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Despite the wealth that comes from being the biggest oil producer in Africa, Nigeria has some of the worst development indicators in the world. From 2011 to mid‐2016, the DFID‐funded Facility for Oil Sector Transparency and Reform (FOSTER) programme's unique design aimed to reduce incentives for the capture of oil revenue by elites and international oil companies, restoring the potential of those revenues to accelerate economic and social development. This article asks what lessons FOSTER's successes and failures offer for improved “thinking and working politically” (TWP). It examines the outcomes from five “clusters” of interventions: three viewed by the FOSTER team as successes and two as failures. The article identifies factors for successful TWP‐based programming, including the need for local ownership rooted in staff with a combination of technical expertise, a deep knowledge of the local political context and excellent networking abilities. The research used a qualitative and inductive approach. Field research was undertaken with 44 semi‐structured qualitative interviews during one month of fieldwork in Abuja and Lagos. The research also included reviews of FOSTER's internal documentation and evaluation frameworks, as well as analysis of newspaper articles and grey literature on the oil sector in Nigeria. The project offers important lessons for politically informed programming about how interventions were implemented (process), what was actually done (content) and how the project responded to changes in context that created or blocked opportunities for reform (responsiveness). The article identifies factors for successful TWP‐based programming, including the need for local ownership rooted in staff with a combination of technical expertise, a deep knowledge of the local political context and excellent networking abilities. The findings have important implications for programme design. They demonstrate the value of built‐in flexibility that allows staff to choose and switch the partners they work with and the channels they work through. They also show that a key aspect of TWP‐based programming is implicit acceptance that some failure may be unavoidable, since this permits staff to balance risk against opportunities. Finally, a better understanding of FOSTER's failures reveals the challenges of a TWP‐based approach and the trade‐offs it demands., SCOPUS: ar.j, info:eu-repo/semantics/published

This paper critically reviews evidence on "thinking and working politically" in development. Scholars and practitioners have increasingly recognised that development is fundamentally political, and efforts are underway to develop more politically informed ways of thinking and working. The literature does not yet constitute a strong evidence base to link these efforts to more effective aid programming: much evidence is anecdotal, does not meet high standards of robustness, is not comparative, and draws on self-selected successes reported by programme insiders. We discuss factors commonly considered to explain the success of politically informed programmes in areas where conventional programming approaches fall short. We consider evidence in three areas - political context, sector and organization - and provide guidance on where to focus next. Finally, we outline ways of testing the core assumptions of the "thinking and working politically" agenda more thoroughly, to provide a clearer sense of the contribution it can make to aid effectiveness.

Increasingly it is argued that anti-corruption efforts have not worked because they are based on inadequate theory, suggesting that collective action theory offers a better understanding of corruption than the principal-agent theory usually used. This paper, published in collaboration with the Developmental Leadership Programme (DLP) , argues that both theories are in fact valuable. But both miss out an important third perspective, which is that corruption can serve important functions, solving difficult problems that people face, especially in weak institutional environments. Effective anti-corruption initiatives are so hard to achieve because they often require insights from all three of these perspectives. (This paper is part of a jointly funded initiative by DLP and U4)

Corruption indicators have been used in budget support Performance Assessment Frameworks (PAFs) for a variety of purposes, including to control for misappropriation of funds, assess Government performance on fighting corruption, and in some cases act as an aid disbursement trigger. This literature- and interview-based study maps PAF corruption indicators and examines their role and effectiveness in monitoring corruption. The study finds that if corruption-related indicators are to be used in PAFs, it is important to: identify clearly budget support objectives and corruption indicator purpose; develop better outcome, rather than output, indicators; support partner country capacity to develop indicators; and work towards a comprehensive diagnostic framework for corruption. In general, the key message is to clarify the objectives of budget support and the purpose of including corruption indicators, and then select indicators that match. Where possible, exploit existing anticorruption processes and align PAFs with national anti-corruption processes, if they exist.

There are growing calls for religion to be used in the fight against corruption, based on the assumption that religious people are more concerned with ethics than the non-religious, despite the fact that many of the most corrupt countries in the world also rank highly in terms of religiosity. This paper explores how the new ‘myth’ about the relationship between religion and corruption is based on assumptions not borne out through the evidence. The paper then examines whether a discursive relationship exists instead, and what the significance of such a relationship might be. Based on a review of several studies of the statistical relationships between religion and corruption, the paper concludes that the evidence for a causal relationship between religion (or type of religion)and either higher or lower levels of corruption is in no way convincing. The methodologies that have been employed thus far are insufficient for proving – one way or another – a causal relationship. This literature is largely quantitative, with a dearth of empirical, fieldwork-based evidence. The results are often contradictory, depending upon which dataset has been used, which raises important methodological issues. The literature is tentative at best, offering comparisons between various datasets and pointing towards possible explanations, sometimes rooted in theory, sometimes not. The data used are often flawed, making the explanations that are advanced problematic. The data are aggregated at the country level; they do not reveal intra-country variations and cannot tell us anything about how individuals’ attitudes towards corruption are formed, the impact of religious (and other socio-cultural influences) on attitude formation, or the ways that individuals condemn or justify corrupt behaviour using the language of religion. The paper adds to a growing body of literature that questions whether research is likely to be able to prove a direct causal relationship between religion and corruption – either positive or negative – and certainly not with the methodologies employed so far. It advocates instead pluralistic approaches that privilege qualitative methodologies involving country and individual level empirical research. These would see both corruption and religion as lived experiences, through which morality is constructed and evolves. Such research, it is argued, would enable morality to be (re)injected into the discourse on corruption. Care needs to be taken in doing so: while religious leaders often urge their followers to desist from corrupt behaviour, some religious leaders and organizations are allegedly corrupt, and the common distinction between public and private morality that informs Western discourse may not apply (or may apply in different ways) to attitudes and behaviour in developing countries. Nevertheless, in many parts of the world, religion maintains a stronger hold on people’s values, attitudes and behaviour than democratic institutions, and as such, it remains an important potential source of power. Therefore, although care needs to be taken in engaging religious teachings and actors in anticorruption discourses and initiatives, this paper argues that doing so may help to shape both academic and policy debates in a more engaging and significant way than the research available to date.