Abstract Mainstream development policies often promote citizens committees to oversee basic social services. Such require influence over, and legitimacy among, service providers perform their roles, which local elites can help or hinder. Using a mixed-methods approach, we analyse the situation in 251 health facility Burundi, part of benefited from interventions designed bolster relationship wit...

Is Islam compatible with modern economic development? The poor development record of predominantly Muslim countries during the past century has led to claims that only a return to medieval Islamic institutions will produce economic growth in a manner that is compatible with Islamic culture. Using data from the thirteenth century Islamic Levant, this paper examines how one medieval Islamic insti...

Nationalism creates and recreates a sense of distinctive identity and autonomy based on the Enlightenment idea of human freedom that enables people to survive in a modern world in which unpredictable change has become the norm. While, in the medieval world, the feudal states invoked religion and cultural resources to make people servile, the modern state invokes identity in a language of servin...

This article argues that the limited economic transformation in West African countries is a function of interaction between domestic elites’ quest for political survival and EU’s international trade partnership with former colonies (Yaoundé Convention 1963–1975; Lomé 1975–2000 Cotonou Agreement 2000–present). The counterfactual argument, demonstrated clearly comparative study (of Yaoundé era), ...

In this paper, we develop an account of the failure of private marketgovernance institutions to maintain market order by highlighting how control of their distributional function by powerful elites limits their regulatory capacity. We examine the New York Clearing House Association (NYCHA), a private market-governance institution among commercial banks in Manhattan that operated from 1853 to 19...

Community-based development has been criticized for its inadequate understanding of power relationships at the local level, which thus leaves room for elite capture. This paper compares and contrasts two case studies, both of which take power seriously in their institutional designs. The solar home system in Bangladesh, represents the ‘counter-elite’ approach and explicitly excludes local elite...