Developmentalist States Research Articles

ESTADO COMO SOLUÇÃO

After the 1990s, the neoliberal agenda was disseminated to the countries on the global periphery as the path to achieving economic prosperity, suggesting that national states were no longer important in the face of "inevitable" globalization. The aim of this essay is to consider the relevance of the role of the state in the development process and to answer the question: in the context of neoliberal globalization, what role still "belongs" to national states in promoting development? Additionally, what challenge does the Brazilian state face in this new context? We draw on authors who address the issue of economic development and the role of the state in this process from a broad perspective. It was found that countries, especially those on the periphery, that "chose" the market as the primary mechanism for regulating economic activity failed copiously, given that private capital is unable to structure the economy and support a development process in the manner of Developmentalist States. It is concluded that, understood as a long-term process, and in light of the challenges of the global economy, the effectiveness of the state in the development process is central to any realistic agenda for economic development.

International development in Africa: Historiographical themes and new perspectives

AbstractThis article explores scholarship on the history of international development in Africa and highlights promising new perspectives. The literature review reveals common themes in writing on the history of development—neocolonialism, knowledge production, and statecraft—but also shows that scholars have given too much power to development paradigms and policies. While the scholarship has demonstrated the rhetorical significance of development and the importance of developmentalist states, historians have paid less attention to institutional cleavages, material outcomes, and the complexity of development intervention on the ground. New work draws on oral histories to center local communities, while also examining national and transnational actors and contexts. Examining how development was executed on the ground, and how local communities experienced and reconfigured development, has the potential to help scholars completely rethink these histories. Recent scholarship demonstrates the long‐term continuities of development; the disjunctures between economic theory and development practice; the particular forms of power and modalities of governance that have emerged in different settings; and the social, political, and material implications for local communities targeted by the international development apparatus.

Past and present land reform in Cuba (1959–2020): from peasant collectivisation to re-peasantisation and beyond

AbstractCuba is a paradigmatic case where the term and concept of the peasantry remains of lived importance. Cuban peasants had a significant role in the past as they did return to the political agenda after the Revolution with particular emphasis under Raul Castro’s administration. However, the Cuban case has not been significantly explored from a long-term perspective that connects the old debates and dimensions of land reforms under developmentalist states to the new agrarian questions in the global era. Based on secondary sources, semi-structured interviews and updated data on land structures, this article explores the long-term process of land reform in Cuba.

The Muslim Brotherhood’s ‘Virtuous society’ and State Developmentalism in Egypt: the Politics of ‘Goodness’

The rise of Islamists in Arab countries has often been explained by their capacity to offer an alternative path of development, based on a religious vision and on a parallel welfare sector, challenging post-independence developmentalist states. Taking the case of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, and building on ethnographic fieldwork, this chapter aims to contribute to this debate, exploring how conflict and cooperation were deeply intertwined in the relationships between this movement and Mubarak's regime. Rather than postulating any structural polarisation, or—in contrast—any simplistic authoritarian coalition, the author argues that the vision of two models of development opposing one another unravels when we move from abstract approaches towards empirical studies. On the ground, both the Muslim Brotherhood and the former regime elites participated in what the author calls the politics of ‘goodness’ (khayr), which she defines as a conflictual consensus built on entrenched welfare networks, and on an imaginary matrix mixing various discursive repertoires of state developmentalism and religious welfare. The chapter also elaborates an interpretative framework to aid understanding of the sudden rise and fall of the Brotherhood in the post-2011 period, showing that, beyond its failure, what is at stake is the breakdown of the politics of ‘goodness’ altogether.

The social construction of the Tunisian revolutionary martyr in the media and popular perception

This paper deals with the efforts of Tunisians to define and honour victims of the revolution of January 2011. The paper argues that revolutionary ‘martyrdom’ can only be understood with reference not only to current events, but also as informed by the historical experience of the Tunisian people and the Arab world. A brief historic background on martyrdom in Islamic societies is presented, before examining how the concept of martyrdom changed as a result of the developmentalist and distributory Arab states that emerged following twentieth-century independence movements. Interviews and media reports are used to highlight the role of the public sphere and civil society in shaping Tunisian attitudes towards victims of the 2011 revolution.

From Authoritarian to Democratic Models of Post-Conflict Development:The Indonesian Experience

Indonesia has experienced three periods of post-conflict development since World War II, and experimented with very different developmental models in each period. The first period followed the Japanese occupation (1942–45) and Indonesia’s national independence struggle (1945–49). Left with a devastated economy, weak human capital and a politicized population, national leaders stressed building a cohesive national identity, and adopted increasingly authoritarian political structures. Significant conflict erupted in the “outer islands” and the period ended in 1965–66 with massive violence directed against the political left. In the second period, an authoritarian military-led regime was in power. Partly modeling itself on the developmentalist states of Northeast Asia, it stressed political order and economic development. Rapid economic growth took place, but this approach had major costs, creating an inflexible political system that suppressed rather than ameliorated local tensions generated by development. The collapse of this model in 1997–98 was thus accompanied by widespread conflict. Since then, Indonesia has adopted a democratic political system. Attempts to rebuild communities shattered by violence in 1997–2005 have combined state-building, economic development initiatives, and patronage distribution. In presenting how governments have dealt with conflict and development issues across these three periods, the analysis emphasizes economic development and state-building policies, and their differential sub-national impacts. These two approaches have frequently played a double-edged role, sometimes undermining security, sometimes underpinning it.

Reclaiming Development? NGOs and the Challenge of Alternatives

In 1987, World Development published a supplement entitled ‘Development Alternatives: the Challenge of NGOs’. Although this challenge now seems far more complicated, this paper suggests one way of giving meaning (and possibility) back to the juxtaposition of ‘development alternative’ and NGOs. Where NGOs have pursued radical rather than merely reformist alternatives, this has usually been in conjunction with political programmes of social movements or developmentalist states. NGOs need to rethink the notion of development alternatives in terms of the politics and political economy of social change, a rethinking that will help define the contours for a theory of NGOs.

Urban Poverty and the Rural Development Bias

It has often been said that there is an ‘urban bias’ in development, due to the assumption that economic growth and modernization naturally occurs in cities and has as its ultimate destination development by urbanization. This has meant that problem oriented interventions are typically focused on excluded rural people and built around rural paradigms. Even in development practice that is explicitly urban, stakeholders are often viewed through a rural lens. This has often left development practice with what amounts to a rural bias. Nowhere has this urban bias in development policy and rural bias in development practice been more clearly manifest than in the developmentalist states of Asia. Drawing on contemporary empirical data from the Urban Poverty Project (UPP), an ongoing World Bank/Indonesian government urban anti-poverty initiative in Northern Java, we discuss some of the ways in which this rural bias has weakened the conceptual tools for imagining development in urban environments. It will be our argument that the dominant rural/village development trope and its corresponding scalar dichotomies between local and global and social dichotomies between traditional and modern have formed the basis of much of the way we think about and practice development. This has often obscured, rather than clarified what people actually want and need and how it can best be delivered.

Global Cities and Developmentalist States: How to Derail What Could Be an Interesting Debate: A Response to Hill and Kim

There is a substantive analysis in this article showing the key role of the developmentalist state in Japan and South Korea. I agree with this. But Hill and Kim (2000) position this issue in a manner that would lead one to infer that I do not. In much of my work, especially on the global city, I have focused in enormous detail on how Japan is different from the US and have emphasised the importance of capturing this speciŽ city rather than falling in the trap of conventional comparative social science and its need to standardise across countries. Hill and Kim have chosen to overlook this. Perhaps this results from the fact that the authors never seem to go past p. 10 in their referencing of The Global City. Not a single reference in the 19 times they cite something from my work goes past p. 10 in that book—indeed, a third of all these references never go past p. 5. Admittedly, the almost 400 pages that follow are very tedious—all that detailed differentiation of the three cities and their institutional and historical settings, all that unpacking of data-sets and of specialised literatures, who needs it! The framing of an argument matters. Hill and Kim set up their critique in a manner that derails the possibility for a substantive debate: whether the modes through which a leading international business and Ž nancial centre such as Tokyo or Seoul articulates with the global economic system are shaped in signiŽ cant ways by the presence of a developmental state to the point that these cities cannot be thought of as global cities. I think this is an interesting question. But this is not what the authors want to discuss. They simply assert that the developmentalist state and the global city are two mutually exclusive categories and that hence, insofar as Japan and South Korea have a developmentalist state, the global city model is not applicable to Tokyo and Seoul. This framing also allows for a particular distortion which is to produce the impression that the global city model is incompatible with a critical analysis of the power of global Ž nance. This then leads them to assert, among other somewhat surprising statements, that I have writen a “breathless paean to global high Ž nance” (note 3). Admittedly, I have been and remain impressed with the power of global Ž nance to destroy signiŽ cant sectors of national economies, distort other markets and subvert state policy. I rather thought that, if anything, this was a breathless paean against global Ž nance and, apparently, so have the hundreds of commentaries and critiques I have received from all quarters on my treatment of global Ž nance. In

The Development of Environmental Administration in Queensland and Western Australia: Why are they Different?

Western Australia and Queensland are often seen as the most developmentalist states in the Australian federation, largely because they remained less developed for longer and have seen much mineral and agricultural development in the latter part of the twentieth century. Developmentalism is usually seen as anathema to a commitment to environmental policy, which most states have taken on in response to environmentalism in the same period, yet these two developmentalist states exhibit markedly different trajectories in response to this environmentalist stimulus. This paper explores the reasons for these differences, finding a variety of causal factors including both socioeconomic influences (such as affluence and demographics), political structures, and personalities and the force of ideas. It suggests that we should be wary of monocausal explanations of such differences.

Globalization: Myths and Realities1

Abstract The current decline of the developmentalist paradigm, and its view of the rural as increasingly residual, revitalizes rural sociology. The blossoming of studies of rurality and ecology is paralleled by the growing currency of globalization as an object of analysis. This is more than a coincidence—in fact, globalization crystallizes local diversity. The two phenomena go hand in hand. But each needs to be understood as an historical construct; that is, they need to be problematized. In problematizing “globalization,” I argue that it must be understood as a post‐developmentalist construct. The postwar goal of national development, institutionalized in the international Bretton Woods regime, has run its course—dramatized by the assault on developmentalist states and institutions in the monetarist regime established under the auspices of the 1980s debt crisis. The nationally oriented institutions of the developmentalist era are now being replaced by globally oriented institutions under the legitimizing cloak of efficiency and financial credibility. Related to this trend, producing communities scramble to reposition themselves either through finding niches in a new global economy or through resistance to global pressures. Either way, there is a new emphasis on defining the local. This article explores the conjunction of global and local definition.

Exploring the three varieties of East Asia's state-guided development model: Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan

In the postwar era, the East Asian state-guided development model has worked well to create successive economic miracles in the region. However, the enduring variances of the individual economies in East Asia still remain. This article explores the empirical diversities hidden behind the intra-regional commonalities. In particular, on the “growthstability-equity” spectrum, the East Asian development paradigm could be sub-divided into three categories: South Korea's “growth-obsessed” pattern (G); Singapore's “growth-with-stability” model (G-S); and Taiwan's “equity-and-stability-based growth” model (G-S-E). Largely derived from the deliberate political choice of a particular strategic path, each model of East Asia has materialized on the basis of strong developmentalist states. However, unlike the multi-goal options (G-S/G-S-E), as in Singapore and Taiwan, the mono-goal options ((G), as in Korea, could gain the chosen objective at considerable cost to the neglected dimensions. As a result, given a set of necessary political conditions, the multi-goal options are a better choice for Third World policy practitioners than are the mono-goal options.

The State, Civil Society, and Foreign Actors: The Politics of Philippine Industrialization

In the Philippines, the politics of the industrialization process is best understood by examining the process of collaboration and contestation that have marked the relationship among three key actors: a weak state, powerful elites in civil society, and in fluential foreign actors. Unlike the insulated developmentalist states of East Asia and the relatively stronger states of ASEAN, the Philippine state has been a captive of powerful vested interests. Among the dominant actors of civil society, the landed capitalists have shown an extraordinary resilience by diversifying their bases of wealth, enabling them to dominate the manufacturing class nurtured by the import-substitution industrialization (TSIJ period. During this period, foreign investment and joint-venture arrange ments strengthened an inward-looking market orientation that made the shift to export orientation more difficult. To sustain industrial and development, the state should construct and support a growth coalition9' of key social actors.