International development - dissonance between discourse and practice

I have consolidated the posts on international development into a working paper. It’s available here. The abstract is reproduced.

This paper will draw attention to some commonly observed dissonances between development thinking and its practice. While they are most salient in the thinking around international development, they manifest in several ways within the world of development practice too.

They cover the obsession with new ideas and innovations, especially technical fixes, and the belief that they can have transformative impacts; the marginalisation of priors and the elevation of rigorous evidence on what works; the importance attached to headline impact evaluations and the deceptive ideology of evidence-based policymaking; the critical importance of the implementation of ideas, the mechanisms of implementation, and the importance of effective management; and the ability to exercise good judgment being the biggest constraint to development, and the problems created by the grafting of best practice ideas using aid money.

This paper will present the perspective of a policymaker and policy implementor on these articles of faith that permeate the discourses and institutions of international development.

I want to make a contextual point here. While the manner of the Trump administration’s assault on regulations and the federal bureaucracy in the US, illustrated by the virtual shutdown of USAID, is both unacceptable and disastrous, the international development world needed a bit of shaking up. Its discourse, in general, has for long been disconnected from its practice.