Editorial vol. 7 number 2

Institutional reform has become one of the central pillars of official development policy and practice, a trend accelerated by the transitions brought about through the end of the Cold War. No public instrument remains immune from review: from macro-economic policy and international trade, the function and policing of global institutions, or the relationship between national governments and the private sector, to the role of the military in peace-keeping and humanitarian action. There is mounting pressure for public policies to be made and implemented in ways that are explicit and rule-bound, by institutions that are properly accountable to those affected by, or underwriting, them. In terms of development-related policies in particular, non-government organisations (NGOs) and others have focused on lobbying for such 'transparency' within their own governments, and across the spectrum of bilateral and multilateral agencies. In so doing, NGOs have have rightly come under scrutiny, as they too are challenged to prove their own accountability and performance.¹

Yet recent years have also seen, on the one hand, a kind of laissez faire fatalism about the deepening gulf between rich and poor; and, on the other, the fear that unbridled capitalism is undermining cultural diversity and further eroding fragile livelihoods and social support systems.² As a result, while most agree on the urgent need to change the ways in which societies govern themselves and relate to each other, there is fierce dissent about what changes are needed, and how best to promote them. For instance, many argue that the Bretton Woods institutions are currently part of the problem rather than part of the solution: for, while they are powerful in setting the policy agenda, their prescriptions, when administered in a deeply unequal world, have a devastating impact on people who are poor or otherwise excluded.³ In other words, the institutions which see themselves as reforming others are themselves in need of fundamental reform.

The contributors to this issue of Development in Practice focus on the problems inherent in relying on existing institutional machinery both to promote far-reaching change and truly to transform itself. Solon Barraclough, a world-renowned expert on food and agricultural systems, demonstrates how aid programmes are necessarily shaped by the economic frameworks which produce them; and mediated by the political and institutional context within which they must function. As Edgar Pieterse shows in relation to post-apartheid South Africa, aid and the institutions through which it is channelled are part of a complex web of power relationships, from which they cannot be isolated. Sara Hlupekile Longwe illustrates a similar point in relation to the 'undertow' of patriarchal attitudes and structures on agencies' formal commitment to gender equity; and this is taken up by Hope Chigudu in her account of how a Zimbabwean feminist NGO has gone about trying to create a new space for 'alternative knowledge'. Joel Audefroy explores the impact of the wider policy context on the scope for community-level action in his review of the low-cost housing sector.

Both Susana Pinilla Cisneros and Robert Johnson look at how existing systems could be tapped in order to release funds for the small-enterprise sector specifically, and human development and poverty-eradication in a wider sense. Yet their optimism is tempered by the knowledge that policy changes would depend on an institutional shift from immediate self-interest to the long-term common good -- which is unlikely to come about without the kind of sustained pressure advocated by Robert Fox, in relation to the multilateral development banks. Mary Purcell and Carlos Heredia demonstrate the virtual impenetrability of public policy debates in their account of the World Bank's Country Assistance Strategy for Mexico; while Deryck R. Brown describes how a donor's narrow emphasis on financial sustainability brought about the near-destruction of a successful organisation in Belize. If, as Firoze Manji argues, the aid relationship is inherently compromising for donors and recipients, this begs the question of whether 'the development industry' can ever be significantly reformed from within.

1 For example, Michael Edwards and David Hulme (eds) (1996): Non-governmental Organisations: Performance and Accountability -- Beyond the Magic Bullet, London: Earthscan/SCF.

2 Kevin Watkins: 'Fast route to poverty', Guardian Weekly, 16 February 1997.

3 The UNDP Human Development Report 1996 (Oxford and New York: OUP) argues that economic growth cannot alone eradicate poverty or promote human development, and that, if present trends continue, 'economic disparities between the industrial and developing nations will move from inequitable to inhuman' (p.iii).

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