Is there a third-world policy process?

Abstract

The introduction to this special issue asks what is distinctive about public policy making in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. In field after field, some political scientists have argued for distinguishing Western polities from developing polities, whereas other have argued for inclusive treatment. The essay assesses these divergent perspectives as they relate to pubfic policy making. On the one hand, it is clear that the systemic frameworks of policy -the institutions, participants, resources, the weight of the state relative to the society, and the capacity of the state to work its will -all vary as between developing and Western countries. The same is true for the scope of policy activity, the configuration of issues, and the actual content of policy. On the other hand, the policy process -the constraints, the ripe moments that produce innovation, the tendency for policy to have unanticipated consequences, and so on -appears to display regularities that transcend the categories of Western or Third World state. The essay goes on to explain the divergences of policy in terms of disparate access to resources, levels of economic development, and social patterns. The convergence of process is explained in terms of the deeper exigencies of human problem solving in highly structured contexts.Comparative public policy is a young field, even younger than the systematic study of politics in the developing countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. The hybrid product of these two fields -comparative public policy in developing countries -is younger still. Nevertheless, even before some basic conceptual issues have been sorted out, findings are beginning to accumulate rather quickly on the policy process and the policy configuration in a significant number of Asian, African, and Latin American countries.Yet there is one question that, with growing knowledge, has become more rather than less difficult to answer. It is, in some ways, the central question: What, if anything, is distinctive about public policy making in Asia, Africa, and Latin America? The answer has become more elusive, because many of the findings on how policy is made and carried out in developing countries bear considerable resemblance to the same findings for Western countries. Some differences can be detected, but it is not always clear that they are categorical rather than country-specific, and in any case the differences usually amount to matters of degree rather than kind. Already it is obvious that an effort to pinpoint the distinctiveness of public policy in the Third World quickly becomes a struggle over nuances.That does not render the effort insignificant, because small differences in policy process can produce large differences in policy product and outcome. Moreover, the fact that some similarities have manifested themselves, despite the widely different political, economic, and cultural circumstances that

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