ABSTRACT
Policy ownership of development agenda emerged as an important aspect in international development cooperation or foreign aid during the 1990s in the backdrop of past failures of reforms initiatives in developing countries steered by different donor agencies, particularly the international financial institutions (IFIs), the World Bank (WB) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The disappointing results of the Structural Adjustment Programs (SAP), introduced as a loan condition by, the WB-IMF, also known as the Bretton Woods twins, in the early 1980s, contributed to the rise of interest in policy ownership. Though SAP was thought to become an agenda for overall restructuring of an economy for faster poverty reduction and creation of employment opportunities, however, it appeared as “nothing else but neoclassical economics espousing a firm belief in the market’s ‘invisible hand,’ the rationality of economic actors’ choice, and a minimalistic vision of the states’ regulation of economies” (Lopes: 2012, 70).
