Researching the politics of development
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Development plans are political statements
9 April 2014.
No system of development administration can be effective that ignores or discounts the political dimensions of decision-making. Ultimately, all development plans are political statements and all attempts to implement them are political acts. The pretension that planners and administrators are politically objective or neutral is naive. The belief that development administration is beyond the scope of politics usually reduces planners and administrators to a politically ineffective advisory role in which they produce plans that are never implemented.
From Dennis A. Rondinelli‘s Development Projects as Policy Experiments (1993). A 20-year-old answer to the Why ESID question. To learn more about the politics-development frontier check out our PEA work.