Beyond Institutions: Political Settlements Analysis and Development

Few concepts have captured the imagination of the conflict and development community in recent years as powerfully as the idea of a ‘political settlement’. At its most ambitious, ‘political settlements analysis’ (PSA) promises to explain why conflicts occur and states collapse, the conditions for their successful rehabilitation, different developmental pathways from peace, and how to better fit development policy to country context. Yet despite the meteoric rise of the term and its tremendous promise, not all is well in the world of PSA. Rival definitions of the concept abound; there are disagreements about its scope and the way it should be used; and little progress has been made on measurement. In response, this paper proceeds in three broad steps. It first reviews existing debates to propose a new and revised definition of political settlements. It then develops two key dimensions—social foundation and political configuration—of the revised concept into a typology of political settlements. In a third step the paper draws on the typology to explore some of the explanatory possibilities the revised concept generates, before the conclusion sets out a broader research agenda, providing both methodological and theoretical pointers for how political settlements analysis could be taken forward.