A new model of development coalition building: USAID achieving legitimate access and dominant information in Bangladesh’s forest policy

The influence of non-domestic actors and institutions on domestic policymaking process has been a constant research topic for a long time in the field of development studies. During recent years, however, the coalition strategy of foreign donors seems to have changed in favor of non-governmental allies in development cooperation, instead of state bureaucracies of the target countries. As a key foreign donor, for instance, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) has introduced the forest co-management development concept, altering important policy and institutional settings in Bangladesh. The changes resulted from a combination of development inputs and politics, including funding, technical assistance and coalition with multiple, mostly non-state stakeholders. In this article, we use the concepts of development policy change, the global governance theorem of direct access to domestic policymaking process, and bureaucratic politics theory from development policy analysis for analyzing this new coalition strategy. A mixed qualitative-quantitative methods approach and the case of the USAID-induced forest co-management development model were employed to analyze the new coalition strategy based on the main interests of the donor. The results indicate that in the development process, USAID formed coalitions with non-state actors at all levels, thus circumventing national bureaucracies. The donor substantially involved non-state actors to (1) overcome the dominant information of state bureaucracies by eliciting data in the donors’ informal interests, (2) gain control over the implementation process at multiple levels, and (3) enhance pressure on all levels of government for substantive policy changes. In contrast, the initial and very marginal coalitions with state agencies imply an initial cost for legitimately accessing a country’s governance system. Furthermore, such detouring of state agencies poses the questions of operational authority and, concurrently, of ownership to sustain the changed practices. A broader implication based on the study findings is to especially consider the sovereignty issue in a development context in a recipient country.