Institutional development in aid agencies: Disputed territory

As a program area of development assistance agencies, "institutional development" has received increased attention in the 1980s even in absence of agreement among professionals on the nature of the problem to be solved. This dissertation examines how "institutional development" professionals define their field of activity. Most practitioners understand institutional development as a broad field which has been an implicit part of development assistance but is only now being made more systematic and explicit. Others believe that the still undefined term can move development assistance strategies in completely different directions and that institutional development is part of the larger debate over the nature and direction of development and aid policy. This study develops a conceptual map of the views of institutional development held by a subset of people engaged in institutional development work. Materials used included documents and interviews with twenty-four practitioners at the U.S. Agency for International Development and the World Bank and background materials clarifying the intellectual sources of the different views. Three competing views were found. Among the issues at the core of the dispute is the nature of collective action in development. In the first view, governments can be seen as responsible for planning and carrying out most development activities, supplemented by citizens' self-help organizations. Governments most often implement their responsibilities through organizations divided into different levels and technical functions. This group works with a subset of organizations which practitioners call institutions, seeking to enhance the capacity of such organizations, and of independent citizen organizations, to carry out their official goals. The second view argues that development should be based on more aggregation of individual decisions, severely reducing the areas of influence of hierarchical public organizations. This group advocates less regulation which inhibits individual and community activity, and more emphasis on rules, or institutions, which emerge from non-governmental social problem solving. The third group argues that organizations are central to development, but not organizations shaped by the institutions of hierarchy and technocracy which divide people into rulers and ruled. This group tries to formulate alternatives starting with organizational relations which reject exploitation.