Joachim Schroeder
III. Estado actual de las lenguas en la formación docen te en educación bilingüe intercultural
The chief empirical task of this research project was to reconstruct six aid policy decisionmaking episodes, a process guided by the framework introduced above. It must be emphasised, however, that these reconstructions, however detailed and illuminating they might be, are not ends in themselves. Rather, they are the means by which I sought answers to the question that animates this thesis: why do major shifts in aid policy occur?
The six decisionmaking episodes I reconstructed do not result in definitive decisions regarding aid spending targets (UK II is the notable exception). Aid policy decisionmaking rarely works in that way. Foreign policy decisionmaking episodes akin to the Cuban Missile Crisis, where deliberations must reach concrete decisions on a course of foreign policy action, are rare in the aid policy issue area. In the absence of such episodes, the next best approach is to examine comparable White Paper-type outputs.
Reconstructing White-Paper-type decisionmaking episodes provides a ‘way in’ to discovering the prevailing decisionmaking dynamics. In essence, each White Paper functions like Alice’s looking glass from Lewis Carroll’s classic novel Through the Looking-Glass. The White Paper provides access to another world; the unique world of aid policymaking. Once ‘through the looking glass’, I am introduced to characters and ideas and events that allow me to gain greater insight into the story of how and why aid policy changed in each environment. The web of forces which are exerted on aid policy decisionmakers become suddenly more discernible
Reconstructing how a decisionmaking proceeded reveals potential causal threads which can then be followed back and forward through time using causal process tracing methods. Causal
101 By far the shortest of the decision outputs I examine is Spearheads of Development Cooperation, which consists
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process tracing is particularly suited to foreign policy analysis because “the research is interested in the many and complex causes of a specific outcome (Y) and not so much in the effects of a specific cause (X)” (Blatter and Haverland 2012, 80). Bennett and Checkel (2015a, Loc 282) recently defined process tracing as: “the analysis of evidence on processes, sequences, and conjunctures of events within a case for the purposes of either developing or testing hypotheses about causal mechanisms that might causally explain the case”. In reconstructing the sequence of events leading to particular aid policy decisions, my overriding objective was to explain how and why the trajectory of aid policy changed in the countries under consideration. Lundsgaarde (2013, 15), who was pursuing very similar research objectives, explains that the “core of the process-tracing method is an effort to reconstruct the course of events and the constellation of variables that led to a given outcome.”
The literature on process tracing matured rapidly during my doctoral studies, helping considerably in my desire to conduct ‘good process tracing’102. Admittedly, conceptions of good
process tracing remain an open question, with the term suffering from its status as a buzzword (Bennett and Checkel 2015a, Chapter One). Nonetheless, as captured by the subtitle of their important new book, Bennett and Checkel are confident in asserting that process tracing has evolved from a “metaphor to an analytical tool”. In my use of process tracing as an analytical tool, I adhered closely to the set of best practice guidelines for process tracing recently outlined by Bennett and Checkel (2015a, Loc 589)103. I also sought out scholarship identified in the
process tracing literature as examples of good process tracing to guide my approach104.
Ultimately, the empirical material presented in chapters 5, 6 and 7 was produced in three phases, summarised in Table 3.C below105. The remainder of this subsection of the chapter is
devoted to describing each of these phases in more detail. Phase 1: Building a foundation of prior knowledge
Prior to undertaking fieldwork and conducting interviews, I invested considerable time building up a foundation of ‘prior knowledge’ of my cases (Collier 2011, 824). There were two main thrusts of this initial effort. To generate a macro-perspective useful for providing context to the decisiomaking episode at hand, I developed an understanding of the broad political, foreign
102 Important volumes on process tracing methods published since 2013 include Beach and Pedersen (2013),
Bennett and Checkel (2015a). These works build on key works including Mahoney (2010, 2012) Brady and Collier (2010), Collier (2011) and George and Bennett (2005).
103 Bennett and Checkel (2015a, Table 1.1, Loc 589) outline ten steps that they consider constitute “Process Tracing
Best Practice”.
104 Research by Fairfield (2013), and Tannenwald (1999) is regularly cited as best practice. Examples that are more
directly relevant for my study include books by Kaarbo (2013) and Lundsgaarde (2013).
105 I fully acknowledge that process tracing is a highly iterative process. While my research certainly didn’t proceed
in a neat linear fashion, I nonetheless found myself needing to work through these three broad phases to produce each of my empirical chapters.
Approach and Method
Page83 Table 3.C: Three Phases of Generating Analytical Explanations of Aid Policy Decisionmaking
Phase 1: Building a foundation of prior knowledge
Research
Objective To obtain a historical understanding of aid policy in each state and a contextual understanding of each episode.
Data Sources & research methods
The data sources examined during this phase where typical materials of ‘contemporary history’: “official government documents, parliamentary reports, newspapers, biographies, contemporary histories, blogs and journal articles” (Gaskarth 2013, 9). Books and journal articles offering historical overviews were sought out.
Snowballing—where locating one piece of evidence leads to another—was repeatedly used.
Research outputs
Contextual information for each case study country, including timelines of key aid policy events over the past 15 years.
“Base-narratives” for each decisionmaking episode, taking the form of detailed storyboards. Base-narratives documented the sequence of events comprising each decisionmaking episode and included lists of the actors I knew were involved and the nature of their involvement.
A checklist of key gaps in knowledge for each episode.
Target lists for interviews for each episode.
Phase 2: Building Comprehensive Sequential Storylines
Central
Objective To generate detailed chronologically-ordered reconstructions of each episode.
Data Sources & research methods
Prioritised primary sources during this phase.
I reviewed speeches, press releases, policy documents, newspaper articles, budget documents, memoirs, social media (including twitter feeds106), radio broadcasts, opinion polling, blog posts, YouTube uploads107 and documentaries.
Used ‘at-a-distance’ techniques to understand the motives and perspectives of individual decision-makers, such as thematic content analysis. (V. M. Hudson 2007, 61)
Immersion in detail—‘soaking and poking’ (Bennett and Checkel 2015a, Loc 527).
Research outputs
6 x physical files containing all relevant documentation (newspaper clippings, official documents, speeches, audio transcripts etc.) for each decisionmaking episode, organised in chronological order.
3x ‘Comprehensive storylines’ reconstructing decisionmaking episodes sequentially in each country, including evidence for the key pressures exerted on each actor (approximately 35,000 words in length).
Phase 3: Crafting theoretically-orientated narratives
Central
Objective To generate explanations for why and how aid policy decisions were made. Data Sources &
research methods
Reauditing data above, including physical files.
Re-examining primary sources, especially memoirs, speeches and quotations.
Data from elite interviews.
Counterfactual analysis.
Research
outputs Part II (chapters 5, 6, 7 and 8) of this thesis.
106 A tweet by one particular politician led to a long discussion during an interview.
107 For example, via YouTube I located video of a speech by Peter Lilley, the chair of the Global Poverty Policy Group
established by David Cameron following his election as Leader, discussing this process. I also located a speech by Lilliane Ploumen to the Centre for Global Development.
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policy and aid policy dynamics operating in my case study countries, focussing on the post- Global Financial Crisis era108.
A handful of country-specific texts proved particularly useful in providing broad-based introductions to these topics as well as advice on further reading109. In parallel with developing
this macro-perspective, I also began to reconstruct the decisionmaking episodes in question, systematically considering each of the six factors highlighted in the expanded aid policy decisionmaking framework. I mapped each decisionmaking episode to the extent possible, identifying who was involved and when, observing when decision units were formed and how they were configured, and documenting sub-decisions that were reached.
The culmination of this initial foundation-building period was the production of a series of ‘base- narratives’, as recommended by Collier (2011, 828). These narratives documented the sequence of events comprising each decisionmaking episode, taking the form of detailed storyboards. They were accompanied with lists of the individuals I knew were involved, or suspected of being involved, at various stages of each decisionmaking episode. Devising these base-narratives illuminated information gaps, which I reformulated as lists of questions which required answering. Many of these questions were subsequently posed to interviewees, or answered by uncovering additional data.
Phase 2: Building Comprehensive Sequential Storylines
The second phase entailed ‘filling out’ the base-narratives created earlier, in as much detail as possible, in order to provide a denser picture of the scene (Blatter and Haverland 2012, 30). During this phase, I embraced the role of a detective110 and “immerse[d] [my]self in the in the
details of the case[s]” (Bennett and Checkel 2015a, Loc 527), searching “for all kinds of information about the temporal unfolding of the causal-process [in order to] present a comprehensive storyline with a sequence of causal steps” (Blatter and Haverland 2012, 30, emphasis added). I was particularly focused on obtaining and analysing primary sources during this phase. During this period, I actively followed each lead I found, tracing them as far as
108 For each country, I familiarised myself with: the political system; recent political history; contemporary foreign
policy debates; the identity of key political parties, their leaders and their distinguishing policy positions (particularly in relation to international policy); the structure and nature of the foreign policy bureaucracy and the position of aid policy within it; and key policy documents.
109 Specifically, these volumes were those by Gaskarth (2013), for the UK; Gyngell and Wesley (2007) for Australia;
and Andeweg and Irwin (2014) for the Netherlands.
110 Embracing the role of detective is commonly cited practice in the process tracing literature. See, for example,
Blatter and Haverland (2012, 105) and Bennett and Checkel (2015a, Loc 510).As Bennett and Checkel suggest, ‘clues’ in this context are equivalent to ‘causal process observations’.
Approach and Method
Page85 necessary to rule out plausible alternative explanations111. At the same time, I systematically
probed the potential explanations offered by each of the six clusters of key factors the expanded aid policy decisionmaking framework suggests are likely to shape aid policy. Considerable time and effort was spent during this phase cross-referencing data sources, as conflicting evidence often surfaced, particularly regarding timing and sequencing of events. In response, I settled on a rule whereby each key piece of evidence needed to be confirmed by at least two sources for me to consider it reliable.
The key research output from this phase was a series of three ‘comprehensive storylines’—one for each case study country which incorporated both decisionmaking episodes. These documents included substantial background sections containing relevant contextual information before presenting a reconstruction of the sequencing of ‘what happened’ during each stage of each decisionmaking episode, including tracking the pressures operating on key decisionmakers at each point. These ‘comprehensive storylines’ were approximately 35,000 words in length and, using the Australian example as an indicator, contained references to over 200 unique evidentiary sources (excluding material generated from elite interviews).
Phase 3: Crafting analytical narratives
The process of turning the three comprehensive storylines I developed into convincing theoretically-orientated narratives (George and Bennett 2005, 205) was more challenging than I had anticipated. Having immersed myself so deeply in decisionmaking details and invested so heavily in developing a careful description (Collier 2011, 824) of each aid policy decisionmaking process, it became tempting to view these reconstructions as ends in themselves, rather than as the raw material from which to generate an “analytical causal explanation”112.
To gain perspective, I deliberately allowed substantial time to elapse between turning the creating comprehensive storylines into analytical narratives. This left space for the inductive emergence of the idea of decider salience as a cross-case phenomenon and a potential organising principle around which I could craft explanatory narratives about aid policy change113.
I returned to the comprehensive storylines I had created to test the within-case plausibility of decider salience and aid salience shocks as causal mechanisms. To this end, I reaudited the data
111 The process tracing literature refers to this process as ‘soaking and poking’. It is that period during which “one
immerses oneself in the details of the case and tries out proto-hypothesises that may either quickly prove to be dead ends or become plausible and worthy of more rigorous testing” (Bennett and Checkel 2015a, Loc 527).
112 This term is taken from George and Bennett (2005, 211), who describe ‘analytical explanation’ as a distinct type
of process tracing which seeks to convert “historical narrative into an analytical causal explanation couched in explicit theoretical forms.”
113 Leaving space for inductive insights is a key feature of causal process tracing (Bennett and Checkel 2015a; Blatter
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I had collected and sought more evidence where required. I focused on specifying the sequencing of the decider salience mechanism, fact-checking anecdotes and examples that illuminated how this processes proceeded, and identifying and critical junctures (Capoccia and Kelemen 2007) where path dependencies were initiated or consolidated (Bennett and Elman 2006; Mahoney 2000; Pierson 2000)114. I also sought and tested alternative explanations,
including by employing counterfactual analysis115.
As I became more convinced about the explanatory power of the decider salience concept, I dramatically revised the comprehensive storylines so that my analytical explanation was built around conveying how salience shifts drove the behaviour of aid policy decisionmakers and hence change. Consequently, much of the granular detail about how decisionmaking processes unfolded ‘fell out’ of the analysis. While these find-grained details were very important in directing me to my eventual explanation, they ultimately often got in the way of the story that needed to be told. Likewise, rather than being constrained by a chronological recounting of events, as in the comprehensive storylines, the analytical narratives presented in are organised more thematically, as they trace the progression of how decider salience drives aid policy change (see Schimmelfennig 2015, Loc. 2367).