Thinking and Working Politically - David Booth
Channel: GSDRC
Date: 2015-05-11

This video accompanies the GSDRC Professional Development Reading pack on Thinking and Working Politically, available at: http://www.gsdrc.org/professional-dev/thinking-and-working-politically/

Development assistance works best, and is least liable to do harm, when the people designing it are thinking and working politically (TWP). This thought has been around for some time, but what it implies in practice has not always been clear. Big steps have been taken to encourage donor agency staff to think politically about the programmes they design and deliver, so that they take proper account of political realities. In DFID, a generation of governance and social development advisers have been trained in what this means. To date, however, fewer economists and sector specialists have been persuaded of the need to step outside their usual ways of thinking about country context. There has been a tendency to see TWP as mostly a matter for governance specialists.

Dr David Booth is a Senior Research Fellow in Politics and Governance at the Overseas Development Institute, London. With experience in sub-Saharan Africa and parts of Asia and Latin America, he works on comparative development, the political economy of reform and innovations in development policy and practice. Currently, he leads research on Developmental Regimes in Africa, funded by the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which builds on the conclusions of the Africa Power and Politics Programme, a five-year consortium research programme supported by DFID and Irish Aid. His latest book is ‘Governance for Development in Africa: Solving Collective Action Problems’, with Diana Cammack, Zed Books 2013.