The evolution of donor-recipient relations in electricityudreform: rethinking the principal-agent framework

摘要

Since the early 1990s electricity reforms across Sub-Saharan Africa have been markedudby controversy. Despite the World Bank’s major role in driving electricity reform asudpart of its conditional lending strategy in the electricity sector, its relationship withudrecipient countries has received little attention within the electricity reform literature.udThis is surprising given the increasing pressure on the World Bank to improve theudeffectiveness of its conditional lending more generally. This thesis contributes to fillingudthis gap by exploring how World Bank-recipient country relations shape and constrainudthe direction of reform.ududThe donor-recipient relationship is commonly espoused in the academic literature as audprincipal-agent relationship, whereby international aid organisations (principals)uddelegate authority for implementing their development policies to recipient countriesud(agents). I develop this framework by incorporating refined concepts of power,udpartnership, ownership and knowledge, prominent features in development studiesudliterature and recent donor discourse. The analytical framework developed is applied toudthe process of electricity reform in two countries: Tanzania and Ghana. While theudimpetus for reform in these two countries was similar, the way in which the reformudprocess unfolded was different. The analysis is based on in-depth, semi-structuredudinterviews and documentary evidence. It uses a process-tracing method, combiningudwithin-case and cross-case analysis. A number of insights emerge from the analysis. Iudfind that availability of reform expertise plays a significant role in determining theudstrength of power relations between donors and recipient countries. It also appears thatudreform ownership lies within different ‘domains’. Uneven ownership across domainsudaccounts for the inconsistent reform implementation noted in both cases. Andudknowledge asymmetry provides a useful concept to analyse the impact of decentraliseduddonor staff. In conclusion, this thesis argues that a modified principal-agent frameworkudoffers additional insight into the workings of the donor-recipient relationship.