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Title
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Agrarian reform and decentralisation in South Africa : can donor brokerage break the mould? Explorations in the complex management of official development assistance
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Author
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Abstract
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| Over the past three decades, a mainstream paradigm has been promoted of Official Development Assistance (ODA) to decentralisation as contributing to an overall more effective, efficient, and democratic provision of public goods and services. However, since it involves a mesh of (non-)governmental, (inter)national and local actors, ODA to decentralisation is prone to multiple and diverse collective action problems, which require ‘good fit’ local solutions rather than ‘best practices’. This perspective of an ‘aid-to-decentralisation plexus’ with multiple collective action blockages, is complemented with the one of brokerage, where third parties ‘influence, manage, or facilitate interactions between non- or lowly-connected actors’. In this dissertation, we scrutinise whether the proposed combined perspective can provide indications on how ODA agencies may, in practice, engage more systematically and effectively as brokers in supporting the local resolution of collective action blockages. The perspective is applied to three previous analyses of South Africa’s encumbered agrarian reform programme between 2011 and 2019. By revisiting previously identified problems of coherence, inclusion, coordination, and collaboration through the lens of donor brokerage, we conclude that donors can, in principle, play an active role in steering towards better fitting and more locally embedded solutions in agrarian reform in South Africa. We illustrate how this active role can take on various forms, depending on the collective action problems faced, available structural brokerage opportunities, opportune or allowed management strategies, and strategic outcome orientations in terms of preserving or tearing down boundaries across governance levels. Since decentralisation and agrarian reform represent political processes of change, adopting the brokerage perspective can help to set out a more pragmatic and realistic ODA course of ‘thinking and working politically’ (TWP). The effective uptake of such an active broker role implies indeed observing the core principles of TWP - political economy approaches; a nuanced understanding of and responsiveness to the local context; and flexibility and adaptation in design and implementation. We propose that adopting the perspective of donor brokerage has a distinct potential added value in terms of aid effectiveness, as both parties can motivate their actions from a genuine concern of actively seeking good fit solutions and of TWP more openly. Obviously, promoting such alternative perspective implies considerable efforts to further explore and adapt methodologies, human resources, planning, monitoring and evaluation frameworks, institutional incentives, and strategies of communication and accountability for both recipients and donors. |
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Language
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English
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Publication
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Antwerp
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University of Antwerp
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2023
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ISBN
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978-90-5728-788-6
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Volume/pages
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234 p.
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Note
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:
Molenaers, Nadia [Supervisor]
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Full text (open access)
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