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This chapter examines the impact of social diversity on state development across the Asia-Pacific region. It argues that variation in ethnic structure both between and within states helps to explain some of the distinctive features of political and economic development across the region. However, these vary across different dimensions of governance. With regards to public policy, highly diverse societies almost inevitably face difficulties of government coordination and policy implementation due to competing ethnoregional demands. On the other hand, in certain situations such diversity may also assist democratic continuity by necessitating cross-ethnic power-sharing and making challenges to the existing order difficult to organize and sustain.

Delegation is not a new phenomenon. This chapter illustrates the persistence, growth, and evolution of delegated governance from the earliest stages of state development in Britain through to the first decade of the 21st century. It reveals the long-term bureaucratic layering which has occurred, and considers why political elites failed to take advantage of specific windows of opportunity when broad reform initiative could have been introduced.

Spells out, from a Weberian perspective, the basic features of the state, and provides a historical review of the development of different forms of state. Various methods of governance at the disposal of the state are analysed. Particular attention is paid to the autocratic state (prescribed by Hobbes), which was the dominant model for long periods.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the three worlds of relief created by the intersection of labor, race, and politics in welfare state development. Blacks, Mexicans, and European immigrants inhabited three separate worlds in the first third of the twentieth century, each characterized by its own system of race and labor market relations and its own distinct political system. From these worlds—and each group's place within them—three separate perspectives emerged about each group's propensity to become dependent on relief. The distinct political systems, race and labor market relations, and ideologies about each group's proclivity to use relief, in turn, influenced the scope, reach, and character of the relief systems that emerged across American communities.

This chapter examines the theoretical controversy raging between the proponents of neoliberalism, who advocate the complete withdrawal of the state from the economy, and the proponents of the “developmental state,” that is, a state that intervenes in underdeveloped economies to nurture a capitalist class that will later be able to carry out independently the functions of capital accumulation and development. An analysis of the economic role of the Egyptian state during the last two hundred years demonstrates that every time the state intervenes in the economy, the rate of economic growth increases rapidly. A reduction or cessation of state intervention usually results in a slower economy, high unemployment, and increasing poverty rates. Worth noting is the articulation of state intervention in the economy with periods of high state autonomy, that is, a situation in which the state is autonomous from the power of all social classes. This kind of state autonomy has occurred only twice in Egypt during the last two hundred years: under the Muhammad 'Ali state and during Nasser's time. State autonomy is not a permanent state of affairs, however, since eventually state autonomy erodes and diverse interest groups penetrate the state. In Egypt, erosion of state autonomy led ultimately to the domination of the system by special interest groups, a decline in the economic role of the state, and the deterioration of development.

The second decade of the 21st century may be that of Africa’s renaissance. As Africa’s economic agencies have come to advocate the adoption of policies leading towards developmental states, so the continent has articulated an African Mining Vision by contrast to other possible strategies for its natural resource governance from assorted global developmental, environmental, financial and industrial agencies. There is need to juxtapose two dominant interrelated strands in the political economy of today’s continent: the impact of the BRICs, especially China, and episodes of commodities boom and bust, this time with a focus on energy and minerals but, in future: food, land and water. Also, there is a wide variety of novel alternative forms of finance from new donors and foundations, sovereign wealth funds, Faith Based Organisations and global taxes for global public goods/partnerships. All these present Africa with the possibility of the emergence of development states.

This concluding chapter highlights the significance of this book’s theory for scholarship and policy. It addresses the implications that result from the book’s central argument about the underappreciated but sizeable role of foreign subversion and its effects on state authority. Importantly, the argument and evidence presented in the previous chapters push back against the normatively unsustainable notion that more conflict will yield effectively governed states. They also challenge scholars to rethink the European statebuilding experience, the baseline for much of the state development literature, through the lens of subversion. The chapter then discusses the prospects for third parties to improve state authority and close the gap between juridical sovereignty and domestic sovereignty. Although there may be some room for third parties to reduce the incentives for states to cripple the domestic authority of their adversaries, system-level constraints that operate in the post-1945 world suggest that subversion of state authority is likely to remain an attractive weapon of statecraft for the foreseeable future.

This chapter examines the effects of the evolution of political institutions in Myanmar on Sino-Burmese relations. The chapter argues that this case stands as particularly powerful evidence for the book’s thesis; as the Burmese regime liberalized, opposition to Chinese influence, previously boiling under a lid of authoritarianism, bubbled to the surface. This has resulted in a weakening of the bonds between governments that had long been “blood brothers.” The chapter shows that under the ruling SPDC, the Chinese could rely on close government-to-government ties to gain support on important issues, such as China’s South China Sea claims, and Chinese firms could rely on politically-connected Burmese “cronies” to secure approval for and protection of their investments. Political reforms beginning in 2011 that witnessed the end to decades-long military rule saw a concomitant plunge in Chinese investment in Myanmar and delays and even cancellations of major projects by Chinese SOEs in Myanmar, such as the Letpadaung Copper Mine and the Myitsone Hydropower Project. The chapter concludes that the Myanmar case illustrates that the evolution of the political “rules of the game” in China’s bilateral partner are a form of political risk for China and its firms.

This chapter discusses the suburban, postindustrial, and holistically planned developments such as the Cambridge Science Park. These were initiated and managed by a single authority, usually a private developer, and hosted a mixture of offices, light industry, and private research centers. The chapter also highlights the emergence of the business park, which the author described as a host of different developments that at various times have been called “office parks,” “science parks,” “research parks,” “industrial parks,” or “technology parks.” The chapter then looks at the history of a new late-twentieth-century urban form, looking at the kinds of working subjects that this form hoped to produce and attract, and its relationship to the state and the wider world. Ultimately, the chapter traces back where the book began, at Trafford Park. Ruined by deindustrialization and choked by geography, Trafford Park was transformed by a state development corporation into a massive business park by the 1980s. As with the private housing estate and shopping mall, this new urban form required a reimagining of the old.

This chapter uses convergence theory to explain broad similarities in welfare-state development and corporatist theory. It explains the determinants of welfare-state development and suggests that convergence theory works well for the time span of a century and the range of development embraced by Sweden and Tunisia, Denmark and Bulgaria, the U.S. and India. It shows that rich countries converge in types of health and welfare programs, in increasingly comprehensive convergence, and to a much lesser extent in methods of financing.

This chapter discusses the role of rural institutions and state campaigns in development. Most accounts of rural development in East Asia privilege the role of land reform and the emergence of developmental states. However, this narrative is incomplete. A thorough examination of rural sector change in the region reveals the transformative effects of rural modernization campaigns, which can be defined as policies demanding high levels of bureaucratic and popular mobilization to overhaul traditional ways of life in the countryside. East Asian governments' use of campaigns runs counter to standard portrayals of the developmental state as wholly technocratic and demonstrates that rural development was not the inevitable result of industrialization. Rather, it was an intentional policy goal accomplished with techniques that aligned more with Maoism or Leninism than with market principles or careful economic management. The chapter begins by assessing common explanations for East Asian rural development in the post-World War II period. It then turns to the case of China and explores some of the reasons for rural policy failures in the Mao era (1949–1976) and successes in the reform era (1978–present). Finally, the chapter revisits the case of Japan and concludes with a few points about why existing theories of state-led development need to be reexamined.

Nearly every country in the world has asserted ownership over the hydrocarbons within its territory (Easo, 2009) and Ireland is no different. Ireland's approach to resource management, however, is dissimilar to many other countries with outcomes that include the transfer of ownership and control of state resources to private interests and one of the lowest rates of government take in the world. The Irish model has also resulted in a prolonged conflict which has engulfed the lives of many people for over a decade. In line with Karl (1997), Dunning (2009), and Di John (2010) who emphasise the value of examining interactions between political institutions and the economy to understand how states manage their resources, and responding to questions raised in the preceding chapter, this chapter follows a critical political economy path to explain how and why the Irish state manages its hydrocarbons in the manner adopted. The nine key factors identified as shaping the Irish approach illustrate how the state's approach has been shaped by diverse and conflicting dynamics and moulded by micro, meso and macro level forces which intersect with specific ideological, political, economic and social influences to create a model of state resource management unique in comparison with other countries.

This introductory chapter presents an overview of the Swedish welfare state and the theoretical frameworks that inform this study. It asserts that Sweden's economic development was the product of a miraculous welfare machine, and that the argument many make as to its progress is simple: homogeneity is good for welfare states, and heterogeneity is bad. Indeed, this outlook is further reinforced by the classic counterexample of the United States and the effects of heterogeneity on its own welfare-state growth. The chapter argues, however, that the links between ethnic homogeneity and the welfare state are contestable; understanding the relationship between ethnicity, race, and the welfare state, therefore, requires attention to how ethnicity enters into labor movements and into politics at the historical moments that matter for the welfare state's development.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the state and rural development in East Asia. In many developing countries, ruling elites pursue industrial development at the expense of the rural sector. They regard industry as critical for national security and economic competitiveness, and many believe that industry-led growth is sufficient to reduce poverty. This preference for industry is known as urban bias. In contrast with most developing countries, East Asia emerged in the post-World War II period as a region that seemed to defy the logic of urban bias, achieving both urban-industrial growth and rural-agricultural development. Nevertheless, it is also true that East Asian governments exploited agriculture, eroding the prospects for long-term development and giving rise to significant rural–urban disparities. Focusing on Taiwan, South Korea, and China, the book examines how and why East Asia achieved rural development, and it advances a theory to explain variation among East Asian countries. It demonstrates that rural transformation in East Asia was not a byproduct of industrialization, but the result of aggressive interventions by strong and activist (if not exactly developmental) states.

This chapter focuses on those recurring situations in the stone quarry workers' life at the stone mines that they generally regarded as unjust, unfair, and as objects of their collective expression of protest. In their long experience of earning a living by quarrying and processing stones on a commercial scale, the workers encountered actual and specific persons, particularly the owners of stone crushers who appeared to violate a social contract that had arisen from their work itself. This chapter discusses the history of workers' protest to explain the complex changeover of workers' consciousness from labour to class. It explores the formation of workers' co-operatives including Shanker Society, the establishment of a new agency called the Delhi State Industrial Development Corporation, the series of strikes staged by the quarry workers, and the workers' attitude towards unionization.

The Introduction tracks the emergence in contemporary China of “minority nationality medicines,” seeing new institutions and assemblages as forms of knowledge production and local development. The concept of medicine itself is recent in rural southwest China, and its meanings are contested. Gathering is a key verb, as social formations are caught in the act of becoming recognizable, useful, and coherent. This anthropology of knowledge attends especially to multiple practices of knowing. A key model is policy directives that guide research and institution-building: salvage, sort, synthesize, elevate. Minority medicines variously engage in these four processes. Chinese ethnicity is also introduced and explained as a creature of the Han majority state. But ethnicity is more like a place-based form of belonging than racial or tribal “identities.” The Introduction closes with the book’s collaborative methodology, between the two authors and with many assistants and allies in field research. Insofar as these allies became a principal subject of the research, the book is an anthropology of the developmental state in local practice. Several networks are drawn together in an ethnography of a present situation, a nation caught in the act of constructing complex social, epistemological, and practical things: minority nationality medicines.