Post on 21-Feb-2023
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The return of politics in development studies (II): capturing the political?
Sam Hickey, Institute for Development Policy and Management, School of Environment
and Development, University of Manchester.
Email: sam.hickey@manchester.ac.uk
Introduction
“…it has become commonplace to accept that ‘politics matters’ for the successful pursuit
of pro-poor policies. But what kind of political analysis is needed to fill out the gaps in
understanding?” (Whitehead and Gray-Molina 2003: 33).
If politics has returned as a central concern within development studies (Leftwich 2005), it
seems that we still lack the analytical base required to shed light on the links between politics
and development. This matters greatly. As the previous paper in this series argued, politics
closely shapes processes of both development and underdevelopment, and the challenge of
ensuring greater equity and social justice is essentially a political one. In order for these
linkages to become well understood the resurgent ‘politics and development’ movement
must seek to render itself legible to the development mainstream in conceptual and analytical
terms if it is to secure its credibility and inclusion over the long-run. For example, the
struggle to make social development an influential dimension within mainstream
development discussions and institutions is closely associated with the analytical weakness of
its various approaches and lack of evidence-based behind them (Green 2001). Without
intellectually rigorous and operationally useful forms of political analysis, the wider project of
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establishing politics as a central concern within development studies remains fragile, as
illustrated by debates over social capital, the concept charged with allowing social
development a place at the high-table of development research at the World Bank
(Bebbington et al 2006).
A growing number of analytical approaches designed to uncover the links between politics
and development have emerged in recent years and the remainder of this series both
introduces and evaluates them in the context of previous approaches and the current
intellectual context within and around development studies. To recap, the previous paper in
this series identified three debilitating tendencies that characterized earlier efforts to capture
politics within development studies, namely a narrow and often technocratic interpretation
of politics, and a failure to engage critically with the notion and promotion of development.
It also suggested a number of reasons as to why it might be difficult to think politically about
development at this historical moment, given the domination of the new mainstream
development agenda of ‘inclusive liberalism’ and the Poverty Reduction agenda in particular
(Craig and Porter 2006). Here, thinking politically about development means to conceive of
the linkages between politics and development and to understand development as an
essentially political project.
This paper examines a number of ‘bespoke’ approaches to politics and development analysis,
approaches that have been specifically developed to illuminate the concerns of development
studies with how politics works. These derive from a variety of sources, both intellectually
and institutionally, and range roughly from agency-centred approaches concerned with
empowerment (political capital, political capabilities) towards the interface of these with
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more structural and institutional dimensions of policy and politics (the polity approach,
political space). These approaches are not comprehensive or necessarily representative of the
current turn to politics, and their relative newness means that any judgement on them is
necessarily premature, and relates as much to their potential to bring politics back in to
development studies, as their actual success to date. The next paper deals with a rather
different type of analytical approach to understanding politics and development, one that
tends to derive more directly from political theory, with attendant implications not only for
the future of political analysis within development studies but also for the (multi-)disciplinary
character of development studies more broadly (Hulme and Toye 2006).
Given the problems encountered during earlier attempts to understand politics within
development, it is imperative to ask how these new approaches can avoid the tendency to
offer technocratic views of how politics and development interact. Here we draw here on
Chantal Mouffe’s (1993) distinction between ‘politics’ and ‘the political’, wherein politics
refers to ‘the ensemble of practices, discourses and institutions that seek to establish a sense
of social order and organization’, while the political constitutes ‘the antagonistic dimension
that is inherent in human societies and which is located within the struggles of diverse social
groups for power and resources’ (Mouffe, 1995, cited in Corbridge et al 2005: 257).
Although heuristic, this distinction is particularly appropriate here given the extent to which
the boundaries of politics in many developing countries remain closely contested, which
these conflicts often uncontained within establish institutional parameters of the political
system. More broadly, and historically, political conflict and struggle has always been central
to development. In relation to ‘empowerment’, the historical move from clientelism to
citizenship that has been heralded as a key shift in pro-poor politics (e.g. DFID 2004), has
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often been achieved only through long-term struggles for the rights of citizenship (e.g. Tilly
1995). Similarly, the historical processes of state formation that the good governance agenda
seeks to intervene in have almost everywhere been characterized by violence and struggle,
with states seeking to assert their control over territories and the (legitimate) means of
coercion (e.g. Bates 2001, Tilly 1990). So, and to paraphrase Grindle (1999), how far can new
approaches to political analysis in development take us in the ‘quest for the political’?
Beyond participation and empowerment?
Political capital refers to “access to decision-making” in the political process (Rakodi 1999:
318), and has been proposed as an extra dimension to the assets pentagon within the DFID-
associated ‘Livelihoods Framework’ (e.g. Carney 1999). Proponents claim that it can move us
beyond the insights offered by social capital, particularly in terms of political empowerment
and its links to the broader politics of democratisation. Despite limited applications to date,
it is accorded a high degree of explanatory power by its proponents, such that political
capital “is one of the key capital assets on which people draw to build their livelihoods”
(Baumann 2000: 6), and acts “as a gatekeeper asset, permitting or preventing the
accumulation of other assets upon which successful poverty-reducing growth depends”
(Booth et al 1998: 79, quoted in Rakodi 1999: 318). As with social capital, two distinct
conceptual approaches can be discerned to political capital, one instrumental (and associated
with North American political science) the other relational (associated with European post-
structural theory). And, as also noted in social capital debates (e.g. Bebbington 2006, Harriss
2001), these different approaches tend to produce different types of insights into the links
between political agency and development, and can be usefully subjected to critical
comparison.
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The former (and dominant) approach draws on resource mobilisation theory, whereby
political capital “consists of the resources which an actor…can dispose of and use to
influence policy formation processes and realise outcomes which are in an actor’s perceived
interest” (Birner and Wittner 2000: 6). Influenced by ‘rational actor’ approaches, resource
mobilization theory derives largely from attempts to explain both individual participation in
social movements and the success of social movements in terms of resource availability,
strategies and networking with other groups (Foweraker 1995). Applications of this
approach have sought to capture a range of links between political capital and the
accumulation of other capital assets. One focus has been on how state bureaucrats or
political party members have used their political capital to capture the financial and other
benefits of poverty programmes once they become localized (e.g. Liu 2003, Raymo and Lie
2000, Baumann 2000), or how districts achieve higher human development indicators
through their representatives holding positions of national power (Weinreb 2001: 453-3).
Political capital can be accumulated by more popular, collective actors also, with the success
of popular environmental struggles explained in terms of how local organisations transform
their social capital (e.g. organisational density) into political capital through campaigns (e.g.
of electoral leverage, disruptive rallies and alliance-making; Birner and Wittner 2000).
Similarly, Booth and Richard (1998: 782) argue that high levels of social capital (e.g.
communal-level activism) are associated with lower levels of democracy, whereas formal
group activism (e.g. through unions) and higher levels of political capital (political
participation and a commitment to democratic norms) were closely associated with higher
levels of democracy.
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What is perhaps most promising is the emphasis on policy reform and broader political
change, which promises to overcome the ‘localism’ that has limited other approaches to
popular agency in development studies, including participation and social capital (Mohan and
Stokke 2000). Moreover, there is some validity in claims that political capital may extended
livelihoods analysis in useful ways, particularly in terms of separating the social and the
political so as to better examine the links, and in offering a potentially systematic means of
examining this. Importantly, the fact that political capital may be operationalised via the
livelihoods framework, already seen as one of the most successful examples of moving
development research from analysis into action (Solesbury 2003), may well prove attractive
to development professionals.
Nonetheless, is there really much added value here? The insights noted above seem valid but
hardly original – for example, problems of elite capture are legion in stories of ‘development
gone wrong’, especially in relation to decentralization reforms (e.g. Crook and Sverrisson
2001). Moreover, these studies reveal the intrinsic limitations of the assets-based
understanding of politics, which tend to offer an instrumentalist, ‘rational actor’ reading of
politics that is problematic in itself (Moore 2003). This approach tends to reduce popular
political agency into atomised forms of manouvreing without recognizing the importance of
grievance, ideology, collective goals and culture to political agency (Crossley 2002), despite
evidence that these dimensions are central to social movements and collective action – from
rural struggles for land to urban struggles for a diverse range of livelihood strategies (e.g.
Peet and Watts 2004, Thorp et al 2005).
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Could the more relational approach to political capital, as inspired by the work of Pierre
Bourdieu, overcome these problems? Here, political capital is viewed as “a special form of
political power and resources” (Xiaoju 2004: 6), with capital understood as a relational
concept that invokes the Marxian tradition rather than as a material asset or stock (Dyke
1999: 194). Bourdieu (1981, 1990) is concerned here with how power itself is constituted,
and how agency is constrained and enabled vis-à-vis relations of power. Conceptualised thus,
political capital explains the ways in which actors have influence in relation to the broader
field of power relations in which they operate, involving class, gender and other differences
(e.g. Stokke 2002, Xiaoju 2004). So, the success of a landless movement will not simply be
determined by the level of resources it can accumulate, but by its success in navigating a
terrain in which other actors are also laying claims over land and vis-à-vis a regime whose
electoral interests do not include landless groups. For Harriss et al (2004), this approach
repoliticises debates over local democratic politics in developing countries, and “highlights
the critical role of political parties” in aggregating the concerns of often disparate collective
actors into a viable political programme. For Bourdieu, political parties are the primary form
of agency that has “accumulated a symbolic capital of recognition and loyalties and which
has given itself for and through political struggle” (Bourdieu 1991: 194-5, quoted in Stokke
2002:13), although a similar case has been made in relation to the role of trade unions in
certain parts of Africa (Beckman 2004).
The Bourdieuan approach to political capital thus places issues of struggle and power
relations at the centre of a political understanding of agency and empowerment. However,
this may prove insufficient in terms of securing a future for political capital within
development studies. In the first place, it is not clear that Bourdieu’s theory of practice,
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which he used primarily to explain the relationship of individuals to power-holders (Dyke
1999: 194), can be so readily applied to studies of collective action. Second, the level of
acrimony surrounding debates over social capital within development studies suggests that
any closely related concept will probably stir more controversy than it is (analytically) worth.
Finally, this approach may not prove to be operationalisable within development policy and
practice, not least given the difficulties in transferring complex forms of critical structural
analysis into policy debates (see Bebbington 2006, on the ‘policy-travelling’ prospects of
social capital). As such, political capital may end up failing to satisfy either the intellectual or
more pragmatic requirements development studies.
The political capabilities approach is a further attempt to embed political analysis within
development studies, with Williams (2004) claiming it offers a means of ‘repoliticising’ the
theory and practice of participation in development and governance. A more ambitious
claim is that it offers a ‘superior’ way of thinking about strategies for promoting political
inclusiveness compared to ‘empowerment’, in that it draws attention to,
‘…the longer term; the process of political learning; the ways in which ideas,
identities and collective self-awareness that constitute valuable political resources
in one context can be reframed to suit other contexts; and the importance of the
intersection between the three arenas driving pro-poor policy-making – the
institutional characteristics of the state; the organisational resources of the poor
and the content of pro-poor policy-making itself’ (Moore 2003: 276).
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For proponents, it is this distinctive sense of history and of the role of the state that enables
political capability research to advance understanding of the relationships between popular
agency and pro-poor forms of policy and political change.
The political capabilities approach responds directly to the call for the work of Amartya Sen
on capabilities to be further developed (Evans 2002), particularly in terms of gaining “a
theoretical grounding that explains the process through which the empowerment of
disadvantaged groups occurs, and the social changes involved” (Hill 2003: 124). With its
focus on collective action in securing long-term pro-poor change the political capabilities
approach to popular agency attempts to go beyond the individualism that tends to pervade
both the political capital approach and Sen’s work (Gore 1997). Importantly, it is arguably
this methodological individualism that has blinded liberal thinking to the constitutive role of
antagonism and power (the political) in social life (Mouffe 1993), whereby popular forms of
agency are cast as aggregate forms of rational actors rather than groups with collective
identities (such as peasant movements) that are only realised in creative tension and often
conflict with other forms of political agency (such as landlords).
The most systematic application of the agency approach to political capabilities seeks to
explain pro-poor policy reform in Bolivia (Whitehead and Gray-Molina 2003), with
particular attention to the Law of Popular Participation (LPP). Established in 1994, the LPP
aimed to directly empower indigenous Bolivians through the direct involvement of peasant
and other local organisations in newly created local municipal governments. Although there
have been several studies of this reform, the political capabilities study from Whitehead and
Gray-Molina (2003) is distinguished by the emphasis that it places on the different political
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regimes and political struggles that occurred over the decades that preceded the reforms. In
particular, the authors note that the same radical political party that introduced the 1994
reforms had also been responsible for the 1950s programme of agrarian reform that included
the formation of peasant’s organizations – the same organisations that were recognised as
key actors through the LPP. Here, “the construction of political capabilities over four
decades has allowed organizations of the poor to play a key role in the decentralization
reforms of the 1990s” (ibid: 33). The political learning of one era was transferred into later
ones, through a mixture of popular organisations, particular activists and the collective ideas
developed by and within these political forms of agency.
The concept thus reveals the key role of government policy in casting the poor (or certain
groups thereof) as legitimate citizens, a strategy of governmentality that has also been shown
to closely shape the popular development of political capabilities in India (Corbridge et al
2005, Williams 2004). The notion that collective memories of political action can inspire the
(re)emergence of contemporary forms of popular agency can perhaps also be applied to
recent processes of democratisation in Africa. Here, the same associational forms that
emerged during the democratic openings of the late colonial era – such as hometown or
‘elite’ development associations – re-appeared over the 1980s and 1990s, laying claims to be
the key conduits of development and democracy between urban and rural arenas (e.g.
Geschiere and Gugler 1998).
Overall, it seems clear that the political capabilities approach has significantly more mileage
than political capital as a means of exploring the complex links between politics and
development, and may also offer an important supplement to the growing rights-based
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approach in development (Nussbaum 2003: 36-40). The emphasis on collective entities, the
role of the state and historical trajectories constitutes a significant move beyond more
voluntaristic approaches that often dominate discussions of political agency amongst poor
people. Nonetheless, this recognition of institutional forms of power does not appear to
extend to the more structural forms of power in society that shape political agency, such as
gender relations, class and race, which may not take such explicit institutional forms.1
Other problems are also apparent. The sense of vagueness that pervades the broader
capability literature (Pressman and Summerfield 2002: 431) is far from absent here, and the
notion of political capabilities seems equally difficult to operationalise. As one proponent
notes, “those wishing to employ it for more analytic purposes need to find more operational
definitions” (Moore 2003: 275), and the attempt to quantify political capabilities for the
Bolivian Human Development Report (UNDP 2002) seemed to raise more problems than
answers.
Between agency and structure: re-politicising the good governance lens?
The polity approach emerged from the same collaborative research effort as the political
capabilities approach (Houtzager and Moore 2003), and has been described as ‘…a powerful
analytical tool to help (development theorists and practitioners) think through how they
might, directly or indirectly, help achieve the empowerment of the poor’ (Moore 2003: 276).
Heavily influenced by historical institutionalism (e.g. Skocpol 1992), pro-poor change is
conceptualized here as being dependent on ‘the ways in which state and societal actors are
constituted, become politically significant, and interact across the public-private divide’
(Houtzager 2003: 13). Applications of this approach to understanding pro-poor change in
Brazil, Peru and the Philippines reveals the centrality of political relationships, particularly
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those between civil and political society but also within political society. So, we find that pro-
poor coalitions have been most influential where they encounter a relatively coherent state
with a professionalised bureaucracy whose authority was broadly accepted (Houtzager with
Pattenden 2003: 90). An important implication for development policy here is that the most
effective way of empowering the poor would be to strengthen public authority rather than
seek to directly resource civil society organisations, and perhaps also to support the
development of the programmatic political parties that have historically secured norms of
public service (Szeftel 2000). It also appears that the liberal emphasis on the ‘autonomy’ of
civil society organizations is of less significance than the strength of the relationship between
such organizations and political parties (Lavalle et al 2005). Finally, the finding that pro-poor
change is closely shaped by the level of intra-elite conflict over patterns of political authority
at national level (Houtzager with Pattenden 2003: 91) marks a significant advance on recent
research into the role of political elites in poverty reduction (Hossain and Moore 2001).
This focus on conflict recalls Mouffe’s focus on how the political directly shapes the politics
of change, and it is this close attention to history and to political relations within the polity
approach that are central in revealing this. The main problem here – alongside the difficulty
of making such analysis operational – is that the causal structure of the polity approach rests
explicitly on the notion of ‘path dependence’ (Houtzager 2003: 13), despite evidence that the
development of political institutions and social movements over time do not conform to the
expectations of path dependency (Alexander 2001, Oliver and Myers 2003). Importantly,
path-dependence theories allow little scope for actors to influence structural conditions, and
so effectively ‘eclipses the role of political ideas, political action and the state’ in determining
political progress (Putzel 1997: 946).
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Political space, already a familiar notion within political geography (e.g. Lefevbre 2003), has
recently been codified into an analytical framework for understanding the politics of poverty
reduction. Webster and Engberg-Pedersen (2002) focus on three key dimensions of political
space: the institutional channels through which policy formulation and implementation can
be accessed, controlled or contested by the poor; the political discourses in which poverty
and poverty reduction are significant issues; and the social and political practices of the poor.
The methodological individualism that underpins some notions discussed above is absent
here, with ethnographic and historical case-studies typically preferred to survey-based work
(e.g. Paerregaard 2002, Villareal 2002, Millstein et al 2003, Hickey 2005b).
Such studies are able to explore the precise ways in which different political actors,
institutions and discourse shape poverty reduction in particular contexts. For example,
Villareal’s (2002) study of political space in Mexico shows how the poor make alignments
with certain sympathetic elements of the state and also play different state departments off
against each other. A South African case reveals how the Homeless People’s Federation
engaged in various socio-political practices (e.g. lobbying, positioning on the political terrain)
in ways that enabled them to transform the discourse surrounding housing policy in South
Africa, and secured the inclusion of marginal communities in relevant policy processes
(Millstein et al 2003): 463). Paerregaard (2002) explores how peasant groups in Peru
successively engaged with different forms of regime and discourse as opportunities
presented themselves (e.g. agrarian reform in the 1970s, democratisation in the 1990s), while
withdrawing when political space for peasant participation shrank (e.g. during the civil
conflict and neoliberalism of the 1980s).
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These sophisticated reading of the ways in which relations of domination and resistance are
closely entwined (e.g. Masaki 2004) derives directly from an engagement with critical theory,
particularly Gramscian understandings of the necessarily counter-hegemonic nature of
political action by and on behalf of the poor, and a Foucauldian analysis of how power
operates (Webster and Engberg-Pedersen 2002). Working across and in-between the
threefold dimensions of political space allows a direct focus on the interplay between
structure and agency. In particular, the focus on political discourse draws attention to the
power relations that intimately shape state-society interactions, and marks a methodological
advance on the binary and economistic ‘supply-demand’ understandings of the links between
citizens and states, as with the World Bank’s (2000) depiction of empowerment as deriving
from increased ‘social capital’ on the one hand and ‘responsiveness’ of the state on the other.
Political discourse here refers to ‘…the discursive framing of rights and responsibilities,
institutions and popular actors, political injustices and goals’ (Millstein et al 2003: 459). This
highlights the importance not only of elite discourses on the poor (e.g. Hossain and Moore
2001, Hickey 2005, Hossain 2005), but also the extent to which ‘recourse to political
discourses and practices of naming are extremely important in most political struggles, and
that marginalized groups may take advantage of such discourses as one of their few assets’
(Engberg-Pedersen and Webster 2002: 267). Nonetheless, this post-structural insight
overlooks the extent to which political discourse reflects and reproduces power relations
between particular groups rather than being constitutive of them per se. A stronger political
economy perspective is required here to reveal the material basis of power relations, as
illustrated by Herring’s (2003) analysis of how progressive politics emerges only after
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agrarian reform has transformed the field of power relations to which state functionaries
respond.
Conclusions
So, to what extent do these new forms of political analysis reveal a close understanding of
the multiple ways in which both politics and the political shape development? At the very
least, they help to situate debates over the role of popular agency within development
squarely in the political arena. This marks a significant advance on the civil society/social
capital paradigm, and brings into play a wider range of potentially pro-poor actors and
strategies. Importantly, politics is generally framed here as a relational phenomenon. So, the
polity approach establishes that ‘the state and public policy on the one side, and civil and
political society on the other, are mutually constitutive. They shape one another’ (Moore
2003: 262). This marks a useful advance on the institutional focus of much recent research
into the politics of development. History is taken seriously here, particularly by the political
capabilities and polity approaches, enabling analysis to take the kind of long view that should
be integral within development studies (e.g. Cowen and Shenton 1996) but all too often falls
by the wayside.
However, problems remain. First, the relationships between political processes and actors
across different levels are seriously under-theorised, particularly in terms of international and
global forms of politics. Little mention is made of the transnational character of ‘national’
elites in most developing countries, let alone of the global elites that do much to shape
political decision-making within poor countries. Political analysis cannot forego an
engagement with the global if it is to make a more thoroughgoing and sustained contribution
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to development studies, and insights from political geography may be useful here. Second,
the focus on relations tends to elide a fuller conceptual engagement with the primary
political institution, namely the state. Indeed, both the polity and political space approaches
are uncomfortably vague concerning precise definitions and theorisations of political
institutions. Third, none of these approaches directs any serious attention towards the
cultural dimension of popular agency in developing countries. As noted by Corbridge et al
(2005), it is “the identity and qualities of the agency that mediates power in political society
that is often the key to the livelihoods and sense of dignity of the poor”, and there is strong
evidence that identities based on social and/or spatial forms of belonging are central to the
successful mobilising strategies of collective actors (e.g. Castells 1997). It may be useful here
to introduce insights from citizenship theory, versions of which pay explicit attention to the
links between agency and identity within political communities at multiple levels (from local
to global), and in multiple forms (including ethnic or cultural as well as national).
A key question is whether these approaches capture the sense of antagonism and unequal
power relations that Mouffe places at the centre of the ‘political’, and which closely shape
development as an historical process and as a series of direct interventions. Perhaps
unsurprisingly, the approaches that manage this most convincingly derive from critical forms
of social and political theory such as Bourdieu’s notion of political capital and
Gramscian/Foucault-inspired concept of political space. The political space approach goes
further than the rather voluntaristic understanding of agency and power relations evident
within notions of political capital and political capabilities, such that all individuals and
groups might be able to obtain the same levels of assets and outcomes from a similar range
of strategic activities. Located within the critical ontological tradition – which holds that
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power relations are the primary social facts that research has an a priori responsibility to
uncover (Sayer 2000) – politics is understood here as the process of struggle concerning how
society should be organized. This positioning also leads the political space approach to
engage more critically with development itself, whether in terms eschewing dominant
understandings of poverty in preference of a relational approach (see Harriss 2007) or
refusing to accept development policy as a simply technocratic act as opposed to a deeply
political one.
Taken together, these tentative conclusions suggest that two more general types of approach
to political analysis might be particularly valuable within development studies, namely political
sociology and critical theory. A political sociology approach underpins many of the clearest
insights generated here, particularly through the political capabilities and polity approaches,
as they ‘…seek to relate socio-economic conditions to political constitutions and institutional
arrangements, and to relate these structural considerations to policy propensities’ (Almond
1990: 24). The relational understanding of politics leads to an emphasis on the ways in which
‘elites’ and ‘masses’ are configured and interact; the links between ideologies, identity and
political behaviour; collective action and social movements; and the political and social
origins of social policy.2 It is arguably insights from this perspective, particularly when
directed and supported by an engagement with critical theory (as with political space), which
promise to engage most closely with how ‘the political’ shapes development. As such, a
fruitful way forward may well be to pursue the project outlined by Nash (2002), involving a
close dialogue between political sociology and post-Marxist approaches.
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What of the operational potential of these approaches? To an extent, this paper has re-
asserted the conundrum whereby analytical approaches that can offer rigorous insights into
complex issue of power and politics tend to be the most difficult to operationalise, while the
easiest to opperationalise (e.g. political capital) tend to lack intellectual credibility. However,
this is not the whole story. For example, the political capabilities approach does not derive
from a critical tradition and yet also proves difficult to operationalise as a ‘practical form of
political analysis’ (Moore and Putzel 1999). More importantly, it is a moot point as to
whether the first challenge for political analysis within development studies is to be
immediately operationalisable, a challenge that seems to have determined the construction of
some of the ‘bespoke’ forms political analysis reviewed here. As Maia Green (2001: 57) has
argued regarding social development analysis, such approaches tend to assert universal
outcomes that development interventions should aim for rather than offering insights into
how development unfolds as an historical process, a failing that has (in part) enabled
economistic paradigms to remain dominant within development studies and keep other
approaches marginal. There is little need for political analysis to fall into this trap by limiting
itself to existing frameworks or manufacturing custom-made forms of analysis. A further risk
here is that ostensibly political ideas become technocratic because their processing into
‘relevant’ and ‘usable’ forms of development analysis means that they often arrive from
broader social science debates denuded of the sense of contest and ideological differences
through which such concepts have been developed and struggled over.
Rather than seeing development studies as something exotic or ‘other’, and which therefore
needs a particular set of conceptual toolkits, it might be more useful in the first instance to
consider it as a foundational concern within social science enquiry. As Bernstein (2005)
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notes, the social sciences originated in a concern with comparative social change over time
and across spaces. Relevant development concepts thus become those social science
concepts and theories formed to understand such processes, while the question of whether
these can be made operational is secondary to the establishment of their intellectual veracity.
It is to some of these concepts from political theory that we turn in the final paper of this
series with regards the challenge of securing a firm analytical base for thinking politically
about development.
Acknowledgements
The author is grateful to Peter Houtzager, Barry Munslow, John Toye and two anonymous
reviewers for their highly insightful comments on this paper, which began life as GPRG
Working Paper No.6. This research was initially produced as part of the programme of the
Global Poverty Research Group, which is funded by the Economic and Social Research
Council (ESRC). The support of the ESRC is gratefully acknowledged.
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1 In this respect, it is significant that the political capabilities study of the LPP in Bolivia failed to note that while the reforms may have empowered peasant organisations, women’s political participation actually decreased following the reforms, largely because their lack of land rights precluded their inclusion within the original 1950s agrarian reforms that empowered the campesinos in the first place (Jeppesen 2002). 2 Pioneering studies from a political sociology perspective include Barrington Moore’s (1967) work on the socio-economic basis of democratisation, Atul Kohli’s (1997) analysis of the social basis of power in India and the work of Charles Tilly (e.g. 1995).