Caroline Hughes

Framing Post-conflict Societies: international pathologisation of Cambodia and the post-Yugoslav states

This article examines the pathologisation of post-conflict societies through a comparison of the framing of the Cambodian and post-Yugoslav states. The notion of failed states fixes culpability for war on the societies in question, rendering the domestic populations dysfunctional while casting international rescue interventions as functional. The article suggests that the discourse of pathologisation can be understood primarily not as a means of explaining state crisis so much as legitimising an indefinite international presence and deferring self-government.

Development Effectiveness and the Politics of Commitment

Abstract 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 programmes in Cambodia and the Philippines illustrate how the failure of donors to take sides with particular reformers has resulted in lost opportunities to achieve concrete outcomes from development projects.

Friction, Good Governance and the Poor: Cases from Cambodia

Friction is a zone of contingency where creative responses of local and international agents produce unexpected effects. Viewing ‘good governance’ in this light allows better appreciation of the blurring of boundaries between international prescriptions and local cultures, often regarded as antithetical in the Cambodian case. In fact, actors in Cambodia mobilize both a newly invigorated domestic cultural discourse and international ways of working to pursue struggles over development in the post-conflict context. However, elite actors are much better placed to do this successfully than are the poor.

Soldiers, monks, borders: Violence and contestation in the greater Mekong Sub-region

Abstract The struggles of poor communities to negotiate development processes have been documented increasingly in recent years. However, recognition of the agency of the poor should not preclude attention to patterns of oppression that may be intensifying in the face of top-down development processes imposed by increasingly well co-ordinated elites. Examination of patterns of violence in border areas across the Greater Mekong Sub-region suggests that integration facilitates the collusion of state actors in the dispossession of the poor in a manner that is deleterious to ethnic minorities, internal migrants and other vulnerable populations. National political processes are not offering mechanisms by which such populations can seek to contest this trend.

Cambodia: Democracy or Dictatorship?

Political Issues In 2000, the political situation in Cambodia remained relatively stable for the second year in a row, which was an important achievement, given the countrys tortuous history. This stability itself begs important questions regarding Cambodias political trajectory, however ? questions which are answered differendy by activists and analysts on different sides of the ongoing political divide. This overview of events in the year 2000 will suggest that the current period of political stability is contingent and liable to relapse into turmoil, but that even contingent stability in itself generates forces for further change. The current period of political stability coincides with the early and middle phases of the electoral cycle. In this respect, among others, the second electoral cycle since the promulgation of the 1993 Constitution contrasts significantly with the first. The first electoral cycle was marred throughout by a continued, overt power struggle between the two major parties of the governing coalition. On one side stood the possessor (by a narrow margin) of the 1993 electoral mandate, the royalist Front Uni Nationale pour un Cambodge Independent, Neutral, Pacifique Et Coop?ratif (FUNCINPEC), led by First Prime Minister Prince Norodom Ranariddh. On the other side stood the junior coalition partner, the Cambodian Peoples Party (CPP), led by Second Prime Minister Hun Sen, the successor to the 1980s one-party state and continued near-total monopolizer of operational bureaucratic power. Analysis of the first electoral cycle focused on the relationship between these two men, their central party organizations, and the military units loyal to them, as the key to Cambodian stability and reform. This power struggle deteriorated into long-predicted violence in July 1997, with the ouster of Ranariddh and much of FUNCINPECs leadership, and the defeat of FUNCINPEC forces in a military battle in Phnom Penh and, subsequently, on the Thai border. The coalition that emerged between the CPP and FUNCINPEC following new elections and protracted protests and negotiations in 1998 has provided

Realities of Political Economy: The Elephant in the Room

The idea that the political landscape can be reordered in a technocratic way by means of market reform and institutional change has dominated thinking in the economic ministries and development agencies of the major Western countries since the early 1980s. It has been heavily influenced by the rational choice/public choice view of politics as a world of self-serving behaviour where vested interests accumulate wealth by mobilising political power and influence to undermine the market mechanism. This neoliberal view initially assumed that the imposition of markets and the ending of government intervention in the economy would be enough in themselves to neutralise the predatory raids on the state that defined the rent-seeking society. As this expectation evaporated, development strategy was switched from an emphasis on rolling out markets to that of building strong institutions to enforce the rule of markets, to insulate markets from the ‘ irrationalities’ of politics and to provide incentives for market-oriented behaviour. In essence, neoliberals sought to replace politics, as they saw it, with technocratic and managerial forms of authority and ‘good governance’ based on market principles and values.

Development as Collective Action Problems

The discussion of various attempts at engaging with political economy analysis by development agencies in the previous chapter showed that such agencies have difficulty in engaging with politics, as a consequence of the understanding they have of their work, as well as their own institutional political-economic realities. This chapter turns to further attempts to operationalise political economy analysis within the broader development community and particularly to the idea that development can be understood as a set of collective action problems, wherein political action is necessary to obtain ‘development’ as a public good so the whole of society is made better off.

Working Politically: Understanding Alliances

Rethinking governance reform in the manner proposed in the preceding chapters suggests that, for donor agencies, ‘working politically’ requires a reconceptualisation of aid programmes as limited interventions in ongoing development processes, plus a more nuanced understanding of putative ‘partners’. How does this approach fit with, or depart from, the major shifts in international aid policy and practice articulated over the last ten years? This chapter addresses this question.

Conclusion: The Road to Nowhere?

Our central purpose in this book has been initially to ask why political economy has emerged as a tool for policy analysis and planning within the major aid agencies and banks. These had for decades been resolutely opposed to consideration of the political and social contexts of development reform, clinging to the assumption that various policy and institutional fixes would be enough in themselves to steer development in the ‘right’ direction. Also, it has been our aim to explain the different ways in which political economy has been understood and applied by policy-makers. Thus, we have made a close analysis of rational choice political economy, institutional political economy and the more pluralist versions of political economy that do take into account factors of power and social relationships. We examine how these approaches have shaped different agendas for policy and strategy in more practical terms.

Understanding the Development Problem

In previous chapters we have critiqued the ways in which donors and associated researchers have attempted to incorporate political economy analyses into their approaches to development. In particular, we identified three assumptions which are prevalent among aid practitioners but which constrain the effectiveness of their political economy approaches: namely, the assumption that development is a public or common good; the assumption that correct development policies can be identified and implemented through experts and enlightened reformers working in partnership; and the assumption that failure by political elites to identify and implement such policies emerges from either information failures or perverse incentives, that is collective action problems. In this second part of the book, we offer a counter proposal to each of these assumptions, developed on the basis of structuralist political economy, and illustrated through reference to four case studies of aid projects in Southeast Asia. In this chapter, we elaborate on our understanding of development as a process of contested structural change, and the implications of this for aid programming.