1

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,

8

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)

19

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.

20

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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).