Benedicte Bull

Policy Networks and Business Participation in Free Trade Negotiations in Chile

Within Latin America, Chile is distinguished by its stable trade policies and rapid negotiation of trade agreements with countries and regions all over the world. Explanations for these phenomena often point to the stable pro-free trade coalition established in the aftermath of the shock-therapy pursued in the 1970s, and Chiles professional government bureaucracy. Although both of these elements are important, this article shows how the rapid integration of Chile into the world economy has also depended on the existence of business associations with expertise on trade issues. Through the process of integration, a close policy network has evolved between key public officials and business representatives. This is premised on the mutual recognition of expertise in the public and private sectors, and is held together by close personal networks of loyalty and trust across the public-private divide. However, while the development of such a policy network has been highly favourable to the process of negotiating trade agreements, it has also contributed to the de-facto exclusion of societal actors that have less to contribute to trade negotiations than business sectors.

Between Ruptures and Continuity: Modernisation, Dependency and the Evolution of Development Theory

The field of development studies provides a number of diverging perspectives to the pressing challenges of our time, but few clear answers to them. This article therefore questions why six decades of development studies have not been able to come up with more generally acceptable recommendations and solutions to old as well as new challenges. The argument is that as a field of study development studies has been so fixated with ruptures and paradigm shifts that much valuable insight of theories and perspectives rejected has been lost. In order to pursue this argument, the articles main focus is modernisation and dependency. While often argued to be opposites, modernisation and dependency approaches have in fact much in common and are still in use in both actual policy making and discourse as well as providing explanations of outcomes and events. However, current development practice also shows that the decades of criticism that development studies has provided towards both concepts have been lost on academics and politicians due to the eagerness to provide clear-cut categories. This argument is illustrated by recent empirical examples from Latin America and Sub-Sahara Africa.

Business Groups and Transnational Capitalism in Central America

1. Introduction: the Emergence and Evolution of Business Groups in Central America 2. Between Hierarchies and Networks: Understanding Business Group Strategies in a Global Capitalism 3. Regional Shifts and National Trajectories: Differences in the Context and Strategies of Business Groups 4. From Oligarchs to Transnational Business Group Leaders? The Shifting Strategies of Key Business Groups 5. Internationalization and the Export Performance of the Central American Business Groups 6. Central American Business Groups, Innovation and Institutional Conditions 7. The Role of the State: Governmental Financial Policies and Business Group Strategies 8. Between the Back and the Front Stage - the Political Strategies of Central American Business Groups 9. Conclusion References

From Business UNusual to Business as Usual: The Future Legitimacy of Public-Private Partnerships with Multilateral Organizations

The 1990s and the early 2000s witnessed an unprecedented move on the part of multilateral organizations toward seeking partnerships with private corporations and foundations (PPPs). These partnerships were seen as having great potential for renewing the UN, and as helping the multilateral organizations achieve the ambitious goals set for them. The reasons for establishing them were as much ideological as financial; increasingly, leaders of multilateral organizations became convinced that public-private collaboration was the solution not only to the financial constraints they experienced — especially in the UN system — but also to the practical challenges they faced. For example, in a 2005 UN-commissioned study called Business UNusual, it was argued that PPPs would be a catalyst for reform and institutional innovation “by infusing private sector management practices and performance-based thinking” (Witte and Reinecke, 2005).

Public–Private Partnerships: The United Nations Experience

This chapter discusses the forms of public-private partnerships (PPPs) that the United Nations has entered into and how they distribute roles and responsibilities between public and private actors. A brief historical introduction to the rise of PPPs in the United Nations system is first provided, followed by a discussion of different kinds of PPPs, distinguishing them along various different dimensions, but focusing mainly on the distribution of roles and responsibilities. The next section discusses the impact of PPPs in the United Nations organizations, while the last section discusses the possible future of PPPs in the context of increased financial constraints.

Governance in the Aftermath of NeoLiberalism: Aid, Elites and State Capacity in Central America

There is an increasing consensus that development and poverty reduction depends on the existence of inclusive state institutions that make and enforce rules and implement development policies. There is also increasing evidence that this depends on the emergence of a development-oriented elite that supports such institutions. However, there is little agreement regarding how such an elite emerges, or how external interventions, such as aid, contribute to the strengthening of institutions through the impact on elites. This article argues that one of the reasons for the limited effect is that governance interventions implicitly or explicitly have been based on a narrow and simplistic view of elites and the state. The article draws up an analytical framework for understanding state capacity and governance, particularly focusing on relations between states and elites. It then discusses how a set of reforms induced by the international community to move Central America toward market-oriented economies have contributed to the current governance crisis in the Northern Triangle (El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras). The final part discusses the impact of the neoliberal reforms on four dimensions of state capacity in the Northern Triangle of Central America: extraction, coercion, service provision and regulation. While the neoliberal reforms did not have a uniform impact on governance, they entered into ongoing struggles between elites, and thus had different effects on processes of strengthening or weakening state capacity.

Changing Elites, Institutions and Environmental Governance

The topic of elites has always been controversial in Latin American social sciences. Elites have been studied indirectly as landowners, capitalists, business-leaders or politicians, and have also been approached directly using concepts and theory from elite studies. Although there is a significant amount of literature on the role of elites in democratic transformations (see e.g. Higley and Gunther, 1992), elites have often been considered to be an obstacle to the formation of more democratic, prosperous and egalitarian societies (e.g. Paige, 1997; Cimoli and Rovira, 2008). This is also the case in the literature on environmental governance, in which elite groups are often considered to be an obstacle to sustainable development and an obstacle to establishing more equitable influence over the use and benefits of natural resources. Therefore, although an elitist conservation movement has long existed in Latin America, struggles to protect the environment from overexploitation and contamination have commonly been related to struggles against local, national and transnational elites by subaltern groups (Martinez-Alier, 2002; Carruthers, 2008; chapters 1 and 2 in this volume).

Chinese engagement in Africa and Latin America: does it matter for state capacity?

ABSTRACT China is now a major actor in global development and wields considerable influence in large parts of the world. The success of the Chinese development model has not only challenged the notion that democracy is necessary for development but also questioned the hegemony of the neo-liberal state encouraging and laying the foundations for a thriving private market economy. The Chinese model of aid, loans, and investments highlights the principles of ‘win-win’, ‘mutual respect’, and ‘non-interference’, based on the needs of a country as articulated by the recipient government. Yet, although Chinese aid does not explicitly aim to affect domestic policies and institutions in recipient countries, it does affect them. In this article, we explore the impact of Chinese aid practices – including grants, loans, and investment policies – on state legitimacy and the capacity of state institutions in sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America. We argue that while Chinese development interventions have highly diverse impacts in various geographical contexts, they tend to strengthen the elites that are in power – whether in government, or those supporting it from the outside. The extent to which Chinese policies contribute to strengthening state capacity depends on the incentives and visions that local elites possess.

Central American Business Groups, Innovation, and Institutional Conditions

This chapter focuses on an important dimension of business groups’ strategies that has so far received only limited attention: their technological innovation activities. This dimension is indeed relevant to an understanding of the dynamics of the business sector in Central American countries. In fact, while there exist several studies focusing on the financial and economic performance of groups in emerging economies, much less is known about their innovative strategies, that is, how groups organize their technological and business activities and what makes them more (or less) successful than independent enterprises (Khanna & Yafeh, 2007; Colpan et al., 2010; Carney et al., 2011).

The Role of the State: Government Financial Policies and Business Group Strategies

It is increasingly recognized that if we are to understand how DBGs react to liberalization and a more open economy, we also have to understand how the groups co-evolve with their institutional settings and national policies. In this chapter we will analyze how business groups in Central America reacted to the liberalization of the banking sector and why they presented diverse responses to the entry of foreign financial conglomerates into the region during the second half of the 2000s. During the years immediately following liberalization, several business groups entered the banking sector across the region. However, by the end of the 2000s, the composition of the banking sector in Central America demonstrated considerable variation. In Costa Rica and El Salvador, most business groups had left the sector. Meanwhile, banks were still key institutions for business groups in Guatemala and Honduras. The puzzle here is to understand why the region’s business groups responded to the liberalization of the banking sector in such divergent ways. Therefore, we examine the impact of government policies on Central American business groups’ strategies in the banking sector from the early 1990s to 2010.