Antonia SettleWorking

March  2010

There has been a shift in development
paradigms reflected in the discourse of international funding bodies, from
technocratic aid modalities associated with Washington Consensus models towards
a ‘new development paradigm’ that accompanies post-Washington Consensus
economic prescriptions. This new development paradigm relies increasingly on
NGOs for channeling funds, while granting more space for government regulation
and emphasizing participatory approaches. The new paradigm has produced a
discourse on devolution, participatory development and decentralization. Yet
the new development paradigm has not broken free of the essentially
technocratic approaches that continue to limit both monitoring and evaluation
procedures and the discourse of development at the broader level, resulting in
a gap between policy and practice as well as ill-informed development policy
formulation.

This paper
undertakes a case study of the Aga Khan Rural Support Program (AKRSP), a rural
development program operating in the North of Pakistan that conforms to the
prescriptions of the new development paradigm and has achieved impressive
accolades, international replication and “remarkable” findings in a number of
World Bank evaluations. The paper seeks to consider this very successful
program beyond the norms of mainstream monitoring and evaluation procedures, to
consider some of the issues raised in the critical literature regarding the new
development paradigm and the larger discourse within which the new paradigm
remains embedded.

The paper raises
a number of issues with regards to the AKRSP, including the role of religion in
sustaining engagement amongst communities and the limits on market functions in
alleviating poverty. These issues are indicative of how mainstream approaches
fail to incorporate important aspects into monitoring and evaluation outcomes
and the narrowness of the discourse within which these processes take place.