November 2010

The video posted above is the second in a series we are featuring on this blog.  The interview was conducted last June, during a learning event jointly organized by the World Bank Institute’s Governance Practice and CommGAP entitled “The Political Economy of Reform: Moving from Analysis to Action.” The event’s primary objective was to bring together relevant expertise and take stock of experiences from around the world on the ways in which political economy analyses have been and can be made more operationally relevant.  Featured in the video is Rakesh Rajani, head and founder of Twaweza (“we can make it happen” in Swahili), a “citizen-centered initiative, focusing on large-scale change in East Africa.”  From years of experience working in Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania, Rajani describes five local networks that he has found exist everywhere in these countries:

They are organic.  They are powerful.  They go to scale.  They matter to people’s lives.  People invest in those networks.  And they would be there even if every aid dollar dried up tomorrow… And you’ll notice that those five are typically not the organizations or the institutions that development actors work with.

The interview posted above was conducted last June, during a learning event jointly organized by the World Bank Institute’s Governance Practice and CommGAP entitled “The Political Economy of Reform: Moving from Analysis to Action.”  The event’s primary objective was to bring together relevant expertise and take stock of experiences from around the world on the ways in which political economy analyses have been and can be made more operationally relevant.  In the interview, Claudia Melim-McLeod of the UNDP Oslo Governance Centre starts off with highlighting a critical issue in supporting change agents on the ground:

Technical assistance, although important, is not enough… we have to be politically savvy to be able to deliver results not only in terms of development effectiveness, but also in terms of what our partners expect us to do.

While traveling abroad, watching or reading news stories about one’s home country can be an eye opening and, at times, disturbing experience.  Unless you come from one of the world’s most powerful countries or an up and coming economic titan, one would quickly get the sense that foreign coverage of the homestead, if any, tends to revolve around natural disasters, major scandals, changes in national leadership, and manmade crises.  I suppose it’s hard to expect otherwise, but there’s more to it than that.  In addition to selective framing and coverage driven by such “news values” as immediacy, recency, and conflict, there’s also national bias.  A recently published book by Prof. Bella Mody, entitled Geopolitics of Representation in Foreign News: Explaining Darfur, argues that the construction of foreign news coverage is determined by several factors, including history and context, on one hand, and national interest, on the other.