Presentation/s:

“It’s the politics, stupid” has become a mantra within international development over the past decade, with politics emerging as the key explanation for why things work (or not) in poor countries. Recent efforts to theorise this have centred on how inter-elite struggles over political authority and economic resources shape the emergence and performance of institutions. This relational understanding of how states gain the capacity and commitment to promote development promises to move the ‘good governance’ agenda beyond its earlier intellectual moorings in new institutionalism, and is already proving influential within development agencies. However, these new approaches are also problematic, with their rational-actor bias, limited grasp of the transnational politics of development and inability to explain how the more immediate world of development policy-making works.

In this seminar Sam Hickey will introduce a conceptual framework that seeks to overcome these problems, and suggests how it will underpin research within the new Effective States and Inclusive Development research centre. An analysis of Uganda’s latest development strategy, as influenced by its recent discovery of oil, the growing role of new rising powers and the broader ideological shift away from the Post Washington Consensus, as well as national-level political processes, is used to illustrate the potential of this framework.

Sam Hickey is Reader in the Politics of Development at IDPM, the University of Manchester. He carries out research, teaching and advisory work on the politics of development, and is currently Co-Research Director of the new Effective States and Inclusive Development research centre (ESID), which is funded by the UK Department for International Development 2011-2016 (www.effective-states.org).

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