In this article we focus on two aid organizations – the United
Kingdom Department for International Development
(DFID) and the World Bank – which are widely regarded
by the political-economy analysis community as first-movers
or leaders, intellectually as well as operationally. Both these
donors have spent the better part of the last decade grappling
with the challenges of governance and trying to process – in
fits and starts, with more or less success – what its lessons
are for day-to-day development practice. There is no agreed
upon benchmark for such “success”; indeed, for many PEA
proponents, simply getting nongovernance specialists to talk
about politics is a triumph in itself. However, in terms of organizational
sociology we have to conceptualize success as institutionalization,
with such indicators as the introduction of
new mandatory procedures, the internalization of new ideas
by organizational management, or the (re)design of professional
competence frameworks. To that end, we delve into
the organizational dynamics of each donor, using internal documentation
and interview data on their aid operations across
headquarters and three country offices. 2 As PEA leaders, both
DFID and the World Bank are “most likely cases” for new
ideas about political analysis influencing practice, while retaining
the distinctiveness of bilateral and multilateral aid contexts.
Their experiences cannot be generalized to every single
aid donor in the world, but ongoing exchanges,
cross-pollination, and isomorphism in the organizational field
of development assistance mean that more donors are likely to
follow where DFID and the World Bank tread; moreover, the
emerging epistemic community proposing PEA is likely to
encounter similar obstacles and challenges elsewhere as they
do in these two organizations, even heightened. Therefore,
while the evidence from these two cases is insufficient to establish
a rigorous generalization, it can in fact supply rigorous
pointers in terms of research and policy implications.