Political Economy Analysis with/without a bang and a crash
PEA origin stories, new developments, and two new PEA jobs live
PEA and the sound of breaking glass
Flashback to the earlier 2000s and my first formal exposure to what we now know as ‘political economy analysis’.
This was the ‘Drivers of Change1’ initiative which DFID rolled out via a bit of a global roadshow. As a newly minted junior DFID adviser in Malawi I was distinctly supporting cast - in fact, supporting the supporting cast.
We hosted a range of government and non government leaders to come and discuss the emerging analysis and it all started with a bang and a crash - literally as I fell down the stairs of the British High Commission while carrying a tray of glasses and water bottles. Luckily we all lived to tell the tale and people were extremely kind after my disastrous entry. Thirsty, but kind.
In hindsight, this ‘drivers of change’ approach was striking in that the nascent political analysis was not a private good to make the donor smarter, but part of an open discussion.
I can’t find an online footprint of this early wave of work in Malawi, but there was a subsequent round, and a report in 2006. The opening paragraph’s point about ‘LoPW’ still rings true, though from 2025 the focus on ‘development programmes’ (i.e. aid) looks a bit dated.
Weaknesses in development programmes are often blamed by donors on the ‘lack of political will’ shown by their partners in country governments. Drivers of Change (DoC) is the name being given to a learning exercise at country level that explores the factors underlying the ‘political will’ problem and how they can be taken more centrally into account in country assistance plans.
I was intrigued to see whether the 2006 Drivers of Change report gives much attention to the international partners as ‘players’ in Malawi’s country drama, including their own incentives, interests, and ‘political will’. What I found is worthy of a cynical drama about the crazy days of peak aid…2
Going underground
With some notable exceptions, PEA appears to have spent a lot of time underground since then - so a private service paid for usually by bilateral donors and other private interests, to inform their own strategy, and as part of risk mitigation. While PEA findings might be shared in some form with close allies, the analysis is not typically made public or open access (‘public’ could include paywalled).
I’ve commissioned, and delivered, a bit of this work myself, and also received a range of draft PEA reports by other people. They are diverse in method, quality and length (lengthy usually reflects starting from ancient history - so several erudite historical chapters before getting to the hot policy here and now). Sometimes I am asked if I can try and improve a draft report, which is (of course) very subjective. Some of the great diversity in PEA is healthy and helpful, though the secrecy creates a quality challenge - it limits peer feedback and review, and quality benchmarking. At worst, PEA can be more or less anything that has political economy in the title.
I think funders and commissioners can also be part of the PEA quality problem - not sure what they really want, and their Terms of Reference betray this. I know because I’ve been there myself. Learning a little through every near miss.
However, we can’t blame all woes on secrecy. Some public reports and PEA frameworks are also pretty thin or partial, with ‘politically cautious’ organisations perhaps responding to criticism (‘why don’t you do politics?’) by commissioning their own ‘political economy’ manual or framework. I think that the WHO’s effort is a bit weedy (see my grumble about it here).
Keeping it Simple (but not stupid)
With this backdrop, I like to keep PEA things simple. I use a boiled down, plain language amalgam of the DFID/FCDO and USAID PEA toolkits, with a few extras stressed - electoral timelines and politically/electorally viable strategies; crises and related windows of opportunity; systems and sub systems (the opportunity for some pictures); and elite bargains and win: wins (these two drawing on Dercon’s Gambling on Development).
I also give explicit attention to the role of external agencies as active players in the domestic political game, not some kind of mystical, well-intentioned passive observer.
This simple structure guides the way I talk about PEA, the way I deliver and write PEA, and the way I guide others through PEA (training for want of a better word). Keeping it simple, plain language, and standardised…. which is also the backbone of the Practical Politics Platform. Customers know what to expect and - in terms of format - get what they expect. This was a lesson learnt from private sector political risk services. New theme, new problem, new country, but always the same reliable format.
PEA for all!
With this background, I was thrilled this month to work with a range of government officials from lowish and middle income countries to set out some basic PEA tools, concepts, a framework for analysis, and then working with them to apply this to their own selected corruption challenge. We learnt as we went - adapted the process to slow down when necessary, and speed up when enthusiasm soared.
This was directly supporting those working on their own country’s challenges - not secretly trying to make their international partners smarter. Getting PEA out of the shadows and into the mainstream…
This overall intention (plain language, open access…) was hatched before 2025’s aid tailspin, but seems to fit the new normal. Within aid, I think that dwindling funds mean that understanding context and politics is even more vital than it was during times of aid plenty, and particularly when (like it or now) aid is ever more a foreign policy instrument; but for PEA practitioners, working directly with country players (and non government organisations and the private sector) seems to be the right shape for the future.
Doing such work with core funding, rather than at the contractual behest of a particular foreign donor, seems better still. However, beggars can’t be choosers. I think that PEA is generally under funded so we practitioners take whatever work we can get.
Building wider demand/funding/support for PEA beyond bilateral aid could also be celebrated as an aid success story - an endorsement of the utility and value of this type of analysis that aid has patiently cultivated, but which can now fly free. Out of the shadows…
Recruiting!
I have been beavering away at the idea of the Practical Politics Platform since October 2023 and we have now reached an exciting milestone - new people!
We are recruiting two core team members to help accelerate the PPP’s development - a Political Economy Specialist and a Programme Manager. Thanks to our two Foundation seed funders.
Job descriptions, and a bit more about the PPP here and pasted below.
The ‘Practical Politics Platform’ [PPP] is a new initiative at the Centre for the Study of African Economies [CSAE] hosted at the Blavatnik School of Government [BSG], University of Oxford, and working with the Economic Policy Network (EPN). The PPP will deliver plain language, open access, action-oriented political economy products that can be used by anyone to understand and tackle political constraints in growth and development. Our target audience is mainstream decision makers: we aim to ‘get politics out of the shadows and into the mainstream’.
With Professor Stefan Dercon as PPP Academic Director, we aim to build on the momentum of two decades of ‘Political Economy Analysis’ (PEA) and research, and harness the global interest in Stefan’s book ‘Gambling on Development’.
The PPP’s USP is a commitment to open access, public good products - not private PEA for paying customers. Our emphasis is on elite bargains, development gambles, finding viable ‘win: wins’, and setting out propositional advice that can help unlock effectiveness in very large flows of finance - whether revenue, debt, private investment, philanthropy, or aid.
Aiming to normalise political economy. Demystify it. Out of the shadows and into the mainstream. Practical political economy. Without a bang and crash.
Get the gist?
Drivers of change generated some good jokes - the DFID Drivers process was ‘owned’ by the up-and-coming governance cadre, yet the social development group had been applying some of the power analysis tools for years. My social development colleague said ‘it’s so cute that governance has discovered politics’. He also annoyed the team by talking about bumper stickers saying ‘Drivers for Change’.
See Drivers of Change and Development in Malawi. David Booth, Diana Cammack, Jane Harrigan, Edge Kanyongolo, Mike Mataure, Naomi Ngwira, January 2006. p.34
“While the position of individual donors regarding food security and agricultural policy is unstable, there have also been unhelpful divisions within the donor community itself. At one extreme, USAID promotes a vision of extensive livelihood diversification away from maize and rapid agricultural commercialisation with growing reliance on regional maize imports. At the other extreme, DFID continues to support maize-production initiatives such as the Targeted Inputs Programme (TIP) and has argued that Malawi should aim to become a regional maize exporter. USAID’s advocacy of rapid agricultural diversification is also at odds with the conclusions of four top World Bank diversification missions, which concluded that the scope for smallholder diversification into high value exportable crops is limited.
There has been a considerable amount of fairly adversarial policy dialogue, reflecting these differences. For example, the EU criticised DFID and early World Bank support for free inputs, whilst USAID blamed DFID for undermining its AIMS (Agricultural Inputs Market Development Project) by supporting the government-run free Targeted Inputs Programme. On the other hand, many donors and occasionally government officials see the EC delegation as ‘driving its own agenda’, given the large resources it has for food security interventions. Constructive donor discussion on the future of Starter Pack/TIP has also been prevented by the view amongst the rest of the donor community that it is ‘a DFID project’. (In another sector, the MASSAJ Project has not engaged other donors as it was seen as a DFID project)”.