ABSTRACT
There has been considerable concern within development studies over the last few decades with the policy ‘conditionality’ associated with the aid programmes and policy advice of the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and other members of the international aid community. Much of this concern has related to the extent to which the policy formulation process was being taken out of the hands of developing country governments and other indigenous institutions and the questions of ‘country ownership’, ‘donor driven’ aid programmes, ‘leverage’ and associated concepts of neo-colonialism, have been to the fore (Hayter, 1971; Killick et al., 1998). This could be regarded as a ‘political economy’ dimension of development economics and of development studies. The OECD has a page on its website which defines its ‘institutional’ interpretation of ‘political economy’ (OECD, 2009), but this definition is significantly different to the concept of the ‘political economy of capitalism’ embraced by writers such as Fine (Fine, 2002, 2006b). Van Waeyenberge (2006) has an extensive discussion of the policy formulation process associated with structural adjustment in the context of concepts of ‘political economy’.
