Developmental Dilemmas, Power, and Institutional Entrepreneurship: A lens for Policy Analysis
Abstract
Why do well-meaning developmental policies so often fail? Consider the recent collapse of the well-constructed peace agreement between the Colombian government and FARC guerillas. Likewise, privatizing former Soviet assets in Russia engendered authoritarian kleptocracy. In such cases, self-interested activity of powerful agents undermines policy initiatives. Alas, achieving inclusive development entails resolving dense collective-action problems of forging cooperation among agents with disparate resources, interests, and understandings. Resolution requires functional configurations of inclusive informal and formal institutions. Yet, powerful actors shape institutional evolution in their favor—because they can. How to proceed?
In this seminar, I will outline elements of a conceptual framework for policy-relevant inquiry into such dilemmas. I will open with background for systematically conceptualizing power, social dilemmas, and four types of agency: leadership, following, brokerage, and institutional entrepreneurship. I will focus on the latter. Institutional entrepreneurs invest resources into discovering narratives and actions in efforts to influence the political-economic and normative understandings that underlie strategic interactions. Such interactions influence trajectories of institutional evolution. By extension they condition prospects for resolving developmental dilemmas. Moreover, these dynamics operate within specific social contexts that are framed by identifiable distinctions in configurations of power. Policymakers beware.
This systematic approach to power, and agency facilitates inquiry into the roots and consequences of context-specific developmental dilemmas. As such, it offers conceptual foundation for developmental policy inquiry and analysis.
About the speaker
William Ferguson is the Gertrude B. Austin Professor of Economics at Grinnell College. After majoring in history at Grinnell College, he worked as an urban community organizer in Seattle, WA. In 1989, he earned a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and began teaching at Grinnell College. These experiences inform his scholarship on political economy theory. His early scholarship focuses on labor economics, emphasizing bargaining theory and collective action. In the early 2000s, he broadens his focus to game-theoretic institutional political economy. His 2013 Stanford UP book, Collective Action and Exchange: A Game-Theoretic Approach to Contemporary Political Economy, opens with microfoundations of collective-action problems before proceeding to a game-theoretic approach to power, informal and formal institutions, policymaking, and economic growth. His 2020 Stanford UP sequel, The Political Economy of Collective Action, Inequality, and Development, proposes a framework for development theory using a typology of political settlements to analyze collective-action problems of political-economic development. He continues this theme as a coauthor of the 2022 Oxford book Political Settlements and Development: Theory, Evidence, Implications. His current manuscript for the Cambridge Series in Development Economics, Developmental Dilemmas: The Role of Power and Agency, focuses more specifically on how power shapes developmental prospects.
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