Towards an enhanced understanding of aid policy reform: Learning from the French case
| Published date | 01 December 2018 |
| Date | 01 December 2018 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1002/pad.1842 |
| Author | Gordon D. Cumming |
RESEARCH ARTICLE
Towards an enhanced understanding of aid policy reform:
Learning from the French case
Gordon D. Cumming
Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK
Correspondence
Gordon D. Cumming, MLANG, Cardiff
University, 65‐68 Park Place, Cardiff CF10
3AS, UK.
Email: cumming@cardiff.ac.uk
Summary
Major overhauls of aid policies and institutions are comparatively rare. When they
happen, they are usually ascribed to pressures arising from outside donor agencies.
Where internal forces for change are identified, the focus is on field operatives rather
than political entrepreneurs based in donor head offices. This article homes in on the
role of the political entrepreneur and shows how this actor can help effect top‐down
reforms to overseas development assistance. It does so by combining a political entre-
preneurship perspective with a broader theorisation of policy change, historical insti-
tutionalism, and applying this innovative framework to French aid reforms over the
years (2001–2010) when Jean‐Michel Severino was Managing Director of the Agence
Française de Développement. It finds that, although historical institutionalism can
explain the broad direction of French changes in terms of “structural factors”such
as exogenous shocks and new institutional configurations, it struggles to account
for incremental shifts and the emergence of “new”ideas. Political entrepreneurship
addresses these issues through its emphasis on individual human agents and their
operational and ideational strategies. It concludes that this relatively parsimonious
framework could provide an enhanced understanding of other reforms in the interna-
tional development field and beyond.
KEYWORDS
Africa, agency structure, aid, development, France, historical institutionalism, political
entrepreneurship, public policy reform
1|INTRODUCTION
Radical overhauls of the foreign aid policies and institutions of bilateral
donors are relatively rare. Where they occur, either over time, as with
Japan's rise as a “foreign‐aid superpower”(Rix, 1996), or suddenly, as
with Britain's creation of an autonomous Department for International
Development (Porteous, 2008), they are generally attributed to pres-
sures arising outside of donor agencies. Many scholars ascribe new
directions in overseas development assistance (ODA) to “structural”
forces in the wider politico‐economic, ideational, and institutional
environment. For some, the focus is on global events, such as the
1998 financial crisis (Dang, Knack, & Halsey Rogers, 2013), or new
norms emanating from international organisations, such as the United
Nations (Thiele, Nunnenkamp, & Dreher, 2007) and the Organisation
for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD; Mawdsley, Sav-
age, & Kim, 2014). For others, the emphasis is on the election of gov-
ernments with different political ideologies (Banks, Murray, Overton,
& Scheyvens, 2012) or changes in the “development cooperation land-
scape”(Gore, 2013, p. 770), particularly the rise of non‐OECD donors
and “beyond‐aid”financing (Zimmermann & Smith, 2011).
A rather different tack is taken by development management
scholars who, while recognising that “domestic politics”and “interna-
tional political economy dynamics …influence donor conduct”
(Gulrajani, 2015, p. 153), lay great stress on the modernising impulses
that arise from within aid agencies (Arel‐Bundock, Atkinson, & Potter,
2015; Honig, 2014; Hupe & Hill, 2007). In effect, as Gulrajani (2015, p.
160) has argued, the “silent figures”and “street level bureaucrats”who
“populate donor bureaucracies”are “worthy of attention for their
Received: 23 July 2017 Revised: 23 July 2018 Accepted: 15 October 2018
DOI: 10.1002/pad.1842
Public Admin Dev. 2018;38:179–189. © 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/pad 179
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