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Alan Whaites is a British political theorist most associated with work on the State and State-building.
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Whaites' best known early work focused on civil society theory and the relationship between civil society and the state. This includes:`Let's get civil society straight' originally appearing in journal form and then as part of an Oxfam politics on development reader[1]. Whaites' argued that civil society had become a panacea for policy-makers (this was in the early 1990s) without due regard to the complexities involved, including the politics inherent within civil society. This was followed by `NGOs,' Civil Society and the State,' arguing that civil society should be viewed within the context of the wider `state'[2]. Although Whaites' is known mostly for his civil society writing in the 1990s it is also possible to find pointers to his later work in his articles on South Asian Politics, particularly Pakistan[3].
Whaites' career has alternated between being a theorist and a development practitioner. In the late 1990s he became global advocacy director with the large international Christian NGO, World Vision International. He left the organisation in 2004 and joined the UK Government's Department for International Development (DfID).
There are no major academic or pure political science papers from this period in journal literature. World Vision did produce a number of policy reports and Whaites is credited with authoring several of these. Whaites also launched World Vision's development journal, Global Future[4], during this period. Some of his papers and the editorial direction of Global Future offer indications of his evolving thinking on the State; including discussions of issues that have now become familiar themes within Whaites' work. These include the questioning of traditional theoretical approaches to state-society relations and the impact on states of donor/international policy prescriptions.
Perhaps the key work from this period is `Masters of their own Development'[5]. Whaites was associated with a long-running campaign by development organisations for the reform of the World Bank and IMF and `Masters of their own Development' summarises some of this experience, making it of interest to students of multilateral agencies as well as students of the state. Also useful is `Precarious States'[6]. Whaites produced a book in 2002 titled `Development Dilemmas' which connected his early work on civil society to globalisation and also to increased pressures for accountability in the civil society sector.
At DfID, Whaites combined his governance and state-building work with his Asian academic background, focusing first on governance in Nepal and Afghanistan. A 2008 DfID Working Paper, "States in Development: Understanding State-building" is representative of his current work [7].
Whaites is most associated with a model of the way that states do or do not work. The model was developed as part of Whaites' work as a political scientist with the British Government,'s Department for International Development (overseas aid agency) and Whaites points to background research funded by both DFID and the OECD-DAC as key sources of influence[8][9]. The Whaites model is seen as less idealized than other attempts to explain the relationship between state and society (such as the Social Contract). Instead Whaites' stresses understanding `how things are' rather than `how we would like them to be.' The model points to three essential `areas' that determine the nature of how states work (whether good or bad). The first is a Political settlement, the second is the degree of commitment of political elites to a few key state `survival functions' (such as taxation and security) and the third is the willingness of elites to respond to public expectations[10].
The model argues that if elites form a political settlement which then emphasizes survival functions this is likely to create pressures to respond to expectations. He draws on JC Scotts concept of states making their society's `legible' in order to build state systems, creating mutually reinforcing relationships. Whaites' argues that some political settlements are formed in ways that reduce incentives to strengthen state functions. These are uneasy settlements where elites lack leadership or a state-building vision and instead the loose relationships create pressures to use mechanisms such as Patrimonialism. Whaites lists a number of factors that are likely to influence the direction that the three key areas are likely to take and which will determine the nature of the overall state-building dynamic. He also offers a typography and definition of political settlements. The model was published as a think piece with comments from the original panel of expert advisers[11].
There has been some discussion of whether Whaites' concept of `responsive' and `unresponsive' state-building is helpful, or whether Weberian terms such as `modern' and `traditional' should be used, or simply `good dynamics' and `bad dynamics.' The logic in the original work seems to suggest that `responsive' conveys the need for mutual engagement between state and society, although there does seem to be an inference that responsive state-building will lead to the dominance of the Weberian `Modern' state. It is also probably best to read Whaites in conjunction with other work that argues strongly for pragmatic analysis and approaches to state capacity and capacity development, such as Merilee Grindel's `Good Enough Governance' approach. Essentially Whaites' work fits into a tradition of trying to balance the idea of development as purely `technical' with an acknowledgment that it is also a product of deep, underlying political forces that are often difficult for outsiders to analyze and understand.
Bibliographies of Whaites works can be found on some UN information sites, particularly [12] and [13]
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