Description
Some 15 years ago, the late Adrian Leftwich published an article documenting “how, at last, a recognition of the centrality of politics seems to have emerged in development theory and policy.” Writing during the heyday of a policy-defining focus on good governance and institutional reform in North-led multilateral organisations, Leftwich struck a cautiously celebratory tone and laid out the challenges that faced development agencies and scholars in a new era characterised by “politics in command.” This paper explores how this operative concern with politics has steadily dissipated over the past decade. It traces the evolution of the good governance agenda from its inception in the early 1990s onwards, and identifies several world-political and international-organisational factors that over the past decade have reduced the preoccupation with good governance and institutions in the international development regime to an increasingly harmless, sterile activity without a transformative ethos. Much of the empirical discussion centres on the case of the World Bank, recent fieldwork data on which illustrates how its lending practice and research output responded to external and internal challenges to re-imagine governance primarily as a realm of optional technical fixes.
