Tag Archives: Political Economy

Guest Post: A Proposal for an Online Practical Politics Platform

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Today’s guest post is from Peter Evans, who recently stepped down as Director of the U4 Anticorruption Resource Centre, and who previously led the Anti-Corruption Evidence (ACE) program at the UK’s Department for International Development.

All too often, approaches to anticorruption reform—like mainstream approaches to growth, development and governance more generally—frame the issue as a technical problem. In development agencies, multilateral organizations, and civil society organizations working on corruption issues, it is not uncommon to hear people say, “We don’t do politics,” or to mention politics only in the context of blaming the failure of a project, or non-receptiveness to technically sound advice, on a “lack of political will.” But as Stefan Dercon emphasized in his influential recent book Gambling on Development: Why Some Countries Win and Others Lose, understanding and addressing development challenges requires engaging seriously with the political economy constraints and opportunities related to power and elites. While Dercon’s book is not about corruption specifically, it is chock-full of corruption examples. And, in fairness, an increasing number of anticorruption specialists have gotten the message that “technical only” approaches often fail, and that making real progress often requires us to understand, and be brave enough to talk about, politics—and in particular the way power is distributed and used in the relevant country or sector.

But while recognizing that politics matters—and that serious anticorruption work requires serious political economy analysis—is a necessary first step, actually putting this idea into practice turns out to be hard, even for people who want to do it—because political economy analysis is hard, and much of the available information is obscure, difficult to locate, or difficult for busy practitioners to digest. Some country- and sector-specific political economy research is published, though not all of it is written in an accessible way. And some research that is highly relevant to political economy analysis doesn’t include terms in the title or abstract that would make its relevance obvious to a busy professional trying to find useful information. Some agencies pay consultants to deliver bespoke political economy analysis, or build skills through training courses, but the utility of these efforts may be limited to that particular agency. SOAS ACE takes an explicit political economy framed approach to understanding and tackling corruption, and there have been a few efforts to provide more general information, such as the U4 Centre’s a workstream on the politics of anticorruption and the UK-based Governance and Social Development Resource Centre, but global coverage of relevant political economy research remains patchy.

To address this problem, I advocate the creation of a “Practical Politics Platform” where good quality, clearly explained political economy research is collected, curated, and presented in a form that is easy to search and freely available as a public good. It would be something like Our World in Data, but for practical political economy research. (To be clear, while corruption and anticorruption would be an important element of such a platform, the platform should more broadly integrate research on related issues, such as accountability, transparency, and public sector governance.) To increase user-friendliness, the platform could include clickable maps that allow users to focus on a country, and disaggregate the information, if desired, by sector and sub-unit. Continue reading →

A Welcome Analysis of Where Mozambique’s Goats Eat

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To say that a successful attack on corruption begins with a political economy analysis is commonplace.  To declare that absent such an analysis of the political, economic, and social conditions that foster a particular type of corruption, an anticorruption policy has little chance of succeeding is hardly remarkable.  What remains noteworthy is in the two decades plus since the global war on corruption began how few such analyses have been done.

Of the more than 7500 entries in Matthew’s corruption studies bibliography, titles of fewer than 50 indicate a political economy focus. The corruption and development “gray literature,” reports on corruption in developing nations commissioned by donor organizations, is little better.  Perhaps a larger number of studies, but few quality ones, and perhaps surprisingly, a real dearth of analyses of petty corruption, the kind that citizens of developing nations, most often the poor, regularly encounter in their daily life.

That’s why it was a pleasure to discover Inge Tvedten and Rachi Picardo’s recent study of where Mozambican goats eat.  The Mozambican expression cabrito come onde está amarado (“goats eat where they are tied up”’) refers, as they explain, to the two-legged species rather than the four-legged one.  The kind that exploit their place in government to enrich themselves, friends, and supporters.  The two draw upon years of accumulated research to show how, in a variety of thickly described situations, “a set of structuring principles and common schemes” lead to the “internalization” or “embodiment” of corruption.  (Others might term the principles and schemes “institutions” and internalization or embodiment a “Nash equilibrium.”) An especially thought-provoking example is how traditional norms of deference to authority figures interacts with the way the District Development Fund, a program to help the poorest, is managed to keep beneficiaries marginalized.

Whether hunting for how to deprive a greedy Mozambican goat of nourishment or for a first-rate example of political economy analysis of petty corruption, readers will profit from perusing Tvedten and Picardo’s article.