Understanding power, culture and institutional change: a revised approach to political settlements analysis

The institutions that govern how we distribute resources, protect rights, and
accord status are widely recognised as important for progressive development
outcomes. Political settlements analysis is an increasingly influential framework
for (post)institutional analysis within development studies, arguing that
institutions and their outcomes are shaped by political economy relations of
power. This article builds on the strengths of political settlements analysis (PSA)
but argues that its strongly materialist foundations overlook the role of social
identity, status and moral beliefs in shaping institutional change. Future research
employing PSA needs rebalancing, incorporating an understanding of power
relations as ideational as well as material and based on cultural as well as
political and economic sources. Drawing on insights from cultural political
economy, this article presents an alternative approach to power in PSA. This
emphasises the contingency inherent in meaning-making processes and conceives
of power as embedded in cultural understandings, as well as political organisation
and economic control. Adopting this cultural political economy approach to
power allows PSA to produce a fuller understanding of the causal mechanisms
generating institutional change.