Beyond Institutions: Rethinking the Role of Leaders, Elites and Coalitions in the Institutional Formation of Developmental States and Strategies

Compared with economics, the engagement of political science with development studies and development policy is still (with notable exceptions) in its relative infancy. This can be illustrated by the manner in which fundamental issues of structure and agency in politics have barely been addressed in the development context. In the main, policy‐makers and researchers – perhaps unwittingly, or perhaps simply oblivious to the profound epistemological and ontological issues at stake – have adopted emphatically structuralist approaches with their stress on institutions and institution building. In doing so they have not only often failed to account for the agential factors in the design, formation and maintenance of institutions, but also for the important success stories which run against the general patterns of institutional failure or corruption. This paper suggests that if researchers and policy‐makers are to engage seriously with the politics of economic growth, state‐building and social inclusion, they will need to have a much better analytical handle on the role of human agency in the developmental process and on the role of leaders, elites and coalitions in particular. To that end, the paper also reports on some of the initial findings of recent research conducted under the auspices of the Leaders, Elites and Coalitions Research Programme (LECRP), the second phase of which is about to commence as The Leadership Program: Developmental Leaders, Elites and Coalitions (LPDLEC). 1 This article is based on a keynote address given at the Association of Development Researchers in Copenhagen, Denmark 12 May 2009. It draws on research conducted for 2 research consortia: Improving Institutions for Pro‐poor Growth (IPPG at http://www.ippg.org.uk) and The Leaders, Elites and Coalitions Research Programme (LECRP at http://www.lecrp.org).