Good Policy Is Unimplementable?

Reflections on the Ethnography of Aid Policy and Practice

Publication date: Thursday 03 February 2005

The paper offers five propositions about aid-backed projects. Secondly, ideas that make for ‘good policy’— policy which legitimises and mobilises political and practical support— are not those which provide good guides to action. Good policy is unimplementable..."

1. Policy (development models, strategies and project designs) primarily functions to mobilise and maintain political support, that is to legitimise rather than to orientate practice. Anybody who has been involved in project formulation knows that this is work which is technically expressed (as project designs) but politically shaped (by the interests and priorities of agencies).

2. Development interventions are driven not by policy but by the exigencies of organisations and the need to maintain relationships. Reflecting on a decade of project level practice, it became clear to me that it was not the policy model that made IBRFP practice intelligible, but rather compliance with the political and cultural logic of field encounters, managerial style, and organisational rules and procedures as systems of relationships.

3. Development projects work to maintain themselves ascoherent policy ideas, as systems of representations as well as operational systems. Policy may not generate events, but it helps stabilise the interpretation of events.

4. Projects do not fail; they are failed by wider networks ofsupport and validation.

5.‘Success’ and ‘failure’ are policy-oriented judgements thatobscure project effects.

About the relationship between aid policy and practice, the writer concludes that "even in small projects the intersection of the world of policy thought and the world of development practices is partial and socially managed. Policy discourse generates mobilising metaphors (‘participation’, ‘partnership’, ‘governance’, ‘social capital’) whose vagueness, ambiguity and lack of conceptual precision is required to conceal ideological differences, to allow compromise and the enrolment of different interests, to build coalitions, to distribute agency and to multiply criteria of success within project systems.

David Mosse is a development anthropologist at the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) with extensive professional background in India. His latest book, "Cultivating Development - An Ethnography of Aid Policy and Practice" (Pluto, London 2005) provides a revealing X-ray of foreign aid programmes.
This 2004 paper, which captures some of that book's main points, "challenges the assumption that development practice is driven by policy, suggesting that the things that make for ‘good policy’— policy which legitimises and mobilises political support — in reality make it rather unimplementable within its chosen institutions and regions."