Redesigning political institutions because existing structures are inappropriate (because they reduce the ability of societies to solve collective action problems as currently designed) is very important. Such an approach must go well beyond the country level. Both regional (West Africa for instance) and subnational (provincial/local) institutions are better suited to solve some of the issues that hold back development in Africa and in fragile states in general.

But, even more important than this is finding some way to address the intrasociety issues that plague so many countries across Africa (and the Middle East and to some extent elsewhere). Why has Korea/China/Taiwan/etc. produced leaders at critical junctures committed to national development while most countries in Africa (and the Middle East, etc.) have not? What is it about East Asian societies (and ideologies) that enable them to promote progress irrespective of regime type? These are critical questions that have not been adequately addressed. The fact that the answers lie outside the scope of what most Westerners’ own ideologies tell them to believe (see Rotberg’s comments on the previous post) does not mean that the answers are not highly relevant.

Incentives surely matter but why are the incentives that leaders face in these countries more oriented towards development than elsewhere? What about their histories, cohesiveness, sociopolitical dynamics, concepts of leadership, morality, and so on have produced such excellent outcomes?

A focus on the state and its leaders excludes the possibility that there are greater forces in society that determine a country’s broad direction. Understanding these forces would explain a lot–and offer a set of ideas on how such forces might be reproduced elsewhere.

When I mentioned multiple equilibria, I did so with physical chemist (!) Ilya Prigogine in mind. The key point here is not that there are multiple plausible outcomes under a certain set of circumstances, which I suppose is implied in your comment, David, (and is Greif’s understanding) although that is true too. It is rather that the outcome is most often in a state of multiple equilibria; hence the point that the rules are essentially becoming as opposed to simply present. In other words, the context is not a stable system, which allows us to define a coherent structure of incentives after careful analysis. (However, multiple equilibria should not be mistaken for arbitrary and erratic non-equilibria.)

I must mention that I’m a mere novice to research in general and to national level politics in particular, in that my own research for a MSc. degree concentrates, as rigorously as possible, on why institutions designed for water provision that are implemented in the same way across Kyrgyz rural villages end up having highly varied outcomes. Nevertheless, if I look to Kyrgyz national politics, I recognise many patterns from the local level. Incentives of the elites are certainly key but trying to map the incentive structure is a perplexing business.

The actions and incentives of Kyrgyz politicians are appearing to be rooted in multiple identities with differing interests. I could write at length giving examples of actions motivated on a backdrop of the extraordinary combination of clan and family ties, ethnicity, business interests, geographic divides, post-communism, Islam, animism, parliamentarism, reference to constituencies that are nowhere to be found in the electoral laws, the expectation of a return to presidential rule etc., etc. Some of these, like e.g. ethnicity even, are in themselves mutable depending on the situation. Kyrgyzstan is currently on its eighth constitution since independence in 1991, all written with considerable assistance from Western experts.

Modelling such context based on available theory with the ambition to design the correct institutions is futile in my opinion.

Which all brings us back to my initial proposal that we need to dig deeper regarding our understanding of institutions and quite possibly enter that jungle Adrian Leftwich mentioned in a comment to the other post on this blog. I remain convinced, however, that it is a path that needs to be taken in order to sensibly get to those “conditions under which country elites might come to address the hurdles they face from day one in acting together to pursue national interests” that David mentions.

I’ll stop now. I promise.

Rothstein makes a good argument for believing that it’s impartiality of a government’s outputs that determines its legitimacy (as determined, ultimately, whether citizens take up arm against it), not whether democratic, or any other, principles were followed on the input side – telling examples are given from Iraq, the Balkans, Finland etc. This captures some of concerns of Seth’s book about ethnic or confessional communities feeling or not feeling that they will be discriminated against, which is largely independent of whether there is majority rule or not – all very relevant to Syria.

Rothstein’s institute in Gothenburg has made some progress in turning this concept into indicators, starting with an expert opinion survey in a number of countries.

I suggested that the most pertinent question is what it would take for African elites to address the collective-action problems that stop them acting in the national interest. Rothstein’s critique of conventional ant-corruption approaches is really interesting here. I won’t give you the details, but the argument ends with the story of how both Sweden and Denmark, having been highly corrupt and inefficient, enacted a series of reforms to the public service in the space of a few decades in the middle of the 19th century, prompted by … crushing military defeats which threatened those countries’ very existence.

You will say that raises new questions about the alternative for Africa. It does.

Part of the problem is that as researchers we can only study what exists or has existed. To answer Rasmus’ insistent question about what form of democracy would do better than the actually existing forms in Africa, we need to know about institutional innovations that have not yet been tried, and which anyway would need to be worked out in detail by country actors, in context, to have any chance of succeeding.

One thing that is clear is that trying out any of the innovations which might make existing democracies more friendly to economic transformation would entail elites and their followers solving major collective-action problems – one of the reasons we headlined that concept in the other discussion on this blogsite.

For example, I would conjecture that in countries with a politico-ethnic structure like Kenya’s, some element of permanent power-sharing is essential. In the mainstream democracy literature, there is some evidence that a mild form of power-sharing, consisting of proportional representation plus guaranteed representation of minorities, makes democracy work better, in conventional terms (Pippa Norris, ‘All Elections Are Not the Same’ in Staffan Lindberg’s edited book, ). I would want to go further, but would expect the benefits to be more far-reaching too.

My other conjecture would visualise an elite agreement to place certain topics that are recognised to be absolutely fundamental to national development outside the sphere of political competition (in the way that monetary policy is protected from politics in some countries). An agreement to put a ceiling the size of cabinets and parliaments would be another way of limiting the harm done to national interests by political competition in a clientelist framework.

These are just conjectures, and I am sure they are subject to Søren’s point about institutional change having ‘multiple equilibria’. But just thinking about them reveals the scale of the challenges to collective action that would be entailed. Perhaps what follows is that, rather than pretending that political institutions can be cleverly designed, the thing to focus on is the conditions under which country elites might come to address the hurdles they face from day one in acting together to pursue national interests.

To be the devil’s advocate for a minute, I’m sure that past proponents of the structural adjustment programmes would equally claim that their policy recommendations relied more than anything on a recognition of the centrality of incentives.

So, I’m glad to see the ‘real questions’ broad to the table above. However, I tend to think that pondering about ‘the alternatives’ in the way a lot of research is carried out these days, really just pushes the key question one step back and is left unanswered. Think of the outcome as the token use of ‘context matters’. I’d suggest that there’s a need to ask how that context, or those rules of the game, came to be and should best be defined – or essentially, how they’re becoming.

My personal opinion is that there’s a need to fundamentally re-engage with the study of institutions, their multifaceted manifestations, how they’re formed and adapt to change. It’s my impression that their complexity has led to a praxis, where studies (often only implicitly) cherry pick their definition of institutions according to the research question, which might fit the purpose in the specific context but is really detrimental to informing policy in a wider context. Some of the programmes from this joint initiative are exceptions.

I apologise that this is probably more of a comment than a question. I suppose my question would be what people think of it. Do we get to the real questions?

Finally, as a number of good reads have been mentioned in this debate let me join in and plug Frances Cleaver’s “Development Through Bricolage: Rethinking Institutions for Natural Resource Management” , which is to be published in a couple of weeks. I think she’s got some very good and important observations about the complexity of institutions, the very meek prospective for designing them, and, in my opinion, while having some similarities to the work on institutions by Avner Greif, provides a better perspective on the multiple equilibrium nature of them, than Avner Greif accomplish in his book “Institutions and the Path to the Modern Economy”. Also highly recommendable btw.

Regards

If you want to change the conversation on development, you are going to have to create your own set of indicators that people can use. Otherwise, you will always get crowded out by these supposed facts.

Fukuyama is working on a project worth referencing. I write about it here:
http://www.fragilestates.org/2012/02/15/fukuyamas-new-initiative-on-governance/

Discussions about governance, democracy, etc. do not capture the essence of the problem because they end up focusing on how we frame the issues and measure what we believe are the results. If these fail to capture something important, you need to establish a new mechanism to anchor our perspective.

One is the terrible price that the winner-takes-all form of democracy threatens to exact from ordinary people in places like Kenya (an issue that is avoided perhaps precisely because the implications are potentially so terrible). The other is the harm that the political incentive structure of competitive clientelism does to the conditions for economic transformation. I don’t think a conscious trade-off is being made about this by ordinary citizens because, apart from the continent’s leading economists like K.Y. Amoako who write eloquently about the harm done by neglecting the issue, there is a low level of understanding of how high the stakes are.

The point of our intervention is not to advocate reviving some dead option, like personal or military dictatorship, but just to suggest that there is a problem here that needs thinking about, and that ‘good governance’ doesn’t get us far in doing so.

It is precisely because ‘what is the alternative?’ is a very hard question to answer that we need to keep posing it!