To go with or against the grain? Politics as practice in the Budget Strengthening Initiative, Uganda
| Published date | 01 July 2024 |
| Author | Rose Pinnington |
| Date | 01 July 2024 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1758-5899.13259 |
Global Policy. 2024;15(Suppl. 4):71–83 .
|
71
wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/gpol
1 | PUBLIC AUTHORITIES
AND POLITICAL PRACTICE IN
CHALLENGING REFORM CONTEXTS
Responding to the failures of the good governance
agenda in the post- Cold War period, development schol-
ars and practitioners have been advancing approac hes
that might better contribute to establishing stronger insti-
tutions in Africa. Increasingly, success in promoting d e-
velopmental change has been claimed to be dependent
on a ‘deep understanding of and proactive engag ement
with local political and power relations’ (Carothers & de
Gramont, 2013; Laws and Marquet te,2 018: 2). In re-
cent years, development scholars and policy researc h-
ers have placed greater emphasis on approaches that
might enable practitioners to support local changes
processes in politically sav vy ways. Sometimes referred
to as the ‘second orthodox y’ (Teskey, 2017 ) in donor
practice, these models aim to take the politi cs of aid-
receiving contexts seriously and ada pt to the realities of
the institutional landscapes in which they are applied.
Recognising that political analysis alone is unlikely
to achieve ‘politically smart ’ (Booth & Unsworth,2014 )
practice, a community of policy res earchers and de-
velopment practitioners have been working together to
develop models for not just ‘thinking’ bu t also ‘working
politically’. Members of the ‘thinking and work ing polit-
ically’ (TWP) communit y of practice note that there is
‘no single agreed definition, framework or set of formal
tools for TWP’ (Laws & Marquette, 2018: 2), but they
are able to propose three key principles for more politi-
cally sensitive ways of working:
RESEARCH ARTICLE
To go with or against the grain? Politics as practice in the
Budget Strengthening Initiative, Uganda
RosePinnington
Received: 2 Novem ber 2022
|
Revised: 30 July 2 023
|
Accepted: 31 July 20 23
DO I: 10 .1111/17 58- 589 9.13 259
This is an open ac cess article under t he terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium,
provided the original work is properly cited.
© 2023 The Author. Global Policy publishe d by Durham University an d John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
Special Issu e: Development Practice, Powe r and Public Authorities
Department o f Political Economy, King's
College London, London, UK
Correspondence
Rose Pinnington, Department of Political
Economy, King's College London, London,
UK.
Email: rose.pinnington@kcl.ac.uk
Funding information
Centre for Public Au thority and
International Development (CPAID),
Grant/Award Number: ES/P008038/1
Abstract
Responding to the failures of the good governance agen da in the post- Cold War
period, development scholars and poli cy researchers have placed increasing
emphasis on approaches that can enabl e practitioners to support local change
processes in politically sav vy ways. Sometimes referred to as the ‘second or-
thodoxy’ in donor practic e, these models aim to take the politics of aid- receiving
contexts seriously and work ‘with the grai n’ of the institutional landscapes in
which they are applied. This paper examines how these princ iples were put into
practice within the ODI's Budget Streng thening Initiative (BSI) in Uganda. The
paper shows how an ‘embedded’ form of technica l assistance enabled the BSI
to act micro- politically, brokering the adoption of fiscal decentralisation reforms
within the Uganda government. However, in the face of a broader political land-
scape of regime survival, the BSI's positi on within Uganda's financial technoc-
racy also constrained its capacit y to support these reforms. In this context of
declining autonomy and shifting poli tical constraints, the BSI worked ‘with the
grain’ to reshape the reforms to align with pre- existing political logics that hin-
dered pro- poor outcomes. Going forward, the paper suggests that fur ther atten-
tion might be applied to understand ing and addressing the fundamental tensions
and trade- offs involved in working ‘with the grain’ of challenging p olitical contexts
like Uganda.
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