ABSTRACT
The empirical case studies in earlier chapters show how political economy factors – actors, knowledge, discourses and incentives – and the interactions between them can influence national decisions about the design, development and implementation of LCRD. Interactions are mediated by actors’ incentives and the coalitions that they form to pursue their goals, as well as their perceptions of the challenges and opportunities at hand, which in turn influence which policy goals they pursue. Unpacking these domestic political economy dynamics enables national
governments to understand which factors can constrain and which can promote the effectiveness of policy processes and practice. Deployed at appropriate stages of the policy cycle, these factors can be used to improve both the planning and the implementation of LCRD. Political economy analysis, then, can be used as a tool to generate the knowledge needed to improve the design of LCRD policy, and it can be put to work to better understand and manage the barriers to successful implementation. Despite the potential of this constructive use of political economy ana-
lysis, for many years it has been more usual to employ it as part of a critical approach; typically donors have taken a problem-driven perspective to understanding factors that constrain implementation of their programmes within a country or sector. Analyses undertaken from this perspective tend to focus little on how countries can use understanding of their own political economy to make better decisions with better outcomes (Fritz et al. 2009). In this chapter we briefly discuss the evolution of analytical frameworks
that make use of a political economy perspective, before moving on to consider the potential for a broader national planning approach. While policy cannot be set by fully rational decision makers working always for the public good and while policymakers may have vested interests, we argue that it is possible to modify and build on existing practice to enable governments to deploy political economy analysis as a constructive, practical tool for shaping and evaluating LCRD policies and programmes.
