Introduction

The impact of engagement between nation states and transnational organizations (in particular, international development partners) on development trajectories has been the subject of an ever more intense academic debate. In Chapters 1 and 2 we discussed the various approaches, and the shift over recent years from a primarily ideological debate around the pros and cons of reforms advocated for by international development partners (see discussion in Radwan, 2020) to a more evidence-based approach (for example, Custer et al, 2015, 2018; Andrews et al, 2017).

On the back of an often heated discussion on the appropriateness and desirability of ‘Washington Consensus’ driven reforms in the 1990s, the problem-driven assessments around government– development partner engagements proposed by Andrews (2013) and Andrews et al (2017) aimed to improve the impact of policy solutions proposed or supported by international actors by working on better tailoring these to national contexts (technically and politically). Subsequently, the large survey-based analyses by Custer et al (2015, 2018, 2021) and Parks et al (2015) worked on framing and documenting the impacts of engagement with international development partners on national policy, and what determined the impact of such influence. Both strands of work are concerned primarily with how engagement between nation states and international partners can be made more impactful, by looking into how support programmes can be designed in a more context-appropriate way and by examining what the drivers of successful dialogue are. The latter includes the frequency and quality of interaction between officials and office holders in partner countries and those in international development partner institutions (multilateral and bilateral). Driven by such analyses, international development partners have also done their own soul searching on the impact of their financing and dialogue.

By and large, these more recent and evidence-based analytical efforts focus primarily on outcome (what is the impact on the substance of policy or institutional reform) and process (what kind of interaction in what context and why) rather than ideology, and in this way have generated a more substance-oriented debate on globalization and the influence of global actors on national policies. What has so far been mostly absent in this debate is a discussion on the impact of the engagement with international actors on civil servants.