Development Centre Studies Informal Institutions How Social Norms Help Or Hinder Development

Informal institutions — family and kinship structures, traditions, and social norms — are often decisive factors in shaping policy outcomes and this book advocates a pragmatic way of dealing with them.

Provides evidence for policy makers on how to deal with informal employment in developing and developed countries alike.

Smuggling is typically thought of as furtive and hidden, taking place under the radar and beyond the reach of the state. But in many cases, governments tacitly permit illicit cross-border commerce, or even devise informal arrangements to regulate it. Drawing on extensive fieldwork in the borderlands of Tunisia and Morocco, Max Gallien explains why states have long tolerated illegal trade across their borders and develops new ways to understand the political economy of smuggling. This book examines the rules and agreements that govern smuggling in North Africa, tracing the involvement of states in these practices and their consequences for borderland communities. Gallien demonstrates that, contrary to common assumptions about the effects of informal economies, smuggling can promote both state and social stability. States not only turn a blind eye to smuggling, they rely on it to secure political acquiescence and maintain order, because it provides income for otherwise neglected border communities. More recently, however, the securitization of borders, wars, political change, and the pandemic have put these arrangements under pressure. Gallien explores the renegotiation of the role of smuggling, showing how stability turns into vulnerability and why some groups have been able to thrive while others have been pushed further to the margins. With both rich empirical detail and novel theoretical contributions, Smugglers and States offers important insights into security and stability in North Africa and the prospects for economic inclusion in a context where many livelihoods exist outside of the law.

This report analyses the impact of “Shifting wealth” on social cohesion, largely focusing on high-growth converging countries.

This book explores the view that normative behaviour is part of a complex of social mechanisms, processes and narratives that are constantly shifting. From this perspective, norms are not a kind of self-contained social object or fact, but rather an interplay of many things that we label as norms when we ‘take a snapshot’ of them at a particular instant. Further, this book pursues the hypothesis that considering the dynamic aspects of these phenomena sheds new light on them. The sort of issues that this perspective opens to exploration include: Of what is this complex we call a "social norm" composed of? How do new social norms emerge and what kind of circumstances might facilitate such an appearance? How context-specific are the norms and patterns of normative behaviour that arise? How do the cognitive and the social aspects of norms interact over time? How do expectations, beliefs and individual rationality interact with social norm complexes to effect behaviour? How does our social embeddedness relate to social constraint upon behaviour? How might the socio-cognitive complexes that we call norms be usefully researched?

There are eight years left to reach the SDGs. Agrifood systems transformation is urgently needed if we are to achieve sustainability, resilience and food security and nutrition in a post-COVID world. This desired transformation can only be achieved by strengthening and capitalizing on the knowledge, experience, skills, and capabilities for collective action of a broad range of public and private actors each of whom bring distinctive interests, needs, resources, influence and capacities. “Governance” is the name for this multidimensional capability for effective and inclusive collective action at all levels. In many country contexts, it is the governance bottlenecks that lead to a gap between policy expectations and their outcomes on the ground. For example, a given policy intervention can make a lot of economic sense but if it is perceived as threatening a powerful interest group or not sufficiently considering that group’s interests, it will most probably fail. Understanding the governance – both institutions and political economy – behind existing agrifood systems can thus make or break the success of any policy or technical support work. Bringing together insights from FAO’s rich experience and knowledge and global literature, this paper introduces an operational four-phased framework for analysis and integration of governance analysis and action into formulation and implementation of interventions at country, regional and global levels. It also provides a review of recent trends in expert thinking about governance for sustainable development and highlights FAO’s conceptual contributions to governance in the areas of FAO’s mandate. The increased use of governance analysis in FAO’s work will stimulate iterative collective learning processes and honest evaluation of potential for change thus supplementing technical solutions with approaches based on a solid understanding of practical and political realities on the ground. With its emphasis on continual learning and adaptation, governance analysis will enable FAO to significantly improve the effectiveness of its policy and technical support to Members to achieve sustainable development that leaves no one behind.

A key distinctive feature of Multinational Enterprises (MNEs) as organizations resides in the fact that they span across borders. This exposes them to dissimilar and often unfamiliar social and economic conditions as they venture in foreign countries. MNEs from industrialized economies that are active in developing countries and emerging markets face particularly challenging hurdles due to both economic and institutional discrepancies between their home and host countries. This book focuses on the uneasy interaction between the traditional logics of developing countries and the economic logic of MNEs. The traditional logics of most developing countries are built around community-based legitimacy and an intuitive but concrete epistemology. Conversely, the economic logic of MNEs from developed economies is built around technical and economic legitimacy and an abstract intellectual epistemology. Unpacking the uneasy interactions between these two logics will help achieve MNEs’ objectives of competitiveness in developing countries as well as globally. The Montreal Local Global Research Group is a well recognized research group in formulating and researching local and global issues in strategic management from the perspective of integrating divergent dominant logics into the strategy conceptualization process, and this will be the first book to be dedicated to the study of the interaction between the traditional logic of developing country and the economic logic of Multinational Enterprise (MNE). The cultural diversity of the contributing authors and the multidisciplinary approach offers a fresh perspective from which to explore beneficial corporate and local strategies that promote long-term economic growth consistent with local traditional and cultural norms. This collection will be primarily of interest to scholars of international business, international development, and economics. Furthermore, this book is immediately relevant to decision makers in Multinational corporations, NGOs and political decision makers that mediate the interaction between local actors and corporate agents in developing and transitional economies.

This book presents the results of a collective and original empirical investigation of the institutional systems underlying the capitalisms that are coming to the fore in developing nations. While varieties of industrialized countries’ capitalisms are extensively scrutinized, those of developing countries’ capitalisms are far less documented. By implementing a unified and original comparative approach based on the institutional complementarity theory, the different contributors of the book find evidence for the originality and heterogeneity of the forms of capitalism to be observed in developing countries. This text analyses capitalist systems as clusters of sectoral institutions and regulations, identifying differences between these clusters in a large sample of emerging and developing countries. Rougier and Combarnous bring together contributions answering the following questions: What are these clusters of institutions underlying emerging capitalisms? Are there common or specific patterns of institutional clustering across countries and what are the main characteristics of the varieties of capitalism they shape? What are their main long-term determinants? Are there specific patterns of economic outcome associated with these clusters? Can different forms of institutional complementarity be observed? How can we analyse institutional reform from this perspective?