Pathologies of development practice: Higher order obstacles to governance reform in the Pakistani electrical power sector

Development actors are regularly aware of the shortcomings of governance interventions before, during, and after development assistance is introduced, yet those programmes continue and are even revisited. Why? This paper uses the Pakistani experience with power sector reforms to illustrate how the d...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: NAQVI, Ijlal
Format: text
Language:English
Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2016
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Online Access:https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/soss_research/2021
https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/soss_research/article/3278/viewcontent/9717525.pdf
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Institution: Singapore Management University
Language: English
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Summary:Development actors are regularly aware of the shortcomings of governance interventions before, during, and after development assistance is introduced, yet those programmes continue and are even revisited. Why? This paper uses the Pakistani experience with power sector reforms to illustrate how the donor-led reform agenda had readily apparent shortcomings. A new wave of development thinking responds to such failures by drawing on complexity theory and moving toward more local, iterative and experimental approaches. However, by highlighting how the awareness of problems with reforms isn't sufficient to avoid them, this paper points to a higher order of obstacles which remain unaddressed.