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- Convenors:
-
Amal Chammas
(York St John University)
Laura Camfield (Kings College London)
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- Formats:
- Papers Synchronous
- Stream:
- Practicalities of aid
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 17 June, -, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
The focus of Aid has shifted and new challenges to human and environmental well-being necessitate new ways of working such as 'Cooperation'. What is the effect of these on relationships between donors and development actors and how is development cooperation initiated and managed at the micro-level?
Long Abstract:
The focus of Aid has shifted and new challenges to human and environmental well-being necessitate new ways of working such as 'Cooperation'. We look at the effect of these on the relationships between donors and multiple development actors and ask how development cooperation is initiated and managed at the micro-level. Our specific focus is the behavior and competencies of implementers of development projects, for example, their ability to establish meaningful partnerships. It welcomes qualitative, quantitative or mixed methods research related to development successes and failures and the role of participatory and ethical behaviours in this process. Proposed papers on participatory and cooperative approaches within development can come from a critical 'aidnography' tradition, or a more applied one; one of the aims of the panel is to bring these into dialogue. Papers can address any or all of the following: the extent to which cooperative and participatory practices have been adopted within development, specifically in relation to the ownership of agendas; the nature of interactions between donors, implementers and recipients; the competencies required for more participatory ways of working; and the challenges in formulating and meeting long term strategic objectives where leadership is more diffuse. Practitioners are encouraged to contribute with real cases from the field. We invite PhD students and early career researchers working on these topics to apply to get critical insights on their work. Presenters are asked to submit 3-4 page draft papers/ notes in advance of their presentation, which will be shared with other participants to foster dialogue.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 17 June, 2020, -Paper short abstract:
New models are emerging in which rural co-operative institutions are linked with efforts to build co-operation across value chains. Mainstream approaches prioritise institutional design yet others emphasise the salience of power relationships. How can we understand the dynamics of co-operation?
Paper long abstract:
How do individuals and groups co-operate to build institutions in rural development? What role is played by existing social and economic relations, and how do they become redefined or transformed into new institutional norms? These are the key questions I am grappling with in my PhD research, which explores co-operative institutional development in north India, in the state of Madhya Pradesh, including wider efforts to build co-operation across national and international value chains. Through 12 months of fieldwork I have been working with farmer producer companies (FPCs), introduced recently in India as co-operative/company hybrids, and their supporting non-governmental organisations (NGOs) to understand the dynamics of co-operation in these market-focused bodies, as well as between them and an array of other development stakeholders.
Mainstream approaches often assume that community institutions are amenable to design (North, 1991; Ostrom, 1990) and create a formal/informal binary, in which the 'rules-in-use' and governance procedures (formal), as well as levels of social capital (informal), can be 'designed' to 'get institutions right', reduce 'transaction costs' and promote 'good governance' (World Bank, 2017). Critical approaches emphasise the importance of existing social and economic context, power relations and the unpredictability of institutional development (Cleaver, 2012; Mosse, 2006). My research explores the development of collective farmer organisations in north India, and the interplay with existing institutional norms and social context. I extend this analysis as NGOs work with donors and large supply chain actors to establish new co-operative institutional forms to integrate FPCs within value chains.
Paper short abstract:
Decision-making by local leaders can improve learning, responsiveness, coordination, contestation, legitimacy and accountability. But constraints and risk make it difficult for donors to support. An approach that enables the policy space could help.
Paper long abstract:
The importance of local agency and leadership for development effectiveness has long been emphasised in aid reform agendas, under the heading of 'ownership'. But in practice, this focus has often fallen victim to 'agency creep', as donors strive to retain control over the policy choices of aid-receiving countries. Even the 'second orthodoxy' risks being locally-informed without being locally-led. More recently, donors' leverage over the policies of aid recipients appears to be decreasing due to economic, social and political factors. Given their previous difficulties with local agency, how can donors find new ways to support, enable and embrace it, and to navigate this new world of changing hierarchies? This paper explores the potential benefits of local agency, as well as the risks and constraints which make it difficult. The analysis suggests a possible way forward for donors: to create an enabling environment, by providing meaningful policy space for local leaders in aid-receiving countries to make their own policy choices. This change in emphasis could enhance the accountability and responsiveness of aid-receiving governments, while managing risks and delivering results. It would involve a shift in donor focus, away from being the protagonist and trying to influence the outputs of policymaking - the policy choices that countries make - and instead, towards trying to support the process of making those choices. In short, the remedy for a perceived misuse of power may not be to usurp it, but rather to support and enable its use for good.
Paper short abstract:
By initiating CSR projects, transnational corporations appear as donors in developing host countries. Do they cooperate with the recipients? A case study from Ghana underlines local actors' chances of participating in CSR decision-making, when specific governance mechanisms are in place.
Paper long abstract:
Recently, close cooperation between donors and recipients of any form of development assistance became a catchphrase in the scientific and societal development discourse. Within this discourse, the interactions and relationships between old and new, global Southern and global Northern, global and local level actors are at stake. Among the stakeholders receiving increasing attention as development actors are private sector entities, which appear as donors when establishing Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) activities in global Southern host countries - an approach praised in particular by the transnational extractive industries. Against this background, this study asks which actors, besides the transnational corporations, influence and guide decision-making processes concerning CSR interventions in countries of operation, paying special attention to domestic actors such as government agencies and local communities as recipients. More precisely, it investigates the governance and stakeholder relations that underlie CSR projects by four transnational oil corporations in the rural Western Region of Ghana. Data, derived from qualitative surveys in form of interviews and focus groups in Ghana, are analysed based on governance recommendations provided in constructivist theories such as the agency theory and the policy mobility discourse. The core results from the Ghanaian case study draw attention to the significance of pro-active local actor involvement, strong personalities among local stakeholders as promotor, and specific forms of leverage and bargaining power. Furthermore, the concept of CSR in the corporations' home countries and the company's internal idea of CSR play a critical role regarding the inclusion of domestic local actors in CSR decision-making processes.
Paper short abstract:
This paper investigates the role that Jordanian women's organisations play within an unequal North/South partnership and looks into how they take on the lead 'against the odds' when it comes to shaping and forming these partnerships to their ideal by using different forms of rightful resistance.
Paper long abstract:
Although today, the notion of partnership is omnipresent in North/South cooperation in development contexts, one partner often continues to financially (and to a certain extent discursively) depend on the other. This is especially the case for non-charity women's organisations in Jordan, where civil society is highly controlled and restricted, and state support for the promotion of women's rights is low and who therefore almost completely depend on their mostly Northern donors.
By combining Escobar's development discourse and O'Brien's concept of rightful resistance, the paper puts emphasis on the role that Jordanian women's organisations play within an unequal North/South partnership and looks into how they manage to take on a leadership position 'against the odds' when it comes to shaping and forming these partnerships to their ideal.
The paper is grounded in a two-month participant observation of a Jordanian women's rights organization and a series of qualitative interviews with their staff members and donor representatives conducted in Jordan between 2018 and 2020. It (1) investigates the divergences of how both the organisation and their donors define partnership and (2) looks into concrete situations in which the organisation attempts to reclaim partnership by performing three different forms of so-called rightful resistance: open resistance, covert resistance, and semi-open resistance.
Paper short abstract:
Why are some civic advocacy campaigns able to achieve policy goals? Based on an evaluation of an assistance program to civic coalitions in Mexico, we argue that success depends on the developing institutions to overcome collective action problems, and fitting strategy to local context.
Paper long abstract:
Why are some civic associations able to achieve desired policy outcomes through advocacy campaigns while others are not? Development assistance often aims to assist civic associations in building capacity to achieve their policy goals. The determinants of advocacy success have important implications for the targeting, design, implementation, and evaluation of aid to civic associations. Based on original research conducted as part of an ex post evaluation of a United States Government (USG) assistance program to anti-corruption civic coalitions in Mexico, we argue that the success of anti-corruption advocacy campaigns depends on the strategic interactions and decisions of coalition members within a political and institutional context.
These contextual factors, including political opportunity structure, historical context, and organizational resource endowments affect campaign results by constraining the advocacy strategies that are available to associations. Given those constraints, campaign success depends upon association selection of a basket of advocacy strategies, and the capacity of the association to overcome collective action problems.
We demonstrate this argument through case studies of anti-corruption advocacy campaigns by coalitions of civic associations in three Mexican states - Nuevo León, Coahuila, and Querétaro. These case studies are based on review of primary and secondary sources, and field research, including semi-structured key informant interviews. We find that more successful anti-corruption coalitions in Nuevo León and Coahuila identified comparative advantages based on organizational resource endowments, leveraged information, expertise, and social networks to influence decision makers, and presented a credible threat of citizen mobilization beyond the key actors in the coalition.