Developmental State Capacity, Poverty Reduction and Institutional Reform

This chapter examines Botswana’s state capacity for development and poverty reduction. Botswana is among the few countries in the world that are often described as “developmental states”. These are countries that have put into place institutions which have helped to sustain long-term growth as part of a broader national development vision (Mbabazi & Taylor, 2005). A developmental state is not defined simply in relation to its economic performance, because not all countries with good economic growth rates are developmental states. To qualify, purposeful or deliberate developmental activism, as the Asian Tigers’ experience suggests, is vital, and this must have ideological and technocratic underpinnings that earnestly seek to deploy state resources in the job of economic development (Mbabazi and Taylor, 2005:151). Developmental states are, to paraphrase Leftwich (1995: 284), “those states whose internal politics and external relations have served to concentrate sufficient power, authority, autonomy, competence and capacity at the centre to shape, pursue and encourage the achievement of explicit developmental objectives, whether by establishing and promoting the conditions of economic growth, or by organizing it directly, or varying combinations of both”. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.