The Conundrum of Policy Stability: The Case of Afghanistan’s Centralized Planning and Budgeting Policies

This paper explores why Afghanistan’s centralized planning and budgeting policies, despite consistent failure to improve local participation and allocative efficiency, remained stable. Based on policy feedback theory, there are two explanations. First, policy actors, given their interests, often tend to keep the status quo unchanged; and second, policymaking processes play a facilitative role for policy actors. This paper explains how centralized policymaking processes enable policy actors to bypass specific constraints of institutional environment such as agenda setting, principal-agent dynamics, information symmetry, and credible commitment to keep certain policies unchanged. With the recent collapse of Afghan state, the Taliban would most likely continue the centralized planning and budgeting policies given their past governance approach and their recent performance.