Rethinking Cooperation Beyond the Project
Funding structures, actor dynamics, and the limits of linear development models
Author: Monica Bianco, Ecosystems Cooperation advisor -CRF Italy
Abstract
Project-based cooperation has long structured the dominant architecture of international development. Shaped by post-war geopolitics, institutional routines, and managerial imperatives, this model defines how problems are framed, how interventions are designed, and how success is measured. Rooted in linear planning, accountability tools, and technocratic rationality, the project format has proven highly adaptable—but also increasingly misaligned with the complex, systemic nature of today’s global challenges. This article traces the historical emergence and institutional consolidation of the project model, examining its theoretical foundations and operational diffusion across multilateral and bilateral cooperation systems. By analyzing its structural features and cognitive effects, we begin to identify the tensions it generates within evolving socio-technical and ecological contexts.
Introduction: The Formation of a Model
The institutional architecture of international cooperation that emerged after World War II was founded on an imperative of order, stability, and controlled reconstruction. The Bretton Woods institutions—the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (World Bank, 1944), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and later the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP, 1965)—crystallized a vision of development as a linear process of modernization, facilitated by capital transfer, infrastructure investment, and technical assistance [1].
This vision found early expression in the Marshall Plan (1948–1952), where “the reconstruction of European economies was designed not only as economic recovery but as a geopolitical strategy to secure democratic capitalism” [2]. The Marshall Plan established the template: targeted funding, short-term programming, and standardized reporting. In the decades that followed, this model evolved into a full-fledged apparatus of development planning—structured around the project as its core unit of intervention.
Theoretical Justifications: Development as a Linear Process
The intellectual foundations of this architecture were laid by modernization theory. In particular, Walt Rostow’s The Stages of Economic Growth (1960) framed development as a universal progression through discrete phases, from “traditional society” to “high mass consumption” [3]. The role of cooperation was to accelerate this trajectory, bridging structural gaps through foreign aid and institutional reform.
Projects became the instrument through which this acceleration could be managed: bounded in time, measurable in outputs, and replicable across contexts. The logic was one of linear causality: identify a constraint, apply a targeted intervention, and move the system to a higher stage. As Escobar later noted, “development discourse made it possible to conceptualize entire populations as problems to be solved through expert knowledge” [4].
This technocratic framing was reinforced by emerging schools of public administration and economics that viewed large-scale social transformation as a matter of planning, sequencing, and delivery. The project form, with its timelines, budgets, and evaluation metrics, aligned perfectly with these assumptions.
Institutionalization Through Donor Systems and Multilateral Agencies
From the 1960s onward, donor agencies and multilateral institutions progressively standardized project-based cooperation. The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the World Bank, the OECD Development Assistance Committee (DAC), and later the European Commission all developed formal tools for project management, including the Logical Framework Approach (LFA) and Project Cycle Management (PCM).
These tools did not merely facilitate coordination—they redefined what counted as legitimate knowledge and measurable success. As David Mosse observed, “projects are organized not only to deliver development but to produce the appearance of success, regardless of impact” [5].
Over time, cooperation became structured around calls for proposals, funding envelopes, thematic windows, and reporting templates. These procedures were replicated by UN agencies, regional development banks, and NGOs, leading to a proliferation of isolated interventions, each bounded by its own logic, documentation, and temporality.
Results-Based Logic and Accountability Regimes
The evolution of cooperation toward performance management culminated in the aid effectiveness agenda of the early 2000s. The Paris Declaration (2005), Accra Agenda for Action (2008), and Busan Partnership (2011) all reinforced a vision of cooperation based on “ownership,” “alignment,” and “results-based management”—yet still within the project paradigm.
Projects were expected to deliver predefined outputs according to time-bound indicators. Public sector reforms, institutional capacity building, service delivery, and even governance were now to be executed through externally funded project units, often operating parallel to state administrations.
As Booth and Unsworth warned, “the insistence on measurable short-term results systematically discourages engagement with complexity, politics, and real institutional change” [6].
Cognitive and Cultural Effects: Project Logic as Common Sense
Beyond its operational functions, the project has become a cognitive infrastructure. It shapes how development actors think, how institutions organize work, and how legitimacy is produced. Arturo Escobar argued that “the dominance of the development project form has produced a global culture of intervention, in which the language, tools, and expectations of external funding shape local realities” [4].
In many recipient countries, ministries and municipalities have adapted their operations to match donor cycles, with specialized Project Management Units (PMUs), consultancy-based staffing, and ad hoc governance. Universities and civil society organizations design their agendas around funding availability rather than endogenous strategies.
This leads to what some analysts call the projectization of the state: a fragmentation of public authority into temporally bounded interventions with no cumulative institutional learning.
Structural and Systemic Limits
While flexible in its replication, the project model reveals deep structural limits. It is poorly suited to long-term transformation, systems thinking, or circular feedback processes. Projects operate on assumptions of predictability, closure, and linearity, which are rarely present in real-world development dynamics.
Elinor Ostrom demonstrated that sustainable governance of commons depends on nested, polycentric institutions capable of adapting rules over time [7]. But projects, by design, cannot establish such institutions—they are meant to end.
Similarly, Schot and Steinmueller highlight that “transformative change requires coordination across domains, experimental learning, and redefinition of goals over time—not compliance with static indicators” [8].
Even when project outputs are delivered, they often fail to translate into structural outcomes. Clinics built without sustained health systems, digital platforms launched without local capability, or laws passed without enforcement mechanisms illustrate how output success masks systemic failure.
Conclusion: A Genealogy of Constraints
The project emerged from a specific post-war rationality: one that prioritized order, managerial control, and measurable intervention in the service of geopolitical and economic goals. Over time, it became embedded in the routines, languages, and metrics of international cooperation.
Understanding this trajectory is essential—not as a rejection of all project-based work, but as a recognition of its limitations when faced with contemporary challenges that are systemic, non-linear, and place-specific. The persistence of the project model reflects not only institutional inertia, but deeper epistemic structures about what development is and how it should be governed.
If cooperation is to evolve, it must re-engage with the institutions, histories, and materialities of the territories it claims to serve. That requires not just new tools, but a rethinking of the logic that governs how we intervene, learn, and relate.
References
- De Long, J. B., & Eichengreen, B. (1991). The Marshall Plan: History’s Most Successful Structural Adjustment Program. In Dornbusch, R. et al. (eds), Postwar Economic Reconstruction and Lessons for the East Today. MIT Press.
- Rostow, W. W. (1960). The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto. Cambridge University Press.
- Escobar, A. (1995). Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World. Princeton University Press.
- Escobar, A. (1992). “Planning.” In Sachs, W. (ed.), The Development Dictionary: A Guide to Knowledge as Power. Zed Books.
- Mosse, D. (2005). Cultivating Development: An Ethnography of Aid Policy and Practice. Pluto Press.
- Booth, D. & Unsworth, S. (2014). Politically Smart, Locally Led Development. Overseas Development Institute (ODI).
- Ostrom, E. (1990). Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. Cambridge University Press.
- Schot, J. & Steinmueller, W. E. (2018). “Three Frames for Innovation Policy: R&D, Systems of Innovation and Transformative Change.” Research Policy, 47(9).
