The Shifting Fortunes of the Economic Technocracy in Uganda: Caught Between State-building and Regime Survival?

Uganda’s impressive levels of economic growth over most of the past three decades have often been linked to the performance of its economic technocracy, particularly the government’s high-powered Ministry of Finance, Economic Planning and Development (MFPED). This paper argues that MFPED (or parts thereof) can indeed be seen as ‘pockets of effectiveness’, with the Ministry often managing to deliver effectively on its mandate, in a context in which this is not the norm. This can be explained in part by the functional and legally mandated nature of some of the tasks that MFPED delivers and in part by the strong levels of international support and oversight. However, we also find that MFPED’s performance has varied considerably over time, despite these favourable factors, particularly in terms of its capacity to control the budgetary process and public expenditure. This variation can be traced to shifts within Uganda’s political settlement, which moved from being broadly ‘dominant-developmental’ to ‘vulnerable-populist’ in character from the early 2000s onwards. This shift profoundly altered the ‘embedded autonomy’ that MFPED had previously enjoyed with regards its relationship with State House, in ways that have undermined MFPED’s capacity to deliver on its mandate. Despite efforts to regain both power and autonomy in recent years, MFPED remains subject to the politics of regime survival in Uganda, in ways that undermine its effectiveness. Whilst this may loosen the hold of neoliberal economic governance in Uganda and enable alternative perspectives to emerge, the more immediate effects have been to damage prospects for policy coherence and economic growth in the country

Politics and Covid-19 in Kampala

As the Covid-19 pandemic spread across the globe in early 2020, the response in the Ugandan capital of Kampala was driven by Kampala City’s Covid-19 Task Force. This is the mirror image of the NTF – the official government of Uganda national-level structure that is explained in the next section. Cognisant that Uganda operates a decentralised system, government mandated sub-national governments to customise the response through the Covid-19 district and city task forces to coordinate and guide the response to the pandemic in the respective administrative units (Kirenga et al. 2020). Similar to the national structure, these sub-national task forces composed of political and technical experts that were drawn from within the respective districts (Kadowa 2020). The political arm of the Kampala City Task Force was headed by the minister for Kampala and Metropolitan Affairs, with members consisting of the resident city commissioners, lord mayor and division mayors, executive director and directors, town clerks and district medical officers, and Kampala Metropolitan Police. On its part, the technical side was headed by KCCA’s director of public health and environment, Dr Daniel Okello. The city’s health directorate’s emergency response team had previously handled emergencies including spates of cholera outbreak in different areas of the city, the Ebola epidemic, and had offered emergence support to victims of the 2010 terrorist bombings in Kampala (Twinokwesiga 2020). At the community level, the technical arm was supported by NGOs, the private sector and community volunteers in the form of VHTs. The latter are a cornerstone of Uganda’s epidemic surveillance and considered a key component in tackling infectious diseases, as they are the first health point of contact in the community. The local council chairpersons (LC I) were responsible for managing residents and ensuring compliance with national regulations (Federica et al. 2020). In this section, we will discuss the different forms of Covid-19 response in Kampala, before touching on some of the organisational aspects of the response

The Politics of Inclusive Development: Interrogating the Evidence.

It is now widely accepted that politics plays a significant role in shaping the possibilities for inclusive development. However, the specific ways in which this happens across different types and forms of development, and in different contexts, remains poorly understood. This collection provides the state of the art review regarding what is currently known about the politics of inclusive development. Leading academics offer systematic reviews of how politics shapes development across multiple dimensions, including through growth, natural resource governance, poverty reduction, service delivery, social protection, justice systems, the empowerment of marginalized groups, and the role of both traditional and non-traditional donors. The book not only provides a comprehensive update but also a groundbreaking range of new directions for thinking and acting around these issues. The book’s originality thus derives not only from the wide scope of its case-study material, but also from the new conceptual approaches it offers for thinking about the politics of inclusive development, and the innovative and practical suggestions for donors, policymakers, and practitioners that flow from this

Do revolving funds generate self-employment and increase incomes for the poor? Experimental evidence from Uganda’s Youth Livelihood Programme

Dofiles, ready-for-analysis data used in the analysis published in the Final Report to 3ie on the project, "Do revolving funds generate self-employment and increase incomes for the poor? Experimental evidence from Uganda's youth livelihood programme" (project code UPW.03.IE.UYDL). This project was funded as part of the Uganda Policy Window round