Development Management

Political Context of Development

Management

You imagine that we simply give orders and country is run

accordingly. You are greatly mistaken
Gamal Abdul Nasir
 Public vs. Private Interventions
• Unseen or unwritten economic decisions in
private or market sectors are as significant as
those in public sector
• Fairyland world of pure competition with
similar access to resources and burden from
obligations
• Government make perfect sense, but how to
measure a mission that goes beyond
profitability to service, justice, equity and
regularity of public good
 Values, ideologies and political
distribution
• Development is rarely a positive sum game:
– Growth or Distribution? Town or country? Large-scale
interest or small scale? Formal sector or informal?
Export production or import substitution? High
technology or low? Capital or labor intensiveness?
Producer price incentives or consumer price
incentives? Centralized or localized administration?
Rewards for this generation or the next?
• Policies are frequently made by bureaucrats or
tiny group of people in opaque political structure
 Values, ideologies and political
distribution
• Official ideologies guiding policy choices
ranging from conservative to liberal and
radical
• Goldsworthy’s Three ‘Thought-worlds’:
– Conservative market or authoritarian
– Liberal reformist (preferring ameliorative change
rather than structural change)
– Radical millenarian – radical Commandist
 Values, ideologies and political
distribution
Ideological vs. instrumental calculations
• Ilchman and Uphoff’s mapping of implicit
technique of calculating choices:
– Central or Core Actors, privileged and critical to regime
– Ideological Supporters
– Sectors
– Violent opposition
– Un-mobilized, with potential to swing the above
 Values, ideologies and political
distribution
Politics in Management
• Politics considered dirty and avoided by Int.
agencies
• Nevertheless it expands the possibilities
• Problem with who and how many involved rather
than with process itself
• Politics offers a mechanism to monitor bureaucracy
• Politics can mobilize new solution to problems
 The State
• Conceptual handle to expand insights about
politics
• State officials have authority to govern , they may
lack the means to govern, given state weakness
or the existence of competing authorities.
• State capacity ranges in strength, but it draws on
normative, coercive and bureaucratic resources
that may surpass those institutions which
accumulate private capital
 The State
Regime type
– Military versus civilian, democratic, authoritarian,
corporatists, or totalitarian
– No party, one part, two party or multi part
– Presidential vs. Parliamentary system
• The dynamics of fixed term, elections
competing parties and similar issues have
great mention for political decisions to
distribute development benefits.
• Yet state is not monolith
 The State
Bureaucratic and organizational politics
• State officials neither think alike nor share
common interests
• Each ministry as distinctive political entity in
itself
• Ministries also compete each other
• Distribution of cabinet posts reveal much
about the power of ministries
 The State
Bureaucratic interaction with outside world
• Do they seek social support?
• To what extent government change brings
personal change
– Patent client ties to recruit and remove personals
– Political appointees infuse political agendas
– Political change numbers few in British, thousands
in US and about 25000 in Mexico
– What about Pakistan?
 The State
Inside bureaucracy: horizontal and vertical ties
• Theory and practice of policy making
• Relationship among ministers and bureaucrats
• Guy Peter’s models of political interactions:
1. Formal Model 2. The Village Life Model
3. Functional Model 4. Adversarial Model
5. State model
• Political system(s) within any political system
• State should be strengthen or the reverse?
 The State
State size and strength
• How large is a state?
• How much does it consumes?
• How the size of state has changed over time?
– Public employment has grown 3-4 times faster in DCs and
2-3 times faster than the population at large
– Not only number of employees but number of state
agencies has also grown
• Who counts as state employee
 The State
• Trimming size of state is more than ideological
notions of limited government
• The issue of the size of state is incomplete
without attention to public accountability
 10
20
30
40
50
60

1963-64
1966-67
1969-70
1972-73
1975-76
1978-79
1981-82
1984-85
GDP

1987-88
1990-91
1993-94
1996-97
1999-00
2002-03
UK Public Spendings as % o

2005-06
2008-09