Interaction, consensus and unpredictability in development policy ‘transfer’ and practice

Abstract

Central to much thinking about the movement of policy from one domain to another is a residual assumption that some essential meaning of the ‘transferred’ policy remains, but is variously interpreted in different contexts. We argue that the new consensuses that emerge in the process of dissemination and implementation themselves (re)constitute policy. We stress both the open-ended nature and the constitutive power of the new knowledge that emerges from micro-processes of interaction in policymaking. Understanding social phenomena as underdetermined helps explain how and why the ‘translation’ of a policy developed in one context and implemented in another is inherently unpredictable. Processes by which a public sector capacity building program was discussed, developed, and implemented in Ethiopia illustrate this approach. Empirical discussion focuses on the ways in which international officials recruited senior Ethiopian support for their policy; how these policymakers rethought and shaped the policy in their own interests; and how the mixed understanding and reception of the policy in different parts of rural Ethiopia continued a process by which original outcomes were importantly transformed.

Keywords:

• Ethiopia
• policy transfer
• state building
• performativity
• interaction
• social construction

Notes

1. Scott's study of state ‘myopia’ (1988) identifies four factors in the failure of state-sponsored development schemes: the administrative ordering of nature and society, premised on a stylized vision from above, lacking the nuance of local knowledge; state commitment to a high modernist ideology; the authoritarian use of coercion in the achievement of modernist designs; and a prostrate civil society lacking capacity to resist.

2. Notably Callon (1986); important contributions stress the non-neutrality (Yanow 2004, p. S16) and local contingency of translation (Barnes and Bloor 1982, p. 39).

3. An earlier draft of this article was presented at a panel at the 5th Interpretive Policy Analysis Conference in Grenoble 23–25 June 2010 on the ‘production of social institutions’; we are grateful to its convenors, Virginie Tournay and Severine Louvel for highlighting these connections.

4. We develop this dichotomy as a distinction between ‘intrinsic’ and ‘extrinsic’ structuralism below.

5. Variously Public Service [Delivery] or Public Sector Capacity Building Programme, pronounced ‘peacecap’.

6. The Ethiopian federation comprises nine federated states, drawn along the lines of the major ethnic or linguistic groups; it was designed to reflect the social, geographic, economic, and developmental diversity of Ethiopia's population, numbering around 72 million in 1991, and closer to 90 million in 2011.

7. We note caveats in the literature about the ‘effect of complexity on transferability’ (Dolowitz and Marsh 1996, p. 353).

8. We see interests as emergent from, and contingent upon, collective processes of interaction resulting in shared knowledge, and shared perspectives: interests, and the groups which share them, are thus neither intrinsic to a particular socio-economic situation, nor can they be ‘read off’ from it.

9. For a fuller discussion of EPRDF's revolutionary democracy see Vaughan (2011b) and other contributions to Abbink and Hagmann (2011).

10. The notion of extrinsic/intrinsic structuralism is developed in Rafanell (2009) and Rafanell and Gorringe (2010).

11. This develops Durkheimian precepts which Collins (1975), Barnes (1995) and Bloor (1997) have explored; see Rafanell (2009).

12. Although we do not develop it in this article, a comparable theory of power sees it as a self-referential social institution, inhering in the distribution of what the collective knows or genuinely believes about it. This perspective suggests that power dynamics are best explained by means of the micro-dynamics of encounters on the ground, which as Goffman and Butler stress, and we discuss above, are performative. See Rafanell and Gorringe (2010) and Barnes (1988).