Joachim Schroeder
IV. Hasta ahora: ‘Espacios lingüísticos’ separados
Elite interviews are typically a vital data source for researchers examining decisionmaking processes. As they did for Lundsgaarde (2013, 16), elite interviews proved crucial in allowing me to “pinpoint the actors who have left a decisive mark on aid choices”116. There were three
reasons why data obtained from elite interviews was especially important for this project. First, the contemporary nature of the episodes I investigated meant that there was almost no existing scholarly literature available. Many of the participants involved remain in government or in politics. A second, related, reason interviews were so important concerned the fact that the decisionmaking episodes I reconstructed received very minimal attention from the press. While the publication of the final policy document typically received media attention, the decisionmaking processes that led to them were not widely reported on. Third, first-hand
114 Collier (2011, 824) advises that to “characterize a process, we must be able to characterize key steps in the
process, which in turn permits good analysis of change and sequence.”
115 For example, I tested my argument that Rudd’s personal investment in increasing Australia aid spending supplied
the initiative and ongoing momentum for aid policy change in Australia by considering what would have likely eventuated in the absence of Rudd. Frank Harvey’s (2012) book, Explaining the Iraq War: counterfactual theory, logic and evidence is an excellent recent example of counterfactual analysis.
116 Lundsgaarde’s (2013) research entailed conducting 77 semi-structured interviews, or around 20 per country case
study. I used this as a rough guide for my own research. Key resources which guided my preparation for interviews were Myers and Newman (2007), Mosley (2013) and Beckmann and Hall (2013)
Approach and Method
Page87 accounts, especially from participants, proved especially valuable in yielding insight into the ‘psychological environment’ of decisionmakers—a key dimension of the aid policy decisionmaking framework.
During this project, I conducted 51 formal, semi-structured interviews117. These interviews were
conducted under the auspices of ANU Human Ethics Protocol Number 2014/426. The interviews generated almost 40 hours of recordings, leading to over 150 pages of transcribed interview data118. Annex 1 lists the individuals I interviewed for this project. Only five of the 51
interviewees requested anonymity, a pleasing result that I partly put down to my promise to interviewees to contact them again to confirm attribution of interview material in the final thesis. Formal interviews averaged just over 49 minutes in length, ranging from twenty minutes to an hour-and-a-half. Most formal interviews were conducted face to face (40 of 51, or 78%), in a range of locations across Australia (Canberra), the Netherlands (The Hague, Amsterdam, Nijmegen) and the UK (Leeds, London, Oxford, York). Nine formal interviews (18% of the total) were conducted by video conference using Skype, with an additional two interviews (4%) conducted via telephone.
From the point at which I began to compile a ‘target-list’ of interviewees, I found it useful to distinguish between ‘participants’ and ‘observers’. Participants were those actors who were directly involved in the decisionmaking episode and whose role made them partly responsible for the decision output (or a sub-output). This way of defining terms sets a high-bar on who I recognised as a participant119. To preserve the anonymity of participants who requested it, I am
limited in the detail I can provide. However, it is important to confirm that I interviewed two or more participants for all but one decisionmaking episodes. Overall, I interviewed sixteen individuals who I classified as participants, including two principals (Mitchell and Knapen)— equating to slightly more than 30% (16 of 51) of the total participant pool. Given the very limited
117 I was guided by a semi-structured interview protocol when conducting formal interviews for this product. This
protocol was approved by ANU’s Human Ethics Research Committee. The protocol was designed to generate responses to my three most three fundamental information requirements: the structure of the decisionmaking episode (i.e. who was involved and when and how); the perceptions of the decisionmakers involved in the decisionmaking episode; and the perceptions of the decisionmakers influenced the decionmaking process. The protocol provided me with relatively generic questions in each of the above categories to ensure the flow of the interview was maintained, along with various prompts should I wish to press the interviewee for more detail about a particular response. While some interviews followed the protocol quite closely, many interviews became quite wide-ranging, especially after once I had developed a very detailed knowledge of each decision.
118 The transcribed interviews generated approximately 80,000 words of material.
119 This way of defining terms sets a high-bar on who I recognised as a participant. For example, it discounts senior
bureaucrats as ‘participants’ unless they were taken offline to participate in the secretariat formed to develop the policy output. Of course, such a senior bureaucrat would obviously remain a valuable ‘observer’.
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potential pool of participants, this represents a significant sample, particularly given I interviewed most of the lead or key authors for the White-Paper type policy outputs120.
Additionally, as the research progressed, it became more important to seek input from interviewees who, while not participants in one the six episodes being reconstructed, were participants in related episodes that proved equally—and sometimes more—important for telling the story of the aid policy change121. For example, the insights garnered from interviews
with Clare Short and Kathleen Ferrier proved vital to my ability to tell the story of changes in UK and Dutch aid policy respectively, yet these individuals were not participants (as I define the term) in the episodes in question.
As distinct from ‘participants’, I define an ‘observer’, as an individual with an intimate knowledge of a particular aid policy decisionmaking episode. This designation allows for ‘participants’ to also be classified as observers. I sought to keep the number of observers I interviewed across the six episodes roughly similar (see Figure 3.D). Most interviewees could be classified as observers of multiple decisionmaking episodes—usually both episodes in a particularly country122—hence the total number of ‘observers’ adds to well over the number of formal
interviews undertaken.
Figure 3.D: Sampling of Observers by Decisionmaking Episode
120 To be more specific here would risk potentially disclosing the identities of individuals who have requested
anonymity.
121 For example, it became very apparent early on, in the UK II case, that it would be vital to interview individuals
involved in the involved in the Global Poverty Policy Group, which was central to the way Cameron’s modernisation agenda for the Conservative Party progressed in the aid policy space.
Approach and Method
Page89 In addition to paying attention to the number of observers I interviewed for each decision, I also sought to interview a variety of types of respondents, to ensure I heard a variety of viewpoints. To this end, I categorised observers into one of six categories: a bureaucrat (e.g. a representative of AusAID, the MFA, DFID or another government agency); a political adviser (e.g. a SPAD in the UK system); a politician; an academic; a member of the development constituency; or a thought leader or member of a think tank (e.g. ODI). To preserve the anonymity of interviewees who requested it, I am not able to publish the breakdown of interviewees by type of respondent.
I transcribed most interviews using transcription software and a transcription pedal. In most cases, I added my own recollections and notes (recorded during the interview or very soon after) to the transcription file at the appropriate places, using a different font to distinguish my thoughts from the interviewee’s words. Some interviews did not warrant require full transcription. In such cases, I generally summarised key parts of the conversation, fully transcribing key sections if relevant.
Once the transcribing was near completion, I collated all the interview data for each case study country into a single document. I repeatedly read these documents, highlighting relevant quotes and ideas. I then collected these highlighted sections into a new document of ‘key interview material’ for each country. Most of this material has been incorporated into the empirical chapters. During the production of the empirical chapters, I regularly returned to key interviews to make sure my account aligned with participants’ recollections.
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3.5
Conclusion
This chapter documented how I constructed a recapturing scheme that facilitates examining aid policy decisionmaking from a new perspective. The Aid Policy Decisionmaking Framework examines aid policy decisonmaking episodes through a much wider lens than other frameworks currently offered by the literature, precisely because its chief objective is to explicitly incorporate factors from all levels of analysis. The trade-off is that the framework produces detailed snapshots of aid policy dynamics in each aid policy system at a point in time. It is crucial to keep in mind, therefore, that the product that emerges after the framework is applied to a given aid policy decision episode is, at least in the context of this thesis, not an end in itself. The
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framework is a means to a more important end; answering the thesis question—why do states change the trajectory of their aid policy?
The decisionmaking episodes I reconstructed represent critical nodes in the history of each aid policy ecosystem in which they occur. By reconstructing them with the Aid Policy Decisionmaking Framework, it becomes possible to detect how, and where, and why sources of aid policy change emerge, interact, and intersect. Essentially, the framework turns these decisionmaking episodes into critical junctures that become a point at which the threads driving aid policy change are observable. Tracing these threads then reveals more about how and why aid policy change proceeds.
The four chapters comprising Part II of the thesis convey what I discovered as I radiated out from each of these six nodes, seeking to uncover the key forces that provided the impetus for aid policy decisionmakers to act to change aid policy. However, as I foreshadowed in chapter 1, the central ideas holding these accounts of aid policy change together are the concepts of decider salience and aid salience shocks. In the forthcoming chapter, I present the argument of this thesis by turning my attention to explaining how these concepts underpin an actor-specific theory of aid policy change.
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4
Theorising Aid Policy Change
“We need a much more vigorous effort to characterize the conditions that can produce decisions for dramatic redirection in foreign policy.”
—Charles Hermann, 1990
“What we must decide is whether there are any patterns in the way in which decision makers perform the basic tasks of processing information and making choices that can constitute explanations…”
—David Welch, 2005
“[P]olitical attention is scarce, and it is consequential.”
—Green-Pedersen and Walgrave, 2014
his chapter sets out an actor-specific theory of aid policy change. At the heart of this theory are two interrelated explanatory mechanisms: decider salience and aid salience shocks. These explanatory devices make sense of variations in the attentiveness of powerful political actors to aid issues, which I argue is the key to understanding the dynamics of aid policy change at the strategic level.
The first two sections of this chapter describe the creative steps involved in developing the theory. First, I address the significance of actor-specific theorising, highlighting the benefits of this approach in light of the thesis question and the deficiencies in the determinants of aid literature (section 4.1). Then, in the subsequent section, I unpack the concepts I appropriated from the agenda setting literature in order to build the theory of aid policy change (section 4.2). Here I introduce the concept of issue salience, highlight the implications of it and explain why the political agenda matters for understanding policy change.
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The third section is designed to stand alone as the decisive statement of the theory of aid policy change this thesis advances (section 4.3). As such, it functions as the nucleus of the thesis. It is the point to which the preceding chapters have been leading, and the point from where the remaining chapters obtain their direction.
The chapter concludes with a section documenting the permissive conditions that allow for the operation of the theory of aid policy change I propose (section 4.4). Here I build on the scholarship of Lundsgaarde (2013, 22) to catalogue the characteristics of the aid policy issue area. Going further than Lundsgaarde, I argue that aid policy exhibits “a politics unto itself” (Lundsgaarde 2013, 6) primarily because of its low salience to political actors.
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