Blog

14 September 2020

ESID experts Tim Kelsall, Sam Hickey and David Hulme provide a clear and essential guide to political settlements analysis. What is it and why should you be interested?

The graphics in this piece were developed by Tim Kelsall for ODI.

The study of political settlements is becoming more widespread in development research. When insights from political settlement analysis are applied in practice, development interventions can be more impactful and sustained because they fit the realities of the local political context. Political settlement analysis can help move from a “best practice” approach, to “best fit”.

A political settlement is a tacit agreement among powerful groups about the rules of the political and economic game, that keeps the peace by providing opportunities for those groups to secure a distribution of benefits (such as resources, rights, and status) they find acceptable.

Why should you be interested in political settlements? 

Countries that are at war do much worse developmentally than countries at peace; and all countries at peace have at least some kind of a political settlement.

But the precise nature of the political settlement can have profound consequences for what it’s possible to do in terms of development and who benefits as a result.

Understanding the political settlement should thus be a priority for anyone who wants to improve the lives of poor people.

In this blog, we explain political settlements analysis using a model developed at ESID, and present a few ‘how to’s to consider when it comes to applying this research.

What are the basics of political settlements analysis?

Building on the work of Mushtaq Khan, Brian Levy and others, ESID’s new model categorises countries’ political settlements according to two dimensions. First is the ‘social foundation’, which captures the demography of power. Second is the ‘power configuration’, which captures power’s geometry.

The social foundation

In all societies there are powerful groups, whether based on gender, class, ethnicity, religion, or some other identity. Some of these groups, acting alone or in concert with others, have the power to make, break, or shape the basic rules of the political and economic game. Governing elites can respond to these groups in two basic ways: co-optation, or repression. Groups who are co-opted receive benefits and are settlement ‘insiders’. Groups that are repressed or marginalised are ‘outsiders’, forced to acquiesce or not strong enough to overturn the settlement.

In ESID terminology, the larger the share of the powerful population that is co-opted, the broader the social foundation. The broader the social foundation, the more committed governing elites will be to deliver inclusive development benefits.

The power configuration

The configuration of power describes how power is arranged and organised within a state.

If the top political leader and his/her closest allies are strong relative to their own followers and opponents, we say power is concentrated.

If, by contrast, they are relatively weak, we say power is dispersed.

In concentrated configurations, the top leadership can dictate terms to other groups in the polity; decision-making can be quicker and implementation more predictable (which doesn’t necessarily mean that the outcomes will be better). In dispersed configurations, the top leadership cannot dictate terms: decision-making is more likely to be characterised by bargaining, horse-trading and struggle, with implementation less straightforward also.

Concentrated configurations typically find it easier to build state capacity for development (and are also enabled by state capacity). It is not impossible to build state capacity under dispersed configurations, but it is more difficult.

Political settlements are not the same as political regimes    

Dispersed power configurations are often democracies and concentrated configurations autocracies, but this is not always so, and it’s crucial to remember that. The question is not whether the regime is an autocracy or a democracy, military or civilian, but instead whether there are broad social groups in society the top leadership must be responsive to, whether it can make decisions that are binding on the rest of society and, if so, how.

What different political settlements are there?

Taken together these dimensions create a 2×2 matrix, with four different ‘types’ of political settlement: ‘broad-dispersed’, ‘broad-concentrated’, ‘narrow-dispersed’ and ‘narrow-concentrated’. The typology complements previous typologies that focused mainly on the question of state capability, supplementing them with insights into elite commitment.

The matrix below details four types of political settlement. It provides a shorthand and common language for researchers working in this space, and can be used by donors or reformers to inform where to focus their energy and resources in different country contexts.

Armed with insights into elite commitment and state capacity, development practitioners and policy reformers should be better placed to make good decisions about what to attempt developmentally, and which partners to work with.

In the past, development practitioners have tried to impose ‘one-size-fits-all’ or ‘best practice’ policies on developing countries, often with disappointing results. To offset that tendency, the typology proposed in Figure 1 provides a first step to understanding the local context and informing a development strategy that best suits it.

1 September 2020

Caesar Cheelo and Marja Hinfelaar reflect on Zambia’s dramatic news.

Zambia’s central bank, the Bank of Zambia (BOZ), is widely regarded as one of the most professional economic institutions in the country, successful in fulfilling its primary mandate of maintaining price and financial system stability.

Since 2018, we have been researching the effectiveness of BOZ in delivering on its mandate, exploring some of the main factors behind the sustained success of the central bank as effective relative to other apex economic institutions in Zambia. BOZ’s steadiness is especially striking when compared to other economic institutions, like the Ministry of Finance and Zambia Revenue Authority, whose functioning was notably undermined by the ruling coalition.

Our research shows that BOZ’s effective performance relies significantly on legal autonomy, which insulates the institutions from undue interference. Effective performance also relies on the role of the Bank’s governor. So what does it mean for Zambia’s political economy that governor Denny Kalyalya has just been fired?

In our timely new paper, out soon, we investigate the role of the governor in fostering and sustaining the success of BOZ. We note that occasional political pressures on the central bank arose quite often between the mid-1990s and 2019, emanating from the competitive clientelist democracy, especially around elections. During those episodes of external political pressure, BOZ was generally able to deliver on its mandate and was identified as a ‘pocket of effectiveness’. We view a pocket of effectiveness as a ‘… public organisation that is relatively effective in providing the public goods and services the organisation is officially mandated to provide, despite operating in an environment in which effective public [policy and] service delivery is not the norm.’ The prospects for an institution to emerge as a pocket of effectiveness are shaped by organisational factors, namely the scope and clarity of its mandate; the strength and political linkages of its leadership; and its internal culture and cohesiveness. Continue Reading →

17 August 2020

Eyob Balcha Gebremariam

Recent GDI alumnus and now Research Fellow at LSE, Eyob draws on his ESID research to ask how the EPRDF remained so dominant in Ethiopia from 2005 to 2018.

In the aftermath of the deadliest post-election protests following the May 2005 national elections in Ethiopia, the now-defunct ruling party – EPRDF – remained the most dominant political coalition. The capital, Addis Ababa, was the epicentre of EPRDF’s political dominance. There were three interrelated strategies that contributed to this maintenance of control and dominance:

1. The use of state-led developmentalism as a legitimising discourse,
2. Expansion of the local tiers of governance to boost the government’s pervasive presence,
3. Proactive mobilisation of different social groups – the urban poor, young people, women.

The combined effect of these strategies enabled EPRDF to control both the horizontal and vertical distributions of power, primarily in the capital city and at the national level.  Horizontally, the party kept rival political coalitions at bay using the above strategies in tandem with politico-legal frameworks. Whereas, vertically, EPRDF expanded its base (at least numerically) and incorporated different segments of society into its structures.

1. State-led developmentalism

EPRDF pursued its objective of achieving dominance hand-in-hand with the commitment to improve citizens’ socioeconomic wellbeing. In doing so, the party sought to derive legitimacy from its developmental provisions. Manifestations of the developmentalist thrust, particularly in Addis Ababa, included expansive infrastructure development programmes – housing, light train, roads, education and health facilities, provision of subsidies for essential food items, such as bread, cooking oil and sugar, and job creation programmes for young people. A recent article focusing on inner-city slum redevelopment argued that EPRDF’s developmentalist intervention had a hegemonic feature of not only provisioning services, but also bringing about accumulation and control.

2. Politico-legal manoeuvring

EPRDF pursued its developmentalist aspiration hand-in-hand with the introduction of new restrictive laws and the expansion of the formal structures of the city administration. Politically inspired laws passed in 2008 and 2009 severely restricted civil society organisations, the media, opposition parties and other groups challenging EPRDF’s rule. The laws gave EPRDF’s repression a legal backing.

Expanding the lowest tiers of governance in the city administration occurred just before the 2008 local elections and by-election in Addis Ababa. The seats of the district council increased significantly from 15 to 300. After a massive recruitment of new members, EPRDF used its new members to beef up local level structures of control and governance. The 2008 success in Addis Ababa also gave way to the May 2010 overwhelming result at the national election level, which gave the party control over every single seat in the national parliament except one.

Newly introduced informal channels of governance and mobilisation also played an indispensable role in extending the control and dominance of EPRDF beyond the formal structures of governance. These channels operated at the sub-district level, which included zonal development committees, ‘one-to-five’ groups and development committees in every neighbourhood of the city. These channels of mobilisation primarily targeted young people and women with lower socioeconomic status.

3. Mobilisation of the urban poor and young people

EPRDF also established contextually negotiated relations with different social groups in the city. The party’s active mobilisation of the urban poor to establish Urban Consumers’ Cooperatives (UCCs) in 2008 is a good example. These UCCs helped the party to distribute heavily subsidised ‘basic goods’ to residents of Addis Ababa in a centralised manner. The UCCs continued to be an integral part of EPRDF’s intertwined developmental objectives and political purposes. For example, unlike many other countries, Ethiopia never experiences ‘food riots’, despite the highest recorded national food price inflation of 61.1 percent in mid-2008. In addition to legal and policy-focused measures by the government, the UCCs played a vital role of distributing subsidised food.

The relationship between EPRDF and the UCCs fluctuated between co-operation and co-optation. EPRDF never hesitated to use the cooperatives as additional actors of political control and mobilisation, especially during election times. But the UCCs have also been quite effective, for example, in securing vital resources such as publicly owned recreation centres into their hands.

Another vital example is the mobilisation of young people through youth employment programmes. EPRDF’s youth employment programmes remained quite political and aligned with its developmental aspirations. The party co-opted young people seeking employment opportunities by forcing them, both implicitly and explicitly, to trade off their citizenship rights. Several young people involved in the government youth-focused employment programme confirmed that they were asked to show their membership of the EPRDF youth league as a requirement to access technical and financial support. Hence, claiming economic rights required them to give away their political rights.

PM Abiy’s administration – April 2018 to the present

EPRDF presided over a strong and relatively capable government, particularly between 2005 and 2015. On the contrary, PM Abiy’s government has been besieged by both its liberal ideology and structural challenges of the Ethiopian state to muster a strong government. One of the most discernible trends during PM Abiy’s administration since April 2018 has been an onslaught on state capacity under the pretext of dual liberalisation – economic and political. The current administration has neither a horizontal (in relation to rival political groups) nor a vertical (in relation to different social groups) dominance in the context of the present power dynamics. Now the World Bank and the IMF have the upper hand in shaping socio-economic policies. As a result, all the elements of socio-economic and political relations derived from state-led developmentalism will cease to exist and be replaced by market-based relations. Hence, the nature of political dominance and control will also change fundamentally.

Read Eyob’s research here.

27 July 2020

In the latest of our series profiling ESID Research Associates, we talk to Kate Pruce on life in lockdown and why she’s excited about using a social justice lens for her research on social protection.

What are your current circumstances during the coronavirus pandemic? Where are you living and what’s it like working from home?

I live in Stockport and am used to cycling for almost an hour each way to get to the university and back, so working from home is saving me time, but also significantly reducing my daily exercise! My PhD training has definitely helped with discipline for working from home. I’m trying to maintain the good habits I developed for productivity when I was writing up, although it can sometimes be difficult to maintain concentration and focus during these uncertain times.

Please can you tell us about your current role with ESID?

I am currently a postdoc Research Associate, which involves a range of tasks, including editorial assistance, conducting literature reviews and writing policy briefs. At the moment, I am working mainly on phase 2 of ESID’s comparative project on the political economy of social protection in Africa, supporting project lead, Tom Lavers, to produce both academic and policy outputs from this project. Previously I also worked for ESID as a project and communications officer, which gave me experience of communicating ESID’s research findings to a variety of audiences and assisting with uptake and impact activities. During my PhD I led the research for the Zambia case study for phase 1 of ESID’s social protection project, which focused on the adoption of social protection policies.

Can you tell us about your own research interests – what areas do you focus on and in which regions?

My research focuses on the political economy of social protection in low- and middle-income countries. I have examined the adoption of social protection policies in a context where policy ideas promoted by development agencies such as DFID and the World Bank interact with domestic politics. I have also begun to investigate the politics of implementation, with a focus on ideas and understandings of deservingness, and I am keen to do more research in this area. So far my fieldwork has centred on Zambia, which was my PhD case study. However, my engagement with ESID’s comparative project is giving me the opportunity to learn about the experiences of social protection across a range of country contexts in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.

How would you describe your research if you were talking to a taxi driver?

I have described my research to taxi drivers many times in Zambia, and have found them to be among the most informed and politically engaged people I interacted with during my fieldwork. Nonetheless, many had not heard of the social cash transfer programme I was studying, which shows that while social protection is widely discussed within the donor community and some sections of government, there is often limited awareness of this development phenomenon in the wider population. In Zambia, I would talk about the poverty reduction aims, as this is a key area of concern for many, and the ways in which social protection is political because it involves decisions about who contributes to and benefits from particular schemes. In the UK, I would also make a comparison with the UK’s welfare system and explain that social protection aims to ensure basic social security provisions for citizens.

Which of your research findings are you most excited about?

The ways in which the design of Zambia’s cash transfer programme was altered in response to complaints from communities was unexpected in a context where demand for services is low and the poorest citizens have limited political voice, particularly in rural areas. My research found that the clash of ideas leading to these complaints was based on contested notions of social justice, centred on understandings of deservingness. According to respondents in the communities selected for my study, deservingness is determined by incapacitation. This aligns with Ronald Dworkin’s (2002) distinction between choice and circumstance, which emphasises individual responsibility within theories of justice. I am excited about the potential of using a social justice lens to analyse the ideas underpinning social protection approaches and how they are received, and am planning to do more research on this in the future.

Which papers or publications are you most proud of? Why?

My chapter on the politics of promoting social cash transfers in Zambia, published in an Oxford University Press edited volume in November 2019. The book is entitled The Politics of Social Protection in Eastern and Southern Africa and is open access. This chapter was part of a collaborative project, involving ESID, UNU-WIDER and the University of Cape Town. I was able to get input on early versions of the chapter at various conferences and workshops in the UK, South Africa and Mexico, as well as during the peer review process. Also, it was published within days of submitting the final version of my thesis with completed corrections, so it was a proud moment in many ways!

Who do you most admire in international development?

This is a difficult question, as there are so many academics I have worked with and whose work I have read that I admire immensely. I’m going to say Professor Merilee Grindle from the Harvard Kennedy School – both for her extensive contributions to our understanding of politics and policy reform, which have been invaluable for my research, and for her approach to the work of others. I have been lucky enough to interact with her at several workshops and conferences, and have been impressed by the way she always draws attention to the contributions and strengths of an argument, as well as providing illuminating and incisive critiques to challenge and improve the work.

What is one way you would like to see international development respond to the current coronavirus pandemic?

Initially, I would like to see existing and new research being used to understand the political, economic and social implications of the pandemic, and to identify potential solutions to challenges faced in specific country contexts. Global Development Institute researchers have already begun doing this, with some examples on the GDI blog. In the longer term, the global nature of this pandemic emphasises the new geographies of development, as all countries are facing health crises, effects of climate change and growing inequalities. I hope we take this as an opportunity to build on the shift that has already begun from international development to global development (for example Horner and Hulme, 2018), which questions the North-South binary framing, while recognising that citizens in the Global South remain hardest hit by many of these global challenges.

Find out more about Research Associate Chris Lyon and how he thinks international development should respond to the pandemic.

15 July 2020

(Chris was speaking in early April 2020)

What are your current circumstances during the coronavirus pandemic? Where are you living and what’s it like working from home?

I think I’m in a pretty fortunate situation compared to many. My partner and I ordinarily live in Rotterdam, but we came back to Manchester to visit family, and then the lockdown started. We are both academics and can be relatively flexible in our working arrangements, so we’re trying to divvy up looking after our baby boy in a fair way around work. I sort of wish I hadn’t been wearing the same jumper for three weeks, but other than that I can’t complain too much.

Please can you tell us about your current role with ESID?

My main intellectual work has been carrying out a critical review of ESID’s overall research findings. Besides this, I edit the working paper series, write briefing papers summarizing various research findings, and help with editorial work on books and papers, and various other ‘behind the scenes’ things.

Can you tell us about your own research interests – what areas do you focus on and in which regions?

I’m interested in the overlap between normative theory – especially political philosophy – and development. More substantively I’m interested in political aspects of development like democratisation, decentralisation, and the politics of social inequalities. I have an interest in Brazil stemming from my PhD fieldwork, and increasingly an interest in Uganda, through ESID work and through my teaching on GDI’s masters research trip module.

How would you describe your research if you were talking to a taxi driver?

You know how people like the minister for international development or from NGOs are always saying ‘we should’ do this or that, or such-and-such is ‘problematic’? I want to help us be clearer on what exactly that means, on what trade-offs might be involved, and how to decide over these. For example, in Rwanda there is arguably currently a trade-in of political freedoms in exchange for stability and economic growth. Is the trade worth it? What should be the attitude of countries, like the UK, who work with the Rwandan government?

Which of your research findings are you most excited about?

Something that I think comes out of my review of ESID work is that the current vogue in development for ‘working with the grain’-type approaches bumps up against problems that are familiar from non-ideal and ‘realist’ political theory (e.g. the balance between idealism and pragmatism, the risk of legitimising the unjustifiable, the question of what you’re ultimately aiming at), and there is an interesting conversation to be had there.

Which papers or publications are you most proud of? Why?

I was tasked with critically reviewing ESID’s overall research output from the perspective of the project’s initial commitment to ‘identifying routes to social justice’ in development. It turns out that’s quite a big job. I will be proud when I finally get those two papers out!

Who do you most admire in international development?

People who drive forward movements that secure longstanding progressive political change in their societies, amidst major challenges of underdevelopment, and often using tactics that probably fall short of what we might think of as ‘ideal’ best practice; they don’t tend to ‘keep their noses clean’. In a research sense, I understand how they do it; in a personal sense, I don’t.

What is one way you would like to see international development respond to the current coronavirus pandemic?

Thinking specifically in an ESID sense, I think it presents an interesting case for the political settlements theory that has been the basis of much ESID research. There might be an initial temptation to see the comparatively effective responses of states like China and Singapore as further evidence of our findings regarding the ability of states with ‘dominant’-type political settlements, and limited competitiveness, to achieve impressive feats rapidly and at scale. However, the state response in far more competitive political environments, such as Taiwan and South Korea, has also been among the most effective. Although admittedly one could argue that both of those developed much of their current state capacity during eras of dominant regimes.

Moreover, as far as I can make out on current information it seems that a big part of the causal story of the outbreak needs to be the early attempts of authorities in China to suppress people sounding the alarm, such as the late Dr Li Wenliang. Arguably, in a more open and competitive political environment, without limits on social media communications and with more intense scrutiny from news media and a political opposition, the truth about the severity of the situation would have become publicly known much sooner, resulting in political pressure and the opportunity for earlier containment, and meaning that countries might not have needed to do so much responding in the first place. Speculative, I know – and there are many other factors, such as intrinsically biological or epidemiological ones – but, at any rate, I don’t think the political settlements analysis, and any lessons we might take from it, are straightforward in this case.

More generally, we know from political history that disruptive moments like this provide rare windows of opportunity for changes to structures and institutions and paradigms – changes of a type that might ordinarily be unfeasibly radical. To be honest, I’ve mainly been thinking about this at the level of the domestic politics of countries, rather than international development. It doesn’t seem outlandish to think that there is at least a chance for various aspects of this crisis to lead to newly egalitarian currents, perhaps somewhat reminiscent of the post-war consensus in the UK, given that it has confronted people with various uncomfortable truths: immigrant fruit-pickers suddenly are revealed as crucial members of the workforce; companies whose products we all consume display callous disregard for their employees (and presume to claim aid from a state to which they avoid paying taxes as far as possible); the latent danger of a de-funded health service becomes undeniable; and the dishonesty of politicians’ attempts to mislead the public into understanding national economies as if they are analogous to piggy banks – ‘there is simply no cash left in the pot to support workers/fund health/etc.’ – is revealed.

At the international development level, I think the response will depend on the still-unclear factor of how the pandemic will affect developing countries. The prospect of outbreaks in the large urban informal settlements across the global South is a fearful one – as our Manchester colleague, Diana Mitlin, has written about. For instance, the first cases have recently appeared in Mumbai’s Dharavi slum, while residents of Rio’s favelas have organised to lobby the state government for emergency measures. Depending on how such situations unfold, the focus may (I’m afraid) for a time tilt towards humanitarian concerns rather than developmental ones.

One longer-term issue: I’m curious to see whether the sheer venality of pharmaceutical companies scrambling to sew up intellectual property rights on relevant drugs during a pandemic might provoke such outcry that we see a change in norms at the global level. Could this subsequently trigger a move against TRIPS and towards different regulation on IP and on pricing? That would have a huge knock-on effect on access to drugs and treatments for citizens in developing countries. I’m not enormously optimistic, but if it’s going to happen at any time, it would be in the wake of a major upheaval such as this one.