Development Bulletin 77

Development agencies are endeavouring to think and act more politically, but they typically overlook people’s politics in the process. This is true also of the scholars and consultants who advise on and advocate politicallyinformed programming.2 Despite there now being a range of approaches to politically-informed programming, overwhelmingly the political actors thought to matter are elites and program implementers. Although it makes a lot of sense to be concerned with the powerful when attempting reform (Hutchison et al. 2014) the responses of intended beneficiaries also make a difference. As the case study here shows, poor people’s politics can derail the best intentions of even their closest allies and advocates. This is because poor people tend to occupy different political worlds to those that the development industry envisages for them (Bracking 2005; Robins et al. 2008).