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Saturday July 19, 2025

Development and policies - Part I

By Dr Naazir Mahmood
May 17, 2020

The writer holds a PhD from the University of Birmingham, UK and works in Islamabad

As Covid-19 has shattered many myths of development, it has also upended some basics of development policy. Both developed and developing countries are now faced with some new challenges that call for a radical rethink in development policy. What does it entail for countries such as Pakistan?

In a series of articles, we will discuss the likely impact of Covid-19 on development policy and its implications for future. First for starters, some concept clarification is in order to make it understandable even to nonacademic readers who may not be adept at handling development jargon. Many policy briefs and papers tend to get bogged down in language that is hard to swallow and most readers end up just browsing through them, without grasping much, or understanding the crux of the matter. So here we try to be as simple as possible.

A policy – be it business policy, development policy, or any other for that matter – helps us achieve certain outcomes. A policy is supposed to guide us in decision-making, and for that it provides us with a system of principles. A policy can be a set of fundamental rules and it can also be a deliberate system of guidelines. It all depends on how comprehensive the exercise of policymaking has been. Sometimes, just one person makes a policy and hands it down to those who are supposed to follow it.

Policymaking may also range from a committee to a broad-based consultation involving public opinions and suggestions. The same applies to development policies. For example, the development of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by the UN was the result of a long consultative process with development agencies, experts, governments, and many other stakeholders. These global goals (SDGs) drew heavily from the successes and failures of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) which most countries of the world tried to achieve from 2000 to 2015. The new global goals have a timeline from 2015 to 2030.

To fulfil the SDGs, most countries of the world have aligned their development policies in accordance with the recommendations of the UN. But the degree and magnitude of these development policies vary in intent and scope. Some countries have developed detailed procedures and protocols to implement their development policies, and in some others the SDGs have not moved forward much beyond a statement of intent. Here some more terms need clarification such as macroeconomic policy, policy analysis, policy governance and management, policy process, policy studies, public policy, and social policy. There is no unanimous definition of these terms.

Policy studies is a discipline with perhaps the broadest meaning, which includes the analysis of the process of policymaking (policy process) and the contents of policy (policy analysis). So, policy studies primarily looks at how policies are made, meaning how it started, who was involved in it, and where it all ended up. It may include studying all sorts of policies. Analysis, as we know, is a detailed examination of anything complex to understand its features. Policy analysis takes more interest in the contents and nature of a policy, though sometimes it may also look at the policy process. Both – policy analysis and process – may or may not result in the formulation of a new policy. Policy governance and management is more related to how it is administered or implemented; how the policy is owned both horizontally and vertically. It defines and guides appropriate relationships among a diversity of stakeholders in a particular policy. The failure or success of a policy – including development policy – to a great extent depends on policy governance and management. When the MDGs’ achievements were analyzed and reviewed at the end of their 15-year period, mostly it was the differences in policy governance and management in various countries that defined failures and successes.

Now we come to the differences and similarities in macroeconomic, public, and social policies, as they are invariably used in development policy discussions. Of these, public policy is perhaps the broadest term by which governments translate their political vision into actions. Public policies are essentially government policies enacted and enforced through legislation. Any government’s defence, development, domestic, education, foreign, health, judicial, labour, macroeconomic, monitory, social and many other policies are public policies because just like public-sector entities, they are owned and managed by the government. They may overlap or encompass each other, but they will remain public policies. Macroeconomic policy normally consists of two tools: fiscal and monetary. Without sound fiscal and monetary policies, a country cannot achieve stability in its macroeconomic outlook. If you want to stabilize the economy, first look at the fiscal and monetary policies. Your GDP, employment, businesses, and price stability, all depend on your macroeconomic policy, including its fiscal and monetary tools. Monetary policy controls money supply through central banks by manipulating assets, bonds, interest rates, and money circulation. Fiscal policy tries to regulate government’s revenue and expenditure to influence the economy by debts or taxes.

Now we come to social policy, which affects the living conditions of citizens. For example, to build or develop a welfare state you must have a conducive social policy in which priority is given to social services. A good social policy prefers human welfare over other considerations. Of course, social policy is not simply a theoretical paradigm; it is an applied subject which tries to improve citizen’s quality of life. Social policy does not work in isolation; it depends on and draws from nearly all other policies as a country’s defence, economic, and foreign policies will directly affect its social policy.

In a nutshell, social policy is a type of public policy related to areas such as criminal justice, education, healthcare, inequality, labour, and many others. Social policies determine the actions that affect the well-being of members of a society. It shapes the distribution of and access to goods and services in that society. So, finally: what is development policy, which is the thrust of our discussion? Actually, without going through all this discussion it would have been more difficult for a non-academic reader to understand our discussion that will follow in our next articles in this series. Development policy certainly comes from the overall social policy of a country. It may draw from all economic, political, and social measures that a country takes to achieve sustainable improvements in living conditions. Development policy may try to improve living conditions in other countries also, as many donor countries do. So, a development policy may just relate to one’s own country or it may cross boundaries to other countries. As mentioned earlier, many policies are interrelated – therefore, trade policy or agricultural policy may also include development-related aspects. The challenge is to figure out how to coordinate all sub-policy areas into a coherent whole.

Without coherence, policies fail and development policy more so. Just setting specific development policy objectives is not enough. Economic, financial, geographic, and thematic priorities need to be ascertained. And then an accountability mechanism coupled with proper monitoring and evaluation systems, facilitate in a development policy’s success. Most countries that failed to achieve desirable targets of the MDGs suffered from these problems of lack of accountability, misplaced economic priorities, financial mismanagement, geographic oversight, such as not giving attention to those geographical areas that are the most backward in human development. Balochistan in Pakistan is a case in point. In the next part of this series, we will look in more detail at development policy and related concepts.

To be continued

Email: mnazir1964@yahoo.co.uk