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Writing on structural adjustment in the early years (1983), I commented that many African governments had made the mistake of assuming in the 1970s that if you did not pay farmers, they would nevertheless produce – they did not. An equally dangerous error was being made – not paying civil servants and assuming they would continue to work. This created the civil servant’s response: ‘the government pretends to pay us and we pretend to work.’ ‘Some Realities of Adjustment: An Introduction’. Editorial introduction to External Finance and Policy Adjustment in Africa: special issue of Development and Change, 17 (3), July 1986. The strength of the case made over the years by Robert Chambers for ‘bottom-up’ programming derived particularly from the evidence that the local community and peasant farmers had access to knowledge critical for the success of agricultural projects. Recently, in participating in an evaluation of the Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP) process in Tanzania, it was made quite clear that one evaluation criterion should be the effectiveness of government consultations with ‘civil society’. However, there was an astonishing lack of clarity among representatives of the donor community regarding what that term meant in practice. The use of this term not only emphasizes the infantilism involved in the process but also refers to a comment by then Lord (Harold) Macmillan, in a speech in the United Kingdom’s House of Lords, referring to when he had to receive an International Monetary Fund (IMF) delegation while he was Chancellor; it went something like this: ‘then I had to receive some gentlemen from Washington, I did know who they were, but it reminded me of when I was at prep school – a lot of jaw-jaw but not much pocket money.’
Chapter 4 Perception and misperception in governance research: Evidence from Latin America 1
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Dumont and Wilson import Carnap’s approach to explication into the social sciences (1967). Przeworski and Sprague (1971: 217) embrace Hempel’s extension of Carnap’s approach. And Wesley Salmon underscores the continued relevance – if by no means, immutability – of the broader realist programme to which Carnap and Hempel contributed (1999). A third possibility is that perceptions of Italy’s institutions were tainted by knowledge of the country’s lacklustre growth performance over the period in question (Kurtz and Schrank 2007a). In fact, Kaufmann and his colleagues are, at least implicitly, adopting the by now discredited ‘operationist’ approach to measurement in which meanings are produced by measures and not vice versa. While they explicitly claim to derive the definitions of the six aspects of governance covered by the WGIs from ‘existing definitions or understandings of the concepts’ (Kaufmann, Kraay and Mastruzzi 2007c: 24), they occasionally admit that their indicators actually drive their definitions – and that the meaning is therefore in the measure. ‘That is’, they write, ‘we have just one implicit definition of corruption, which comes from the aggregation of these many data sources across many countries’ (Kaufmann et al. 2007c: 7). The limits to operationism are by now well known. According to Henry Byerly, the ‘strict application of the more extreme operationist doctrine would lead to as many notions of a quantity such as mass as there are different operational procedures for measuring mass’ (Byerly 1972: 376). Less strict applications are untenable, however, for efforts to
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