Excellent article Stephen. I agree with the 4 conditions we need concurrently. Hence why need to support with growth oriented teams, and support progressive leaders (in govt/politics AND in business), as they are the ones to know/be in the political windows and know where there is room to maneuvre the political settlement.
Thanks, Jonathan. I think there is a real job in helping these future cohorts to be prepared. And it is also worth looking beyond just the obvious ones. It's an odds game.
Interesting. What would you make of Mkandawire's argument (Thinking About Developmental States in Africa: https://doi.org/10.1093/cje/25.3.289), that Africa has had developmental leaders - able and willing to discipline their own support bases, but this alone is no guarantee that the developmental project is successful?
Mkandawire is right to say the developmental leadership existed, and the failure was never a deficit of will. His own test settles it. The measure of capture is how a state behaves in hard times, and African coalitions dropped their favoured groups more easily than the narrow capture story allows. The discipline was real. But it was not necessarily the scarce thing.
The difference is narrow. He puts the residual outside the state: commodity collapses, the SAPs, the IMF, at the limit bad luck. The post puts it one step further in. The international rescue that does the most work is not exogenous to the settlement that receives it. The settlement leans the economy toward commodities; the commodities breed solvency crises; the rescue refinances them. What looks like bad luck from outside is a crisis that the settlement generates and is then bailed out of.
So the post asks what else has to be true for that leadership to bite, and why the one shock that would force its hand is the one the settlement is organised to prevent - a challenge to the economic configuration.
Excellent article Stephen. I agree with the 4 conditions we need concurrently. Hence why need to support with growth oriented teams, and support progressive leaders (in govt/politics AND in business), as they are the ones to know/be in the political windows and know where there is room to maneuvre the political settlement.
Thanks, Jonathan. I think there is a real job in helping these future cohorts to be prepared. And it is also worth looking beyond just the obvious ones. It's an odds game.
Interesting. What would you make of Mkandawire's argument (Thinking About Developmental States in Africa: https://doi.org/10.1093/cje/25.3.289), that Africa has had developmental leaders - able and willing to discipline their own support bases, but this alone is no guarantee that the developmental project is successful?
Mkandawire is right to say the developmental leadership existed, and the failure was never a deficit of will. His own test settles it. The measure of capture is how a state behaves in hard times, and African coalitions dropped their favoured groups more easily than the narrow capture story allows. The discipline was real. But it was not necessarily the scarce thing.
The difference is narrow. He puts the residual outside the state: commodity collapses, the SAPs, the IMF, at the limit bad luck. The post puts it one step further in. The international rescue that does the most work is not exogenous to the settlement that receives it. The settlement leans the economy toward commodities; the commodities breed solvency crises; the rescue refinances them. What looks like bad luck from outside is a crisis that the settlement generates and is then bailed out of.
So the post asks what else has to be true for that leadership to bite, and why the one shock that would force its hand is the one the settlement is organised to prevent - a challenge to the economic configuration.
Excellent application of the Bueno de Mesquita selectorate franework. The blog presents how “developmental elites” really operate.