And if there was no state?: critical reflections on Bates, Polanyi and Evans on the role of the state in promoting development

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Notes

Alina Rocha Menocal is a PhD candidate in Political Science at Columbia University, New York. She can be contacted at 13 Kildare Gardens, London W2 5JS, UK. Email: [email protected]

See Albert Hirschman, Essays in Trespassing: Economics to Politics and Beyond, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981, p 7.

Among the strongest advocates of state retrenchment in favour of greater reliance on the market were the conservative‐leaning governments of Ronald Reagan in the USA and Margaret Thatcher in the UK. For further reading on the rise of neoliberal economic and political thought, see Adrian Leftwich, States of Development: On the Primacy of Politics in Development, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000.

The term ‘Washington Consensus’ was originally coined by economist John Williamson when he proposed a list of policy recommendations that countries willing to reform their economies should undertake. Williamson, ‘What Washington means by policy reform’, in Williamson (ed), Latin American Adjustment: How Much Has Happened?, Washington, DC: Institute for International Economics, 1990.

It was President Reagan who once famously declared, ‘Government is not the solution. Government is the problem.’

Hirschman, Essays in Trespassing, p 19.

Since peasants have control over the land they cultivate, however, manipulating food prices has not always proven an easy task. Peasants can‐and often do, according to Bates‐escape the demands the state imposes on them through a variety of tactics, which include altering their production mix, selling their products through unofficial channels or leaving the countryside to become workers. In any case, the state as a whole loses important sources of revenue.

Robert Bates, Markets and States in Tropical Africa: The Political Basis of Agricultural Policies, Berkeley, CA: California University Press, 1984, p 102.

Ibid, p 118.

See, for example, Howard Stein & Ernest J Wilson III, ‘The political economy of Robert Bates: a critical reading of rational choice in Africa’, World Development, 21 (6), 1993, pp 1035–1053.

Catherine Boone, ‘States and ruling classes in postcolonial Africa: the enduring contradictions of power’, in Joel Migdal et al (eds), State Power and Social Forces: Domination and Transformation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

Ibid, pp 132–133.

Michael Bratton, ‘Peasant–state relations in postcolonial Africa: contradictions of power’, in Migdal et al, State Power and Social Forces.

Ibid, p 252.

World Bank, World Development Report 1991, New York: Oxford University Press, 1991, pp 31, 49.

Reginald H Green, ‘A cloth untrue: the evolution of structural adjustment in sub‐Saharan Africa’, Journal of International Affairs, 52 (1), 1998, p 211.

Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time, Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1957 and 2001, p 3.

Ibid.

Adam Przeworski, ‘The neoliberal fallacy’, Journal of Democracy, 3 (3), 1992, p 47.

Polanyi, Great Transformation, pp 67, 68.

Ibid, p 73.

Ibid, p 101.

See ibid, pp 76, 57, also ch 12.

Ibid, p 3.

Ibid, p 132.

Ira Katznelson, notes on keynote speech at a conference on Karl Polanyi held at Columbia University on 27 April 2001, p 2.

World Development Report 1997, quoted in Leftwich, States of Development, p 51.

Peter Evans, Embedded Autonomy: States and Industrial Transformation, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995, p 29.

Ibid, p12.

Ibid, p 61.

Ronald J Herring, ‘Embedded particularism: India's failed developmental state’, in Meredith Woo‐Cumings (ed), The Developmental State, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999, p 334.

Midwifery involves the state creating a protected environment that can foster the emergence of selected industrial sectors. Through husbandry the state continues to nurture these sectors so that they can compete internationally.

Evans, Embedded Autonomy, p 13.

Shahid Yusuf, ‘The East Asian miracle at the millennium’, in Joseph Stiglitz & Shahid Yusuf (eds), Rethinking the East Asian Miracle, New York: Oxford University Press/World Bank, 2001, p 7.

See, for example, TJ Pemple (ed), The Politics of the Asian Economic Crisis, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999.

Atul Kohli, ‘Embedded autonomy: states and industrial transformation’, The American Political Science Review, 90 (3), 1996, p 670.

Evans, Embedded Autonomy, p 35.

Ibid, p 40.

Ibid, p 40.

Not because the spectrum for debate is necessarily broad, but rather because the model embracing neoliberal globalisation seems to have trumped all others, at least rhetorically.

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Alina Rocha Menocal

Alina Rocha Menocal is a PhD candidate in Political Science at Columbia University, New York. She can be contacted at 13 Kildare Gardens, London W2 5JS, UK. Email: [email protected]