By Dr Clare Cummings (Lecturer in Politics and Development)

The rules (or institutions) that govern how we distribute resources and uphold rights are central to questions of inclusion, equity and development. A popular framework for understanding the roots of formal and informal institutions is political settlements analysis (PSA). First developed by Mushtaq Khan in 2010 and influencing over a decade of donor-funded research, PSA argues that to understand how institutions function, we must analyse the ‘inherited balance of power or “political settlement”’ in which institutions exist. According to PSA, rules reflect the interests of the powerful.

PSA is a compelling framework that refocused the institutional turn in development studies on critical political economy theory. It shows how clientelist political rules are not based on cultural norms and that the transformation of political institutions requires shifts in economic relations of power. This critique challenged the idea that ‘good’ institutions could simply be imported from elsewhere and elucidated the limitations of culturalist explanations. Why, then, should we still be thinking about culture?

‘Culture’ is a slippery term with varied definitions across different contexts and disciplines. In cultural political economy terms, ‘culture’ refers to the collective production of meaning through which people make sense of their world. Yet, culture is not only about ideas or language but is embodied in everyday routines and rituals. Paying attention to culture encourages us to examine how meanings inform actions and how actions gain meaning.

Culture is also not fixed. Rather, it is a process of meaning-making whereby people interpret their environment and reduce its complexity to a comprehensible narrative. This recognises the contingency in how people think and act and the power of ideas to transform structure. ‘Putting culture in its place’, as Ngai-Ling Sum and Bob Jessop advocate, aims to rebalance materialist and structuralist political economy analysis so that the role of agency, ideas and interpretation is taken into account.

Inspired by the work of other political settlements scholars: Tom Lavers and Sam Hickey on the role of ideas in policy change, Hazel Gray on how ideology can shape economic transformation and Tim Kelsall et al.’s attention to the disruptive potential of marginalised groups, I propose a cultural political economy approach to PSA. Where Khan’s framework focuses on competition between politically organised groups to secure their interests, my alternative approach examines:

• how ideas and interests shape how actors form social identity groups and seek collective goals regarding the allocation of rights, status and/or resources, and
• how power resides in cultural, economic and political ideas and practices.

What does this mean for how we understand institutions?

In my research, I apply my cultural political economy approach to PSA to two case studies of institutional change: the post-war rewriting of Nepal’s constitution and the outlawing of metal mining in El Salvador.

Negotiating rights and reservations

The aftermath of Nepal’s civil war saw the successful mobilisation of many marginalised ethnic groups. One group, the Madhesi, became particularly influential. Through mass protest, political negotiation and legal activism, the Madhesi achieved greater rights and reservations for marginalised groups and a devolution of power to regional identities through the adoption of federalism in Nepal’s 2015 Constitution.

This political movement became powerful through the Madhesi people’s shared experience of discrimination, which united class and caste groups around a desire for justice and respect. While strategic rent-seeking by Madhesi politicians shaped the movement’s trajectory, the power of cultural identity and the vision of ethno-federalism also played critical roles in enabling the movement to arise.

Reversing the rules on mining

Struggles for rights may be an obvious case for demonstrating the relevance of cultural political economy but what about struggles over rules governing resources? The case of El Salvador’s 2017 mining ban shows how even contests over precious metals involve ideas, identity and status. As foreign mining companies began exploring El Salvador’s gold deposits, a social movement emerged from the communities whose water supply and livelihoods were threatened.

Mobilising around shared political ideas, the anti-mining campaign grew but it was when, in 2007, that the conservative archbishop of San Salvador endorsed the campaign that the movement really gained influence. The archbishop’s endorsement allowed the idea of a mining ban to fit with the identity of the right-wing political leaders and gave moral authority to the narrative that ‘water is worth more than gold’. Exemplifying the power of cultural actors to influence institutional change, a de facto ban on mining was introduced in 2007 and, after persistent campaigning, this became law in 2017.

These two brief examples show that recognising how people mobilise around ideas of justice and identity, not just interests is necessary for understanding how these institutions were transformed. Adopting a cultural political economy approach to PSA allows a broader understanding of political organisation and captures the value as well as interest-laden process of institutional change. As Nancy Fraser argues, to ‘decouple’ the politics of distribution from the politics of recognition is to understand only half of the story.

Read the full open access research papers:

• Understanding power, culture and institutional change: a revised approach to political settlements analysis
• Explaining institutional change in Nepal and El Salvador: A cultural political economy approach to political settlements analysis

Note: This article gives the views of the author/academic featured and does not represent the views of the Global Development Institute as a whole.

Please feel free to use this post under the following Creative Commons license: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). Full information is available here.