SOAS Research Online

Abstract

This commentary reflects critically on the contribution that this volume makes to the study of PoEs and state capacity in the Global South, and prompts a rethinking of some of the author’s own decades old work on Republican-era China. It lauds the ways in which the political settlements approach substantially adds to the extant literature on PoEs. In recognizing that organizations are never divorced from their surrounding environments, the political settlement typology explains systematic variation both between cases and over time, with shifting interactions between technical domain, the skill of organizational leadership, and the overall political settlement leading to differing and changing ‘degrees of PoE-ness’. At the same time, these reflections suggest that the volume’s case selections of presumptive excellence, which the authors call the ‘logistical’ segments of the state, are almost entirely within the economic technocracy. A disaggregation of why ‘excellence’ appears to be so concentrated in the economic technocracy, and which of its PoE-fostering features might be applied fruitfully to very different arenas of policy implementation, particularly those that require service delivery or behavioural change, is a natural next step for research on PoEs.