Applied political economy analysis: a problem-driven framework - - Toolkits

Disclaimer: The views presented in this paper are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent the views of ODI or our partners. This material has been funded by UK aid from the UK Government, however the views expressed do not necessarily reflect the UK Government's official policies. Acknowledgements The author is grateful to numerous colleagues for comments and discussions on previous iterations of this material, and for feedback from users of this framework. He thanks Claire Dilliway, Roo Griffiths, Tam O' Neil and Pearl Samandari Massoudi for their help with the editing and layout of this publication. We are also grateful to the UK Department for International Development (DFID) for their funding support; however, the views expressed do not necessarily reflect the UK Government's official policies. The views expressed in this paper and all responsibility for the content of the study rests with the author. This framework helps practitioners and researchers to use political economy analysis to understand and respond to practical problems. The framework has three dedicated, but related, phases: problem identification, problem diagnosis and consideration of plausible change processes. In this introductory note we describe the key components of the framework, the relationships between them and how to use the framework to undertake analysis. Annex 1 contains a diagram of the overall framework. Annex 2 provides a glossary of key terms. It is worth noting at the outset that, for those with significant experience in the political economy of development, there is a lot of familiar material here. Successive efforts over the past decade have brought the development community to a point where there is considerable consensus that gaining a better understanding of the political, economic and socio-cultural dimensions of the contexts in which organisations operate is an important step towards greater effectiveness and better outcomes. Partly as a result of this consensus, the applied political economy field has become quite a crowded arena, with different frameworks, diagrams, terminology and acronyms all popularised by different organisations (see Edelmann, 2009, for selective review). What follows is an attempt to distil some of this into a structured, concise and usable framework to provide some guidance on how to navigate this space. The framework encourages conceptual rigour while speaking to operational needs and making space for a diversity of approaches across the broad spectrum of what has come to be known as 'political economy analysis', at the same time …