Jane Hutchison

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.

The state and employment relations in the Philippines

Employment relations in the Philippines feature significant formal rights and protections for workers on the one hand, and feeble enforcement of these by the state on the other. This is not explained by weak state capacities, separate from political logics. Hence, with some modifications to accommodate the character of the Philippine state, this article applies Hyman’s conceptualisation of ‘three broad and often contradictory’ logics to state power across the areas of labour standards, labour relations and labour policy participation. Across these, legitimation concerns – both domestic and international – have shaped much of the formal architecture of employment relations in the Philippines, whilst pacification and accumulation priorities tend to underlie lax state enforcement of labour standards, employer impunity with respect to unfair labour practices, extrajudicial violence against leftists, as well as the legal restrictions on strikes. International actors – the United States and the International Labour Organisation – have also determined the formal architecture, but in ways that stress associational freedoms over associational strength. This has left the mainstream of the labour movement with significant organisational interests in the status quo, despite its attendant weaknesses.

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.

Analysing Reform and Reformers

In aid programming, working more politically is often taken to mean finding and supporting developmental reformers as agents of change. But given that everyone can claim to be a reformer when they talk with donor agencies, there is an urgent need for a form of analysis that can evaluate the commitment of actors involved. The reconceptualisation of development offered in the last chapter offers a basis for this. As aid programming is an intervention in ongoing development struggles, it is possible to gather significant information on how relevant actors conceive of and pursue their interests by analysing their stances in these struggles. Our analysis proceeds from the assertion that development actors differ in their conceptualisation of, and commitment to, particular reform goals, but they do so in a manner that is consistent with their broader interests and the ways they have pursued these over time.

Development Agencies and the Political Economy Turn

As we showed in earlier chapters, donor agencies started to realise in the 1990s that development policy involves more than adherence to macroeconomic fundamentals, which had been the major precept of the Washington Consensus. The awareness that non-economic factors were important produced a wave of publications on the centrality of ‘governance’ and led to a focus on institutions.

Agrarian Reform in the Philippines: Democratic Transitions and Redistributive Reform

This book evaluates the capacity of new democratic regimes to promote redistributive agrarian reform, an issue of concern to developing countries throughout the world. The author analyses the problems caused by political liberalisation and social and economic reform by examining in detail the formulation and implementation of agrarian reform in the Philippines under the governments of Corazon Aquino and her successor, Fidel Ramos. He reveals how the interaction between state and society shapes policy decisions, showing that what is needed for successful agrarian reform is a combination of sustained, forceful political leadership and grassroots agitation by peasant organisations. The author concludes that the new Philippine democracy has proved more conducive to redistributive reform than the authoritarian Marcos regime but has still failed to implement the more controversial and costly elements of the reform policy.