During the 1990s donors came to realise that development required better ‘governance’, and DFID recognised early on the need to work with the research community to identify ways of improving governance for better development outcomes. The Centre for Future States and the Citizenship, Accountability and Participation Programmes (Institute of Development Studies, Sussex); the Crisis States Research Centre (London School of Economics); and the Centre for Research on Inequality and Ethnicity (CRISE, Oxford University) have been funded by DFID over the past ten years. This paper provides a brief overview of what these different programmes have told us about governance, fragility and conflict in the developing world.
The key message from all four research programmes is that to understand development we must understand the politics that shape it. Ultimately it is political decisions that will shape whether or not the Millennium Development Goals are reached, revenues are raised to fund investment, and growth occurs.
This research adds depth to our understanding of development as a political process, provides rich evidence based on country experience, and points to the questions which aid agencies must address in order to be effective – including in more fragile countries. It demonstrates that durable reforms need to be constructed, nationally and locally, in a way that fits each political context and it challenges donors to build the capacity to contribute to this effectively.
Key Findings:
- The research has produced important new insights and offered many practical policy messages, but it has also revealed major challenges. It shows, for example, that reforms often do not fail for lack of ‘ownership’ or ‘political will’ but because of the wrong starting assumption, that progressive change is only achieved through strengthening formal, rules-based institutions. The evidence instead underlines the complexity of sustainable governance reform. It also highlights the frequent gap between research findings and current practice.
- Governance research frequently produces high-level advice that can often be difficult to translate into aid-financed operations (‘politics matters’, for example), or detailed findings on local contexts that may not be universally applicable.
- Governance research also regularly exposes the powerful institutional barriers raised within aid agencies against accepting the consistent message coming from both research and evaluation reports – that as outsiders they have far less influence over local development processes than is often assumed. Yet the urgency to adjust donor policy thinking and practice to the central messages from the research covered here is rapidly growing.
- Global shifts in economic and geopolitical relations are fundamentally changing the operational context for Western donors. So traditional donor-recipient relationships urgently need to change.
Recommendations:
- No amount of understanding can substitute for better donor practice. The research underscores that good understanding of the political context is essential if donors are to be effective in promoting development. So donors always need to approach country contexts with a good working understanding of key lessons on governance drawn from research.
- The experience of the DFID-supported governance research programmes points to the importance of developing and supporting multi-partner research networks – which can work together over a period of time – to develop Southern owned research agendas and ensure the communication and use of findings.
