Pablo Yanguas

The University of Manchester, Effective States and Inclusive Development Research Centre, Research Associate

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Ph. D. Government 2012, Cornell University
M. A. Government 2010, Cornell University
B. A. History 2006, University of Seville
Supervisors: David Hulme, Nicolas van de Walle, and Tom Callaghy

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Papers by Pablo Yanguas

Note: The Role and Responsibility of Foreign Aid in Recipient Political Settlements

Journal of International Development

Varieties of State-Building in Africa: Elites, Ideas and the Politics of Public Sector Reform

SSRN Electronic Journal

Land′s End: Capitalist Relations on an Indigenous Frontier

The Journal of Development Studies, 2017

Can Aid Bureaucracies Think Politically? The Administrative Challenges of Political Economy Analysis (PEA) in DFID and the World Bank

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2000

‘New’ approaches confront ‘old’ challenges in African public sector reform

The disappointing performance of conventional public sector reforms in developing countries has l... more The disappointing performance of conventional public sector reforms in developing countries has led to the rise of ‘new’ approaches seeking to overcome traditional bureaucratic barriers to change: leadership-focused interventions like the Africa Governance Initiative (AGI); accountability-focused initiatives like the Open Government Partnership (OGP); and adaptation-focused models like those of Africa Power and Politics (APP). While these approaches are appealing to aid donors in their promise to move beyond the limitations of purely formal institution building, they fail to provide new answers to the ‘old’ analytical and practical challenges of public sector reform, in particular administrative patrimonialism, public corruption and political capture. The evidence is yet inchoate, but all points to the need for these approaches to work together with conventional ones. Beyond novel implementation tactics, however, there is a need for new strategies of sustained political support for embattled reformers who face powerful incentives against institutional change.

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Barriers to Political Analysis in Aid Bureaucracies: From Principle to Practice in DFID and the World Bank

Politics has become a central concern in development discourse, and yet the use of political anal... more Politics has become a central concern in development discourse, and yet the use of political analysis as a means for greater aid effectiveness remains limited and contested within development agencies. This article uses qualitative data from two governance “leaders” – the United Kingdom Department for International Development and the World Bank – to analyze the administrative hurdles facing the institutionalization of political analysis in aid bureaucracies. We find that programing, management, and training practices across headquarters and country offices remain largely untouched by a political analysis agenda which suffers from its identification with a small cross-national network of governance professionals.

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The role and responsibility of foreign aid in recipient political settlements

This article revisits the basic concept of political settlement by using an incumbent-challenger ... more This article revisits the basic concept of political settlement by using an incumbent-challenger ideal type and defines the mechanisms through which a settlement is influenced by foreign aid: diffusion, legitimation and brokerage. The new framework illustrates how aid may support continuity or change, and allows for an interrogation of the ethical implications of donor choices. Challenging the implicit utilitarianism prevalent in current agendas and practices in the development community, this analysis highlights the inescapable value judgments that must guide international assistance, despite the significant structural incentives to focus on supposedly calculable risks and results.

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Can aid bureaucracies think politically? The administrative challenges of political economy analysis (PEA) in DFID and the World Bank

ESID Working Paper 33

Although politics has become central to international development assistance, the use of politica... more Although politics has become central to international development assistance, the use of political economy analysis (PEA) as a means for greater aid effectiveness remains an aspiring epistemic agenda. Even though virtually all aid donors have some personnel working on the development and implementation of PEA methodologies and frameworks, whether this new cognitive model for aid is compatible with pre-existing administrative factors is still an open question. We argue that for PEA to become fully institutionalised in donor agencies it needs to overcome the hurdles of administrative viability: its proponents need to reconcile it with corporate and professional incentives, as well as with the political environment in which an agency operates. We track this process empirically within two PEA leaders: the UK Department for International Development (DFID) and the World Bank. Using documents and interviews from headquarters as well as three country offices –Bangladesh, Ghana, Uganda – we find that political economy analysis has not yet become institutionalised in programming, management or the professions, and remains an intellectual agenda very much rooted in the governance silo. We conclude by arguing that the future of PEA lies in organisational change, not any particular framework, and that this change is more likely to occur by disseminating PEA outside of the governance profession into agency management and the various sectors of development assistance.

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Leader, Protester, Enabler, Spoiler: Aid Strategies and Donor Politics in Institutional Assistance

Aid coordination has come to be seen as a miracle cure for the ills of donor proliferation. Howev... more Aid coordination has come to be seen as a miracle cure for the ills of donor proliferation. However, in weak states which need aid conditionality as a catalyst for institutional change the ideal of aid coordination is conceptually suspect, and in some instances politically counterproductive. Coordination is only one of the two solutions to the collective action problem that the public good of effective institutional conditionality generates; donor leadership is the other one. The desirability of each solution depends on each donor’s commitment and presence, which together generate a four-fold typology: leader, protester, enabler, and spoiler. As long as there is at least one enabler or spoiler donor present, aid coordination will be less effective than donor leadership.

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Building State Capacity for Inclusive Development: The Politics of Public Sector Reform

ESID Working Paper 25

A capable state is essential for inclusive development, and throughout the developing world gover... more A capable state is essential for inclusive development, and throughout the developing world governments and international development agencies are seeking to build it through a multifaceted agenda of Public Sector Reform (PSR). This paper presents an analytical review of the PSR agenda, emphasizing the political contestation inherent to the development of state capacity, and argues for a more nuanced and politically-informed research agenda. We begin by examining the various definitions of state capacity that are commonly employed by researchers, and settle on bureaucratic capacity as the transversal precondition for policy implementation. State capacity so understood has two components, effectiveness and accountability, and two domains, internal and external. Their intersection generates four broad dimensions of reform: organizational rationality, administrative restraint, social embeddedness and political autonomy; and each dimension in turn is likely to exhibit a different pattern of political contestation due to the parallel incentives for patrimonialism, corruption, oligarchy, and capture. We use this analytical framework to categorise and examine the major components of the PSR agenda, assessing their rates of success or failure according to the available evidence: we find that the relative failure of the PSR agenda so far is due to its reliance on flawed assumptions about the administrative politics of state capacity. We then evaluate whether new models that try to bypass central bureaucracies are likely to encounter greater success; specifically, we review the Africa Governance Initiative, the Open Government Partnership, and the ‘hybrid models’ approach of the Africa Power and Politics Programme, and argue that all of them will be forced to confront the same politics of state capacity in the end. We close the paper by outlining a set of tentative guidelines for future research at ESID and elsewhere, suggesting a greater focus on the role of elites, informal institutions, the legislature as a non-state component of state capacity, the distinction between transversal and sectoral approaches, and finally the modalities and objectives of external assistance.

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Drafts by Pablo Yanguas

Varieties of State-Building in Africa - August 2017.docx

Why do some states in Africa seem to be stuck in a spiral of corruption, while others build effec... more Why do some states in Africa seem to be stuck in a spiral of corruption, while others build effective developmental bureaucracies? This article presents an analysis of variations in public sector reform (PSR) which explores how the stability of a country’s elite settlement and the coherence of its developmental ideology interact with reform ideas in the PSR policy domain. This framework is explored through a structured-focused comparison of reform experiences in three Sub-Saharan African countries with different elite settlements: competitive Ghana, weakly dominant Uganda, and dominant Rwanda. In Ghana, where successive regimes have focused on political control for partisan purposes, it has been quick reforms compatible with top-down control that have achieved political traction. In Uganda, high-visibility reforms were introduced to secure donor funding as long as they did not threaten the ruling coalition’s power. In Rwanda, lastly, the regime has fostered and protected various public sector reforms because it envisioned them as instruments for domestic legitimation as key elements of an impartial developmental state. In combination, policy domain, elite time horizons, and ideational fit allow us to move beyond blanket statements about isomorphic mimicry or neopatrimonialism, and towards a more nuanced understanding of the varieties of state-building in Africa.

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Why We Lie About Aid (And the Messy Truth About Promoting Development)

Donor publics have been misled about the nature of development: for decades they have been told t... more Donor publics have been misled about the nature of development: for decades they have been told that it is about charity and technical fixes, when in fact it is as much about fights as our own policy-making is at home. Aid practitioners work in a world of struggles for reform, but they are forced to misrepresent and obfuscate the reality of development in order to comply with very restrictive and selective interpretations of principles like accountability, transparency, ownership or harmonisation. That is the dysfunctional aid system that we in donor countries have built, and then shackled with a discourse that mistakes short-term results for long-term transformation. A different approach is possible, and indeed has been quietly applied by innovative development practitioners around the world who provide political coverage for reformers or build coalitions that open up spaces for change. With real stories from aid practitioners in Britain, the US, Spain, Uganda, Honduras, Nigeria, Liberia, Rwanda and Ghana, this book explains what lies behind the much-criticized pathologies of aid, and challenges us to have a more honest conversation about development assistance.