Political Settlements and Development

Abstract

Few concepts have captured the imagination of the conflict and development communities in recent years as powerfully as the idea of a ‘political settlement’. 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. Yet despite the meteoric rise of the term and its tremendous promise, not all is well in the world of PSA. Rival definitions of the concept abound; there are disagreements about its scope and the way it should be used; a growing schism between conflict specialists and economists; basic concepts are ambiguous; and little progress has been made on measurement. This book consequently has three main aims. The first is to argue for a revised definition of a political settlement, capable of unifying its diverse strands. The second is to put the concept on a more solid theoretical and scientific footing, providing a method for measuring and categorizing political settlements, using both qualitative case studies and a large-n statistical analysis to illustrate its potential. And the third is to examine the implications of the findings for mainstream social science analysis and for policymakers.

How Political Contexts Influence Education Systems: Patterns, Constraints, Entry Points

“…However, as the table also signals, there also were some striking differences between the two countries. As Kelsall et. al's (2022) political settlement framework helps to clarify, the normative vision applies only to those rare competitive contexts where power concentration is high and thus where (paralleling dominant contexts) goals are coherent, unambiguous, and cascade systematically downwards through the public sector.…”

“…The typology used in the present paper distinguishes among contexts according to the 'form' that power takes: hierarchical versus horizontal; underpinned by personalized versus impersonal institutions. A typology laid out in Kelsall et. al (2022) is organized around two variables that focus on the 'content' of power: 'power concentration' (PC), the robustness of agreements among stakeholders to cooperate (or acquiesce); and 'social foundation' (SF), the breadth of the range of 'socially salient stakeholders.…”

International donors, domestic politics, and the expansion of social cash transfers in Malawi

“…In the last decade or so, DFID had adopted PSA to inform country strategies and frameworks. It also funded large research projects that apply PSA to development issues, notably research by the Effective States and Inclusive Development Research Centre at the University of Manchester (ESID) (Kelsall et al, 2022). The ESID research has extended PSA to understand how and why social protection is expanded in developing country contexts.…”

“…The PSA has its origins in several literatures and fields, including international law and peacekeeping (Kelsall et al, 2022). Over time, it has grown into a powerful idea that is used to explain various conflict and development issues including “why conflicts occur, and states collapse, the conditions for their successful rehabilitation, different developmental pathways, and how to better fit development policy to country contexts” (Kelsall et al, 2022). Its application to the field of development studies emerged out of a critique of new institutional economics by Mushtaq Khan in 1995 (Behuria et al, 2017).…”

Institutional resilience: how the formal legal system sustains informal cooperation

“…Echoing this point, Hartwell and Urban (2021) show in a case study of the transition experience in Estonia and Poland that political institutions need to be aligned to make the protection of the rule of law work. Relatedly, the theory of political settlements (Kelsall et al, 2022) deals with questions of how the ground rules governing economic and political exchange are the results of agreements between different groups. In developing a framework to study economic development, Ferguson (2020) draws attention to the myriad collective action problems that need to be solved to create growth.…”