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Both political elites and rebel groups have access to sophisticated military technology and external support, and this further undermines the prospects for even-handed engagement between states and citizens (Moore 2004). Political mobilization is often along ethnic lines rather than around economic or other interests of the sort that would facilitate compromise over time and provide incentives for political actors to respond. The fact that poor people, even in democracies, are often not organizing around common interests in poverty reduction is clearly problematic from the point of view of gaining support for a pro-poor agenda.

Virtually everyone pays lip service to it. It provides the rationale for much mainstream donor policy and practice: to improve donor harmonization; to nurture country ownership of poverty reduction programs; to strengthen country recipient control over planning, budgeting, and procurement arrangements for aid; to apply conditionality in a more selective and nuanced way; and to carry out better political and institutional analysis. As discussed by de Renzio and Mulley later in this book, these principles are now enshrined in an ambitious, high-profile Declaration on Aid Effectiveness signed by officials from developed and developing countries in Paris in March 2005.

Global markets can be a source of virulent, corrosive corruption or a powerful disciplining device” (World Bank 2006a, 122). Furthermore, “incentives for good governance are heavily influenced by the international economy, the behaviour of other governments and the private sector” (dfid 2006, 33). Sections v and vi below pick up this theme and suggest ways in which more rigorous action by wealthy countries to curb the negative effects of their actions on poor countries could offer a powerful, if indirect, way of contributing to better governance.