What is the nature of the new politics of inclusion? This chapter from Changing Paths: International Development and the New Politics of Inclusion challenges the perception that supporting uncoordinated and decentralised actions in civil society and the market is sufficient to produce improved governance outcomes. Greater inclusion will emerge instead from representative and deliberative institutions through which societal and state actors can negotiate collective solutions across the public-private divide.
The nature of politics in the developing world has changed. Two decades of pro-market reforms have disassembled the developmental state. These reforms have also succeeded in fostering economic integration, but they have failed to significantly reduce absolute poverty or high levels of inequality between and within countries. These failures have shaken donors and caused a shift toward pro-poor policies designed to empower marginalised groups to challenge their economic and political exclusion.
The new politics of inclusion is currently rooted in the belief that the uncoordinated, decentralised actions of civil society, market, and state actors are likely to create a mutually reinforcing movement that can produce all good things for all people. Its core elements—decentralisation, civil society, and participation—are built on a suspicion of the state and large political organisations in general, preferring to limit the power of these entities in favour of ‘radical polycentrism’. Recent international governance agendas reflect this ideology’s faith in the power of the market and civil society to restrict public authority.
Yet, in focusing so heavily on limiting the action of large political organisations, radical polycentrism ignores the need for collective actors. Uncoordinated civil society activity is not enough. Indeed, much of current development policy is based on a faulty definition of civil society, producing three key errors:
- Denying the role of political organisations in the constitution of civil society
- Ignoring democracy’s need for institutions such as parties, to aggregate and represent differences
- Refusing to accept the fact that political society is where collective actors and individuals contest the legitimate right to exercise control over public power and the state apparatus
The construction and interpretation of a new politics of inclusion must instead concern itself with how societal and state actors democratically negotiate collective solutions across the public-private divide. A principal obstacle to greater inclusion is the lack of reform-oriented political actors that can aggregate competing interests both within society and between society and agents of the state. To facilitate the construction of such coalitions, donors must refocus their analysis toward the political arena; one method for achieving this is the ‘polity approach’.
With the developmental state consigned to history, it should be replaced not by a radical polycentric sphere and unregulated markets but by a ‘polity’ in which societal actors and state agents compete and cooperate to produce purposeful change through representative and deliberative institutions. Further research is needed to bring about policy change; specifically, four key components of the polity approach deserve deeper inquiry:
- Embrace the variability and the uneven capacity for public action among states
- Assess the ‘fit’ between societal and state actors
- Recognise that political institutions severely constrain the ability of actors to engineer ‘fit’
- Appreciate that state-society interactions are iterative in nature, composed of sequenced episodes of mutual adjustment through conflict and negotiation.
