Development Effectiveness and the Politics of Commitment

International aid agencies have experienced a ‘political turn’ over the past decade, with political economy analyses becoming increasingly numerous as a means to drive development effectiveness. Yet aid agencies have so far failed to shift their aid modalities in response. The problem lies in an inadequate conceptualisation of ‘politics’. Most donors continue to see development as a public good, rather than as the focus of contestation in a context of societal struggle, and consequently fail to take oppositional forces sufficiently seriously. This facilitates the misapplication of terms such as ‘partnership’ and ‘ownership’, contributing to failures in efforts to promote reform. A more truly political analysis of aid intervention entails two innovations: the use of structural analysis to distinguish between interests in reform; and the use of this distinction, in turn, to inform the practice of taking sides in political struggles. Case studies of international aid programs in Cambodia and the Philippines illustrate how the failure of donors to take sides with particular reformers resulted in lost opportunities to achieve concrete outcomes from development projects. The development effectiveness agenda has prompted a refocusing of aid agendas onto political dimensions of change and hence onto political economy as an analytical tool. The World Bank’s study of governance reform ‘under real world conditions’ and the UK Department for International Development’s (DFID)‘drivers of change’ approach exemplify this. However,