Morton's Fork: “Democracy” Versus Neopatrimonialism in Developing Countries

Abstract

It is argued that conditions for social justice in developing countries are deficient under both state capitalism (“democracy”) and neopatrimonialism. Development assistance is similarly constrained, but it also has shortcomings in relation to “democracy” promotion. Political economy analyses can provide authentic insights into how poor people negotiate for public goods, but such interactions seem unlikely to yield sustainable social justice for most citizens. The assessment calls for a reconfiguration of power relations and a more egalitarian distribution of public goods within and between countries, which is what most people are predisposed to want and are entitled to expect and enjoy.

Keywords:

• social justice
• state capitalism
• neopatrimonialism
• development assistance
• democracy
• political economy

Acknowledgment

Our thanks are due to Dian Elvira Rosa for always thorough, intelligent, and reliable research assistance.

Notes

²Such experience spans more than 30 years in more than 25 countries, including: Kenya (Blunt, 1978, 1980, 1982), the Asia-Pacific, (Turner, 1999), Lebanon (Blunt, 2003a), Southern Sudan (Blunt, 2003b), Cambodia (Blunt & Turner, 2005), Timor-Leste: Blunt (2009), Indonesia (Blunt, Turner & Lindroth, 2012a, 2012b), and Iraq (Blunt, 2012).

¹Following Chomsky (1997, 1999, 2010) and Roy (2003a, 2003b), and as we have said elsewhere (Blunt and Lindroth, 2012), “by state capitalism we mean a system of state governance in which the decision making organs of the state are used primarily to serve the interests of major corporations and in which the state and business interests work together or collude to ensure that the lion's share of national wealth is acquired by small business and political elites and their cronies and supporters - or plutonomies Chomsky (2010, p. 94) - creating circumstances in which the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. This is what neoliberals call democracy.”

The views expressed in this article are solely those of its authors.

³However, some civil society organizations complain about a reduction of donor funding, especially since the 2004 elections (Aspinall, 2010a), thereby reinforcing claims that growth may not always be for the right reasons (Centre for the Future State, 2010; Booth, 2011c).

⁴We use the terms “neopatrimonialism” and “patronage democracy” interchangeably throughout.

⁵There are numerous studies that have demonstrated that decentralization programs rarely deliver in practice what they promise in theory, creating conditions in which patronage can flourish (e.g., Carino, 2007; Crook, 2003; Fjeldstad, 2004; Hulme & Siddiquee, 1999; Johnson, 2003; Prud'homme, 1995;Tapscott, 2008; and Turner, 2009) and that, in some cases, they can undermine political stability (e.g., Blunt, 2012). For example, Hulme and Siddiquee (1999) traced decentralization in Bangladesh back to the 1950s and found that “despite successive decentralization policies over the years, service delivery in Bangladesh remains at exceptionally low levels and effective local governance is virtually unknown” (p. 46). Diamond (1999) is unequivocal about the potential effects of decentralization on patronage: “Where hierarchical chains of particularistic, patron-client relationships are already the dominant mode of politics, shifting discretionary financial authority from the central to the local level may simply shift the locus of clientilism and corruption from the central to the local arena, making these problems even tougher to control …” (p. 244).

⁶Globalization and “free” trade are others (see, for example, Roy (2010a, 2010b, & 2011)).

⁷There is mounting evidence from neuroscience, evolutionary theory, and sociobiology that Homo sapiens has an innate dislike of hierarchical extremes and inequalities, and that people possess strong egalitarian predispositions (e.g., Marlowe, 2004; Wilson, 2007) and an innate or “hard-wired” sense of fairness. Young children, for example, have been found to develop inequality aversion early in childhood” (Fehr et al., 2008, p. 1082) and it has been shown that the rejection of unfair proposals is driven by a phylogenetically old structure” in the brain (Gospic et al., 2011, p. 1).

⁸We acknowledge that there are many complexities and issues of contention in relation to all three positions that we have not been able to give the attention that they deserve. To take just one example, Fabre and Miller (2003, p. 4) question whether, as Rawls attempts to, it is possible “in a multicultural world to hold all societies to a common standard of decency that is both high enough to protect basic human interests, and yet not biased in the direction of particular cultural values.” Others have questioned the logic of being able to observe at the same time “freedom” and “equality,” arguing that the maintenance of conditions of equality for all would necessarily involve state action that would inhibit certain freedoms.

⁹Vivid examples have been given by Roy (2010a, 2011) of the devastating effects on poor people of big dam construction in India.

¹⁰We have argued these, and related points, more fully in Blunt et al., (2011), Blunt and Lindroth (2012), and Blunt (2012).

¹¹For a recent example, see Blunt (2012) on US “development assistance” to Iraq and its effects.

¹²Such as the firing of missiles from unmanned “drone” aircraft or the dispatch of secret agents or troops to assassinate the enemies of America and her allies, frequently at the cost of innocent civilian lives and other so-called collateral” damage.

¹³The same shortcomings are discussed by Blunt (2002).

¹⁴In India, as in other countries, “traded” public goods include water connections and drainage lines, government jobs, roads, electricity connections, irrigation, government contracts, hospital beds, and cheaper drugs and treatment, and so on (Berenschot, 2010, p. 893).

¹⁵Some might argue that the conditions of Gujarat are those of transition towards “democracy,” to which we would say as follows. First, we argue in this paper that “transition” towards a destination that is a purer form of state capitalism is unlikely to provide for poor people significant benefit over and above that that they receive under combinations of neopatrimonialism and state capitalism. Second, the likelihood that Gujarat is a good example of development progress is diminished considerably by relatively recent (February, 2002) events there that included the massacre of two thousand Muslims, one hundred and fifty thousand Muslims driven from their homes, the public gang-raping of Muslim women, and the subsequent re-election of the government that had stood by while these atrocities had been perpetrated (Roy, 2004a, 2010a, p. 117). Berenschot's (2011) findings suggest that these aspects of the political climate may not have changed a great deal. Third, we share Roy's (2010a, 2011) view that India is a subject nation or client state of “American Empire” and that its version of “democracy” is some combination of state capitalism and neopatrimonialism. For example, it is a “democracy” that in the last 55 years or so has allowed big dam projects to displace between 33 and 55 million people. Moreover, those that are displaced and dispossessed (are) sentenced to a lifetime of starvation and deprivation … They have no recourse to justice” (Roy, 2004a, p. 3). Also, see Roy (2001b, 1–33).

¹⁶This is contingency theory, which is old news in the management discipline (Mintzberg, 1978), including discussions of management in Africa and Asia (e.g. Blunt, 1983; Blunt & Jones, 1992; 1997).

¹⁷This too is old wine in a new bottle—see, for example, Blunt & Warren (1996).

¹⁸More pointed still is Roy (2004b, p. 2): In the long run NGOs are accountable to their funders, not to the people they work among. They are what botanists call an indicator species. The greater the devastation caused by neoliberalism, the greater the outbreak of NGOs. Nothing illustrates this more poignantly than the phenomenon of the US preparing to invade a country while simultaneously readying NGOs to clean up the resultant devastation.” Or “they end up functioning like the whistle on a pressure cooker. They divert and sublimate political rage and make sure that it does not build up to a head. Eventually it disempowers people” (Roy, 2010a, p. 85).

¹⁹As indicated earlier, findings from Latin America back this up and suggest that “corruption and inequality are inversely related … and (corruption) may be perceived as a means of pro poor redistribution” (Andres & Ramlogan-Dobson, 2011, p. 972).

²⁰We acknowledge that these are crude measures and that, in the absence of suitable multivariate statistical analyses, those given to quantitative measures of such things will find it easy to remain unconvinced. But the import of our findings lies not so much in their ability to make fine distinctions between the relative failings of each of the systems that we discuss, which we admit is less than ideal, but to draw attention to the magnitude of the inequities and injustices associated with elite interest domination under both.

²¹More vividly still, Roy (2010b, p. 4) has said that poor people in India (the 800 million people who “live” on less than US 50 cents per day) “are fighting because, as far as they are concerned, ‘the fruits of modern development’ stink like dead cattle on the highway.”