ABSTRACT
Donor policies on democracy and good governance are relatively recent in origin and are still undergoing a process of evolution. Despite attempts to formulate a common interpretation, participatory development and good governance (PDGG) embraces a wide variety of policies and programmes, and official donors vary considerably in the emphasis they give to PDGG policies in their overall aid strategies and country programmes. 1 Aid donors employ a number of different mechanisms to implement such policies, which range from punitive approaches based on aid conditionality through to more positive forms of assistance designed to strengthen political institutions and groups in civil society. Moreover, since PDGG policies focus on domestic policy issues which are politically sensitive, there is potential for conflict between competing aid objectives on the part of individual donors and between recipient governments and donors. For these reasons, one would expect a high degree of policy incoherence and problems of aid policy co-ordination among donors, which renders PDGG highly relevant to a discussion of aid policy coherence.
