The practice of the World Bank and DFID headquarters
and offices demonstrates that the principles of political analysis
are far from institutionalized in their actual operations.
Despite different political environments – multilateral and
bilateral – and very different lending instruments and goals,
the incorporation of PEA into both donors’ operations exhibits three similar patterns. First: whatever frameworks for
political analysis have been produced internally have remained
peripheral to core operational guidelines, leading to a practice
of occasional, ad hoc, and nonmandatory analytical work
superimposed on conventional planning, implementation,
and evaluation models. Second: whatever informal systems
for political engagement have been tried arose from the discretion
of individual country and project management personnel,
and thus remained idiosyncratic and personality-based products.
Third: despite over a decade’s worth of refinement and
dissemination, PEA strategies and methodologies have been
largely ignored outside the governance profession. Underlying
these patterns of negligible impact on operational guidelines,
over-reliance on personality, and a certain professional
parochialism, is the deeper corporate incentive to disburse
aid funds as quickly and efficiently as possible, for which political
analysis is still seen as an obstacle. These comparative
findings lead us to conclude that the task of getting aid
bureaucracies to think politically for the ultimate goal of aid
effectiveness has to be considered first as a contentious process
of organizational change, one in which the powerful inertia of
the aid business can severely curtail the aspirations of a small
network of motivated analysts and practitioners.