Donors and Disciplines Meet the Political Economy of Development: The Contested Evolution of Political Settlements Analysis

Over the last two decades, political settlements analysis (PSA) has been widely published in academic journals and has been influential in development programming. This paper is based on a review of 75 peer-reviewed publications employing PSA across social science journals. In line with existing research, it identifies two schools of PSA research. First, an ‘originalist’ approach that aims to expand the historical materialist and structuralist roots of PSA, initially developed by Mushtaq Khan. Second, ‘revisionist’ approaches, which dissent from Mushtaq Khan’s original work while aligning with mainstream approaches to varying degrees. Such ‘revisionist’ approaches are not entirely unified and show both dissent from and alignment with dominant New Institutional Economics and Good Governance approaches.
Building on Michael Polanyi’s analysis of how scholarly communities are captured by incentives to both show dissent from existing scholarly work while also showing alignment with dominant framings, this paper evaluates how such tensions have evolved within the PSA literature. PSA is an example of an approach, which was originally established in opposition to neoclassical economics. However, revisionist PSA approaches have brought more popular interpretations of PSA in line with mainstream understandings, hoping to build a consensus while the structuralist roots of PSA have been obfuscated.