This week’s session focused on the correlation between inclusive political settlements and stable and resilient society. ‘Political settlement’ are defined by Mushtaq Khan as a situation with a combination of power and institutions that is mutually compatible and also sustainable in terms of economic and political viability. ‘Settlement’ is “often loosely termed as the social order based on political compromises between powerful groups in society, which sets the context for institutional and other policies”. The session, facilitated by Dr Alina Rocha Menochal assessed the complexities in creating inclusive societies in which state-society relations and cooperation is based on legitimacy rather than coercion.
The aspect of the session that particularly struck me was consideration of international intervention and the role of multilateral organisations and donors in supporting states moving from so-called fragility to stability, since state fragility considerations have made the issue of political settlement central to donor concern. As in previous posts when I highlighted the dangers associated with sticking to particular normative understandings when engaging in international intervention in state and peace-building, I noticed similar issues re-emerge here in relation to creating political settlements.
At the heart of Mushtaq Khan’s writing is the idea that institutions will look and act completely different in different contexts, due to the different underlying political settlements in place. Understanding these contexts is key to discerning how best to intervene in the country concerned. However, the lecture and associated reading highlighted the current dearth of research-generated knowledge on the key issue of how initially narrow, horizontally inclusive settlements, expand to become vertically inclusive settlements with a more widely shared power base. This lack acknowledged, in part, in the literature as being due to the dynamism of political settlements.
Looking at the contrasting cases of Guatemala and Costa Rica, which are given, in Rocha Menochal’s writing as examples of the way in which political settlements change over time ‘as elites and different groups in state and society continue to re-define the nature of their relationship through a combination of horizontal and vertical interactions’, we see two countries whose political contexts looked initially similar (including authoritarian rule), but who ended up with different outcomes. Costa Rica successfully transitioned to democratic rule, while Guatemala did not, a process interrupted by the counter-reform movements in the country, but which Costa Rica’s transition process could withstand. This was due to the emergence of a political party in Costa Rica, that transformed the nature of the political settlement underpinning the state and the different histories of elite power ( the interests of landed elites and the military were more closely aligned in Guatemala). Hence the need to operate responding to the SPECIFIC context with which you are dealing.
As a consequence, I would be worried about an approach which focused too heavily on identifying trends (though these can be useful) between countries to explain transitions from narrow to widely-inclusive political settlements for fear of the ‘one-size fits all’ approach that this could encourage. It seems development practitioners still grapple significantly with this despite mainstream acknowledgment of the need to think and work politically (eg the most recent WDR). For example, the lecture and associated reading highlighted, for example, that interventions relating to processual inclusion still favour a focus on reforming formal institutions, despite evidence that informal institutions often take prevalence in terms of state function and the actual distribution of power in a number of developing countries.
Given-à la Mushtaq- the highly contextualised nature of this distribution, it makes sense to me that there should be more focus on frameworks, for example, which identify how to read political contexts and power dynamics, to enable politically smart outcomes in these situations.
I feel that until there is an acceptance of the uncertainty required in practice to work adeptly with specific contexts, current prevalent approaches to intervention and creating political settlements may not change. However the distance between policy and how this has to work in practice is something that I realise is a chronic and persistent tension, and probably will be for some time.
Sources
Community of Practice (2015), The case for thinking and working politically: The implications of ‘doing development differently – Thinking and Working Politically
Khan, M. (2010) Political settlements and the governance of growth-enhancing institutions
Rocha Menocal, A. (2015) Political Settlements and the Politics of Inclusion, State of the Art Series, Development Leadership Programme, University of Birmingham
World Bank Group (2017) Governance and the Law, World Development Report, Washington DC
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