(a) DFID
It should not be surprising for the UK Department for
International Development to have become a PEA leader
among bilateral donors. Shortly after the previous Overseas
Development Administration was extracted from the Foreign
Office and given full departmental status in 1997, the first
White Paper on International Development released by DFID
highlighted “good governance, corruption, and the rule of
law” as one of the key challenges to be tackled by UK development
assistance (DFID, 1997). To that effect the agency
would need a way to identify and assess the quality of government,
the sources of corruption, and generally the politics surrounding
development in the countries where it operated.
Thus emerged the “drivers of change” (DoC) approach, which
in some ways launched political-economy analysis in its current
form. The objective of DoC country studies was to understand
“the underlying political system and the mechanics of
pro-poor change,” and in particular “the role of institutions
– both formal and informal” in enabling or hampering such
change (DFID, 2004, 2005b). In the early 2000s more than
20 drivers-of-change studies were conducted by DFID country
offices with the help of scholars and consultants.