An overview of available resources
Politics play a fundamental role in development. Regardless of your appetite for politics or your own preferences towards a particular ideology, policy implementation is determined by the political context of a country. What does this mean in practice and are there tools to analyze this systematically?
The short answer is yes. Political Economy is a field of economics focused on understanding the distribution of power and resources and how that impacts development outcomes. One of the powerful instruments of the field is a Political Economy Analysis or PEA. The aim is to have a better understanding of the political context and how that plays a role in the outcomes we see.
Why is PEA important? It comes back to the Public Policy Triangle (which I’ve blogged about here and here. Access the full guide on this topic here) – which I think is one of the most powerful concepts when thinking about public policy. The Triangle helps you to search for solutions that are technically correct, politically feasible, and administratively doable. PEA helps ensure that your policy or project achieves the second of those 3 characteristics.
I’ve been following Abt’s blog focused on Governance and Development for a while. Lead by Graham Teskey, the team has created a comprehensive blog series about Political Economy Analysis including tools, case studies and practical applications. It’s one of those valuable resources worth sharing. The blog is written from a donor’s perspective, but I think there are relevant tools for anyone working in the public sector that wants to analyse and understand the political context in a systematic way.
Below I’ve added a short summary of the topics discussed and the link to the relevant blogs.
- Political Economy Analysis: what is it and why do we do it?
- The levels at which PEAs can be conducted (country, sector or problem)
- Tools to conduct a PEA including how to define a problem.
- A framework to apply PEA in practice
- PEA challenges and criticisms.
- Case studies grouped by level of analysis (global, regional, country or sector)
- There are different communities of practice interested in the field. While each has its own focus and acronym (of course), there are common principles – like the need to understand the political context, to be adaptive, and to find locally driven opportunities for change. The blog expands on the characteristics of each discourse. The table below is a great summary.
Finally, to complement Abt’s blogs these are other useful resources:
- UKAID’s beginner’s guide to PEA.
- USAID’s practitioner’s guide on thinking and working politically through applied PEA.
- ODI’s How to Note on PEA.
- A training course on PEA by the Policy Practice for Swiss Development Cooperation.
- University of Birmingham’s Governance and Social Development Resource Centre (GSDRC) has developed a topic guide on PEA.
Photo by Volodymyr Hryshchenko on Unsplash
