Development Aid Confronts Politics: The Almost Revolution.

Wisor, Scott

Development Aid Confronts Politics: The Almost Revolution. By Thomas Carothers and Diane de Gramont. Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2013.

Debates in development studies, like other fields, are often cyclical. Big controversial ideas come into vogue, are hotly contested, and then fade away, only to be rekindled decades later. Unfortunately, the participants in these new debates are often ignorant of the intellectual history of their discipline. One such debate is between the technocrats, who see improving human welfare as a simple science of delivering schools, hospitals, and infrastructure, and the political economists, who see power, politics, and institutions as the determinants of development success or failure. Thomas Carothers and Diane de Gramont have done contemporary participants in these debates a great service by writing a thorough and analytically insightful book on the history and evolution of thinking about development aid and politics. Beginning with early debates surrounding aid and governance in the 1960s and 1970s, through the governance focus of the 1990s, and into the vigorous debates around politically sensitive aid of today, the authors show the reasons that purely technocratic aid has failed but also explore how development agencies have struggled to fully integrate political concerns into development programs. The book draws on academic research from a range of disciplines, including economics, political science, and anthropology, and engages with the policy papers of official development institutions and international nongovernmental organizations. The authors show why politics must be taken seriously in development aid, how development institutions have struggled to integrate political-economic analysis into their programs, and what the future may hold for the politics revolution in development aid. Readers might want more prescriptions by the end of the book--what, after all, should development agencies do? But the authors do well to avoid providing final answers. Rather, they usefully highlight the tensions inherent in taking politics seriously in aid delivery, and note the uncertainties that remain in the study of how social and economic progress can be fostered. They provide measured recommendations for the future of political analysis in development assistance, arguing that development practitioners must take seriously the constraints of politics and the potential pitfalls in politicizing aid, continue to experiment with systems of development assistance that respond to these realities, and muddle through.