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What kind of state would be most effective for development in the countries of the
global South today? Would democracy, civil society and an emphasis on human
development find a place in it?
Manpreet Dhillon

"The struggle for the freedom to have bread, the freedom to obtain all consumer goods
cannot be deferred."
-- Antonio Gramsci
Development has come to occupy the collective imagination of statecraft in present times. It
is valued for it emancipatory potential to release mankind from poverty and disease. It has
come to be placed as the rubicon of partnership between various actors defined by numerous
persuasions, an ideal state.
Max Weber defines the concept of the state as ownership of the legitimate use of force. He
defines politics as the struggle for power. He establishes a legal-administrative order through
which the state functions and legislates on its citizenry. For him, a bureaucratic functionary
established on the basis of established rules is required for the state to exist and transact
business. A separation of the public and the private domain is also one of the markers for a
modern state to come in being. This purposive rationality interacts with the demands of the
political order that is located in the norms and cultural fabric of society (Dusza, 1989).
Foucault ([1978]1991), further down the road, looks at the governmentality of the state when
it has taken over from the Sovereign the mantle of ownership of the lives and mandates for
its citizens. The security of the state assumes priority and spreads itself in the logic of looking
after the pastoral flock. In thus creating a discursive framework wherein to govern is to
govern things, create a subject for the practice of government. He quotes Guillaume de la
Perriere, government is the right disposition of things, arranged so as to lead to a convenient
end. In this quote he slices away territoriality and moves into the complex of men and
things. Foucault loops into the way a ship is managed by taking care of exigencies outside
the bounds of security. Here he brings into argument another element of statecraft, viz.law
Government is defined as the right manner of disposing things so as to lead not to the form of the
common good, as the jurists texts would have said, but to an end which is convenient for each of
the things that are to be governed. This implies a plurality of specific aims: for instance, government
will have to ensure that the greatest possible quantity of wealth is produced, that the people are
provided with sufficient means of subsistence, that the population is enable to multiply, etc. There is a
whole series of specific finalities, then, which become the objective of government as such. In order
to achieve these various finalities, things must be disposed and this term, dispose, is important
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because with sovereignty the instrument that allowed it to achieve its aim that is to say, obedience
to the laws was the law itself; law and sovereignty were absolutely inseperable. On the contrary,
with government it is a question not of imposing law on men, but on disposing things: that is to say,
of employing tactics rather than laws, and even of using laws themselves as tactics to arrange things
in such a way that, through a certain number of means, such and such ends may be achieved.
Further on, he loops in the economy
It was through the development of the science of government that the notion of economy came to be
recentred on to that different plane of reality which we characterize today as the economic, and it
was also through this science that it became possible to identify problems specific to the population;
but conversely we can say as well that it was thanks to the perception of the specific problems of the
population, and thanks to the isolation of that area of reality that we call the economy, that the
problem of government finally came to be thought, reflected and calculated outside of the juridical
framework of sovereignty. And that statistics which, in mercantilist tradition, only ever worked
within and for the benefit of a monarchical administration that functioned according to the form of
sovereignty, now becomes the major technical factor, or one of the major technical factors, of this
new technology.

Abrahamsen (2000) posits the good governance idea into the heart and nerve center of
Foucauldian governmentality in which the developmental discourse is embedded in social
relations and structures of power. Let us look at what this implies.

The agenda concretised when state legitimacy was challenged due to its inability to govern
the masses and due to the invalidation of Communist regimes. This led to a vacuum that was
filled by the agenda of the economy as market. It can be argued that democracy only came as
the hand-maiden of marketization in specific countries of Africa that she looks into. It was
not a mass mobilization but an exigency of the state to be legitimate in the international arena
and gain power. She argues that globalization has enveloped the sovereignty of the state as an
autonomous actor and the state has networked with agencies of capitalism that reflect
international political economy, thereby making the state complicit in giving up power to
these outside agencies. After the end of the Cold War these states have felt the need to be
integrated with the world economy.

Economic reform of the state is a priority where donors dictate the terms of those reforms, the
missionary zeal of the West in civilizing the savage has accepted the new language of
development. Being poor is a sin that the West cannot let others suffer from. In this way, two
methods; stabilization and structural adjustment have come to be tools of the civilizing
mission. The market is the new Christianity. Disinvestment became the baptism; a cleansing
act from the sins of centralization and bureaucratic inefficiency. The good governance agenda
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puts sin back into the imagination of the governed as they are constructed to be unable to gain
their own understanding. The seductiveness of good governance is nothing less than the
seductiveness of being civilized and saved by the benevolence of the westerners. The state
becomes the beast to beat with its foreignness that was borrowed from Weberian rationality
and not coming from the values and customs of the land and the good governance agenda
emerges as the liberator of indigenous values and self expression.

Leftwich (1994) provides insight into how democracy and good governance link up by
providing examples of high-growth states in the developing world as essentially
undemocratic contrasted with seemingly democratic governments and citizenry in the
Western countries. He argues for the centrality of political engagement in bringing the
populace to a developmental path when he states that most of the centralized states achieved
impressive growth even in their regimes. He stresses how the concept of democracy was
liked with good governance by donor agencies when they evaluated the feasibility of change
as per their standards and norms. Here in, an effective and open public service has come to
define the good governance criteria as per the World Bank report Governance and
Development where in 1. Accoutability, 2. A legal framework for development, 3. Information
and 4. Tranparency become the tools of achieving governance excellence. He gives the
definition of strong states as having a strong and determined bureaucracy, a dubious human
rights record, disregard for civil society engagement and elite political direction of economic
decision making.

Evans (1995) in his book Embedded Autonomy took a stance that markets cannot really
function without the state and the state in turn cannot function without its bureaucrats, thus
putting Weber back in the bargain. He argues that it is precisely through state design that
growth takes place for eg. the IT revolution in Brasil, India and Korea during 1970-80. Evans
paraphrases Weber in elucidating the main tasks of the state i.e. making war and insuring
internal order primarily, and then fostering economic growth and welfare for the population.
The value of economic growth lies in creating a balance for its other tasks and creation of
rubric of legitimation around and within itself. He further holds that national economic
development and global trade are enmeshed in the new world order under neo-liberalism and
thus the local demands of the citizens are linked with the demands of global trade. He terms
this as the idea of creating comparative advantage. He thus creates a model of two state
explanation : predatory state and development state. The developmental state for him is a
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state that conjoins embeddedness (of the bureaucrats in the social networks and ties of
society) with autonomy (in the Weberian logic of being separate and rational oriented with
rules and functions) because the bureaucrats are the selective best who hold a office of high
honor with good pay and are commitment to the task at hand. He uses what he calls a
comparative institutional approach to gain knowledge about the creation and success of
various primarily infrastructural and economic institutions that came into being due to
interventions by state elites to spur growth in their countries.

Kohli (2004) divides the state into three sub-types for his analysis : neo patrimonial,
cohesive-capitalist and fragmented multi-class states. Nigeria being the example he cites for a
neo-patrimonial state wherein public resources are treated as private property by the ruling
elites in government albeit the stricture of legal-rational institutions existing. Cohesive-
capitalist states are in toto developmental states which rests of strong elite bureaucratic
structure premised on class commitments. For Kohli, India and Brasil are fragmented multi-
class states where developmental agenda cannot be completely enforced by the ruling class
because of multiple agencies engaging with the state and where the public domain is open to
contestation and negotiation, leading to impact on public policy. His argument pre-supposes
to my mind, an argument that democracy impinges growth. But then again, he is talking
about the engagement of the rulers with the industrialists and not necessarily about the role of
democratic institutions in leading to growth. I exemplify this by stressing that he is more
concerned with the relation between political and economic ties rather than the processes
within it, the rulers and the industry are the actors in his play. So, the argument boils down to
whether the state should have more power or the market in engendering development.

Pzeworski (1993) considers the demands of democracy on economic growth by looking at
property rights and the demands for consumption that makes authoritarian regimes seem
better positioned to deliver high growth. He tries to look into the linkages between
democracy and secure property rights that the state can affirm to the owner(s). He writes

The market is a mechanism in which individuals cast votes for allocations with the resources they
own and these resources are always distributed unequally; the state is a system which allocates
resources it does not own, with rights distributed differently from the market. Hence, the allocation of
resources which the individuals prefer as citizens does not in general coincide with that at which they
arrive via the market.

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To act as an intermediator, another element was introduced in the state-market dialogue that
was thought to have the potential to iron out the disputes on both sides; this was the entry
point of civil society in development discourse. In Olstroms (1996) formulation this is a
citizen as client relationship with the State as service provider, or the creator of certain public
goods. Evans (1996) gives a detailed analysis of how one can think of civil society as a
partnership between the citizens and the government, which he terms complementarity, that is
further refined in the idea of synergy, which is an engagement between the citizens and
government. A self rule of the local if you like. This links up with his earlier formulation of
embedded economy but he has changed the players in the game from the market to the
citizenry. Locality is the primary element in creating synergetic relationships with the state
where mutual benefit and efficient allocation and use of scare resources can be achieved by
sharing the cost and effort of governance. He says that both complementarity and
embeddedness is required for the creation of synergy and to co-produce development
outcomes in society. Evans also states that without a solid public institutional support only
social capital cannot enable synergetic relationship to co-produce developmental successes.
Ultimately, Evans analysis also boils down to creating relationships between the governing
and the governed. Co-production also means a social commitment by the government
workers towards the success of the program by identifying with the goals and being willing to
invest the energy for the chosen outcomes to come to fruition, in simple terms, they must
have very high motivation levels for co-production to become synergetic. He stresses on
endowments as enablers of synergy by focusing on the administrative structure and then the
political and social structures. Evans assumes that social ties of solidarity and mutuality are
stronger in the Third World and lays the blame on public institutions for not being competent
and engaged enough. He places the onus on public administrative bodies on enabling synergy
for co-production to take place. What seems interesting is that he places a term political
competition into the whole issue of co-production hinting at how politics is an intrinsic part
of success. Further, he stresses on the need for an egalitarian social set-up for co-production
to be successful and in places where there is sharp divisions of land and labor with wide
ranging differences in the ownership of resources, it is highly improbable that any co-
production can be tapped into. He says that the relationship of the bureaucratic officials with
the elites and their complicity affects negatively on co-production. What he comes to next is
on soft technologies of cultural change for scaling up the social capital for synergy to occur.

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Ben Fine (1999) locates this re-centring of the state and civil society participation in the post-
Washington agenda that the World Bank has been looking at to push the developmental
agenda further. He stresses that the microeconomic understanding is being reignited to
understand the information dissymmetry existing in present understanding by the extension
of microeconomic principles to areas that have previously been unexamined or taken as
exogenous in the light of standard assumptions within economics. From where do
productivity increase, comparative advantage, economic policy, family decision-making, and
non-market institutions derive? He deconstructs the definition of social capital and links it
with the ability of social capital to translate to economic performance. Although the idea is
borrowed from Bourdieu, it moves into the realm of social network without referring to its
content as meaning. Putnams contribution of the increasing popularity of the term social
capital and its movement into politics and the state, questioning the causation of economic
with civil society and iter and intra regional development.
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This new approach of the World
Bank is to re-look its position of the state when it comes to development and the need of
partnering with the state to push the new agenda for development. So, the state is brought
back in in development through the use and interaction with networks of social capital and
enabling synergies between the two. Thus, the social element of economic capital needs to be
re-looked at conceptually as the social capital has been separated from economic capital
whereas there cannot be capital without social relationships.

Jenkins (2010) acknowledges that there is no set definition of the term civil society as it is
used in India (or elsewhere). Here, the NGOs come in as another civil society actor marked
specifically by their constitutional inability to engage in politics. NGOs are supposedly non-
profit organization promoting certain socially desirable goals and working towards achieving
them. However, the NGO movement has also had its history of engagement with grassroots
and civil society actions that have impacted state decision making processes, it has also come
into be formulated as a part of state policy framework in implementation and tracking for
many government schemes. NGO activism has also been clearly documented by Jenkins
giving specific examples of organizations that have an engaging political front combined with
a more non-politically engaged wing devoted only to social upliftment. NGOs have also
been a training ground for political engagement and the manufacture of local political leaders.
Thus, in looking at the engagement of the NGO sector as one of the assertions of civil society

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Harris. J and P. de Renzio (1997). Missing Link or Analytically Missing? : The Concept of Social Capital, An
Introductory Bibliographic Essay, Journal of International Development 9(7): 919 37.
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what Jenkins concludes is that its importance and role in civil society mobilization can only
be overlooked at the risk of intellectual and policy myopia.

Gramscis analysis of civil society can maybe negotiate the dialogue between civil society,
development and the prospects of democratic citizenship. Buttigieg (1995) confronts the state
of civil society that came in the wave of the annihilation of Communism and the move
towards democracy in Eastern Europe with its focus on democracy and civil society
participation.

Gramsci regarded civil society as an integral part of the state; in his view, civil society, far from being
inimical to the state, is, in fact, its most resilient constitutive element, even though the most
immediately visible aspect of the state is political society, with which it is all too often mistakenly
identified. He was also convinced that the intricate, organic relationships between civil society and
political society enable certain strata of society not only to gain dominance within the state but also,
and more importantly, to maintain it, perpetuating the subalternity of other strata.


Gramsci defined a war of position that will enable the subalterns from being able to engage
with the state and create a meaningful engagement. He would look at development as not a
precondition for democracy but as democracy as a path to progress. That is the reason that he
spent so much time in engaging with the notion of culture as alternative hegemony which will
be possible only through intellectual development and education. He blames the cultural
backwardness of the masses for the inability to have clear ideas that will enable rigorous
thinking about how to bring change and the ways to achieve the change. He says that this has
resulted in catastrophic consequences.

Buttigieg states

In order to acquire this independence, the workers and peasants had to do more than simply join
organizations, such as trade unions, that represented their interests; they needed to educate
themselves, to learn to look at the structure of the state from their own perspective, and to develop the
capacity to imagine a different kind of society and the collective will to struggle for it.


Gramsci stresses the point that the private sphere and the public sphere are not essentially two
separate places where governance occurs. Gramsci can be said to be a statist as he
emphasizes the role of the state in enabling and acting as a force where civil society can come
together and interact so that the rules of the game can be negotiated in the institution of the
state, which for Gramsci is more than just the public and institutionalized entity. He states
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that the strength of the state can be gauged by the sturdiness of the dialectical unity
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between state and civil society. He thus stressed on building a social foundation first for a
new regime by means of engaging with the culture of society that will translate in the
political state also.

If Gramscis ideas fail to bring a democratic society that sustains and expands human
capabilities then we can always take refuge in Scotts (1998) anarcho-political ideation of the
metis through which the subjects have lived through and survived various state interventions
to better the human condition that were coerced on them by various worldviews and ideas.

References:

Abrahamsen, Rita. 2000. Disciplining Democracy: Development Discourse and Good
Governance in Africa. London: Zed Books. Chapters 1-3.
Buttigieg, Joseph A. 1995. "Gramsci on civil society." In boundary 2, vol.22, no. 3, pp. 1-32.
Dusza, Karl. 1989. "Max Weber's conception of the state." in International Journal of Politics,
Culture, and Society, vol.3, no. 1, pp.71-105.
Evans, Peter. 1995. Embedded Autonomy: States and Industrial Transformation. Princeton:
Princeton University Press. Chapters 1 & 10.
Evans, Peter. 1996. Government Action, Social Capital and Development: Reviewing the
Evidence on Synergy. in World Development. Vol. 24, No. 6, pp. 1119-1132.
Fine, Ben. 1999. "The developmental state is deadlong live social capital?." in
Development and change, vol.30, no. 1, pp.1-19.
Foucault, Michel. [1978] (1991). Governmentality in Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon and
Peter Miller, eds. The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality. London: Harvester
Wheatsheaf.
Jenkins, Rob. 2010. Non-governmental Organizations in Niraja Gopal Jayal and Pratap
Bhanu Mehta, eds. The Oxford Companion to Politics in India. Delhi: Oxford
University Press.
Kohli, Atul. 2004. State-Directed Development: Political Power and Industrialization in the
Global Periphery. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Introduction and
Conclusion.

2
Anheier, Helmut K., and Stefan Toepler. International encyclopedia of civil society. 2010, p. 410.
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Ostrom, Elinor. 1996. Crossing the Great Divide: Coproduction, Synergy, and
Development. in World Development. Vol. 24, No. 6, pp. 1073-1087.
Przeworski, Adam and F. Limongi. 1993. Political Regimes and Economic Growth in The
Journal of Economic Perspectives , Vol. 7, No. 3, Summer, pp. 51-69.
Scott, James. 1998. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human
Condition Have Failed. New Haven: Yale University Press. Introduction and
Conclusion.