Abstract
As structural adjustment policies and market reformations have become widely adopted throughout the global south, emancipatory political institutions, and particularly social funds, have become hallmark programs promoted by the World Bank. Initially conceived of as temporary solutions to the social problems brought about by rapid economic restructuring, social funds became durable institutions in many developing countries. Designed to be autonomous from the governmental bureaucracies, at least in principle, such institutions have been regarded as relatively successful programs. In Empowered Participation or Political Manipulation?, Rabab El-Mahdi analyzes major social funds in Bolivia and Egypt. She is concerned with evaluating the degree to which the funds achieve their stated goal: the creation of meaningful, community-centric participation in development and the political process through the provision of a social safety net, micro-loans, and other programs intended to nourish civil society. Informed by interviews with key actors in the state, the social fund bureaucracy, and the World Bank, coupled with extensive fieldwork, El-Mahdi convincingly demonstrates that in both states, the social funds were ultimately weak vehicles for development, largely replicating dysfunctional patterns of corporatism and favoritism found in the state bureaucracy.
El-Mahdi begins by outlining her conceptualization of civil society, which is rooted in Gramscian theory, in Chapter Two. She develops three interrelated spheres (the state, the economy, and civil society), which allow for a richer analysis of how, for example, the state may use economic policies to coopt or otherwise transform civil society. Using the goals of social funds as a barometer of their success, she focuses on three core indicators: (1) participation, or who participates in the decision-making process of the social funds and how participation operates, (2) whether the social funds are accountable to the communities where the programs take place, as well as to governments, organizations, and donors participating in funds, and (3) the embeddedness of social fund programs in their local community, and particularly how the flows of information between specific sites of the fund and its central office allow for meaningful participation by beneficiaries or community members.
A detailed accounting of the historical evolution of civil society in Egypt and Bolivia is provided in Chapter Three, where El-Mahdi deftly traces the different regimes, economic policies, and other factors shaping the development of civil society and its relationship to the state. This sets the context for a more thorough investigation into social funds for each case. Chapter Four examines Egypt’s Social Fund for Development (SFD), which was initially introduced in 1991 and became a permanent and autonomously funded institution by 1999. Here, she finds that, despite being an institution autonomous from the state, the SFD quickly became co-opted by the Egyptian government bureaucracy, which limited political dissent, and oriented it toward satisfying donors rather than recipient communities. Chapter Five turns to Bolivia’s Emergency Social Fund, which ultimately transformed into the Fondo de Inversion Productiva y Social (FPS) by 2000. While the implementation of the FPS had a limited improvement in local participation, unlike the SFD in Egypt, El-Mahdi argues that the allocation of funding was clientelistic, similar to the state bureaucracy. A concluding chapter is devoted to discussing the prospects for emancipatory political institutions generally, where El-Mahdi outlines how the difficulties in disentangling semi-autonomous institutions from state bureaucracies limits the capacities of social funds and comparable programs to spur democracy, accountability, and development.
Overall, El-Mahdi succeeds in pointing to the significant limitations of social funds as emancipatory programs that may have little net positive impacts for civil society and perhaps even less success for development. Despite the many strengths of the book, a point of weakness involves a lack of theoretical development of the international context informing the development of the social funds. The author often points to the importance of each nation-state’s historical and political contexts in not only contributing to the bureaucratic culture of the funds, but also their relative successes and failures. The application of Gramscian civil society is predominantly inward-looking, and rings insular, particularly given the different geo-strategic and political economic positions of nation-states throughout the global south. Egypt’s geo-strategic importance, for example, is referenced multiple times, making the weaker theorizing of how international contexts influence the construction and execution of the social funds all the more pronounced. Given that the World Bank is a strong proponent of developing emancipatory political institutions and was a strong backer of the social funds in each state, a more detailed theoretical discussion of how international factors shaped the development of the funds as well as expectations about how they would operate would have made a welcome addition.
This point of criticism aside, El-Mahdi provides a needed critical assessment of social funds as vehicles for development. The book is rich in its historical detail, yet is written accessibly to those without expertise in either Bolivia or Egypt. It will be of interest to scholars of development, globalization, political economy, and civil society.