Mainstreaming the social dimension into the overseas development administration: a partial history

Written by the first Chief Social Development Adviser of the Overseas Development Administration (now called the Department for International Development), this article describes when, why and how an understanding of the social dimension became mainstreamed into the policy and practice of the British aid programme. Exploring the growth within the context of the changing political aid environment of the final quarter of the last century, the history of social development within the British aid programmes is described from its origins in the mid-1970s up to 1997. It asks how it was that a new specialist group of social analysts was established as part of the agencyʹs bureaucratic machinery and compares this with the World Bankʹs experience. The article concludes by briefly considering the challenges facing social development expertise following 1997.