Research project
Public–Private Development Interfaces in Ethiopia (DEVINT)
Private enterprises, businesses and large corporations have, over the past decade, entered the field of international development on an unprecedented scale. While it was unthinkable and even considered illegitimate for traditional donors to partner with these private, market-driven actors a few years ago, public–private partnerships have now emerged as the new, unquestionable normal. The growing role of the private sector is reflected in the Agenda 2030, which pays due attention to the private sector as both an objective of and a means to implement the audacious SDGs. SDG17 – revitalise the global partnership for sustainable development – specifically underscores how private sector involvement is required to realise the SDGs in poorer countries.
This paradigmatic shift has made an imprint on official development policy globally: in Ethiopia, the government has tapped into this discourse to stimulate the business sector and create job opportunities. In Norway, the shift is reflected in the government’s recent White Paper on development policy and operationalised via Norad’s, its aid agency, new ‘strategic partnership’ programme, which aims to foster greater public–private development partnerships.
While the shift towards increased public–private partnerships is documented in existing literature, it is not clear how the inclusion of private actors has changed the meanings, processes and mechanisms of international development. Through detailed empirical case studies in Ethiopia, DEVINT will map and analyse these changes, the challenges and opportunities they present to development cooperation and the unintended consequences and impacts these changes have on development practice. The project will analyse different forms and renderings of public–private partnerships and how the involved actors perceive, navigate and implement these partnerships.
Combining the insights of post-development theory and actor oriented approaches to development, DEVINT explores public–private partnerships in practice. While the discursive approach of post-development theory attends to the level of policy, an actor perspective will, with a focus on the actors’ joint partnership formation and policymaking processes, grasp how these policies shape development practice. Focusing on the practical encounter of different actors allow us to study the intersection of different actors’ lifeworlds, interests, mandates, and how this shape the formation of joint partnerships and projects. Studying such situations of interface also enables us to explore the complex relationship between development policy and practice, including how actors employ strategies of brokerage and translation to manage and manoeuvre policy–practice and public–private interfaces.
While studying the new aid regime and public–private partnerships are important to understand and improve how bold SDG strategies and objectives are converted into practice, we also posit that doing so will reveal larger processes of governance, power and social change that are shaping the world today.
Project Manager
Participants
External
Marit Tolo Østebø, University of Florida
Teshome Imana, Addis Ababa University
Lovise Aalen, Chr. Michelsen Institute
New publications
Conclusion: Public–private relations in the wild
In this conclusion, the authors draw on their readings of all the contributions in 'The Politics of Public–Private Partnerships and International Development: Insights from Ethiopia' to highlight the contributors’ insights and the connections between them, as well as suggest new directions and questions that have been opened up by the volume’s collective analysis. The chapters in this volume illuminate how the PPP agenda is rendered in markedly different ways as it moves from policy to practice despite sustained efforts to refine PPP frameworks and claims about their importance for achieving the UN SDGs and reducing the international development finance gap. By tracing partnership relations over time and across borders within and beyond Ethiopia, the contributors to this volume shed light on messy constellations of actors, institutions and relations that fit – although often uneasily – under the PPP umbrella. They follow public and private configurations, from beer breweries to textile exporters to housing and hospitals, in international development cooperation and around the windowless conference rooms of the World Bank. In this conclusion, the authors suggest that the unruliness, inconsistencies and arbitrariness that emerge through these cases indicate that PPPs can be fruitfully reframed not only as wild but also as situated in the wild. This chapter is part of the book 'The Politics of Public–Private Partnerships and International Development'.
From synergy to subsidy – The cultural problem of public–private partnerships in international development
This chapter explores the cultural problem of PPPs. The PPP policy agenda in international development seeks to juxtapose actors with distinct rationales and institutional logics, with the ambition to create synergy between them. In practice, however, the intentional encounter between public and private actors produces interface situations that also amplify the actors’ distinctiveness and thus the cultural problem of PPPs. The chapter draws on data collection in the World Bank and a case study in Ethiopia of a PPP development project involving an NGO and a multinational corporation. This shows the practical renderings and effects of the culture problem, here causing the private actor to withdraw from the partnership and their joint project. Thus, what was meant as a project of synergy becomes a publicly funded proxy and subsidy of private interests. At the general level, the chapter shows how the PPP agenda compels categorisation as either public or private while at the same time it seeks to merge these differences. As such, the interface dynamics and cultural problem are not only produced by the PPP agenda but may also undermine it. This chapter is part of the book 'The Politics of Public–Private Partnerships and International Development'.
Tracing the travels of a development model
Historicising Ethiopia’s contemporary global Public-Private Partnerships (PPP) agenda, this chapter examines how its contemporary manifestation in Ethiopia bears the imprint of the PPP model’s checkered historical and political trajectory. The underlying analytical gambit is that tracing the ‘travels’ of the PPP model – via analyses of China and the UK’s PPP waves – can both help explain how Ethiopia ended up adopting the model in the first place and understand the distinct form this adoption has taken. In the process, the analysis shows how Ethiopia’s PPP policy relies upon a highly selective process of ‘lessons’ to be ‘learned’ from (un)successful projects that partially but not entirely airbrushes out experiences that would threaten the uptake of the model. These elisions are crucial for imagining that the risks of PPP can be overcome with capacity-building and more rigorous management processes. The chapter contends that this selective learning can help account for the spread of PPPs to Ethiopia and the persistence of the PPP promotion efforts by international financial institutions globally. Taken together, the chapter makes the case for treating the PPP model as an unfolding global process. This chapter is part of the book 'The Politics of Public–Private Partnerships and International Development'
Unravelling the Ps in public–private partnerships for development
With the launch of UN Agenda 2030, public–private partnerships (PPPs) became formalised as both an objective of and a means of implementing the UN Sustainable Development Goals. An established policy-oriented research agenda has long sought to make sense of the ‘jungle’ of PPPs by identifying critical success factors and chronic shortcomings. Yet the instrumentalist inclination to evaluate PPPs restricts this agenda’s theoretical horizons. Building on a relatively smaller but significant body of critical PPP work, Agenda 2030 calls for research that embraces the messiness of PPPs and treats the plasticity of the term as a feature to understand rather than a bug to be overcome. To wit, Agenda 2030 advances an inductive approach to exploring the PPP buzzword in its specific enactments and makes the case for problematising the Ps in PPP from the bottom up and from multiple perspectives. Ultimately, Agenda 2030 highlights the theoretical value of escaping the evaluation meta-narrative that delimits the theoretical potential of a great deal of existing research on PPPs for development and PPPs more broadly. In addition to helping inform and enhance our understanding of the contemporary PPP agenda, this approach is useful for making sense of the political and capitalist forces that are shaping not only Ethiopia but the world at large today. This chapter is part of the book 'The Politics of Public–Private Partnerships and International Development'.
International finance institutions and the public-private partnership dilemma
Over the last decade, leading international finance institutions (IFIs) have devoted considerable resources seeking to revive public–private partnerships (PPPs) for infrastructure. This renewed PPP agenda has sought to learn from the model’s checkered track record and the ‘evidence-based critique’ that emerged in its wake. Indeed, rather than dampening enthusiasm for PPPs, this critique has inspired IFIs to elaborate a growing array of best practices and institutional reforms intended to help governments avoid past mistakes and thereby undertake PPP programmes that achieve value for money at scale. Despite these efforts, the pipeline of PPPs has stagnated. Taking stock of the agenda’s results and conducting a close reading of the new PPP guidance, this article suggests that this outcome is neither surprising nor necessarily a failure. By developing rigorous mechanisms for achieving value for money and thus adding complexity and transaction costs, the new PPP agenda helps governments avoid predation but at the cost of appealing to the private sector. Rather than ushering in a new dawn of PPPs, the agenda simply moves the dial on what the article terms the PPP Dilemma: whereby governments must choose between a high-volume but low-quality PPP world and a low-volume but high-quality PPP world.
The Grammar of Status Competition: International Hierarchies and Domestic Politics
States do not only strive for wealth and security, but international status too. A burgeoning body of research has documented that states of all sizes spend considerable time, energy, and even blood and treasure when seeking status on the world stage. Yet, for all scholars' success in identifying instances of status seeking, they lack agreement on the nature of the international hierarchies that states are said to compete within. Making sense of this status ambiguity remains the key methodological and theoretical challenge facing status research in international relations scholarship. In The Grammar of Status Competition, Paul David Beaumont tackles this puzzle head on by making a strength out of status' widely acknowledged slipperiness. Given that states, statesmen, and citizens care about and pursue status despite its difficulty to assess, Beaumont argues that we can study international status hierarchies through these actors' attempts to grapple with this same status ambiguity. The book thus redirects inquiry toward the theories of international status (TIS) that governments and citizens themselves produce and use to make sense of their state's position in the world. Advancing a new framework for studying such TIS, the book illuminates how specific theories of international status emerge, solidify, and become contested, and how these processes influence domestic and foreign policy. Showcasing the value of a TIS approach via multiple historical case studies—from nuclear arms control to Norwegian education policy—Beaumont thereby addresses three major puzzles in IR status research: why states compete for status when the international rewards seem ephemeral; how states can escape the zero-sum game associated with quests for positional status; and how status scholars can overcome the methodological problem of disentangling status from other motivations
Bottom-up development as framed freedom: developmentality and donor power
International development assistance is founded on and reproduces a set of conceptual and structural binaries. Development actors themselves have attempted to alter lopsided aid relations, as illustrated by the prominent policy agendas of ownership and localisation in the 2010s. These are both expressions of bottom-up approaches to international aid, which challenge the very hierarchical nature of development as a particular Western instrument and historical project of intervention. This article argues that the top-heavy, donor-driven policies to turn development bottom-up fail not simply because of these discursive challenges. Aid asymmetries also persist because of the neoliberal audit culture evolving in tandem with the liberal contours of ownership and localisation agendas. This is analysed in terms of developmentality, which, as a tacit and indirect form of power, is both produced by and simultaneously undermines the liberal tenets of bottom-up approaches.
Localization and developmentality: Policy pragmatism in pandemic times
Motivation: Localization is increasingly invoked in debates about how to reform international aid: to improve aid effectiveness and address ethical concerns by turning hierarchical aid relations on their head. This has proved to be easier said than done. The COVID-19 pandemic produced logistical impediments to aid practitioners, which translated into a renewed, if temporary, interest in localization. Purpose: The initial scope of the research engaged with the notion of partnership during COVID-19, but almost all informants drew attention to the concept of localization. The article maps and analyses the challenges and advantages of localization, as seen from the practitioners' perspective. Approach and methods: The article draws on 24 interviews conducted in Oslo with representatives of various Norwegian development and humanitarian non-governmental organizations and government agencies, in addition to policy and grey literature review. Findings: The article shows that the re-emergence of the localization debate during COVID-19 occurred not because of any ambition to reform aid, but as a pragmatic and temporary response to the logistical impediments caused by the pandemic. Reflections from the interviewees on the pros and cons offer more substantial insights into why localization fails to change practice, while at the same time localization enables a form of indirect governance related to accountability regimes. This is analysed as developmentality, reflecting the logic that localization takes place when recipients do as donors want, but they do so voluntarily, which suggests that localization counterintuitively may reinforce existing power structures. Policy implications: Localization is poorly conceptualized. While a definition could be helpful in practice, one that is too rigid could undermine the diversity of actors and knowledge that localization aims to advance. At the operational level, localization requires greater flexibility and slack throughout the aid chain, especially in the audit and accountability regimes of donor and funding authorities, which permeate and uphold lopsided aid relations.
Revisiting the Case of Ethnography and International Relations
This article revisits the debate on the role of ethnography in International Relations. It primarily does this by elucidating three points of tension in the literature on ethnography in International Relations. Firstly, it tackles the challenges related to ‘getting on’ with ethnography after the reflexive methodological developments that have taken place within anthropology since the 1980s. Secondly, it investigates how to overcome certain matters of scale and how to conceptualise the ‘international’ methodologically, or more specifically, ethnographically. When looking at issues that somehow exist and operate on the international scale, the ethnographic task of immersion in local scenes does sometimes seem like an ill-suited approach. However, I argue, this problematisation is dependent on a certain methodological understanding of what the international is. I attempt to formulate an alternative methodological approach that takes seriously the idea that international relations always can be accessed locally. This paper suggests that one of the main solutions to the obstacle of scale is methodologically abandon the imaginary of totalities as a higher level. In this way, ethnography can enable important understandings of social relations that exist across scales of local and global.
Humanitarian–development nexus
This is a chapter in the book Elgar Encyclopedia of Development.
Project Manager
Participants
External
Marit Tolo Østebø, University of Florida
Teshome Imana, Addis Ababa University
Lovise Aalen, Chr. Michelsen Institute