Weber goes to Africa? The politics of PoEs and state-building in Africa

Session Submission Type: Roundtable

Session Description

When do states work for development? Given the general perception that most governments in developing countries are riddled with patronage and corruption, it remains a puzzle that certain parts of the state function remarkably effectively in developing countries. Known as ‘pockets of effectiveness’ (PoEs), such high-performing agencies play a critical role in enabling developing countries to achieve progress: PoEs have proved critical in establishing the conditions for economic growth, avoiding the resource curse, performing a range of regulatory functions and, in some cases, delivering services. Although contemporary examples are generally drawn from developing countries – including the developmental states of East Asia – historical evidence suggests that bureaucratic enclaves were critical to processes of state formation and development in industrialised countries too, including through developing meritocratic forms of civil services system and other Weberian features of stateness.
This Roundtable relocates the PoE phenomenon within deeper processes of state-building, and challenges the prevalent view of them as technical fixes that are somehow divorced from their wider context. We draw on a major new research initiative from the Effective States and Inclusive Development research centre based at the University of Manchester (UK) to present a systematic comparison of three different types of PoE from five different countries. This Roundtable will present a comparative overview of the findings and share country-level insights from a selection of Ghana, Kenya, Rwanda, Uganda and Zambia. Leading scholars will then critically discuss the results and place them into conversation with the wider field of scholarship on PoEs, state-building and development in the global south.
Our analysis frames PoEs in relation to the often contradictory ideas and incentives that generate processes of state building on the one hand and regime survival on the other, often within the context of contested processes of democratisation. We show that the performance of PoEs is most powerfully shaped by the type of ‘political settlement’ within which they are located. Although other factors matter – including organizational leadership and international support – but it is the ebb and flow of political settlement dynamics that matters most, particularly in terms of the dominant incentives and ideas that shape elite political behavior. The influence of the populist turn within the global south over recent years is particularly apparent within settlements where ruling elites are increasingly vulnerable both to pressure from political opponents seeking to replace them in power and from internal factions demanding goods in return for loyalty. Here we identify a willingness of some ruling elites to directly undermine even those parts of government that are required for basic state functioning. Such moves are often contested by the senior bureaucrats whose competence is critical to high-performing agencies, and who face the challenge of maintaining the embedded autonomy required to manoeuvre effectively within the wider politics of patronage. However, we also identify contexts where political leaders have proved themselves to be resistant to such pressures, and argue that it is here where we may be seeing the links between PoEs and deeper processes of state-building. Our findings help make the case for rethinking the politics of development and also reformulating the nature of the new governance agenda, particularly in terms of the continued move away from ‘good governance’ prescriptions in search of more problem-solving and contextualised responses.

Sub Unit

• Division 12: Comparative Politics of Developing Countries

Cosponsor

• Division 53: African Politics

Chair

• Julia Strauss SOAS University of London

Presenters

• Sam Hickey University of Manchester

• Matthew Tyce University of Manchester

• Peter M. Lewis Johns Hopkins University

• Martha C. Johnson Mills College

• Abdul-Gafaru Abdulai University of Ghana Business School

• Badru Bukenya Makerere University, Kampala

• Julia Strauss SOAS University of London