Strategic-relational Approach Research Articles

Joining the ideational and the material: transforming food systems toward radical food democracy

This paper presents a conceptualization of radical food democracy (RFD) which links the diverse economies approach of Gibson-Graham with Tully’s notion of diverse citizenship. Despite its invaluable contribution to theorizing the role of alternative food networks (AFNs) in transforming unsustainable industrial food systems, the diverse economies scholarship has been criticized for essentializing the autonomy of alternative economic practices—hence risking to confound emancipatory social change with punctuated forms of “local,” “quality,” “organic certified” products, which nevertheless remain embedded in market-mediated capitalist relations, and displacement and/or deferral of negative impacts. This paper aims to address such critiques, contending that the realization of RFD requires both (1) the experimentation with new economic practices that carve out food economies alternative to the working logic of capital accumulation, and (2) the cultivation of new political subjects capable of universalizing these particular struggles. After situating various existing practices associated with food democracy in a framework of various modes of democratic citizenship, we underpin our understanding of RFD with a theory of change informed by Bob Jessop’s strategic-relational approach to social structures, agents’ reflexive actions, and their contingency. Following a critical scientific approach to the social role of academics, this theoretical framework is illustrated using a case study from Germany. The empirical work draws on participant observation and semi-structured interviews with leaders of Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) cooperatives and Food Policy Council (FPC) networks conducted in Cologne, Berlin, and Frankfurt in 2018–2020. To conclude, this paper argues that the emancipatory potential of food democracy should cultivate both lighthouse alternative economic practices that are connected with people’s everyday lives, and political imagination that dares to critically engage with existing institutions. Likewise, RFD praxis requires a constant back and forth between the ideational and the practical, the abstract and the concrete, the actionable and the analytical, to challenge both the symbolic-discursive and the material dimensions of capitalist agri-food systems.

Sustainability against the logics of the state: Political and institutional barriers in the Chilean infrastructure sector

The state is often portrayed as a progressive entity enabling transition processes. However, this article delves into the limitations faced by state institutions, which have been identified as resistant to change and entrenched in path dependence. This article explores the political and institutional barriers that state institutions encounter when implementing sustainability approaches in the infrastructure sector in Chile. The article argues that explanations based on path dependence and lock-in overlook the crucial political and strategic dimensions of policy and institutional inertia. Employing a Strategic Relational Approach (SRA) reveals that the identified barriers, such as limited state capacity and institutional logics, are strategically employed by state and civil society actors to maintain a growth-oriented policy paradigm conflicting with sustainability goals. State barriers constitute a system of strategic selectivity to discourage the adoption of sustainability approaches while favouring incumbent actors, market-based systems, and those specific infrastructures of the growth-oriented paradigm.

Rethinking Political Inclusion Beyond Moderation: Strategic Relational Pluralization in Tunisian Islamist Politics

Abstract This article explores the complex dynamics shaping the integration of the Tunisian Islamist party Ennahdha into the instituted political game. Drawing on a strategic relational approach, the analysis highlights the simultaneous, mutually reactive, and often conflicting relationships of Ennahdha party with three types of actors: political secular forces (allied or antagonist), political and religious Salafi actors, and faith-based associations. Based on extensive field research and 33 in-depth interviews conducted with key players involved, we propose to capture these dynamics at the macro (regime), meso (organizations), and micro levels, through the notion of strategic pluralization, by which we mean a reconfiguration of Ennahdha’s relations with various Islamic actors under the pressure of secular forces. Going beyond institutional-structural approaches and monolithic interpretations of the Islamist constellation, we argue that Ennahdha’s integration in relational economies has formed the basis of the party’s strategy to secure its political inclusion in the post-revolutionary scene.

Neoliberal reform discourse in Egyptian higher education

The global neoliberal discourse on Higher Education (HE) reform has become dominant in both the developed and developing worlds. The paper tackles the Egyptian HE reforms that have been produced in line with the global neoliberal discourse through the World Bank’s (WB) funded reform projects. Through Foucauldian discourse and genealogical analysis, the study questioned, troubled, and de-naturalized the inevitability and persistence of the neoliberal discourse in Egyptian HE. Far from being deterministic and rational, the process of transfer of the global neoliberal discourse to Egyptian HE was embedded in the interaction of a number of discursive and structural selectivities as captured by the Strategic Relational Approach. On one hand, privatization, cost-sharing strategies, and quality assurance systems constituted the major policy reforms produced by the neoliberal discourse. On the other hand academic freedoms, university autonomy, and equitable access to HE have been discursively disallowed, de-problematized and excluded. The 25th of January revolution represented a discontinuity that threatened the collapse of the neoliberal discourse while the crushing of the revolution perpetuated and reinforced the neoliberal discourse reflecting a mutual relationship between neoliberal and authoritarian discourses and governmentalities.

The gaps between policy design and peasant migrants' intention of citizenization: The study of China's Guangdong Province

The citizenization of peasant migrants is key to understanding China's long-term urban-rural imbalance and ongoing rural transformations. The majority of existing literature focused on structural/institutional or agentive/subjective factors, while an integrated perspective examining both structural and agentive factors related to the citizenization process is rarely seen. Borrowing theories from the strategic-relational approach, this paper unfolds the matching and mismatching mechanisms between the policy design and peasant migrants' intentions of citizenization. Drawing on a case study in China's Guangdong Province, this study finds that: (1) citizenization policies prefer to offer citizenship to the new generation of peasant migrants, which matches the age structure of peasant migrants; (2) although municipal governments are prone to attract young peasant migrants with high educational level and strong competitiveness, peasant migrants generally have a relatively low educational level and weak professional training; (3) the high threshold of citizenization in mega-metropolitan and metropolitan cities mismatches peasant migrants' preference towards the first-tier cities. This paper describes the matching and mismatching mechanisms between structure and agency associated with the citizenization of peasant migrants. The policy reflections proposed by this study point towards enhancing nearby urbanization and in situ urbanization, so as to increase the attraction of young peasant migrants by ordinary cities. Besides, this paper calls for the promotion of rural-urban co-governance, making rural revitalization an alternative and supplement to the urbanization driven by rural-urban migration.

A relational approach to the role of the state in societal transitions and transformations towards sustainability

The important role of the state in societal transitions and transformations towards sustainability has long been acknowledged. Yet, existing theoretical frameworks in the field remain only partially capable of providing the necessary analytical support to study this. In response, this article proposes a relational approach to the role of state power in societal transitions based on the strategic-relational approach to state theory as developed by Bob Jessop. The resulting analytical framework is built around six mutually intertwined dimensions of the state: forms of representation, internal organisation, forms of intervention, social basis, state projects, and hegemonic formation. The article relates each of these to recent issues and research within energy and transitions scholarship and specifies how the framework can be used in empirical studies. Through this approach a sophisticated conception of the state is provided, moving beyond understanding it in purely institutional terms or as a singular, unitary, or monolithic actor.

Examining non-Indigenous teacher perceptions of Indigenous students in Taiwan through a Strategic Relational Approach

This article examines non-Indigenous teachers’ expectations of, perceptions of, knowledge about, and attitudes towards Indigenous students in Taiwan using a Strategic Relational Approach. Drawing on survey data that combined Likert-scale responses with reflexive, open-ended questions, we found that whilst teacher survey responses indicated a normatively positive view of Indigenous students, this was troubled by their open-ended answer responses which included many negative perceptions of Indigenous students’ behaviours, family backgrounds, and capacity for educational achievement. We argue that this indicates an underlying tension held by non-Indigenous teachers of Indigenous students, constructed through contradictory perceptions of self (open to and encouraging of Indigenous learners) and of Indigenous students (as less capable than non-Indigenous students, and uninterested in educational success). Using the Strategic Relational Approach’s notion of a context conduct dialectic, we offer an explanation of this tension by positioning teachers centrally within Taiwan’s cultural political economy, before considering implications for teacher education.

Leadership and institutional design in collaborative government digitalisation: Evidence from Belgium, Denmark, Estonia, Germany, and the UK

Large-scale government digitalisation projects require collaborative approaches for their successful development and implementation. To shed light on these collaboration dynamics, the interplay between two integral parts of collaborative projects: the project rules, procedures, and structures (collectively known as institutional design) and the leaders managing these projects is studied. In doing so, the paper provides empirically grounded insights into the management of collaborative government digitalisation projects. Taking an institutional perspective, and the strategic-relational approach (SRA), we examine the extent to which institutional design constraints leadership behaviours, and under what conditions leaders begin to adjust and/or challenge these design features adding to the knowledge of managing digitalisation of government. To this end, we present a five-country case study of national digitalisation projects across Europe. Our results show that while clear institutional design features such as established rules, project structures, and standard operating procedures are essential at the initial stages of the projects, leaders' skills in understanding and tailoring these features are critical to handle project-related problems and moving forwards towards implementation. This underscores the importance of examining projects taking an SRA approach and the need to understand leadership behaviour in the context of the structures in which it is embedded.

Revisiting institutional credibility of informal rental housing in Shenzhen: For dwelling function or exclusion function?

The credibility thesis premises that an institution's endogenous credibility and function, rather than its form, ensures its persistence. Informal rental housing (IRH), an informal housing institution in China, was suggested to serve as a dwelling for low-income residents in previous research on institutional credibility. Combining the institutional functionalism in credibility thesis and the relational and constructivist perspective in the strategic-relational approach (SRA), this research on two distinct SPRH cases in Shenzhen aims to re-examine the credibility thesis, moving the emphasis away from institutional functions toward the interaction between function and dysfunction, and their substitutability in the relation reconstruction dynamics. It reveals that the informal housing institution's credibility rationale has shifted in Shenzhen. Instead of serving a dwelling function, IRH is becoming an investment tool for profit-making and a part of public service for government targets, contributing to the credibility of informal housing and exacerbating the exclusion of the disadvantaged groups from urban areas. IRH's institutional credibility is contingent upon not just the endogenous institutional function, but also on the interplay of the function and dysfunction embedded in its institutional environment.

Power and agency within the evaluative state: A strategic–relational approach to quantification of higher education

This article addresses the problem of the quantification of higher education by introducing a theoretical framework for power relations and agency within this process. Instead of treating evaluation regimes as external and imposed on the sector, it argues for a relational approach to the problem of exercising power over the higher education sector through means of evaluation. To develop such an approach, the article draws on two sources: Guy Neave’s account of the evaluative state and Bob Jessop’s strategic–relational approach (SRA) to the state. By using the latter to further develop our understanding of the logic under which the evaluative state operates, the article offers a general framework for inquiring about the conditions that shape power relations and impact the degree of agency at the disposal of the actors involved in the evaluative state. For this purpose, the article operationalises the six general dimensions of the state developed on the grounds of the SRA in the context of the evaluative state. In turn, to demonstrate its heuristic value, the article refers to the emergence of the evaluative state in Poland and how scholarly communication was quantified and made commensurate in this process.

Understanding a Key Electoral Tool: A New Dataset on the Global Distribution of Voter Identification Laws

ABSTRACT Relating electoral laws to electoral integrity has long been a focus of academic research. Using the strategic-relational approach, as outlined in this special issue, it is possible to better understand how electoral laws shape the voter experience and electoral outcomes. This paper contributes to this understanding by looking at Voter Identification (ID) laws. With no consolidated dataset of voter ID laws existing outside the U.S.A. it is difficult to answer research questions put forward in this special issue, especially the second. This paper begins to address this shortfall by presenting the Comparative Voter ID Law (CVIL) index. Which has collected data on 246 individual electoral jurisdictions. Data presented show how voter ID laws are distributed globally, regionally, by regime type and level of democracy. The second part of the analysis goes on to describe voter ID laws by whether a jurisdiction has compulsory ID laws, how many different types of ID are accepted and the minimum number of ID documents that must be shown. Thirdly, other variables within the dataset are described. The CVIL will provide opportunities to understand how Voter ID laws are part of institutional design, are used by actors, shape the voter experience and electoral out-comes.

Regulation by impasse: Pesticide registration, capital and the state in Costa Rica

Costa Rica's prodigious use of pesticides, as well as the burgeoning plantation sector that these agrochemicals support, exacerbates the tensions between extraction and preservation at the heart of the country's development model. We explore these tensions through a study of the country's pesticide registry, the regulatory process to approve active ingredients and formulations for use. After nearly two decades of reform efforts, the registry is widely recognized to be non-functioning: most of the country's pesticides exist in administrative limbo and relatively few new compounds have been approved. Based on extensive interviews and in-depth policy analysis, we construct four phases of reform and use a strategic-relational approach to the state to analyze this process. We conceptualize the registry's gridlock as a form of governance that we term regulation by impasse, an arrangement reproduced through disputes within and between the cognizant ministries, juridical bodies and other regulating authorities, in relation to the shifting strategies and contexts of political economic and wider social forces. We argue that hegemony is tenuously maintained through the registry dispute itself, while revealing the deeply frayed condition of the Costa Rican development model.

The strategic-relational formation of regional and metropolitan scales: studying two Polish regions undergoing transformation

ABSTRACT This paper aims to capture a given spatio-temporal fix in the regional and metropolitan formation processes within two Polish regions: Lubelskie and Silesia. The strategic–relational approach (SRA) to the state analysis was adopted to discern the key elements of regional and metropolitan discourses. The wide SRA framework allows us to situate these discourses within formal and substantive dimensions of both scales, and then – using the territory–place–scale–networks (TPSN) framework – to connect them to the other aspects of socio-spatial relations. The selected regions occupy a special place within regional policy in Poland and discourse at a national level due to structural problems within their territories. Therefore, different actors have identified the need for thorough regional transformations. In turn, they should be analysed in the context of the state transformation, which began in Poland in 1989, with its currently unknown direction when it comes to the modes of regional and metropolitan policies. The results of the research prove that specific actors adopt regionally different strategies, aiming at pursuing their own goals as well as supporting regional raison d’états. At the same time, however, it is difficult to indicate evidence of political rescaling concerning the transfer of tasks and resources to the regional scale, except for its strengthening resulting from the implementation of European Union funds, which can be considered in terms of governance or meta-governance failure. The ‘stewards of hope’ image has been assigned in this context to new metropolitan-scale institutions.

The State in a Capitalist Society: Protests and State Reactions in Vietnam and Indonesia

When, how, and why do states take what kind of action vis-à-vis protests? This article tackles these under-researched questions with respect to Vietnam and Indonesia. The theoretical frame applied focusses on the state–society nexus and in-built biases of the capitalist state and its actions. It draws on Poulantzas’ idea of the state as a material condensation of the relationship of social forces as well as on Jessop’s “strategic-relational approach” and his concept of the “state in a capitalist society.” The method used is Protest Event Analysis, using data for 2016 and 2017 from four Indonesian and Vietnamese newspapers. This is complemented by data drawn from various newspapers on protests and state reactions for the period 2018–2020. The focussed theory frame used helps to explain similarities and differences of state reactions in Indonesia and Vietnam. Both states may govern protest in slightly different ways. Ultimately, however, both those states’ reactions indicate strong similarities in that they serve to maintain existing patterns of political, economic, and socio-cultural domination and the accumulation of capital as the very basis of the capitalist economy. To put these tentative findings to the test, longer-term data and cross-regional comparisons on state reactions to protests should be used.

Reproduction, discipline, inequality: Critiquing East-Asian developmentalism through a strategic-relational examination of Singapore’s Central Provident Fund

The five ‘developmentalist’ welfare states of East Asia (South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Japan) have been presented as successful projects of economic progress, positively aligning citizen-interests with business objective. Utilising Jessop’s Strategic-Relational Approach (SRA), we analyse the Central Provident Fund (CPF), Singapore’s ‘forced savings’ social policy which organises housing, healthcare, education and retirement. Through a myriad of eligibilities/ineligibilities, Singapore’s CPF administers desired social behaviours while sustaining a series of inequalities supporting certain classed and gendered interests over others. Our analysis breaks down the CPF into three social relational orientations: (1) heteronormative familial responsiblisation, (2) labour market activation and (3) class reproduction. The article highlights the function of CPF in institutionalising conservative and pro-market political interests. CPF reproduces material inequalities and fashions behaviours conducive with the dominant accumulation strategy while discouraging those which are not, privileging some interests over others.

‘Win-win’ contested: negotiating the privatisation of Africa's Freedom Railway with the ‘Chinese of today’

AbstractAs infrastructure development has become a key ingredient in Africa–China relations, the role of African governments in co-determining the design, funding and governance of the continent's infrastructures has come under close scrutiny. This article sheds light on the rehabilitation of a symbol of Sino–African friendship: the Tanzania–Zambia Railway Authority (TAZARA). Employing Jessop's strategic-relational approach, it is shown that the strategies of the shareholding governments in the negotiations with a Chinese consortium were informed by strategic learning from previous railway privatisations, corresponding cost–benefit analyses and reflection about Chinese commercial interests. Zambia's indebtedness and Tanzania's autocratic developmental state under President Magufuli formed crucial elements of the structural context in which the fate of Africa's Freedom Railway was negotiated. The article transcends both crudely structuralist accounts of a supposedly all-powerful China and voluntarist conceptions of African agency that are void of structure. Assessing (African) agency requires analytical sensitivity towards the dialectical interaction between specific strategic capacities and strategically selective political–economic contexts.

Theorizing nation-building through high-speed rail development: Hegemony and space in the Basque Country, Spain

Despite a variegated body of academic work on nation-building and rail infrastructures, attention to the relationship between nation-building and wider processes of economic and political restructuring and an explicit and theoretically robust consideration of space have been largely missing. This paper seeks to address both limitations by advancing a spatially sensitive conceptualization of how rail infrastructures may be used as a tool for nation-building in contemporary capitalist societies. Particularly, I draw on Jessop's strategic-relational approach to the state and on theoretical contributions on the spatiality of social relations to propose the synthetic notion of ‘spatial hegemonic vision’ to explain the legitimacy and substantive coherence of state action, argue for the inherent spatiality of nation-building projects, and facilitate a theoretically robust and nuanced understanding of such spatiality. I further distinguish between political economic and cultural dimensions in nation-building and discuss the materialization and imagining of specific configurations of territories, places, scales and networks involved in spatial hegemonic visions. This conceptualization is then applied to the development of a high-speed rail line in the Spanish region of the Basque Country. This line has been mobilized to advance two competing yet partially compatible spatial hegemonic visions, whilst becoming itself a site where they came into conflict. The paper concludes by examining the validity of the proposed conceptualization and discussing its applicability to other contemporary cases of nation-building through transport infrastructures.

The Impact of Covid-19 on Structure and Agency in a Borderland. The Case of Two Twin Towns in Central Europe

ABSTRACT The Covid-19 pandemic has sparked numerous unintended social and political consequences, especially for border regions as many European states decided to temporarily close their borders. This decision had a tremendous effect not only on the work of various actors in border towns, but also on the lives of borderlanders, whose daily practices are embedded in cross-border spaces. By applying a strategic-relational approach (Jessop [2001]. Institutional Re(Turns) and the Strategic – Relational Approach. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 33, no. 7: 1213–35. doi:10.1068/a32183), our article aims to explore the impact of the pandemic on institutional structures and the agency of various actors in two selected twin towns – Frankfurt an der Oder-Słubice and Cieszyn-Český Těšín. Based on both expert, semi-structured interviews with representatives of the above-mentioned towns and a document analysis, it elaborates on the coping strategies deployed to counteract the challenges caused by the border closure, the factors impacting cross-border cooperation, as well as the similarities and differences between the selected cases .

Immigration Policy and State Power

An analysis of 20 years of official documents (1995–2014) and legislative acts at national and EU levels using Jessop’s Strategic Relational Approach (SRA) offers insights into inherent structural flaws in the Justice and Home Affairs aspects of European and member state migration policies. Focusing on two triptychs (hierarchy, governance and government; state power(s), strategic selectivities and structures) and tracking their development clarifies that this policy field’s purposes stray beyond migration management. In fact, the EU migration policy model was set up to be inherently expansive and is intimately linked to EU institutions and national governments striving to enhance their power(s). This is why apparent aberrations and unlawful acts by states amounting to a power grab have developed into an attack against normative frameworks including human rights. This article investigates whether European approaches to immigration policy at the EU and national levels currently pose a problem in terms of state power and authoritarianism due to inherently expansive tendencies and the serial production of problems and hierarchies. It offers a methodological, state-theoretical contribution to address a policy fix in which the EU and its member states appear caught, with harmful effects that spread beyond EU borders through externalisation.

Crisis, institutional change and peripheral industrialization: Municipal-central state relations and changing dependencies in three old industrial towns of Hungary

This paper aims to discuss radical changes, institutional responses and their socio-spatial consequences by focusing on reorganisation of institutional settings of local economic development after the global financial crisis (2008). We focus on the complexity of institutional change and social relations driving those in three old industrial towns (Dunaújváros, Martfű and Tatabánya in Hungary) that faced a functional, cognitive and political lock-in in the 1990s, and emerged as spaces of encounter of global production networks, governmental development policies and local society in the 2000s. This entailed a complex and dynamic assembly of various interests and strategies, providing a scope for local institutional experimentations that were interrupted by the global crisis and the resulting macro-structural changes. We place municipal agency, its uneasy, contested and changing relation to the central state in the focus. We discuss how the introduction of a new regulative system and institutional-spatial hierarchies in Hungary after the 2008 crisis enhanced central state power, and how that was mobilized to develop a new regime in which communities were losing control over their resources, and local assets were being channelled in peripheral industrialization orchestrated by the central government. Discussing municipal agency in a strategic-relational approach allows us to highlight the depth and multiple consequences of the crisis locally beyond market relations, giving an insight in the spatial rearrangement of power in relation to peripheral industrialization.