If you hang around conversations on ‘thinking and working politically’, as I do, you’ll hear a lot of references to ‘Political Settlements’ as it’s grown up, more academic, but sometimes incomprehensible cousin. As this new book’s blurb declares ‘At its most ambitious, ‘political settlements analysis’ (PSA) promises to explain why conflicts occur and states collapse, the conditions for their successful rehabilitation, different developmental pathways from peace, and how to better fit development policy to country context.’
But ‘not all is well in the world of PSA’, with lots of disagreements over definitions and implications. This new book, by Tim Kelsall, Nicolai Schulz, William D. Ferguson, Matthias vom Hau, Sam Hickey, and Brian Levy (is there an authorial equivalent of a manel? But at least it’s Open Access – yay!), aims to establish PSA as a permanent part of the development landscape by unifying different strands of thinking, putting the concept on a sounder theoretical footing and examining the implications for policymakers.
First the definition: a PS is ‘an ongoing agreement among a society’s most powerful groups over a set of political and economic institutions expected to generate for them a minimally acceptable level of benefits, which thereby ends or prevents generalized civil war and/or political and economic disorder.’
It proposes a 2×2 typology of political settlements. One axis measures whether elites include/exclude a broad range of players, which they call ‘social foundations’. If they’re inclusive, expect the PSA to spread the benefits around. If exclusive, expect kleptocracies.
The other axis is more about capacity – the political elite’s ability to get stuff done, which they unhelpfully call the ‘configuration of power’ (the book has the odd nice turn of phrase, but overall, is pretty heavy going). If that configuration is dispersed, there are too many cooks and no-one knows what is happening; if concentrated, then policies can be agreed and implemented.
This yields the following 2×2:
Broad social foundations – dispersed configuration: Good intentions, weak ability to implement. Short termism and populism/patronage likely to flourish, at the expense of long term economic development.
Narrow social foundations – dispersed configuration: Unwilling and unable to do much except steal/repress, often leading to instability as fractions of the elite squabble over the spoils.
Broad social foundations – concentrated configuration: Most likely to deliver inclusive development, with pressure both to deliver social benefits to a broad swathe of society, and the capacity to agree and implement long term development policies.
Narrow social foundations – concentrated configuration: With fewer pressures to spread the benefits in the short term, these regimes are better placed to force populations to forego immediate benefits, while pursuing long term economic development a la Asian Tigers.
The authors perform a big cross-country regression that broadly backs up their theoretical arguments: regimes with a broad social base deliver more social development; those with a tight concentration of power are better at economic development.
Is all this particularly useful? The test comes in the final 4 page ‘advice for policy makers’ section.
First, focus on the broad-concentrated settlements: ‘it is only in this type of settlement that finance or technical advice is likely to work well’.
In narrow-concentrated settlements ‘development partners will need to be more imaginative’. That means shifting political incentives to try and broaden the social foundations, e.g. by trying to convince the elites that educating the workforce might make them richer, or substituting for failed state provision eg via aid-funded parallel health and education services (not exactly a long term strategy). Where resources are a big source of revenue, global initiatives to encourage transparency/discourage theft, can help. Also find champions, work with civil society etc to broaden the social base.
In broad-dispersed settlements, ‘top down, system-wide reform efforts are unlikely to work’, but identifying and working with pockets of effectiveness and multi-stakeholder coalitions might help.
Narrow-dispersed settlements are the toughest nut to crack. What are donors supposed to do when the country (or at least the capital) is in the hands of a small group clinging on to power, trousering what they can, and unable to implement very much, even should they want to? Such places often ‘teeter permanently on the brink of conflict’. Here the book defaults to global governance, tackling global ‘bads’ like finance, taxation, arms, drugs etc to reduce the likelihoods of division and meltdown.
The problem is, as ever, that aid is increasingly targeted at the hardest-to-fix places – narrow-dispersed in this formulation (often fragile and conflict-affected states), because the broad-concentrated settlements mostly no longer need aid. Tricky.
Overall, some useful stuff in here. But (and I probably missed a lot of nuance, partly because the writing is so dense) I was left with a bit of a ‘meh’ feeling that this was essentially an unnecessarily complicated and inaccessible version of a 2×2 that Oxfam uses – are states/elites able and/or willing to do the right thing?
Thank you, Duncan, for reviewing our book on your blog. Aimed mainly at an academic audience, we agree that it is quite demanding of the reader. We hope that some policy makers and practitioners will nevertheless find it useful, and that even if the 2×2 has similarities to a framework already in use, they might gain comfort from the idea that it is now underpinned by a more rigorous body of knowledge than hitherto. We hope, also, that some readers will be interested in knowing more about the underlying drivers of elite commitment and state capability, not least because we believe this provides greater insight into how to promote inclusive development. Here, it is worth noting that our advice for policymakers in narrow-dispersed settlements is not limited to taking action at the global level. Some of the measures we propose for other types of settlement may also work, though given the challenges of the narrow-dispersed category, the chances of success are probably slimmer.
Author
Thanks Tim, and apologies for over-simplifying on the narrow-dispersed recommendations
Thank you, Duncan, for this review of a book that you warn us has dense prose and is unnecessarily complicated (I downloaded the file, but am not sure I will plough through it). I was introduced to the term “political settlements” by James Putzel in one of his visits to the Philippines. I initially thought it was narrowly about peaceful settlements of srmed conflicts. Your succinct summary of the 2×2 typology makes it accessible to fellow development workers in the field. Maraming salamat!
Author
Lovely to hear from you Ed, hope you’re well!
Many thanks for this review.
Hi Duncan, and thanks for reviewing the book, which I thought offered a pretty clear summary. Can you share the Oxfam 2×2 on capacity and commitment? My sense is that the one we use in this book helps to identify the underlying drivers of capacity and commitment – i.e. the conditions in which governing coalitions become committed and capable of delivering particular forms of development – and so is explanatory rather than descriptive…but perhaps the Oxfam one does this too? On other points, I would respectfully disagree that the ONLY test of academic work in development studies is the quality of the policy implications it generates…surely the first test is whether it provides a more coherent and insightful account of how the world works than earlier versions? Which then offers the basis for changing the world. Good to hear from you and others on whether we met this initial test, including experts on the countries we discuss here. On a lighter issue I would also defend the writing style! Didn’t you even enjoy (Tim’s) analogy with The Godfather?!? All the best, Sam
Hi Duncan, thank you for this review. Can you kindly share a link to the “a 2×2 that Oxfam uses – are states/elites able and/or willing to do the right thing?”
For additional context, it’s probably worth mentioning that this book came out of the Effective States and Inclusive Development (ESID) research centre – and its 10 years of toil!
The project published some much more accessible findings and implication around political settlements, and their application to governance, economics and social issues – all here: https://www.effective-states.org/findings-summary/
Thanks for the review. As a long time practitioner, I would have expected more in the book and perhaps the view on the rule of law, not so much the traditional “justice” sector but the prevailing rules and the hopefully predictable means and institutions for their enforcement in settlements. The theory on settlements always seems very thin on rule of law.
@Joseph, Thanks for your comment about ROL. It’s true that the book does not say much about this. However, I think we would argue that ROL is unlikely to become generalized until there is a broad distribution of powerful groups in the economy and society that have an interest in it. In other words, a broad social foundation would be a necessary but not sufficient condition for ROL. In narrow settlements, ROL programmes might be able to lay the basis for rule of law by winning hearts and minds, building capacity etc, but they are unlikely to see major progress until the settlement changes. In some countries, broad settlements that had ROL are now narrowing. In these contexts, extra efforts need to be made to defend ROL, which is likely to be under threat.
Thanks. I appreciate your comment. My view is more what is termed a “thick” rule of law which considers how, i.e., by what rules and consistent means, a group or groups do or do not mobilize, allocate, manage resources for public goods, including for physical security. For each of these actions, any settlement, however broad or narrow does or does not undertake the actions with at least a minimum of predictable rules. Even if the rules are self serving only to one group. Any group or groups always have an interest in some firm of rule of law to serve their interests. It may not deliver public services but the actions take on public resources do follow a pattern in every settlement. So my point is that rule of law so conceived is central not marginal or distant to your work which provides a great deal in explaining, not describing.
In fact, it is said that things are not difficult, but they are usually made difficult by what you call ‘elites’, they are usually people appointed by the old and international powers who have other interests besides the development of the country where they operate .
The same rulers use only the ‘coalitions’ close to power, totally excluding the elderly, etc. so not affect shape, influence, and locus of power.
How can we make this ‘elite’ manage to adopt institutions that are in line with ‘international best-practice’, and to deliver improvements?
Really appreciate the work that has gone into this book and Tim Kelsall’s efforts to help me and others use this more practically. Getting PSAs embedded in theory is important and not to be underestimated, given present biases etc. But, that said, using the concept practically has led me to conclude that broad PSA configurations at the national level are not always that helpful to specific problems at the local level. For it to be helpful, you need to replicate the concept down through different levels of governance, I think and that can become time consuming and less practically helpful. But, the conceptual discussion is bold and important so I am theoretically a fan!
Hi Katherine, Tim and Sam are currently working on just that…
As part of the African Cities Research Consortium, we’re looking at how national political settlements relate to city politics. There’s a blog from Tim here outlining the approach https://www.african-cities.org/african-cities-and-political-settlements/ … and the initial city studies should be published over the next couple of months. Do sign up to the newsletter if you want to be notified when they see the light of day! https://manchester.us3.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=bcd8bd59d8a6df29c40af74ed&id=ff85f02090
Thank you, Duncan for this review. Speaking as the 6th co-author [:) and as a long-time participant in ESID, I found most valuable the book’s determined effort to clarify the theoretical foundations of political settlements analysis, and to demonstrate statistically its empirical salience. With one additional step – elaborating further on the links between power and institutions – the value added for practitioners comes more clearly into focus. The book’s definition of a PS as an “….an ongoing agreement among a society’s most powerful groups over a set of political and economic institutions….” provides the conceptual foundation for such an integrated approach. In two recent pieces, I elaborate on this aspect of the work:
The first is a piece written for the RISE education systems research programme that synthesizes a dozen new RISE-commissioned country-level case studies of the politics of education sector policymaking to illustrate how a power-institutions framework helps identify innovative context-aligned entry points for improving learning outcomes. Here’s a link to a short sumary of the piece:
https://workingwiththegrain.com/2023/01/30/how-context-and-reform-align-or-misalign-new-evidence-from-the-education-sector/
The second is a short conceptual piece that spells out (beyond what is laid out in the PS book) how power-centric and institutions-centric approaches can be integrated in a way that is both conceptually robust and (as elaborated in the education example) value adding for practitioners.
https://workingwiththegrain.com/2023/01/30/characterizing-context-how-power-and-institutions-interact/
Thanks to the work leading up to the new book, both pieces are built on a stronger conceptual foundation than some of my earlier work. I am hopeful that they can serve as something of a remedy to Duncan’s ‘meh’ feeling. What say you, Duncan?
Hi Duncan – Just wondering whether you’d taken a look at these applied pieces and, in light of them, had any further reflections re the value added of political settlements analysis? Best. Brian
Author
Drowning, Brian, but will add it to the list – thanks for the prod!
Hi Duncan, and thanks for reviewing the book. Can you share the Oxfam 2×2 on capacity and commitment? My sense is that the one we use in this book helps to identify the underlying drivers of capacity and commitment – i.e. the conditions in which governing coalitions become committed and capable of delivering particular forms of development – and so is explanatory rather than descriptive…but perhaps the Oxfam one is too? On other points, I would respectfully disagree that the ONLY test of academic work in development studies is the quality of the policy implications it generates…surely the first test is whether it provides a more coherent and insightful account of how the world works than earlier versions? Which then offers the basis for changing the world. Good to hear from you and others on whether we met this initial test, including experts on the countries we discuss here. On a lighter issue I would also defend the writing style which I don’t think is particularly dense or heavy – didn’t you even enjoy (Tim’s) analogy with The Godfather?!? All the best, Sam
Author
Thanks Sam and everyone else, great series of comments on here and on twitter. Tied up in classes today, but will read, reflect and maybe respond early next week
Political settlements analysis is an important and conceptually strong strand of political economy analysis more broadly, so it’s interesting to hear and read about the latest evolution of thinking on political settlements and to read the back and forth in the comments.
For me, typologies of contexts are useful to the extent that they support the emergent learning in particular contexts that is needed to address specific challenges with complex and contextual causes. And, to go a step further, if they are found useful by people in the particular contexts who are trying to address specific challenges.
I guess this is a more general version of Kathy Bain’s question about whether national PSAs are useful for addressing specific problems at more local levels.
So then the question is what sorts of typologies of context can best support efforts to understand and address the dynamics that hold specific challenges in place in particular contexts?
Thanks for the RISE link too Brian. Perhaps that will convince me of the practical value of typologies of context, perhaps in support of in-context emergent and collaborative learning.
Thanks, Alan – I look forward to learning whether or not the RISE-sponsored applications to the education sector indeed had some additional ‘convincing power’. Brian.
My fuller – but never final – reflections here:
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/contexts-typologies-learning-grains-truth-better-public-alan-hudson/