To go with or against the grain? Politics as practice in the Budget Strengthening Initiative, Uganda

Responding to the failures of the good governance agenda in the post‐Cold War period, development scholars and policy researchers have placed increasing emphasis on approaches that can enable practitioners to support local change processes in politically savvy ways. Sometimes referred to as the ‘second orthodoxy’ in donor practice, these models aim to take the politics of aid‐receiving contexts seriously and work ‘with the grain’ of the institutional landscapes in which they are applied. This paper examines how these principles were put into practice within the ODI's Budget Strengthening Initiative (BSI) in Uganda. The paper shows how an ‘embedded’ form of technical assistance enabled the BSI to act micro‐politically, brokering the adoption of fiscal decentralisation reforms within the Uganda government. However, in the face of a broader political landscape of regime survival, the BSI's position within Uganda's financial technocracy also constrained its capacity to support these reforms. In this context of declining autonomy and shifting political constraints, the BSI worked ‘with the grain’ to reshape the reforms to align with pre‐existing political logics that hindered pro‐poor outcomes. Going forward, the paper suggests that further attention might be applied to understanding and addressing the fundamental tensions and trade‐offs involved in working ‘with the grain’ of challenging political contexts like Uganda.