Marc Berenson

Russia: A Re-emerging Donor

Since 2007, Russia has been “re-creating” an international development assistance programme and has become an active global development cooperation partner. Russian official development assistance increased more than eightfold in a decade. Russia consistently promotes cooperation for international development and the Millennium Development Goals in major global governance institutions. But to what extent is Russia’s international development assistance compatible with its international cooperation strategy and domestic development priorities?

Serving Citizens: How Comparable Are Polish and Russian ‘Street-Level’ Bureaucrats?

An experimental survey on bureaucratic responsiveness in the social welfare arena in Poland and Russia shows that both countries’ social welfare workers are capable of performing in a manner deemed helpful to local Polish and Russian citizens—a key component of effective governance. Such findings are surprising given an absence of reforms to create Weberian bureaucracies out of both countries’ social welfare agencies, differences in Polish and Russian overall governance, and variations in civil society legacies. The findings suggest that Weberian features, designed to keep outside interests at bay, may not necessarily be essential for local government to be perceived as being responsive and may not be relevant for certain sectors, such as social welfare, where opportunities for corruption are more limited. Because “customer service” is important for an effective state, citizen perceptions of local bureaucrats’ responsiveness need to be recognized as critical components of on-the-ground governance.

Governance and the Depoliticisation of Development

This collected volume sets for itself the bold task of re-shifting the dialogue regarding the role that the current ‘governance agenda’ should play in global development. Hout and Robison take on what they regard as the post-Washington Consensus thinking in multi-lateral aid organisations (primarily, the World Bank) by claiming that the underlying motivations for the current decade’s development projects are still in sync with those of the 1980s and 1990s neoliberals. Through a contextual analysis of the Bank’s, the UK Department for International Development’s (DFID) and other similar organisations’ words and activities (but not accomplishments, per se), the editors take a stand against what they claim is the current ‘technocratic’ pursuit of self-regulating markets and, instead, argue that today’s development agenda should be the pursuit of greater political participation in governance projects. While Hout and Robison insist that their critique is aimed at post-neoliberalism, the main target of their attack remains the 1980s and 1990s Consensus. Robison associates the push for markets with the contemporaneous ‘rise of illiberal regimes and oligarchies’, ignoring, of course, that illiberal regimes and oligarchies did exist prior to 1980s. And, yet, singling out the undemocratic outcomes that came with the ‘technocratic’ efforts to shift China and Russia towards the market economy should not be done without recognising that other ‘technocratic’ reforms were accompanied with democratic successes in Central and Eastern Europe. (Privatisation programmes – the central focus of the politicians and economists throughout the post-communist region as well as of the Bank and the IMF in the neo-liberal 1990s – came in many flavours.) Of course, the editors are correct in recognising that multi-lateral development work often does make for ‘strange bedfellows’, but in practice could a multilateral institution charged with the task of reducing global poverty afford not to work with all governments, regardless of regime type? As Pascale Hatcher points out in his contribution to the volume, the Bank does after all have to engage with political actors of all stripes, including those very politicians who have to approve its loans and projects and allow local access to improve conditions. Rather than evaluate the Bank on how well it pursues its self-stated objective to reduce poverty, the volume calls for greater voice and participation in multi-lateral development activities. This brings up the question as to whether participation, in and of itself, is always the path to greater economic livelihood. Should assistance organisations withdraw from places where the prospects for democratisation and for the elimination of gross distortions in politics appear slim? Should projects that focus on growth be placed aside in favour of those that give more people voice? It is, of course, just a question of balance, but often the rhetoric in the volume presents development programmes as ‘either/or’, which might just be due to the fact that for all the efforts to parse out the various shades of governance, the ultimate goal of multi-lateral institutions like DFID and the World Bank – development – is never really defined. Hout, for example, criticises a series of Bank evaluative indicators for being too biased towards economic activities, too focused on narrow vested interests and out of sync with politics and civil society, without conceding that economic activity is, after all, at the heart of development and that ‘state capture’ does reflect a distortion of domestic political interests. In the end, in the absence of some sort of development-yardstick – economic growth, poverty reduction, standard of living, life expectancy, etc. – by which to measure the differing Journal of Development Studies, Vol. 46, No. 3, 595–601, March 2010