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The road not taken
Eyben, Rosalind
Eyben, Rosalind
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eyben.pdf
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Abstract
"The origins of this paper lie in a proposal from UNRISD that I contribute to one of the series of background papers commissioned for the tenth anniversary of the Beijing Women Conference. The suggestion was that within the series on the Changing Political Economy of Development I explore the extent to which Poverty Reduction Strategies (PRS) are a genuine innovation or alternative to former international development policy approaches, contextualising this with reference to the PRS process in Bolivia about which I had already written (Eyben 2002, 2003, 2004, Eyben and León 2003). Taking this suggestion as a starting point and, writing from a disciplinary perspective of social anthropology rather than political economy, my response was to explore how the international aid system ‘thinks’ and therefore ‘knows’ and how that thinking shapes policy possibilities and ignores or trivialises potential alternatives. This present paper should be read very much as work in progress. After many years as a policy practitioner, it is only recently that I have been able to begin this exploration, including a reflexive revisiting to my own actions, beliefs and knowledge. Thus, I have written the paper from the perspective of what I am now, an academic social analyst, as well as from the perspective of what I have been, a former aid official. Throughout the 1990’s I was working for the UK Department for International Development (DFID) on poverty, participation and gender issues. Between 2000 and 2002 I was head of the DFID office in Bolivia at the time its Poverty Reduction Strategy was being developed and initially implemented. As an aid official, I was very much engaged in debating and negotiating concepts and issues of gender and poverty with other practitioners and policymakers including with those in government bilateral aid ministries, in international NGOs and in the United Nations and International Finance Institutions. All of these organisations together make up what I shall refer to as the international aid system. In that system I saw myself involved in a contest between different kinds of knowledge that was shaped by relations of power. In the last two years I have come to appreciate increasingly my own ‘situatedness’, one that even shaped my moral position on the meaning of development (Ufford et al. 2003). I was ‘passionately concerned and ethically engaged’. (Rosaldo 1989: 169). At the same time, I was not only a ‘missionary’ but also a civil servant – a ‘mandarin’ (Miller and Razavi 1998). I had a duty to my Minister, and through the Minister to a democratically elected parliament, to implement, rather than shape policy. The ambiguity of my own position is not unusual and in different ways may have shaped the actions and beliefs of many of those in the aid system, including those of economists who are the dominant profession in the system."(pg 3)
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2004-06
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With permission of the license/copyright holder