The Comparative Political Economy of Development

Africa and South Asia

Barbara Harriss-White, Judith Heyer, Barbara Harriss-White, Judith Heyer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• eBook ISBN: 9781135171933
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book illustrates the enduring relevance and vitality of the comparative political economy of development approach promoted among others by a group of social scientists in Oxford in the 1980s and 1990s. Contributors demonstrate the viability of this approach as researchers and academics become more convinced of the inadequacies of orthodox approaches to the understanding of development.

Detailed case material obtained from comparative field research in Africa and South Asia informs analyses of exploitation in agriculture; the dynamics of rural poverty; seasonality; the non farm economy; class formation; labour and unfreedom; the gendering of the labour force; small scale production and contract farming; social networks in industrial clusters; stigma and discrimination in the rural and urban economy and its politics. Reasoned policy suggestions are made and an analysis of the comparative political economy of development approach is applied to the situation of Africa and South Asia.

Aptly presenting the relation between theory and empirical material in a dynamic and interactive way, the book offers meaningful and powerful explanations of what is happening in the continent of Africa and the sub-continent of South Asia today. It will be of interest to researchers in the fields of development studies, rural sociology, political economy, policy and practice of development and Indian and African studies.

1
Introduction

Barbara Harriss-White and Judith Heyer

The project

The chapters in this book celebrate the enduring vitality of a comparative political economy approach that is empirically grounded and based on an undogmatic and critical engagement with Marxist theory in which agency, non-class institutions and structures and struggles expressed through them play roles in capitalist transformation alongside class formation and class structure. The approach is historical, comparative and interdisciplinary. It is also one that assumes that the macro context is important for understanding the micro level and vice versa. Most of the chapters in this collection are based on these ideas, or some variant of them, though not all use the language of capital and class.

Most of the chapters also trace their origins to the Oxford University Comparative Political Economy seminar run by Judith Heyer, Gavin Williams, Megan Vaughan and Barbara Harriss-White from the 1980s until the mid 1990s. It was the crucible for Oxford’s MPhil in Development Studies, which started in 1996. The seminar was also a crucial starting point for many masters, doctoral and postdoctoral projects, and generated a body of work the continuation of which is in evidence today. This work was strongly influenced by, and closely linked to, work in political economy being published in the Journal of Peasant Studies (and now the Journal of Agrarian Change) and in the Economic and Political Weekly.

The focus of the researchers associated with the Oxford Comparative Political Economy seminar was rural. Judith Heyer’s retirement was an opportune moment to reflect on the vibrancy of this research – rural and non-rural – and the contemporary implications of its findings. The original group’s comparative political economy was centred on comparisons within and between Africa and South Asia. That is also the focus of this book.

Central to our approach is the notion of class conflict. Class formation and class conflict are understood to be the prime movers behind processes of social change and the expansion and deepening of capitalist relations of production and social reproduction. Class relations are defined through the ownership of land and assets, through conflicts of interest and class struggle. In turn, the study of social structure, social relations and their transformation is indispensable to our understanding of the attempts to manage this process in the name of development.

Some of the criticisms levelled in the 1980s at this Marxian political economy as applied to rural change were that it is homogenising and reductionist; that it places too much emphasis on structure, and has little room for agency; that it underplays the role of politics, culture and ideology; that it ignores aspects of identity such as gender, sexuality, caste, race, ethnicity and religion; and that although ostensibly empirically based it uses empirical material to confirm rather than question its preconceived view of the world. As da Corta shows here (Chapter 2), this was the result of a selective reading at the time. It has certainly not been true subsequently.

The comparative political economy exemplified by the chapters in this book is the result of a continuing critical engagement with theory, grounded in empirical evidence, with analytical space for social agency. It incorporates open, context-dependent and pluralist accounts, within which Marxist theory is often an important ingredient but not a totalising referent (see, for example, Rogaly, Harriss-White and Bose 1999), on agrarian structure in West Bengal). It also draws on Karl Polanyi’s concept of embeddedness, with many studies not only of the rural economy but also of state and policy which reveal the inability of secular states or apparently neutral markets to wrench themselves free of social and political relations of class, ethnicity, religion and patriarchy. Indeed, rather than conceiving of non-class relations and institutions as ‘epiphemonena’, ‘impurities’ or ‘residuals’ expected to be dissolved or destroyed by ‘modernity’, it sees them as enduring and constitutive of modernity. Our comparative political economy draws on the concept of social structures of accumulation adapted and developed in India Working, Harriss-White’s 2003 book on India’s informal economy – see also Meagher, Chapter 8 in this volume.

Some of the followers of this approach to political economy also drew on the sub-discipline of socio-economics, but while the latter attempts to incorporate social structures into economic analysis, it neither mentions class nor considers seriously politics and power (Heyer, Stewart and Thorp 2001).

Political economy approaches have regularly neglected agency on the part of poor and exploited classes. A key feature of much of the work published in this book is that it examines the idea that the poor have strong capacities for political and economic agency. Their mobilisation, however, may be constrained by structures and settings in which the room for manoeuvre and agency is restricted. In this book, for instance, Francis explicitly examines constraints on the agency of poor people in rural South Africa (Chapter 5); Devereux looks at coping strategies due to seasonality and extreme food shortage (Chapter 6); Ochieng (Chapter 7) analyses the role played by political patronage in the agency of smallholder tea growers; and while Meagher shows the networked agency of self-employed manufacturers faced with the pressures of liberalisation, mass unemployment and informalisation in Nigeria (Chapter 8), Prakash shows the resourcefulnesss of Dalit entrepreneurs faced with an array of institutional and political obstacles in India (Chapter 15). Several other chapters in this book address the political agency of Dalits around class and identity. Centuries of contemptuous and oppressive treatment have placed huge obstacles in the way of Dalits’ development. Subject to positive discrimination and dedicated development projects, euphemised as ‘backward’ and ‘weaker sections’, generally confined to casual agricultural labour, low- status artisan crafts, construction, carcass and sanitary work, they remain disproportionately excluded and/or adversely included in India’s capitalist transformation. This book puts them centre stage. The role of gender relations is another important theme, given attention particularly in Chapters 5 by Francis and 13 by Kapadia. Kapadia shows that it is low-paid women at the bottom of the hierarchy that support the low-wage economy of India, and that subordination within the household reinforces women’s subordination within the wage economy. The questions best answered by feminist political economists about the sites and relations of authority, subordination, exploitation and oppression in the cycles of production and reproduction (see Pujo 1996) can also be asked of other economic manifestations of identity such as caste and ethnicity.

Ochieng and Meagher (here, as well as in her forthcoming book on ‘identity economics’) show the importance of regional and ethnic identities in shaping and unravelling economic opportunities and development.

While followers of political economy have always been interdisciplinary, history has been as integral to the comparative political economy of development as has been geography. Later followers also had considerable analytical room for political ideologies and practice. Some looked at contested agrarian relations in response to changes in national and global political economy (Harriss-White and Janakarajan 2004; Basile, forthcoming). Other research explored rural-urban political economy through agro-commodity chains, rural-urban clusters and agro-industrial districts (Pujo 1996; Jayaraj and Nagaraj 2006; Roman 2008; Ruthven 2008; Basile, forthcoming). Yet others looked at elite accumulation strategies as well as the politics of the marginalised (Williams 1975; Moore and Vaughan 1994; Fernandez 2008; Sarkar 2009). Yet other work explored how the dialectics of negotiation, bargaining and struggle helped to explain why specific forms of social relations either persist or change (Olsen 1996; Rogaly 1997; Majid 1998; Razavi 2003; Kim 2008). Another way comparative political economy developed was through the interrogation of theories of institutional change in the light of evidence for institutional innovation, destruction, persistence and reworked roles (Basile, forthcoming; Ochieng 2005). The relation between agency and deviance, and responses to both in resistance to institutional change and in institutional reworking, are also being explored. Tools were also developed for the processes and relations that dominate when formal regulative institutions including the state do not operate (Basile, forthcoming; Meagher, in this volume; Harriss-White 2003, 2008).

Practical method

The comparative political economy approach was strongly linked to South Asian and African village studies, in what da Corta (Chapter 2) describes as a ‘collision of Marxist methods … with concrete village economic, social and cultural reality’ (see Harriss-White and Harriss 2007; Harriss-White 1999).

Its empirical grounding is a key feature of the work represented in this book. Empirical work – what the anthropologist Polly Hill called ‘field economics’ but extended to political economy – is necessary to understand what is going on on the ground, to give specific answers to questions about social change and thereby to engage with theory. Fine detail matters here.

Empirical work in comparative political economy involves an iterative process consisting of several stages. (i) Theory gives rise to questions as well as to presumptions about what data need to be collected to answer these questions. The method is deductive at this stage. (ii) Data collection, involving fieldwork and/or archival work, based on an initial reading of theory, but also open-ended and interdisciplinary, looks out for – and follows up on – whatever may be relevant in order to be able to answer the questions chosen as the focus of the research. It is important at this stage to allow evidence that challenges initial positions to emerge, making it possible to discover the unexpected, to discover additional dimensions that might not have been anticipated. The most valuable fieldwork/data collection is the fieldwork/data collection that produces surprises, data that do not conform to preconceptions, to what we think we know. This is surely the way that agency came back into (if it had ever left) what was essentially Marxist research. In collecting data, one may find that one has misunderstood – in which case (if one has gone through the literature well) it is likely that many have misunderstood – the problem, the explanation and often the theory as well (see Olsen 1996 for a good example of the development of theory on the basis of what was found in the field). (iii) Data processing and analysis – not foreswearing socio- or econometric analysis where appropriate (see Meagher, Chapter 8 and Harriss-White and Vidyarthee, Chapter 15 in this volume) – leads to what are often a revised set of research questions, and a set of explanations that go beyond the range of those originally anticipated as possibilities. Data collection and processing should allow one to reflect on theory, modify theory and develop theory, inductively.

This method takes empirical material seriously, deductively and inductively, and engages with theory from the perspective of local peoples’ experience, mediated by first-hand research. Many of the chapters in the book are based on research that has used this methodology or one similar to it.

Non-policy research and its relation to policy

Much of the research does not feed directly into policy. It is important to recognise the value of such research. Non-policy-oriented research has produced a corpus of work that is highly relevant to the policy process – because it helps us understand the processes that may be managed through policy, as well as understanding the policy process itself. Non-policy-oriented research is just as necessary to the development of good policy as is good policy-oriented research. Without a fundamental understanding, research that feeds into policy is most unlikely to have the impact intended. Examples of important non-policy research in this book include Heyer showing the marginalisation of Dalits in a development process that looks in many ways ‘successful’ (Chapter 11); Williams showing how state support made what was an essentially unviable sector viable (Chapter 9); Kapadia showing the way in which women at the bottom of the socio-economic hierarchy make possible a low-wage economy that persists at their expense (Chapter 13); and Francis showing the implications of development policies that are unsustainable in the medium or the longer term (Chapter 5). None of this research was directly policy-oriented. All of it is essential to our understanding of development dynamics.

It would be difficult to get such research funded in contemporary circumstances. This is because the relation between policy-driven research (where enquiry is contained and room for analytical manoeuvre limited) and non-policy-driven research is currently unbalanced towards a restricted vision of policy. This problem results from the way that research is funded, especially research on development … Funding is increasingly restricted to research that feeds into an aid-defined policy agenda, and much less readily available for fundamental research, let alone research which is justified for teaching and learning. This means that there is far too little research that is not governed by what funders identify as policy relevance or themes which the policy agenda of funding institutions puts up for investigation. This is what makes independent research, such as much of that offered in this book, increasingly rare, and increasingly important, today.

The contributions to this book adopt different approaches to development policy. For Africa, Ellis, a long-time champion of rural livelihood creation, presents a policy menu for an urban response to agrarian poverty and crisis. The relations between agriculture and the non-farm economy need synergising by active support to very small businesses. Francis signals the importance of a ‘basic income’ and of labour market reform to address the barriers to economic and social mobility and to create livelihoods. Devereux shows the importance of seasonality in perpetuating and reinforcing poverty and inequality and examines the limited role that social protection policy can play in addressing this. Policy and its effects in Afghanistan are an integral part of the political economy approach of Pain too.

Many of the contributions to this book are concerned with the effects on social transformation of there not being policy, or of unintended consequences of policy, or of paradoxes stemming from the nexus of oppressive and exploitative interests of class, state or status groups which sabotage redistributivist deve...

Table of contents

• Routledge Studies in Development Economics
• Contents
• Figures
• Maps
• Tables
• Contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The political economy of agrarian change
• 3 Strategic dimensions of rural poverty reduction in sub-Saharan Africa
• 4 From ‘rural labour’ to ‘classes of labour’
• 5 Poverty
• 6 Seasonal food crises and social protection in Africa
• 7 The political economy of contract farming in tea in Kenya
• 8 Networking for success
• 9 Free and unfree labour in the Cape wine industry, 1838–1988
• 10 The Opium ‘Revolution’
• 11 The marginalisation of Dalits in a modernising economy
• 12 Shifting the ‘grindstone of caste’?
• 13 Liberalisation and transformations in India’s informal economy
• 14 Dalit entrepreneurs in middle India
• 15 Stigma and regions of accumulation
• Glossary
• Index