Which development fad has Malawi not experimented with since its birth as an independent nation in July 1964? It has not only experimented with almost each and every development fad that has caught the attention of development practitioners but has also been among the pioneering implementers but without much to show for. The findings of the latest Integrated Household Survey (IHS) are a clear indictment of the apparent failure of the country’s efforts to shovel itself out of the webs of underdevelopment half a century later. Poverty remains deep, severe and widespread with half and quarter of the population living below the poverty line and chronically poor respectively. It is against this backdrop that this paper seeks to rethink Malawi’s governance development framework through the political settlement analytical lenses. A political settlement is broadly defined as a common understanding usually forged between and among elites about how power is organized, shared and exercised, which, inter alia, plays a key role in shaping patterns and processes of economic growth, tax capacity, state responsiveness and even access to justice. The main argument of this paper is that although there have been moments of hope and promise of developmentalism throughout the last 50 years, they have not lasted because the country’s political settlement has fundamentally remained the same regardless of the transitions it has undergone over the years. The proposition of this paper is that Malawi’s development governance framework must not only be obsessed with what to do but also how to do it, which requires a great deal of innovative institutional engineering largely outside the prescriptive text book policy toolkits.

1. Trapped in Webs of Underdevelopment for Half
a Century? Rethinking Malawi’s Governance
Development Framework
Blessings Chinsinga
Centre for Social Research (CSR) and Department of
Political and Administrative Studies (PAS)
Chancellor College, University of Malawi
P. O Box 280, Zomba
E-mail: kchinsinga@yahoo.co.uk

2. Outline of the Presentation
• Setting the context
• Political settlement framework
• Malawi’s development efforts
• Malawi’s development predicament in perspective
• Feasible development governance framework?
• Concluding remarks

3. Setting the Context
• Reviews about Malawi’s development achievements after 50 years of
independence have hardly been complementary
• Some scholars have actually described Malawi as a perfect case of
development disaster (Hulme, 2013; Mills, 2013)
• Malawi is characterized as a development disaster because most of its
development indicators are in the same league as Afghanistan, Sierra Leone,
Somalia, Liberia yet these countries have endured protracted civil strife
• The question is: what have we done with our peace? What do we mean
when we say Malawi is the land of milk and honey? Does it mean peace in
shared poverty? Increasingly people are becoming nostalgic about the past.
Why?
• A recent University of Oxford study as reported in the local media puts
Malawi’s development jinx into proper perspective: it concludes that it will
take a minimum of 74 years for Malawi to develop. Why? And develop in
what way?

4. Setting the Context Cont’d
• Malawi is one of the poorest countries whether judged by Gross
National Product (GNP) per capita, the United Nations
Development Programme’s (UNDP) Human Development Index
(HDI) or its Human Poverty Index (HPI)
• There is a whole range of competing explanations about
Malawi’s development predicament
• The paper seeks to offer an alternative explanation to Malawi’s
development predicament using the political settlement
framework and attempts to rethink its development governance
framework
• The main argument is that Malawi is stuck in the vicious cycle of
underdevelopment because its political settlement has
fundamentally remained same regardless the transitions it has
undergone over the years

5. Setting Context Cont’d
• The issue is that Malawi has a dysfunctional political
settlement that creates perverse incentives for progressive
and sustainable development efforts
• In which case the challenge of development lies not so
much in what needs to be done: that is identifying the right
technical fix(es) but rather more fundamentally in how it is
done (processes that facilitate or obstruct change)
• The proposition in rethinking Malawi’s governance
development framework is that getting to the ‘how’
requires a solid understanding of institutional dynamics
at work both formal and informal and the kinds of
incentives they generate

6. Political Settlement Framework
• Political settlement is defined as an expression of a common understanding usually
forged between and among elites about how power is distributed, organized and
exercised (Parks and Cole, 2009)
• A society’s political settlement is therefore manifested in the formal laws, implicit
understandings, specific mechanisms and ways political power is exercised
• Political settlement entail the types of formal as well as informal political bargains
that can end conflict and bring about sustainable peace, promote reform,
development and poverty reduction or fail to achieve any such progress (Khan, 2010)
• Political settlements are vital because they shape the field on which politics is played
meaning they prescribe the nature and rules of the political game that determine
which players are in and playing what role (Leftwich, 2010)
• Moments of transition represent critical junctures that may make it possible to
achieve fundamental changes to the state which might involve reconfiguring power
within the state or renegotiating the state altogether
• The character of political settlements might better explain why similar sets of
formal institutions such as democratic rules can have widely divergent outcomes
between and across countries

7. Political Settlement Hierarchical Governance Multi-stakeholder governance
Dominant developmental Good performance if principal-agent issues
are solved; easier for some sectoral
activities than others
Could add value on the margin, if it
helps solve principal-agent problems or
could threaten dominant political
position
Dominant predatory Capture by predatory principal Unlikely to be effective as a
countervailing power to predator
Inclusive competitive
clientelism
Poor performance due to multiple
principals with lack of clarity of goals;
managerial or worker capture insofar as
managers can play principals off one
another, and both managers and workers
get away with rent extraction through low
effort or corruption
Good performance if conditions of
politically salient stakeholder and
effective mobilization hold; can be
effective for both public activities
serving elites and those serving non-elites
Elitist competitive
clintelism
Poor performance due to multiple
principals with lack of clarity on goals;
managerial or worker capture as in
inclusive competitive clientelism
Good performance for elites if
conditions as in inclusive
competitive clientelism hold
Competitive
programmatic
Moderately good performance if
sectorally influenced principal-agent
issues are solved
Potentially very good performance

8. Malawi’s Development Efforts Since 1964
2000 Vision 2020
Key:
NLTP – national long term perspective
MTP – medium term perspective
8
MTP
NLTP
2000 2006
2011
2016
2020
MPRSP MGDS MGDS II
MERP
DEVPOLS
PAP
1964 1984
SAPs
1998
Source: EP&D, 2014

9. Malawi’s Development Efforts since 1964 Cont’d
• Malawi has undertaken several development initiatives since attainment of
independence in July 1964
• These efforts have entailed both short and long-term development
interventions
• The current development indices, however, show that these interventions have
not been very effective
• Malawi remains one of the poorest countries in the world with even a less
promising prognosis although between 2006 and 2010 it was dubbed as the
fastest growing economy in the world after the oil rich gulf state of Qatar
• The results of the 2012 Integrated Household Survey (IHS) fly in the face of the
claims of the Welfare Monitoring Survey (WMS) (2009) which suggested that
the incidence of headcount poverty had declined from 53.9 percent in 2005 to
39.6 percent in 2009
• The grim reality is that poverty has remained deep, severe and widespread
marginally declining from 53.9 to 50.7 percent between 2000 and 2012; the
proportion of the ultra-poor increased from 22.5 to 25 percent during the
same period; and the gini-coefficient which measures the gap between the
rich and the poor, worsened from 0.39 to 0.45

10. Malawi’s Development Predicament in Perspective
• The political liberalization has not unleashed the country’s development potential: in
fact, in some cases there is nostalgia about the promises of development in the one-party
dictatorship
• There have been several critical junctures that would have facilitated the emergence of a
developmental orientated political settlement but these have not been seized
accordingly
• Key critical junctures include the transition to multiparty democracy in May 1994; change
of government through Mutharika’s defection from UDF in February 2005; the
ascendancy to power of Mama JB following the death of Mutharika I in office; and the
change of government through the ballot box ushering in Mutharika II
• Malawi’s political settlement has moved from dominant predatory to elitist competitive
clientelism anchored fundamentally by the same old and familiar political culture
• Key elements of Malawi’s political culture include the following: 1) prevalence of
patronage; 2) clientelism; 3) opportunism and corruption; 4) centralizing authoritarian
tendency of the executive; 5) weakness of citizenry and civil society vis a vis the state; 6)
narrowness of the deliberative public sphere; 7) excessive deference to authority; and 8)
fear, docility and suspicion
• Two main consequences of Malawi’s contemporary political culture as follows: 1)
formal rules and institutions are often ignored and a more personal, irregular agenda
dominates when hard decisions must be taken; and 2) this makes it easier for
politicians to advance their personal agendas because there is little clearly or widely
shared understanding of what is in the public interest

11. Feasible Development Governance Framework?
• Inspired by the now established fact that politics matters in
creating conditions for and implementing sustainable
development interventions
• It is not all about technical fixes but also getting politics right in
order to put in place a democratic as well as capable
developmental state
• A potentially viable development governance framework should
pay attention to at least the following:
• Something about policy content (technical robustness of development
programmes and projects)
• Something on policy processes (its quality)
• Something underlying enabling conditions (political organization
and/or settlement)
• Would probably lead to policy making processes that are
problem driven, iterative and adaptive (PDIA)

12. Governance Development Framework
Governance
development
framework
Politics matter
Not politics
alone
Leadership
Coalitions
Agency

13. Feasible Development Governance Framework? Cont’d
• Politics matter: interests, incentives and motivations
• Not politics alone: technical soundness of ideas, projects
and programmes
• Agency: choices, decisions
• Coalitions: development is fundamentally about
overcoming collective action problems
• Leadership: as a political process not the great man or
woman of history model
• NB: no technical solution to a problem without a political
solution; and resolution of political problems will always
require technical support and implementation

14. Concluding Reflections
• Development in Malawi will remain a challenge as long as the
country’s political settlement remains squarely intact
• The main challenge is that while the transition to multiparty
democracy provided some hope for change, Malawi’s political culture
has simply adapted to multipartysm and elections but without losing
its force
• Political settlement is critical because it influences the relations within
the state and also the nature of boundaries between politician/state,
citizens and the private sector
• Draws attention to the fact that political elites were concerned with
three things with varying weights: development outcomes, personal
enrichment and political continuity (either regime stability or re-election
depending on political conditions)
• The proposed development governance framework could perhaps
help deal with these challenges and usher Malawi onto a new
trajectory of development prospects