Seth
Kaplan writes that international development agencies in particular are
limited in their ability to change and to really take on the TWP agenda. Past
experience obviously suggests he’s right to be sceptical. He points to the need
to instead take
ownership seriously and support local actors in solving their own problems,
by investing in human capital and in
leadership – universities,
think tanks, scholarships and so on.
The difficulty is that his way of doing this would take decades to bear
fruit, and we don’t have decades to deliver the SDGs.
Seth’s emphasis on human capital and leadership doesn’t, as he
suggests, actually contradict messages from the TWP literature – see, for
example, David Booth and Sue Unsworth’s work on ‘politically
smart, locally led’ development or what Adrian Leftwich and Steve Hogg
called ‘institutional
indigenisation’. I would point to a
different dilemma in bringing TWP to the mainstream of development work; how we
convince people working on each of the SDGs that some of their biggest
challenges are political rather than technical, and that we therefore won’t
achieve the SDGs by 2030 (or perhaps ever) without thinking and working
politically. Certainly we need to understand how politics permeates every
aspect of Agenda 2030, not just the bit where politics is explicit, like SDG16.
Take, for instance, SDG6
- Water. I’ve heard about a huge water program in a fragile state. Roughly
three quarters of the program had failed for largely technical reasons – wrong equipment,
not enough due diligence, that kind of thing. Yet the donor’s biggest headache
had come from the successful 25%.
Where water was delivered, there was a great deal of political capture
and, in some areas, an increase in violence. It’s a reminder that water is a
resource that people are willing to fight over and – depending on how it is
delivered – it can be captured relatively easily. So we need to do more than
lay pipes to achieve SDG6 by 2030; we need to consider the unique political
characteristics of the water sector in each national or subnational context
we're looking at.
Not all development programs will be about challenging power, but more
of them do this unconsciously than is currently recognised. Recent
research suggests, for instance, that roads are the ‘open sesame’ factor that
helps ordinary citizens challenge existing patron-client relationships. When
new roads connect rural areas to each other and to cities, they give people physical
access to alternative social and political networks and relationships that can
help them manage the risks of breaking the old ties. Good roads make them more politically
resilient. Road building looks like technical infrastructure, but it may have
profound political ramifications. Something to think about for SDG9?
Colleague Claire Mcloughlin is currently researching the
link between service delivery and legitimacy She’s looking at higher
education in Sri Lanka, a country that often confounds experts by having both a
high HDI
score and a civil war. In higher education there is active conflict between
citizens and the state today that can be traced back to critical junctures in
the 1950s and 1960s; unfunded promises made on education by the post-colonial
government which raised unrealistic expectations, and which were also used to benefit
one community at the expense of another.
So when we consider education – SDG4 – keeping politics
at the heart of things suggests the need to watch, for instance, those
countries that expanded education for the MDGs but paid little attention to its
quality or to whether newly educated citizens would have jobs to go to. Such
unfulfilled expectations may well fuel future conflict.
A significant factor in disappointing development results is ignoring
the politics, or at least not trying to understand the political landscape
where we’re trying to achieve change. Of course, TWP might mean doing things very differently
in some contexts, but it may mean simply being more politically aware. To
achieve the SDGs, we need to confront the issue of political
will head on, from the international community to the village level. But
how to do this?
A new
DLP research paper suggests a way to build a robust, comparative evidence
base to help us better understand how politically informed development programs
emerge in different political contexts, different sectors, different
organisations and with different types of individuals. We argue that it’s not
just about being
flexible and adaptive, or entrepreneurial,
or working with the political
settlement, or understanding different
sectors’ political characteristics; it’s about how all of these combine to create or shut down the space for thinking
and working politically.
The lesson, we suspect, is that as long as design is appropriate to the
program and to the context, there is no one way to do design these sorts of
programs. In some spaces it may be really difficult and in others it may be
relatively easy. Understanding these differences and figuring out how to
support different actors in different contexts to TWP may help allay the
concerns of those who, like Seth, worry that development agencies won’t be able
to take this on board.
And, we hope, this will help SDG-focused colleagues – in government,
civil society, development agencies and so on – better understand how to think
and work politically to achieve their goals, before 2030 comes and goes.
Dr Heather Marquette
is Reader in Development Politics at the University of Birmingham’s
International Development Department. She is Director of the Developmental
Leadership Program, and Academic
Director of the Governance and Social Development Resource Centre.
The views
expressed in our blogs remain those of the authors and do not necessarily
represent the views or policies of the OECD or its members
