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Send for the cavalry: Political incentives in the provision of agricultural advisory services
Author(s) -
Kjær Anne Mette,
Joughin James
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
development policy review
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.671
H-Index - 61
eISSN - 1467-7679
pISSN - 0950-6764
DOI - 10.1111/dpr.12324
Subject(s) - incentive , subsidy , government (linguistics) , politics , agriculture , service (business) , christian ministry , component (thermodynamics) , point (geometry) , business , public economics , public administration , economics , political science , marketing , microeconomics , market economy , law , ecology , linguistics , philosophy , physics , geometry , mathematics , biology , thermodynamics
This article examines how political incentives shape the implementation of agricultural advisory service reforms. Using the Uganda experience as a typical case we find that elections incentivized the Government to add a subsidized input component to the existing service. Growing pressures from local politicians, the Ministry of Agriculture and increasingly disgruntled army factions then constituted a strong and interlocking set of further incentives to revert to a recentralized, top‐down model dominated by the new, subsidized input component. Our findings point to how well designed implementation processes can be disrupted by the changing incentive structure, an insight which calls for more patient and much more pragmatic approaches to adopting “trial and error” models rather than more ambitious, but perhaps unrealistic, options.