THE POLITICS OF DEVELOPMENT POLICY

Theories of the causes of development in the Third World are criticized for a lack of attention to policy, focus on too abstracted and too narrowly conceived variables, and an excessive concern with generalization. Two more promising current approaches - analysis of the calculations of politicians and officials when they make policy decisions, and of the implications for the politics of policy making of certain economic variables and policies - are assessed and reformulated. The merits of these approaches are then illustrated with cases from current research on the polities of development policy in Indonesia.