5. CONCLUSION
The aid community has spent the last two decades getting to
grips with the challenge of politics. And while it seems that on
a strategic level institutions and governance are now inescapable
components of development discourse, the practice of
two “leaders” like the World Bank and the UK Department
for International Development demonstrate that the principles
of political analysis are far from institutionalized in actual aid
operations. Despite different political environments – multilateral
and bilateral – and very different lending instruments and
goals, the administrative viability of PEA in both donors is
equally reliant on the discretion of country and project staff,
due to a general lack of institutionalization into operational
guidelines. This challenge is compounded by the lack of
awareness about political analysis outside the governance professions,
from which the emerging epistemic community
almost exclusively arises. In contrast to social impact assessment
frameworks, which have entered DFID and Bank due
diligence procedures and programing, PEA remains a nebulous
field of expertise, a way of thinking more akin to political
intelligence than anything that can be operationalized. As
such, it remains closely identified with the professions of public
sector specialist and governance adviser, which means economists
and sector specialists have little incentive to pay it any
attention. Our study of two “most-likely” cases for the success
of PEA lead us to a number of research and policy implications
which could find applicability within DFID and the
World Bank as well as across the range of donor organizations
where the emerging epistemic community of political analysis
is already at work.