An aid system split into relatively autonomous professions
presents a major challenge to any intellectual agenda seeking
to influence how the entire field thinks and acts. The governance
cadre and the public sector profession were created
for the purposes of governance and public sector programing,
and inevitably political-economy analysis tends to be seen as a
tool developed specifically for the needs of that programing
area – other professions take care of health, infrastructure,
or agriculture, not politics. And so what seems painfully obvious
to PEA proponents – that politics is intrinsic to any aid
intervention – has an air of self-promoting intrusion for everyone
else. Thus far the PEA epistemic community has failed to
develop a powerful narrative for overcoming professional isolation,
and as a result its proponents often end up preaching to
the converted: governance workshops attended by governance
practitioners where participants complain about the absence
of nongovernance specialists.