State Infrastructural Power Research Articles

State infrastructural power in a neopatrimonialist democratization context: Why Tunisian sustainable land management fails

State infrastructural power in a neopatrimonialist democratization context: Why Tunisian sustainable land management fails

State infrastructural power through scalar practices: On China’s decarbonization endeavors

To offer a fresh angle on the state capacity to advance decarbonization, this article brings into dialog political economies of scale and the Mannian notion of state infrastructural power, animating this conceptual cross-fertilization with an analysis of China’s evolving policy framework for decarbonization. This article begins with building the conceptual construct of scalar practice as a source of state infrastructural power and categorizing three key scalar practices, namely, interscalar rearranging, interregional reshuffling, and urban‒rural scalar mixing. Building upon this, the article critically evaluates China’s policy framework and state actions against the notion of infrastructural power: the Chinese state applies noncoercive means to elicit support, extract resources, and coordinate actions while transitioning to decarbonization-driven accumulation regimes, and these noncoercive means are mobilized together with coercive means through the art of scalar structuration that (re)defines central–local, urban‒rural, and interregional relations. Overall, this study elucidates how state-orchestrated processes of (re)territorialization for the decarbonization agenda give rise to the expansion of the state’s autonomous power in relation to civil society, albeit in a manner that manifests contested power struggle and conflicting internal logics.

Cash transfers after electoral violence: A case study of citizen‐state relations in Nakuru, Kenya

AbstractThis paper examines the impacts of three cash transfer programs, one for orphans and vulnerable children (CT‐OVC), one for older persons (OPCT) and a universal social pension (Inua Jamii Senior Citizens' Scheme), for citizen‐state relations in areas of Kenya that experienced high levels of electoral violence in 2007. Drawing on 40 interviews with civil servants and community leaders and 16 focus group discussions with both beneficiaries and non‐beneficiaries of the cash transfer programs conducted across two sub‐counties in Nakuru, this paper argues that the central state, in the wake of post‐electoral violence, effectively mobilised state power to make and enforce geographic targeting decisions down to the village level in an effort to mitigate ethnic tensions and strengthen citizen‐state relations. The paper further argues that the success of such localised distribution in strengthening citizen‐state relations has been limited due to incomplete program coverage, limited information about targeting procedures, and citizens' prior experiences with the state which collectively undermine citizens' perceptions of inclusion and exclusion at the local level. These findings are brought into conversation with other research on cash transfers and citizenship across Kenya to parse out the ways in which the impacts of cash transfer programs for citizen‐state relations are mediated by state infrastructural power, citizens' prior experiences with the state, and key aspects of program design. The paper also examines the implications of these findings for other countries across Africa that have experienced generalised electoral violence.

Kenya’s ‘Universal’ social pension: The politics of registration in Marsabit County

In 2017 the government of Kenya transformed its poverty-targeted older persons cash transfer into a ‘70-plus’ social pension. While the literature suggests that a switch from targeted to universal programs would simplify registration and reduce inclusion and exclusion errors, there were significant variations in take-up of the social pension across diverse counties in Kenya, with lower take-up in counties with higher rates of poverty. Drawing on qualitative data collected across six months in 2018, including interviews and focus group discussions with government officials, community leaders, politicians and ordinary citizens, this paper examines why take-up of the social pension has been lower in Marsabit County, an area of the country with high levels of poverty. We find that government officials struggled to register eligible beneficiaries in remote and marginalized communities within the mass registration exercise’s tight timelines. As a result, they often relied on local actors to relay information between the state and local communities, which resulted in uneven registration and the exclusion of some marginalized populations, particularly in remote and conflicted affected areas. We argue that pressure from the national government to register potential beneficiaries in the month prior to the highly contested 2017 national election exacerbated the challenges posed by low state infrastructural power, including limited resources, low state oversight and a lack of embeddedness within local communities. The visible expansion of the social pension prior to the election was prioritized over achieving universal registration. This paper contributes to the literature on universal versus targeted approaches to social assistance and furthers our knowledge of the challenges of reaching the poorest of the poor even through nominally ‘universal’ programs. While universal approaches expand access to social assistance, this paper highlights the importance of ongoing registration and investments in state infrastructural power to ensure that remote and marginalized populations can access social assistance.

Hostile Environments: State Infrastructural Power and the Exclusion of Unauthorized Migrants in Western Europe

Hostile Environments: State Infrastructural Power and the Exclusion of Unauthorized Migrants in Western Europe

Hydroelectric Extractivism: Infrastructural Violence and Coloniality in the Sierra Norte de Puebla, Mexico

This paper argues that in Latin America, renewable energy and mining infrastructures are entangled in a logic of so-called green extractivism that rearticulates coloniality through infrastructural violence. It grounds the analysis in a case study of the Sierra Norte de Puebla, Mexico, where a logic of hydroelectric extractivism entangles small hydropower and mining projects. This co-articulation of extractivist and green transition imperatives reflects a reconfiguration of the Mexican political settlement to make natural resource extraction compatible with, and even necessary to, mitigating climate change. While presented as sustainable development by state and corporate actors, Nahua and Totonac land and environmental defenders resist these projects and call them proyectos de muerte to indicate that they threaten Indigenous lives, livelihoods, and territory. In analyzing this case study, the paper dispels the prevalent assumption that small hydropower plants cause minimal socio-ecological impacts. The findings also highlight the contested role of the state, illustrating that a state's infrastructural power can perpetuate coloniality and infrastructural violence while also enabling political activism to effectively challenge them. The focus on small and sustainable infrastructure contributes to burgeoning research on green extractivism, while the emphasis on power relations challenges much of the current literature on energy and sustainability transitions.

Bureaucratic fragmentation by design? the case of payroll management in the democratic Republic of Congo

ABSTRACT This paper examines the sources of bureaucratic fragmentation and coherence in the Democratic Republic of Congo by exploring the connections and tensions between interface bureaucracies and the back-office administration tasked with managing the public payroll system. Building on the ‘real governance’ literature and the notion of ‘infrastructural power’, we analyse the recent history of payroll management in Congo and especially its evolution over the last decades of state implosion and reconstruction so as to gauge the potential of different drivers of state infrastructural power. The return of the state in the first decades of the twenty-first century led to a spectacular and unprecedented growth in the number of civil servants, made possible by a reconstituted state budget and renewed donor engagement. Yet this growth largely reflects increased political competition and further disarticulated the payroll system, increasing its vulnerability to the issue of ghost workers. The case study shows important trade-offs, in processes of post-conflict reconstruction, between the triple objectives of building state infrastructural power, making use of it to improve public service delivery, and its democratization.

Strengthening the State through Crisis Management: Battles against the SARS and COVID-19 Pandemics in China

How do state leaders use crisis management to strengthen state infrastructural power? What explains the strategic choices of a state’s selective institutionalization of crisis measures? Crises offer unique opportunities for state-building, yet the role of crisis management in consolidating state power is underexamined. This paper explores these important issues by examining how the Chinese government has deployed wartime-like measures in battling the spread of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) and COVID-19. While authorities in China have adopted unconventional measures in managing the crises, they have selectively normalized ad hoc practices and institutionalized certain measures to strengthen state infrastructural power once they have ended or been temporarily contained. Drawing on the frameworks of rational choice and historical institutionalism, our analysis suggests that the central government normalizes or institutionalizes measures that help to consolidate its control of the bureaucracy and enhance regime legitimacy.

Infrastructural state capacity in the digital age: What drives the performance of COVID‐19 tracing apps?

AbstractIn a context where states increasingly complement their physical presence with digital means, the classic idea of infrastructural state power needs reconsideration. The COVID‐19 pandemic represents an unparalleled opportunity to that end, given the uniformity of one type of digital infrastructural intervention—the offer of contact tracing apps‐ and its highly varying performance across geographies. Against this backdrop, the article seeks to expand traditional discussions on state infrastructural power by testing a series of propositions on the explanatory factors behind tracing apps' emergence and adoption rates. The findings stemming from a pool of 150 countries show no straightforward connection between traditional and digital forms of infrastructural power. They also point at the primacy of governmental trust over financial, institutional, and technological factors—including privacy standards—when explaining high adoption, suggesting that the relational aspect of infrastructural power acquires a proportionally greater weight in the digital era.

Aiming for Universal Health Coverage through insurance in Ethiopia: State infrastructural power and the challenge of enrolment

Many developing countries are considering insurance as a means of pursuing Universal Health Coverage. A key challenge to confront is how to achieve high levels of health insurance enrolment. For voluntary schemes this entails mass awareness raising and promotional activity, though as schemes move to compulsory enrolment, monitoring and enforcement are required. This paper focuses on Ethiopia, which has made state health insurance for the informal sector a central pillar of its Universal Health Coverage strategy. The paper shows that high enrolment requires particular forms of state capacity, captured by Michael Mann's concept of state ‘infrastructural power’. The paper draws on detailed case studies of insurance implementation in the Tigray and Oromiya regions of Ethiopia to illustrate variation in state infrastructural power and the implications for health insurance. Findings suggest that the potential of state health insurance as a means of promoting health access for a broad section of the population may be limited to the minority of countries or regions within countries exhibiting high levels of infrastructural power.

Governing homeowner associations in China’s gated communities: the extension of state infrastructural power and its uneven reach

ABSTRACT Homeowner associations (HOAs), the emergent neighborhood-based organizations, spawn new modes of neighborhood governance in post-reform China, meanwhile are profoundly influenced by state power. Aiming to unpack the complexity and hybridity of neighborhood governance, this research presents a detailed examination of how the local state exerts institutionalized control over HOAs through three critical mechanisms of infrastructural power: (1) the establishment of regulatory institutions to formalize the state influence on HOAs; (2) the enforcement of registration projects to make HOAs legible and governable; (3) the cultivation of clientelist ties with participants of HOAs. The uneven state reach owing to fragmentally organized local authorities is purposively designed to facilitate political control on urban neighborhoods. This study enriches Mann’s conceptual framework of infrastructural power through the scrutiny of fragmented state apparatus, and renews our understanding of the dynamic state–society interactions at the conjuncture of economic liberation and political domination in post-reform China.

The Politics of Social Protection in Nepal: State Infrastructural Power and Implementation of the Scholarship Programme

This paper explores the dynamics shaping the implementation of Nepal’s School Scholarship Programme, an educational assistance programme that provides cash stipends to primary and secondary students of marginalised communities. Drawing on fieldwork in four districts – Ilam, Saptari, Lalitpur and Jumla – this paper makes two distinct arguments. First, it highlights the importance of infrastructural power to the implementation of social transfers – especially the limited capacity of higher levels of the state to monitor effectively the actions of lower levels. Second, it concludes that programme design can compensate for some of the limitations of state infrastructural power – especially the use of categorical targeting to distribute scholarships that has emerged from social justice framing of the scholarship programme. The limitations of state infrastructural power are especially keenly felt with respect to the disbursement of scholarships. As such, limited state infrastructural power leads to delayed and reduced payments that are likely to undermine the potential of the programme to effect social justice.

Authoritarian Aid and Regime Durability: Soviet Aid to the Developing World and Donor–Recipient Institutional Complementarity and Capacity

Abstract How does authoritarian aid influence the durability of dictatorships? Western aid is thought to facilitate authoritarian durability because it can provide patronage. Authoritarian aid, by contrast, has received far less attention. This article examines both Soviet economic and military assistance, developing a theory of donor–recipient institutional complementarity to explain the impact of Soviet aid during the Cold War. The argument is developed through case studies of Vietnam and Ghana and a cross-national statistical analysis of Soviet economic aid and military assistance to developing countries from 1955 to 1991. Soviet economic aid was tied to the purchase of Soviet industrial equipment. When recipient states shared the Soviet Union's centrally planned economy, economic aid strengthened state infrastructural power by (1) enhancing fiscal capacity and (2) cultivating the dependency of the population on the state. Aid flows helped consolidate and maintain authoritarian institutions, promoting authoritarian durability. By contrast, while Soviet economic aid to noncommunist regimes provided some opportunities for patronage through employment in SOEs, the lack of institutional complementarity in planning institutions and overall lack of capacity of these institutions caused Soviet aid to contribute to inflation and fiscal crises. Economic problems, in turn, increased the vulnerability of noncommunist regimes to military coups, particularly when ideological splits emerged between pro-Soviet rulers and pro-Western militaries that undermined elite cohesion. The institutional subordination of the military to communist parties insulated communist regimes from the risk of coups.

Regulatory-Disrupting but Infrastructure-Freeing: Entrepreneurial Financing During the Arab Spring (WITHDRAWN)

How do revolutions affect entrepreneurial financing? Prior studies argue that revolutions generate political uncertainty that decrease financing and that a more absent state breeds greater informality. However, the Arab Spring saw an increase in state financing actually, and these state institutions, rather than their absence, directly allocated such funding to informal firms. Using a novel dataset collected as the Arab Spring was occurring in Tunisia and Egypt, our study argues that prior work has predominantly focused on how revolutions erode state regulatory power (i.e., the degree to which the state can issue rules without consulting its citizenry). However, we argue that revolutions may also free state infrastructural power (i.e., the degree to which citizenry rely on state institutions for goods and services). More specifically, we find that firms founded during the revolution paid less in bribery payments (“regulatory-disrupting”), and informal firms received more of the state funding made available amidst the Arab Spring (“infrastructure-freeing”). In paying greater attention to state infrastructural power, this study brings greater nuance to how we understand the role of revolutions on entrepreneurial activity. More generally, this study heightens engagement of work in entrepreneurship with insights from political sociology.

State Infrastructural Power and Social Transfers: The Local Politics of Distribution and Delivering ‘Progress’ in Ethiopia

This paper examines the politics of implementing the PSNP in Ethiopia. The PSNP is a targeted food and cash-for-work programme that places a strong emphasis on its ‘productive’ contribution through public works, a livelihoods component and the aim of mass ‘graduation’ from support. The paper focuses on how local governments resolve two challenges related to the distribution of social transfers. First, is the challenge for state capacity of generating sufficient and accurate information with which to select households while limiting undue influence of powerful local actors. Second, is the recurrent tension between the programme’s developmental objectives and its protective function. The paper argues that variation in state infrastructural power is vital to understanding how these challenges are resolved in different parts of Ethiopia. Drawing on two research sites in each of Afar, Oromiya and Tigray, the paper highlights the extremes of variation within Ethiopia. Implementation is shaped by the particular spatial pattern of expansion of the party-state carried out under EPRDF rule. In Tigray, strong party-state infrastructural power underpins selection processes and local state compliance with national targets. In Oromiya, state infrastructural power was underpinned by a significant degree of coercion in the face of limited legitimacy of the party-state. However, recent political events have seriously eroded this. In Afar, the state is forced to compensate for its own limitations by engaging in negotiation with clan structures.

The Politics of Distributing Social Transfers in Oromiya, Ethiopia: Encadrement and the Fluctuation of State Infrastructural Power

This paper examines the politics of distributing the Productive Safety Net Programme (PSNP) in Ethiopia’s Oromiya region. Drawing on detailed case studies in Arssi and North Shewa, the paper highlights the importance of state infrastructural power in shaping programme distribution. Over 30 years of Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) rule, the party-state project of encadrement, or the incorporation of people into structures of control, has been taken to a new level. The creation of sub-kebele administrative structures and performance evaluations that reach down to the household level have underpinned a massive expansion of state infrastructural power – the ability of the central state to implement policies throughout its territory. The case studies highlight the importance of state infrastructural power in understanding PSNP implementation. Sub-kebele structures have become a key aspect of PSNP implementation, notably in identifying who receives support. However, strong state infrastructural power has also proven problematic, used to enforce graduation from the PSNP to meet centrally defined targets, regardless of the reality of local food insecurity. The Oromo protests and the ongoing transformation of the political landscape in Ethiopia have unleashed a counter-movement to the project of encadrement, leading to the collapse of these structures of control. This collapse threatens state infrastructural power, both in terms of service delivery and the coercive power of the central state.

The Political Economy of Health Insurance Enrolment in Ethiopia: Party, State and the Quest for Universal Health Coverage

Many developing countries are considering insurance as a means of pursuing universal health coverage. A key challenge to confront is how to achieve high levels of health insurance enrolment. For voluntary schemes, this entails mass awareness raising and promotional activity, though as schemes move to compulsory enrolment, monitoring and enforcement is required. This paper focuses on Ethiopia, which is has made state health insurance for the informal sector a central pillar of its universal health coverage strategy. The paper shows that high enrolment requires particular forms of state capacity, captured here by Michael Mann’s concept of state ‘infrastructural power’. The paper draws on detailed case studies of health insurance implementation in the Tigray and Oromiya regions of Ethiopia to illustrate variation in state infrastructural power and the implications for the promotion of health insurance. The findings suggest that the potential of state health insurance as a means of promoting health access for a broad section of the population may be limited to the minority of countries or regions within countries exhibiting high levels of infrastructural power.

The Indigenous Inheritance: Critical Antecedents and State Building in Latin America and Southeast Asia

AbstractIn comparative-historical analysis, countries are always different places before critical junctures set them on divergent pathways. By comparing the legacies of politicized ethnic diversity for the construction of state infrastructural power in Latin America and Southeast Asia, we elaborate the methodological and substantive importance of these “critical antecedents.” The critical antecedent in each region was the inheritance at independence of a sharp indigenous cleavage. This indigenous inheritance shaped threat perceptions and state-society coalitions in both regions in similarly powerful path-dependent ways—yet in intriguingly divergent directions. A salient indigenous cleavage hindered but did not preclude state building in nineteenth-century Peru, while fostering but not predestining state building in post–World War II Malaysia. Divergent levels of postcolonial state infrastructural power thus exhibit deep if indirect foundations in the identity cleavages inherited from preindependence eras. This cross-region comparative exploration highlights the analytical leverage gained from systematically incorporating preexisting cross-case differences into critical juncture accounts.

Mapping State Infrastructural Power

We reinvigorate the concept of state infrastructural power by highlighting how the physical presence of the state influences citizen behavior by signaling state interest and strength. We propose a new measure of state infrastructure based on points-of-interest data provided by location-based services companies. Our measure helps researchers address four challenges associated with studying state infrastructural power: 1) it draws on firm-produced (rather than government-produced) data, 2) it includes geo-referenced location information, which can be aggregated to any geographical or administrative level, 3) it traces temporal changes in state infrastructure, and 4) it covers different types of state agencies. We illustrate its features using original databases that we constructed by scraping state agencies in China and other countries. We demonstrate how researchers can use our measure by examining how coercive organizations reduce protests and provide our data, code, and a tutorial to help researchers explore new avenues of inquiry.

The Politics of Distributing Social Transfers in Afar, Ethiopia: The Intertwining of Party, State and Clan in the Periphery

This paper examines the politics of distributing social transfers in Ethiopia’s Afar region. Two detailed case studies are used to examine the role of state infrastructural power and party politics in shaping distribution of the Productive Safety Net Programme (PSNP). The paper emphasises the importance of situating the PSNP within the context of the expansion of a fused party-state alongside a process of economic ‘modernisation’ in Afar over recent decades. This process has contributed to food insecurity, which the PSNP is intended to address, as well as the limited nature of state infrastructural power, with the state reliant to a significant degree on clan structures for local governance. The result is that the PSNP – designed and financed by the federal government and donors – ultimately depends to a significant degree on the authority and territorial reach of the clan for implementation. While past evaluations have highlighted poor implementation, and particularly targeting, in Afar, the study finds that perceived legitimacy of the distribution of the PSNP varies considerably. Though past studies have pointed to the involvement of clan leaders as one of the main causes of poor implementation, this paper suggests that the more fundamental problem is, rather, the lack of infrastructural power of the state that necessitates the involvement of clan leaders.