Book Review: GUIDELINES ON PERFORMANCE CONTRACTING: A PRACTITIONER'S MANUAL. United Nations Department for Support & Management Services. United Nations, New York, 1995. iv + 102 pp.
✍ Scribed by DR. MARK GRAY
- Book ID
- 101290644
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 1997
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 72 KB
- Volume
- 17
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0271-2075
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
economic policy reform, and second generation (or political) conditionality, which involves the reform of policy processes and political structures. The former involved donors in the imposition of their own economic policy preferences, the latter involved an insistence on the superiority of their own political forms: both entail interventions in the political sovereignty of developing and transitional economies.
Unsurprisingly, therefore, aid conditionality is controversial, both in principle and in practice. Research and re¯ection are necessary in order to clarify a set of ambiguous and disjointed issues. This interesting collection of case studies and essays is a starting point for the serious policy debate that aid donors omitted to conduct before haring off in a new and dubious direction. Stokke's exhaustive 87-page survey of the `core issues' both summarizes research ®ndings and draws out key questions. Does political conditionality involve a new disregard of national sovereignty? Does political prescription imply responsibility for political outcomes? Are external aid agencies capable of accurate interventions in widely varying local political cultures? What are the relationships between democracy, human rights and development? Does political conditionality ful®l donor objectives, and what are these anyway?
The case studies provide illustration, but no consistent answers. The essays on European donorsÐBelgium, Germany, Holland, Switzerland, NorwayÐreveal attitudes ranging from conviction to reluctance. Curiously, there is no study of the UK, the principal European progenitor of political conditionality, and the omission of British and American cases limits any claim the book might have to comprehensiveness. An interesting study by Mark Robinson of NGOs emphasizes the ways in which political conditionality brings both opportunities and dilemmas for these agencies. In what is much the most perceptive and critical piece Georg Sorensen addresses the main controversies: the ambiguities in conceptualization of democracy, the uncertain linkages between democracy and economic development, and the problem of double standards that bedevils aid practice by donor and recipient alike.
While this set of studies is uneven in quality and unwieldy in organization, it usefully maps out some of the existing terrain, which might well be signposted `here be mine®elds'.