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SOME NEW CONVENTIONS ABOUT SOLOMON ISLANDS GOVERNMENT
Political settlements, pacts and capabilities
David Craig
1. Reversing the ‘Retreat of the State’– Solution = expanding capacity and
good governance outwards – Focus on deficits and capacity
building– Finding the political will: focus on
actors2. Working with a fraught political settlement and post intervention ‘Re-ordering of Political Capability’
– Focus on actual political-economic elites, their pacts and $$, and how these transform into institutional capabilities/ political settlements
EXISTING AND NEW CONVENTIONS ABOUT GOVERNMENT AND INSTITUTIONSIN SOLOMON ISLANDS
• Political settlements/ Khan: Elite power, pacts, institutions– Coalescing/ enrolling political and
economic power to invest rents in political authority and institutional capability for security/ development
• Slater: Provisioning vs protection pacts and institutional outcomes: unsustainable provisioning, fragmentation/ militarisation vs insecure elites ordering power via formal institutions for security/ development
• Tilly: ‘clientage’ payments bridging economic/ political divides
• Mann: ‘grasp and reach’ capability of institutions– grasping power/ rents centrally, and
reaching out to constituencies
SOME NEW CONCEPTS
• Dispersed constituencies, central political pacts focussed on provisioning
• Urban primacy (without political representation), centralised rents
• Weak party/ pact enrolment/ grasp: limited protection/ policy commitments, dissolution of governments through confidence votes
• Weak reach: enormous problems in provisioning, and expressing political agency/ electoral claiming through government machineries
LOGIC 1
FRAGMENTED GEOPOLITICS AND THE PRIMACY OF PROVISIONING
• Problems of elite cohesion, protection and concessionary provision
• Clientage, security and elite –provisioning in a fragmented trading economy
• One dimensional / short term cash transactions across ethnic divides
• AND Monetisation of elite political economic pacts, driven by fragmented concessionaires: timber/ trading/ gambling
• Institutionalised in the Two stage electoral process / ‘Club for Staying in Government Forever’
LOGIC 2
ETHNIC CLEAVAGES AND THE MONETISATION OF POLITICAL-ECONOMIC PACTS
• Co-production pacts: massive international commitment to security, justice, health and education, public finance– Political agency/ enrolment/
accountability corroded in mainstream public provision
• Vertical layering of capabilities/ rents into institutions to provision and enrol political support: Constituency Development Funds– Corrosive raiding of budgets for
new layered capabilities – Pre-empts effective
intergovernmental transfer system formation
LOGIC 3
SIG/ DONOR PACTS
CO-PRODUCTION AND INSTITUTIONAL LAYERING
• Slater’s provisioning outcomes: Fragmentation/ policing/ militarisation/ crisis prone – Security and basic services guarantee– Weak policy agency/ accountability – Unsustainable provisioning/ raiding
• But with durable layering and specific settlements– Co-production and cdfs– Different settlements by locality/ island
states/ Honiara/ sector?• What else might be transformational?
Consolidations– political consolidation: Local (stv), Honiara
(urban development and representation) – Political economy: consolidating mining
rents, with intergovernmental transfer system (PNG)
– Consolidated pathways: Education plus regional labour market integration
– Consolidated regional commitment (Barbara ‘co-ownership’ of long term security/ development)
FUTURE TRAJECTORIES