ABSTRACT
Why is it so hard for international development organizations—even ones as well resourced and influential as the World Bank—to generate and sustain change in the way things are done in those countries where they work? Despite decades of investment and effort, why do partner governments continue to engage in those traditional patterns and styles of public service management that international development organizations have sought to supplant with methods that are supposedly more accountable, efficient, and effective? This book provides an answer to these questions by drawing on the concepts of ritual governance and the ritual aid dance. The first of these concepts refers to the ways that the programs and projects of international organizations are introduced into and are constrained by multiple layers of rituals, performative acts, and cultural logics, logics that intersect with and reinforce the political, economic, and social structures in and through which they operate. The second concept illuminates how international aid organizations and the governments with which they work are engaged in a “ritual aid dance” where each actor plays a part but does not (and cannot) acknowledge the ways that it depends on—or at least uses—the other for its own gain. The development of these concepts is based on research on the World Bank’s efforts over the course of several decades to encourage, through its financing, projects, and technical assistance, the implementation of social sector reform in Indonesia.
