Politics in Developing Countries

Damien Kingsbury

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351583145
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

Politics in Developing Countries provides a clear and reader-friendly introduction to the key factors and themes that shape political processes in developing countries. Achieving development outcomes such as reducing poverty and inequality is only possible through efficient governance, well-planned policies and careful allocation of resources, but often politics in developing countries has been identified with mismanagement, corruption, conflict and repression of dissent. This book assesses the politics of developing countries in the period since decolonisation, focusing on the ways in which states have or have not worked to the advancement of their citizens' interests. Key topics include:

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• Colonialism and its legacy

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• Ethnicity and nation building

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• Governance, corruption and the role of the state

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• Poverty and the political economy of development

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• Aid and outside influence.

Drawing on a range of case studies from around the world, Politics in Developing Countries looks at the consistencies and variations between developing countries, examining why some have forestalled political change by liberalising their economies, and others have actively stifled calls for change. Wide-ranging and engagingly written, this introductory textbook is perfect for students of politics and international development, as well as for those with a general interest in the challenges faced by countries in the Global South.

1 ‘Development’ and ‘politics’ in developing-country contexts

On the edge of the commercial district of a provincial capital there is a hotel of four levels, the ground floor of which houses a restaurant serving cheap food from behind a wire fence topped with razor ribbon. The hotel was regarded as the height of modernity when it was built in the 1980s but, in the 21st century, is looking markedly faded and worn. Its plumbing system is more reliable than most, although the water issues in spurts, in spasmodic response to the impulses of a ground-floor pump.

The street outside is busy during the day, with a jumble of poorly maintained cars, motorbikes, wooden carts and many people, about half of whom are going somewhere and the other half trying to eke out a living selling mobile phone credit, pens, fruit or trinkets. Most of the people here are recent arrivals, from the villages where the families have become too large, the land with too many people and the opportunities for work next to non-existent. They speak the lingua franca with varying degrees of fluency, given they are a polyglot people brought together by the state executing the administrative role of the former colonial power.

The street sometimes sees flashes of wealth when a new car, sometimes a European model, glides past. The economic gulf between the opulence of the car and the life lived by its owner and that of the people on the street is vast. This is a country that has an elected government, only it has almost a monopoly on politics, and being close to a minister or senior party member enhances opportunities for government contracts and, hence, wealth. Documented evidence is rare but it is widely believed that government members receive kickbacks for the favorable awarding of these lucrative contracts. This is all, however, very far removed from the daily lives of people on the street.

What is closer to their lived experience is poor education, courtesy of low levels of government investment in that sector, in keeping with neo-liberal prescriptions about governments cutting spending. Likewise, health care is lacking, so that preventable chronic illnesses remain prevalent among the poor, with elites able to use private clinics or fly out to see specialists elsewhere. On the street, average life expectancy is shorter, women and babies die more often in childbirth or soon afterwards and options for a different type of life are practically non-existent. The government promises development, a better future. For most, however, that future remains disappointingly distant.

This could be any provincial town in any developing country anywhere in the world. Its political processes, though differing in scope and style, are broadly common.

Politics

Politics is usually understood in relation to government, which is how political processes manifest most obviously for most people. Indeed, the origins of the word ‘politics’ refers to the governance of cities. However, politics – or what is political – is actually the employment of power or capacity to achieve particular ends or to privilege particular interests or objectives over others.

Arguably, the dominant form of interest is economic, in the wider sense, implying people’s material preferences and needs, in turn shaping how they are able to live. Decisions about economic matters, such as distribution, opportunity and alleviation (or imposition) of scarcity are among the most ‘political’ and will very often be contested. It is through this contest, which identifies interests across groups of people, that group identity is formed, usually manifested as a political movement, organisation or, with a particular agenda, a political party.

What distinguishes politics in developing countries from politics in developed countries is not an absolute, and the problems encountered by one may well manifest in similar form in another. However, developing countries do face a confluence of problems that can be said to distinguish them from most developed countries. In particular, developing countries necessarily face greater economic challenges (this being a key definition of their status), resources are often more scarce or less able to be accessed and poverty tends to be greater in both relative and absolute terms. Moreover, the opportunities for political processes to develop around ‘rules of the game’, so that there is a regulated and agreed method for the resolution of competing interest demands, is usually less fully formed and more vulnerable to fracture or dissolution.

This is often complicated by developing countries having been carved out of territories that may include people who do not share common identity bonds or who may indeed even be antithetical towards each other. Such common bond that they might have shared may not have lasted much beyond shared opposition to prior colonial rule and exploitation, the consequences of which also inform the subsequent political approaches and opportunities. One might even go back further and suggest that pre-colonial models of political relations also reverberate in post-colonial societies, in terms of pre-colonial competition and conflict, as well as in seeking more culturally ‘authentic’ (if sometimes reified) models for social organisation (e.g. see Akyeampong, Bates, Nunn and Robinson 2014).

In such cases, the organisation of political power and its distribution of material benefits can be skewed in favor of groups on the basis of ethnicity rather than common economic need, which may set up types of rivalries rarely seen in developed countries facing fewer economic challenges and usually a greater sense of social cohesion. Having less time than most developed countries in which to develop rules and institutions through which to mediate competing interests, and set against more austere and often urgent sets of circumstances, politics in developing countries is frequently beset by tensions that are less apparent in developed countries. It could further be suggested that earlier attempts to resolve some of the fundamental challenges of developing countries have been undermined by a global shift towards a neo-liberal economic agenda which, while having overseen economic growth in many areas, has also produced greater economic inequality both within and often between countries.

All of this begs the question as to whether the politics of developing countries is in some way fundamentally distinct from politics in developed countries and, hence, needs to be considered employing a different set of referential tools. This book identifies some of the key ways in which the politics of developing countries is different in terms of orientation and emphasis from that of developed countries.

Coming from what is intended to be a prior, first principle set of assumptions about the nature of power and its application, developing countries are not given a pass to be understood in their own – usually quite varied and often inconsistent – terms. Such relativising of understanding politics has two fundamental problems. The first is that it assumes a commonality among developing countries that can be understood in its own terms that is fundamentally different to that of developed countries. The second assumption is based on a relativisation that does not allow analytic closure; there is no logical point at which the devolution of exceptionalism ends.

The first assumption fails in its lack of understanding of politics as a field in which there is a continuum of challenges and typologies rather than, at some arbitrary point, a fundamental disjuncture. That is to say, the type of politics may vary, but the subject remains politics. The second assumption acknowledges – indeed privileges – relativism but fails to acknowledge similarity. Differences do exist, but not so much so that they manage to escape from the overarching subject field. And, at least as importantly, the bounding of the subject field implies that ‘difference’ cannot be used to rationalise the diminution of a host of political markers. Were it the case that ‘difference’ implied its own (necessarily unlocatable) political markers, so many developing countries would not have undergone many of the political changes they have, from the sloughing off of dictatorships or authoritarian governments, to accountabilities for gross corruption and human rights violations.

Development

Development, it is said, when it is working properly, promotes justice, reduces poverty and builds environments for people to lead productive, creative and fulfilling lives. These outcomes are intended to be achieved, to the extent they can be, through thoughtful and careful government policies and planning, using available resources. Yet in developing countries this is only partly, or not at all, the case. This is often less because resources are non-existent than because of how they are prioritised and often made unavailable.

‘Development’ has historically been seen in overwhelmingly, and often exclusively, economic terms. The origin of the term in this context was in reference to ‘economical development’, first used in 1860 in relation to the then young colony of Victoria in what is now the Commonwealth of Australia (Cowen and Shenton 1996:175). This followed the effective collapse of the gold boom which had seen the colony’s (non-indigenous) population increase from fewer than 100,000 in 1851 (SMH 1851) to more than a half a million just seven years later (Searle 1977:382). Similarly, the income of unionised skilled workers rose from 8 shillings a day in 1851 to 40 shillings within three years (VIG 1851:5; Cowen and Shenton 1996:176).

The relevance of this discursion on a developed country’s colonial past is to demonstrate the origins of the idea at two points. The first is that ‘development’ was understood primarily in economic terms. The second was that it was also seen as a form of ‘progress’ (Cowen and Shenton 1996:12–18). In 1855, colonial Victoria was allowed its own parliament (albeit with a landed and essentially undemocratic upper house) following a rebellion by gold miners at the Eureka Stockade, on the Ballarat goldfields, the year before. The rebellion had a number of causes, principal among them the imposition of what was for many a burdensome mining licence attendant upon an authoritarian approach to efforts to enforce its collection.

Many of the ‘Eureka’ miners were recent immigrants, and some were refugees from the European liberal ‘Revolutions of 1848’ (all of which failed),¹ with many others being either exiles from the failed English Chartist movement or converts to the then radical Chartist ideal of a secret vote for all men. From around 1850, trade unions had begun to form in Victoria, and in 1856 Victorian workers founded the first trades hall council, with its stonemasons’ union winning the world’s first eight-hour day that same year. These pioneer working-class heroes construed ‘development’ as not just about overall economic growth but including liberal progressive social and political values. That is to say, the origins of ‘development’ were inherently political.²

Since World War II, the idea of development has taken on a particularly economic tone, led by the United States’ efforts at rebuilding Europe and Japan after that war’s destruction, employing industrialisation along with, eventually, ‘democratic’ politics. However, the emphasis was on industrialisation, particularly as the idea became applied to newly independent former colonies. In this respect, notions of development, and their critique, have tended to shun the political, even though it is political decisions – or the lack thereof – that determine development outcomes.

In one sense, then, ‘development’ as it has come to be understood was simply intended to imply economic growth or growth in per capita gross domestic product (GDP), which, in turn, would find a way of being distributed throughout a society and thus raise most people’s standards of living. The earliest means of achieving this development was intended to bring the process of modernisation to new or developing countries. In many respects, this concept continues to underpin policy in many developing countries. The initial intention was that these developing countries emulate the West (developed countries) to industrialise and then ‘take off’ (as demonstrated, over five stages, by Rostow 1960:4–16).

Not only did this process of industrialisation and ‘take-off’ fail in many, perhaps most, cases, but the definition of development in these terms has come to be identified as too prescriptive and too limited. Various development paradigms came and went, and they are still doing so. Where a program is successful, it is usually a consequence of being applied by developing countries themselves. The most recent of these cases have focused on ‘governance’, implying that clear and consistent rules around financial probity and orderly processes are fundamental to successful development. One could also suggest that such qualities also constitute ‘development’ in its political sense. The failure to understand ‘development’ in this more political sense has, moreover, been shown to curb the economic growth that initially defined it.

A further, if still largely material and apolitical, way of measuring ‘development’ has been through the increasingly broad range of human development indicators (HDIs), which include such yardsticks as infant and maternal mortality, life expectancy, education, access to potable water, adequate nutrition and other ‘quality of life’ measures, as well as per capita GDP and the distribution of available wealth.

None of these paradigm shifts in approaches to development since the middle of the last century has provided a ‘magic bullet’, with those that promised one among the least productive. The advantages and drawbacks of global markets – putting a premium on financial responsibility; strong or weak central planning; intrinsic economic potential or the lack thereof; participatory and bottom-up versus top-down approaches; and pro-poor versus pro-growth models – have each played a role in advancing, or hindering, development. From the 1980s until around 2010, the inherently political, perhaps ideological, neo-liberal paradigm was dominant, and it remains so in many markets, under the generic rubric of the ‘Washington Consensus’ (Williamson 2004).

The ten key principles associated with the Washington Consensus are: avoidance of large fiscal deficits relative to GDP; ending government subsidies in favor of key pro-growth, pro-poor services such as primary education, primary health care and infrastructure investment; broadening the tax base and reducing marginal tax rates; market-determined, positive interest rates; a competitive exchange rate; removal of restrictions on imports; encouraging foreign direct investment; privatising state enterprises; deregulation of market activity; and, finally, guaranteeing legal security for property rights (Williamson 2004:3–4).

This Washington Consensus implies a reduction of government deficits relative to GDP, a related reduction of government subsidies and other payments (including on education and health care), broadening the tax base and cutting top-end tax rates, the market determination of interest rates and floating currency exchange rates. Along with these policies came the opening of markets to global trade, the reduction of tariffs and other trade restrictions, relatively open external investment and the privatisation of state-owned enterprises, or SOEs (Williamson 1989). These policies also aligned with the IMF and World Bank’s ‘structural adjustment programs’ (SAPs).

SAPs are lending regimes aimed at persuading borrowing economies to align their governments’ revenues with its expenditure and at producing long-term economic growth. The IMF is generally responsible for financing the stabilisation of a given economy, with the World Bank responsible for transforming its structure. Key characteristics of SAPs accord with the precepts of neo-liberalism enumerated above. Cuts to education and health spending hard-wired into SAPs have led to criticism of the programs, prompting the World Bank to shift focus, with targeted countries now urged to develop SAPs as a means of poverty reduction (Bird 2001).

This, in turn, runs counter to an earlier conception of development that, while retaining its economic focus, insisted on qualitative as well as quantitative changes to social structures and did not shy away from the introduction of new ones (Dowd 1967).

Although not formally part of the Washington Consensus, it was often suggested that such a paradigm necessarily ran in tandem with ‘democratisation’. The pairing of the two was seen, in some quarters, to represent a ‘post-ideological’ world, teleologically identified as ‘the end of history’ (Fukuyama 1992). This argument was, however, more a blind for neo-liberalism, with little emphasis on political substance or its translatability into previously undemocratic political contexts.

The Washington Consensus faced three hurdles. In some cases it was applied but did not produce the desired outcomes: indeed, it made many people poorer. Secondly, many governments rejected the model as being financially onerous and ideologically driven. Even where economic development proceeded, this was very often due to longer-term government planning that involved more state investment rather than less (‘developmentalism’ or ‘state-directed capitalism’ – Halper 2010:103–134), rather than neo-liberal economic prescriptions as such. Again, this did not imply any particular political modelling to achieve such outcomes. The third obstacle, however, constituted the biggest challenge of all to the Washington Consensus – and that came from a competing paradigm that has become known as the Beijing Consensus.

The importance of the Beijing Consensus, which is more or less the economic and political model adopted by post-Mao China, lies in the challenge its economic success has posed to the hegemony of the Washington Consensus and its assumed dominance of the industrial West (Halper 2010). Rather than being specifically prescriptive, the Chinese model, as it was also known, was perceived as offering a ‘pragmatic’ route to stable economic growth, involving state-led or -run enterprises, a strong export orientation and the redirection of state resources as required (Hasmath 2014).

Insofar as the Beijing Consensus model addressed non-economic factors, it relied on the idea of political continuity (usually in the form of authoritarianism) rather than representative pluralism. This, in turn, largely meant keeping active political power out of the hands of the people while, in some instances, allowing the window-dressing of elections (in this category Singapore remains a prime example).

The most common intended meaning of the term ‘development’, then, has concerned economic and material issues. Political issues have played second fiddle or been disregarded altogether. ‘Development’ describes both the economic method and the rationale of many developing countries. To the extent that political processes are addressed at all in developmental terms, normative ‘political development’ has been excluded from the debate (for elaborations, see Huntington 1968; also Kingsbury 2007a). The key exception to this has been Sen’s reliance on participatory elections to help ensure good governance and thereby promote conceptions of ‘freedom’ (Sen 1999b:35–53) or ‘capabilities’. This implies reasoned individual and social control over circumstances rather than vice versa (Sen 1989). That is, ‘economic prosperity is no more than one of the means to enriching lives of people’ (Sen 1989:42).

In large part, the politics of developing countries has, almost from the outset, been identifi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword
• 1. ‘Development’ and ‘politics’ in developing-country contexts
• 2. Colonialism and its legacies
• 3. Ethnicity and nation-building
• 4. Authority and democracy
• 5. Poverty and the political economy of development
• 6. Aid, influence and development
• 7. Economic structuring and trade relations
• 8. The Beijing Consensus versus the Washington Consensus
• 9. The military in politics
• 10. On democratisation
• 11. Timing and sequencing of political transitions
• 12. Sovereignty and strategic relations
• 13. Critical reflections on politics in developing countries
• Bibliography
• Index