Suchergebnisse

The study of regional powers has become an increasingly prominent part of debates in the academic field of International Relations (IR), particularly regarding their role in creating the conditions for international security. While the IR literature tends to focus on the causal effect of material and ideational factors to explain the policy of regional powers, this article uses an interpretive approach, centring on the study of historical representations. Through a comparative analysis of the foreign policies of Brazil and Nigeria since the 1990s, it argues that a focus on the traditions and dilemmas of regional powers enables a better explanation of their policy, one which illustrates how material factors are refracted through the representations of foreign policy elites in the two countries and expressed in their foreign policy practices as regional powers.

Despite the wealth that comes from being the biggest oil producer in Africa, Nigeria has some of the worst development indicators in the world. From 2011 to mid‐2016, the DFID‐funded Facility for Oil Sector Transparency and Reform (FOSTER) programme's unique design aimed to reduce incentives for the capture of oil revenue by elites and international oil companies, restoring the potential of those revenues to accelerate economic and social development. This article asks what lessons FOSTER's successes and failures offer for improved "thinking and working politically" (TWP). It examines the outcomes from five "clusters" of interventions: three viewed by the FOSTER team as successes and two as failures. The article identifies factors for successful TWP‐based programming, including the need for local ownership rooted in staff with a combination of technical expertise, a deep knowledge of the local political context and excellent networking abilities. The research used a qualitative and inductive approach. Field research was undertaken with 44 semi‐structured qualitative interviews during one month of fieldwork in Abuja and Lagos. The research also included reviews of FOSTER's internal documentation and evaluation frameworks, as well as analysis of newspaper articles and grey literature on the oil sector in Nigeria. The project offers important lessons for politically informed programming about how interventions were implemented (process), what was actually done (content) and how the project responded to changes in context that created or blocked opportunities for reform (responsiveness). The article identifies factors for successful TWP‐based programming, including the need for local ownership rooted in staff with a combination of technical expertise, a deep knowledge of the local political context and excellent networking abilities. The findings have important implications for programme design. They demonstrate the value of built‐in flexibility that allows staff to choose and switch the partners they work with and ...