Patterns of difference and practical theory: researching the new poverty strategy processes in...

Journal of International Development

J. Int. Dev. 15, 863–877 (2003)

Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI: 10.1002/jid.1040

PATTERNS OF DIFFERENCE ANDPRACTICAL THEORY: RESEARCHING

THE NEW POVERTY STRATEGYPROCESSES IN AFRICA

DAVID BOOTH*

Overseas Development Institute, London, UK

Abstract: A collection on the past and future of social-development analysis provides an

opportunity to reflect and connect. This article reflects on a ten-year-old book called

Rethinking Social Development and connects it with a recent study of Poverty Reduction

Strategy processes in Africa. It argues that the recent work fills a gap in the empirical basis of

the book, adding force to its main arguments—about dominance, agency and diversity in

development—while also speaking to some unresolved issues: about the place of macro-

institutional analysis, the limits of ‘actor orientation’ and the generation of practical theory.

Copyright # 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

1 INTRODUCTION

Ten years ago, a group of social-development researchers based in the UK, The

Netherlands and the US came together to produce a book called Rethinking Social

Development (Booth, 1994a). Decades seem to be good periods in which to do rethinking

and draw up balance sheets in intellectual life. This CDS anniversary issue is therefore

welcome, among other things, as a chance to revisit the issues that concerned that group in

the early 1990s. I believe the issues remain relevant and the conclusions broadly correct.

On the other hand, some of the arguments can be deepened, and newer and better

illustrations provided. In fact, for the first time it is possible to establish the relevance of

key propositions with evidence of a kind that was notably lacking a decade ago—that of

development and aid issues in Africa. This article aims to show how.1

The argument builds up as follows. In the next section, I outline the major themes of the

1994 book, and the principal points on which the contributors took differing or opposing

Copyright # 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

*Correspondence to: D. Booth, Overseas Development Institute, 111 Westminster Bridge Road, London SE17JD, UK. E-mail: [email protected] article may appear self-indulgent and in places irritatingly self-congratulatory, but the issues are of widerinterest and importance, and on balance I think there is value in telling this story in this way.

views. Section 3 observes that these debates made little reference to social development

research on Africa, and gives some of the reasons. Section 4 explains how this void

might now be filled, drawing on recent comparative research on Poverty Reduction

Strategy processes in eight African countries. My contention is that this work points

to the continuing validity and relevance of the arguments we offered in 1994, in-

cluding both the core propositions on which all of the contributors agreed, and the less

consensual positions I defended in the presentation and Afterword of the book. Section

5 concludes.

2 RETHINKING SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT TEN YEARS LATER

As several contributions to this Special Issue acknowledge, social development is not a

well-defined field. It is certainly not a discipline, but rather a cluster of disciplines or bits

of disciplines that have been identified historically more by what they are not—not

economics, and probably not political science—rather than by a clear alternative identity.

Rethinking Social Development reflected fully this legacy. The book was contempora-

neous with the process through which a number of European development agencies and

the World Bank came to create cadres of Social Development Advisers and give full

recognition to them (see Eyben, this issue). However, the contributors were not very much

involved in that process. Our concerns had longer, deeper roots, mainly in academic

controversies of the 1970s and 1980s. We were concerned to rebut the accusation that

academic development studies as a whole was largely irrelevant to development practice.2

But our case for relevance was more broad-based than the one being made at the time by

Social Development pioneers in the agencies.3

The group was characterized by certain elements of common intellectual history. We

agreed on certain key propositions that, by this time, were widely but not universally

shared in the field. But we also had significant disagreements about precisely what the

implications were for method, theory and the relationship between research, policy and

practice.

2.1 Shared Positions, Core Propositions

A fair generalization about the group is that we had been influenced by radical and/or

formally Marxist critiques of the first-generation theories of social development, those

associated with the concept of societal modernisation. We had also absorbed and

contributed to the critique of the Marxist framework in its classical and neo-Marxist

variants, and were influenced in different degrees by the various ‘post-Marxist’ political

economies and actor-oriented research traditions that had emerged or were revived in the

2This had been the contention of a famous article by Michael Edwards (1989).3The handbook of social analysis produced in the then Overseas Development Administration (1995) includedour book in the list of bibliographic resources under The Role of the Social Analyst. However, points of contactwith our substantive interests were few, partly because the UK aid programme was then project-oriented andSDAs were primarily engaging on that terrain. Today, DFID has moved substantially ‘upstream’ in itsdevelopment work and SDAs are concerned with such things ‘drivers of change’ in national societies, an agendathat is much closer to what we were concerned about then. Meanwhile, several of our contributors have become invarious ways more engaged with the worlds of practice.

864 D. Booth

Copyright # 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. J. Int. Dev. 15, 863–877 (2003)

1980s. Most of us retained a commitment to the integration of social-science disciplines or

to some form of multi-disciplinary working. We were interested in, but maintained some

critical distance from, several boundary-hopping fashions of the 1980s—rational choice

analysis, new institutional economics, regulation theory, postmodernism and participatory

appraisal.

This background gave the book a certain coherence and the contributors a shared

position on certain key issues. It made us critics of much of what had counted as social-

development theory during the previous 40 years, and it made us advocates of some sort of

new beginning. A key point of agreement was that, despite their very different ideological

badges and intellectual thrusts, previously fashionable theories of societal modernisation

and capitalist underdevelopment turned out to have meta-theoretical underpinnings of a

very similar sort.

To cut a long story short, they were all explicitly or implicitly functionalist—that is,

they assumed the existence of systems (‘social systems’, ‘modes of production’, ‘world-

systems’) with in-built capacities to secure what they need—the conditions of their

existence—in the way that biological organisms do. Arising from that shared starting-

point was a common tendency to view development as a matter of conformity with or

limited divergences from powerful central tendencies, driven by systemic requirements

(structural differentiation, transition to a higher mode of production, systematic blockages

of such transitions, structural underdevelopment, etc.). In turn, these theoretical tendencies

had led to quite a serious underestimation of diversity, complexity and room-for-

manoeuvre in development processes.4

Against these traditions, and their manifestations in common-sense thinking about what

today is called globalization, we asserted three principal propositions:

* despite appearances, ‘dominant’ processes, mechanisms and powers in development

dominate only to a limited degree;

* social actors have ‘agency’ (knowledge and power to act), and hence respond creatively

to opportunities and constraints introduced by other forces;

* development processes are consequently more diverse, more unpredictable (for better

or worse) and therefore more interesting than many would have us believe.

2.2 Different Positions, Points of Disagreement

Although we agreed on that basic framework, we did not have a common view on its

implications. Contributors took different positions, or placed the emphasis differently, on

three points:

* the degree to which debunking previous theories or meta-theories based on illegitimate

organic metaphors implied abandoning the study of global and macro structures (as

opposed to doing this differently);

* the relationship between what anthropologists call the ‘emic’ and the ‘etic’ in

researching the beliefs, discourses and behaviour of social actors in development;

4This was common ground between Booth (1985), Clay and Schaffer (1984), Corbridge (1986) and Long (1984)among others. Theoretical influences included Cutler et al. (1977), Giddens (1981, 1984) and Elster (1985) aswell as, in a more diffuse way, the postwar ‘Manchester tradition’ of anthropology.

Patterns of Difference and Practical Theory 865


* the priority attached to doing research in such a way as to generate applied theory,

bodies of more or less general propositions that can be of use to policy makers and

practitioners.

I took a particular view on these issues, which influenced the shape of the volume and

the direction taken by the editorial material. No doubt, many of the arguments were not as

clearly put as they might have been. Nonetheless, several of the papers bear re-reading

today as the best available statements of some fundamental truths about the scope and

potentialities of social development research. Let me illustrate briefly, referring to each of

the areas of dissension mentioned above.

2.2.1 The place of macro-institutional analysis

The book embraced global and macro institutional analysis as a continuing focus for social

development researchers. It recognized Buttel and McMichael’s (1994) plea for histori-

cally-grounded macro-sociology and ‘incorporated comparison’, as exemplified by their

research on international food regimes. No worked examples of food regime analysis were

included in the book. However, it included one of the best exemplars of comparative

macro-social analysis in UK research at the time—Nicos Mouzelis’ (1994) overview of

‘the state in late development’.

A different view was also well stated. Long and van der Ploeg (1994) explored the

diversity of farmers’ responses to recent changes in the policies of states and agribusiness

firms in Europe and Latin America. They showed the importance of not assuming that the

former are fully explained by the latter. But they were less convincing in suggesting that

this implied ‘a definite adieu to structure understood as explanans’. I thought it was

overstating the case against structural determinisms to see social structure as merely ‘an

extremely fluid set of emergent properties [that] functions as an important point of

reference for the further elaboration, negotiation and confrontation of actors’ projects’

(Long and van der Ploeg, 1994, pp. 80, 81).

In brief, for many kinds of purposes, structures and institutions do need to be studied

and compared in their own right. Whether comparative institutional analysis or compara-

tive actor behaviour is the focus depends on the research question; it is a tactical matter.

Both changes in structural conditions, and patterns of actor response, can figure centrally

in causal accounts that explain outcomes, depending on what is already known and what

is not.

2.2.2 Inside and outside actors’ perspectives

On the emic/etic issue, the book lined up with a classic point of view in anthropology (e.g.

Geertz, 1973). It contained one of the most interesting statements of the case for both

getting ‘inside’ the behaviour of social actors, by understanding their beliefs, concepts and

intentions, and observing it and examining its consequences from ‘outside’. Using

examples from his research areas in India, John Harriss (1994) demonstrated very clearly

how much can be sacrificed if the researcher either loses touch with the meanings actors

give to what they do (e.g. by dismissing moral-economy notions underpinning patron/

client relations as ‘false consciousness’) or fails to observe the way different trends in

agrarian structure or politics influence the outcomes of such behaviour.

With their strong a priori commitment to demonstrating the room for negotiation

and struggle to redefine policies and other macro-initiatives at the local level, other

contributors to the volume were in danger of falling into the second trap. This was

866 D. Booth


another sense in which several of us were unhappy with the kind of rethinking of

social development research summed up in Norman Long’s manifestos of ‘actor

orientation’.5

2.2.3 Linking theory, research and practice

On theory, research and practice, the Afterword of the volume argued that there was value

in research designs that enable systematic comparison. There was no inherent reason why

research that rejected several previous theoretical traditions in social development should,

by that token, be incapable of formulating generalizations and general concepts. Recog-

nizing diversity in development processes and outcomes is not a reason for rejecting

theory, but for pitching the search for theory at a different level: seeking patterns of

difference, rather than just documenting the fact of diversity. Furthermore, wishing to be

relevant to practice was certainly not a reason for giving up theoretical pretensions.

Practitioners can, in fact, only handle advice if it is expressed at some reasonable level of

generality.

This was linked to a practical problem in research design. Reflecting funding constraints

or individualistic traditions of scholarship, typical research projects were inclined to

generate isolated case studies without possibilities for comparison or adequate contextua-

lisation. This made it hard for them to generate either theoretical insights or useful policy

guidelines. Some examples of the potentialities of large, team-based research projects

were given from what was then recent research, at UNRISD, IDS and ODI.

3 CONNECTING THE ARGUMENT WITH AFRICA

With the exception of this last point—about practical theory and the design of research—

much of what we said in 1994 could be substantiated from studies reported or reviewed

within the book. But the content of the book was skewed, thematically and geographically.

We explored quite well the range of views on agrarian change, with writings by Buttel,

Harriss, Long and van der Ploeg, and frequent citations of Henry Bernstein, Tom Brass,

James C. Scott, Robert Chambers and other representatives of the major strands of

thinking. We were weaker on most non-rural issues in development. We were good on

social divisions, but poor on gender.6

3.1 Geographical Bias of the Book

Geographically, it was very much a book about India, Latin America and Europe. Africa

was the backdrop to a reflection by Tony Barnett and Piers Blaikie on doing ‘jobbing

social science’ on AIDS impacts (Barnett and Blaikie, 1994). I made some references to

work I co-ordinated for Sida in Tanzania, supporting the case for investigating realities on

the ground, and for using rapid methods to capture a sufficient range of situations to

5Such as Long (1990), now re-edited as Chapter 1 of Long (2001). The reasons why researchers working in thistradition might feel justified in neglecting the critical observation of behaviour, and investigation of thesystematic effects of patterns of action, are made particularly clear in the 2001 book’s appendix on ‘cornerstonesof an actor-oriented approach’.6Unfortunately, the thinking that became Naila Kabeer’s (2000) essay on structure and agency in the analysis ofgender relations was still over our horizon.



suggest general hypotheses. But otherwise Africa was a missing continent, neglected both

as a source of ideas about theory and method, and as a source of illustrative examples—a

surprising fact in view of the strength of interest in the African continent among both

practical development workers and teachers of development studies.

There was no doubt an element of accident in the neglect we heaped on Africa. Books

reflect the vagaries of acquaintance and networking. But it was also the case that there was

little social development research going on in the UK and Holland that exemplified well

the problems of theory and method we were grappling with.7 I felt the point rather acutely,

as I had already stopped working mainly on Latin America and had done several pieces of

fieldwork in Africa. Where were the examples of re-thought social development in my

own research, or at least on the terrain I had chosen to work on?

3.2 Obstacles to Connecting with Africa

I began to overcome this embarrassment with a 1994 article that argued against a largely

deductive approach to structural adjustment reforms in Africa, whether neoclassical or

‘oppositionist’ in origin. Research on the impacts of adjustment policies needed to be free

‘‘not just of thinking based on ‘abstract markets’ but also of presumptions about what

necessarily happens when economic liberalization is unleashed, beginning with the

presumption that policies in practice correspond closely to declared intentions or textbook

formulas’’. In Tanzania, liberalization had been very fast in some areas and very slow in

others, with the effect that ‘expected’ changes in the incentive structures facing house-

holds and firms under structural adjustment had not materialized. Things were happening,

some good, some bad; but they could not be fairly characterized as impacts of adjustment

(Booth, 1994b, pp. 50, 59).

Since that time, recognition that economic liberalization in Africa is characterized by a

partial-reform syndrome with political roots, and that there has been a systematic ‘taming

of structural adjustment’ is quite widely accepted (Chabal and Daloz, 1999; van de Walle,

2001; Jayne et al., 2002). However, in 1994 it was much easier to get a hearing for

studying ‘real markets’ (as opposed to market theories) than for researching the ‘(un)-

reality of structural adjustment’ (as opposed to assuming policies are in place and arriving

at a critique by deduction). The former, not the latter, emerged as the main thrust of the

collection in which my article appeared.

At the time, I felt this was part of a wider problem. Colleagues who were utterly

convinced of the need to break with mechanically deterministic interpretations of rural

change on the terrain of Europe or Latin America, still seemed to have difficulty making

the break when it came to Africa. For reasons I have never quite understood,8 the image of

Africa as a continent in the grip of powerful external forces, with most of what happens in

countries being fairly directly attributable to external factors, has proven extraordinarily

resistant to contrary evidence.

7US African studies would no doubt have provided a more fertile field. After we put together our collection,young Africanists on both sides of the North Sea began to produce empirical studies informed by these kinds ofissues of theory and method, among them Fisher (1997), Fisher and Arce (2000), Gould (1997), Leach andMearns (1996), Ponte (2002), Seur (1992) and van Donge (1993).8Post-colonial guilt is the obvious explanation, maybe a little too obvious.

868 D. Booth


3.3 A Current Example

There is, therefore, still a need for compelling illustrations, drawn from research in Africa,

that show the relevance of our consensus of 1994, as summarized in the first set of bullet

points above. I believe this need can now be met. I also think the work in question provides

further evidence to support the positions I took on the issues that divided us in 1994—that

is, the questions in the second bulleted list. The focus of the research I want to refer to is

the initiative that has led governments across sub-Saharan Africa to organise national

consultations to generate Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs).

4 RESEARCHING PRSP PROCESSES

The PRSP initiative is an appropriate experience to examine if one is interested (as we

were in 1994) in the degree to which the changes that matter are driven by powerful global

forces or ‘general tendencies’. It arose from a decision taken in Washington in September

1999 by the first-ever joint meeting of the key policy committees of the World Bank and

the International Monetary Fund. Originally conceived as a means of linking enhanced

Highly Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) debt relief to more focused poverty-reduction

efforts in the eligible countries, the preparation of a PRSP on the basis of a national

consultative process has since become a blanket requirement for all countries receiving

World Bank concessional credits and IMF adjustment loans. On the face of it, a more

telling example of the power of the big international financial institutions to determine the

fate of millions in the poorest parts of the world could hardly be found.

That, indeed, is the conclusion that was rapidly drawn about the initiative in some NGO

quarters.9 When combined with the observation that PRSPs tend, in practice, to

incorporate most of the macro-economic policies and many of the sectoral priorities

favoured by the Washington institutions, it led easily to the claim that PRSPs are simply

‘structural adjustment under a new name’. Those who draw this conclusion start from the

view that structural adjustment programmes exemplify the ability of Northern financial

institutions to use their loan conditionalities to impose their will on the countries of the

South. They tend not to doubt that what is happening to poor people is the result of that

fact. However, a slightly closer examination of the PRSP initiative and its consequences

shows that reality is a good deal more complex and contradictory.

In the rest of this section, I advance and briefly defend three propositions about PRSP

processes that illustrate and give substance to the agreed core of Rethinking Social

Development. Then, I want to suggest how researching PRSPs helps also to confirm the

particular positions I defended in the editorial material and Afterword of the book. For

both purposes, I draw on a study of early experience with PRSP processes, based on eight

African country cases, commissioned by the Strategic Partnership with Africa (SPA) and

completed during 2000–02 (Booth, 2003).10

9See, for example, Jubilee South et al. (2001).10The work was carried out by a large international team based in different countries of Africa and Europe. Thecountry studies and authors are detailed in the reference list.



4.1 How Dominant Are ‘Dominant’ Processes, Mechanisms and Powers?

Both the origins of the PRSP initiative and the evidence of the behaviour they have elicited

at the country level strongly support the generalization that dominant forces only dominate

to a limited degree. It is important here to distinguish two possible claims:

1. The general adoption of PRSPs confirms that the Bank and the Fund have the power to

impose their will on some of the things that borrowing governments do; and

2. PRSPs exemplify the capacity of the big international financial institutions and the

donor community to make governments do things that they do not want to do.

The first claim is obviously true; the second is contradicted by a large body of research on

the effectiveness of policy conditionality and adjustment lending since the 1980s as well as

by the experience of formulating and implementing PRSPs up to this point.

The origins of the 1999 decision to abandon the former Policy Framework Papers and

adopt consultatively-produced PRSPs as the framework for Bank/Fund country lending

involve a complicated story that has been well told elsewhere (Christiansen and Hovland,

2003). The detail that matters is that the initiative was a response by a coalition of

international actors, including major bilateral agencies and Northern NGOs, to the failure

of Bank/Fund conditionality in the previous decade. Although requiring PRSPs did not

immediately provide a substitute for forms of conditionality focused on the adoption of

specific policies or actions by the recipient, it was based on the observation that in the

absence of national commitment, such policy conditionality seldom works. Governments

implement measures that they ‘own’ to some degree, and they are equipped with quite

considerable capabilities not to implement, to implement partially, or to implement and

then reverse, measures that, for one reason or another, they do not like (Collier et al., 1997;

Dijkstra, 1999; Dollar and Pritchett, 1998; Killick, 1998; Mosley et al., 1991; White 1999).

Although its immediate effect is undoubtedly to add to the conditionalities imposed on

governments, the PRSP initiative is a serious effort by the Washington institutions to use

their influence in a different way. It represents a fairly desperate gamble on the part of the

community of international development agencies. The gamble is that by instituting a

more structured and focused form of discussion within countries about what to do about

poverty, governments will, whether they wish it or not, raise the level of interest in and

commitment to poverty-reducing actions. Governments will become more accountable to

national stakeholders for what they do in this area. In consequence, anti-poverty actions,

including those funded by external grants and soft loans, will become more effective than

they have been in the past, since most failures have been the consequence of limited

national commitment.

Whether or not this is likely to work is another question. However, the PRSP initiative is

quite clearly a concession to a noteworthy reality—the reality that traditional conditionality

does not produce effective reform, because agreements on reforms can be, and typically are,

subverted by powerful actors within recipient countries. Thus, the very origins of the

initiative exemplify the proposition that ‘dominant’ forces dominate to only a limited degree.

Studies of actual processes of preparing PRSPs in countries suggest similar conclusions.

In the national stories, there are many suggestions of nominal compliance with the

guidelines, and cases of governments doing just enough to keep the donors happy and no

more. It is open to doubt, for the time being, whether the PRSP process has resulted in a

significant increase in official or public commitment to anti-poverty action. Several

positive effects and worthwhile spin-offs are identified in most cases. For example,

870 D. Booth


poverty-reduction priorities are increasingly influencing the national budget process as a

whole, rather than being treated as a ‘sector’, relevant only to social-welfare ministries.

New lobby groups have come into existence, and the public policy dialogue has widened

in small but important ways. However, there is no evidence that real political commitment

can be engineered in such a simple way.

The ‘gamble’ behind PRSPs is not that leopards can be made to lose their spots, or that

decades of path-dependent behaviour by national elites will be diverted in a short period

into new avenues. Rather, it is that in combination with other incremental changes, new

dynamics will emerge in the medium term in which accountabilities to national

stakeholders begin to work with, rather than largely against, the external accountabilities

fostered by aid. The fact that this conclusion has to be so cautious and qualified illustrates

the broader observation that concerns us here: despite appearances, dominant forces

dominate only to a limited degree.

4.2 The Implications of ‘Agency’

The immediate impacts of the PRSP initiative across countries exhibit some common

features. But our case studies also revealed significant differences, leading the researchers

working on the different countries to conclude with prognoses that range from utterly

dismal to cautiously hopeful. Formally, all the processes have had the same product—a

paper that is submitted to the Joint Boards in Washington as a suitable framework for

concessional lending and/or progress towards completion of a debt-relief package.

However, what the process has meant for power relations and institutional capabilities

within countries varies quite a lot across the eight cases.

The principal reason why country experiences vary is that actors in the countries have

responded to the initiative in different ways, reflecting their particular points of departure

and prior commitments. Within and across countries, the relevant ‘stakeholders’ come to

the process with different political and bureaucratic incentives, and different beliefs based

on past experience. This affects the way they behave. The different actors also interact

with each other, engaging in transactions of various sorts and modifying each other’s

behaviour in the process. These dynamics are a further factor helping to generate

noticeably different outcomes.

An example of prior commitments influencing the response is the case of Mali. The

PRSP process in Mali was derailed early-on and only brought back on course after

considerable effort because the country had recently gone through what many observers

regarded as an identical type of planning exercise with UNDP support. Key actors in

government were irritated at having to start over again, and others feared a loss of recently-

acquired powers and resources (Dante et al., 2003). Institutional turf wars motivated

responses in several other countries, notably Malawi, where rivalry between the National

Economic Council and Ministry of Finance and Economic Planning has been a factor in

the ineffectiveness of anti-poverty planning for some time (Jenkins and Tsoka, 2003).

On the other hand, the PRSP consultations produced some interesting dynamic effects,

even in Malawi. Despite being in other respects quite discouraging, the Malawi process led

to the creation of a new NGO pressure group, the Malawi Economic Justice Network,

which obtained unprecedented concessions from government, helping to stimulate the

most significant public debate about some key issues since Independence (Jenkins and

Tsoka, 2003).



4.3 The Scope for Diverse and Unpredictable Outcomes

The PRSP gamble is that by altering slightly the mix of external conditionalities, greater

‘national ownership’ of poverty-reduction efforts will be achieved, and that this will make

a difference to results. It is completely unclear from present evidence whether even the

first objective—a genuinely different level or kind of commitment within countries—is

likely to be attained. What the case studies do confirm, however, that this will be a weakly-

determined process. There are some notable general constraints, which must not be

underestimated (see next point). But within those limits, it is not the case that we know in

advance what the outcome will be.

Together, domestic interests and political movements, and the not inconsiderable inertia

found in the aid ‘industry’ itself, put up huge obstacles to forward movement in the

direction suggested by the PRSP initiative. But behaviours on both sides of the aid

relationship frequently have unanticipated consequences. Initiatives by powerful organi-

sations have certainly been capable of generating dynamics that escape their control, and

although uncertain, this may represent the best hope of a pathway out of the current

troubles of development assistance in Africa.

In all of this, it is clear that politics matters a great deal. The PRSP gamble will work, if

it works at all, because of the way it engages with countries’ mainstream political

processes. To take one type of example, political capital has certainly been made out of the

PRSP initiative by governing parties in Tanzania, Rwanda and (since 2001) Ghana.11 That

does not guarantee that anything very significant will result, but it is a start—a benchmark

that has been set by a national political process (as opposed to one agreed with donors

behind closed doors) to which reference may be made in future exchanges between

political actors (CDD, 2003; Evans, 2003; Mutebi et al., 2003).

Malawi, and Kenya before 2003, were cases where high-level political interest in more

effective poverty reduction was extremely slight, so that little in the way of political

benchmarking occurred. On the other hand, the PRSP consultations in Kenya under Moi

are credited with having created new alliances and visions of a more reform-oriented

future (Hanmer et al., 2003). It may not be too much to suggest that the process

contributed in some way to the outcome of the elections in December 2002, which

brought to an end nearly four decades of KANU rule.

To be sure, these are small gains in relation to the challenges that are on the African

development agenda. In no cases so far,12 has a political leader seized the opportunity of

the PRSP initiative to sit more firmly in the driver’s seat, offer a real alternative

programme for national development and oblige donors to toe the line in the way that

leaders in several Asian countries have done at various points in the past. But the

commitments that the aid community has made to respect initiatives of that sort make this

a possibility that cannot be excluded.

11Under President Jerry Rawlings, Ghana declined to participate in the Enhanced HIPC scheme and undertookPRSP preparations in an unusually perfunctory and unpromising way, as reported in the country study by Killickand Abugre (2001). The new government that assumed power in January 2001 under J.A. Kufuor entered theHIPC process, took political credit for doing so and found a fairly significant place for the PRSP within its visionof ‘positive change’ for Ghana.12The best candidate is Uganda (Piron, 2003).

872 D. Booth


4.4 The Place of Macro-Institutional Analysis

Asserting that actions and processes of interaction can have unexpected consequences, for

better or worse, is not the same as saying that anything is possible. In embarking on our

explorations of PRSP processes in the eight countries, we took for granted the main

findings of research literature on the fundamental structures of African politics and the

political economy of aid. Our assessment of the initiative itself and our criteria of

judgement about national processes, were rooted in an analysis of the vicious circles

between neopatrimonial (patronage) politics, corruption and supply-driven, projectised

aid, and the difficulties posed by trying to break out of these and replace them with

virtuous circles of democratic accountability, national policy development and ‘good

donorship’. In several cases, the PRSP process case studies helped to further highlight

these kinds of institutional logjams.13

We may well not have struck exactly the right balance in these studies between

institutional contextualisation and action-oriented analysis. However, doing the research

did remind us of the importance of using knowledge of macro-institutional background to

set the scene for analysis of interaction processes around a specific policy initiative, so that

the likely consequences can be assessed in a realistic way. A strong body of comparative

macro-structural research is a sine qua non for doing this.

4.5 Inside and Outside Actors’ Perspectives

The research was quick-and-dirty by many standards. A lot therefore depended on

methodological triangulation—using different sources and different types of evidence

to cross-check facts and interpretations. This involved an approach to the beliefs and

actions of the people being interviewed and observed that is consistent with the classic

anthropological view identified earlier. It was essential to understand people’s beliefs and

rationales for acting in order to explain their behaviour; yet what people said was often not

reflected in what they did, and this provided the most valuable type of fuel for analysis.

Thus, for example, it was only by careful in-depth interviewing of responsible officials

that we understood the degree to which PRSP drafting processes were driven by concerns

to deliver the kind of product expected in Washington, as opposed to one that is fit for the

purpose of guiding national policy. Again, fairly close engagement with staffs of the IMF

and the World Bank was necessary to show how the commitment to doing business in a

different way was variable, between the two organizations and—especially at the Bank—

between staff in different sections. Without this understanding, many specific actions

would have been mis-characterised and therefore wrongly explained.

At the same time, on both the country side and that of the external agencies there were

inconsistencies between statements and actions, and examples of contradictory behaviour.

These were not only valuable analytical raw material. They also suggested the mechan-

isms by which significant change might be expected to occur.

For example, the IMF was struggling visibly to reconcile its commitments to greater

openness in support of the PRSP principle of national policy ownership with established

procedural rules and staff mind-sets, as well as some genuine justifications for protecting

market-sensitive and politically sensitive information. Within a more complex and less

13See for example the case studies on Benin (Bierschenk et al., 2003) and Mozambique (Falck and Landfald,2003).



integrated organizational structure, World Bank staff were more likely to be divided

departmentally in the degree to which their actions corresponded to the Bank’s policy

stance on PRSPs. In these instances and others, change seemed most likely to occur as

a result of growing inconsistencies between behaviour and beliefs, or between behaviours

in different contexts. Cases of pure intellectual or professional conversion seemed less

likely.

4.6 Linking Theory, Research and Practice

Last but not least, the design of the PRSP study had important benefits from the point of

view of extracting practical lessons. The relatively large set of country cases enabled us

not only to uncover diversity in responses and consequences, but also to identify some

patterns of difference. For example, some regular relationships were identified between

countries’ prior progress in reforming their budget processes and the seriousness of the

priority-setting in the PRSP. Certain types of donor support to participation by ‘civil

society’ emerged as productive of a genuine improvement in the national policy process,

while others appeared merely to strengthen a harmful clientelism.

The study did not set out with a theory to test but proceeded mostly by induction. It

worked with a loose framework of topics and issues, and this proved sufficient to extract a

few worthwhile generalizations about differences from the country evidence. In addition,

we aimed to refine and set up for future testing the central hypothesis that could be said to

underlie the PRSP initiative—that greater policy ownership within countries can, to some

degree, be engineered, and that, if this happens, policies will be taken more seriously and

better applied. This was done, and further studies and evaluations will be able to build on

this work.

Because it was possible to advance a few middle-range generalizations, the conclusions

of the study were used by practitioners, and the research has influenced policies. The work

was commissioned by the SPA, the forum of lending agencies and donors concerned with

low-income Africa, and the reports informed the deliberations of that group. Perhaps more

important, the study was one of very few pieces of empirically-grounded analysis that was

available to feed into the review of the PRSP approach conducted by the IMF and World

Bank in the first quarter of 2002. Although evidence from various sources was drawn on,

the review produced a set of conclusions that corresponds quite closely to those of our

survey of the eight African experiences.

5 CONCLUSIONS

After all, then, it is possible to illustrate with evidence and models of research from Africa

what we said in Rethinking Social Development drawing mainly on Asian, European and

Latin American examples. The shared points of departure of the group of researchers who

contributed to that book remain valid and can be further illustrated with recent research in

Africa on a current topic. It is no more true now than it was ten years ago that change is

well analysed in terms of general tendencies driven by dominant forces and underlain by

systemic ‘needs’. Social processes are shaped in part by the ways different sorts of actors,

coming with their own stores of experience and knowledge, respond to the challenges they

encounter. Development is consequently less uniform and more surprising than that type

874 D. Booth


of approach suggests. The way African countries have engaged with the PRSP initiative is

a good case in point.

The study of African PRSPs also helps to advance the debate we started in 1994 about

alternative ways of rethinking research and theory in social development. As the study

illustrates, taking agency seriously is not just relevant to local-level or rural social

research. Nor does it imply stopping doing large-scale historical or comparative analysis

that focuses on structural variability and change, not on actors. On the contrary, sound

‘actor orientation’ implies methodological iteration between studies of action situations

and investigations of structure. It calls also for attention to both belief and behaviour.

Finally, whether its immediate focus is action or structure, research will be better at

generalising, a better source of useful theory and thus also more relevant to policy and

practice, if it takes the form of coordinated comparison. Research designs that enable the

identification of patterns of difference are what make possible practical theory.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This article is partly based on a presentation at the seminar ‘Agency, Knowledge and

Power: New Directions in the Sociology of Development’ held to mark the retirement of

Professor Norman Long, University of Wageningen, 14–15 Dec 2001. The author is

grateful to Eleanor Fisher and three anonymous referees for comments on drafts.

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