ABSTRACT
Singapore has been lauded as a story of successful delayed or late development. The initial global and local conditions under which the Singapore developmental state was able to engender factor- and investment-driven economic transformation based on borrowed technology, are no longer obtaining. In the earlier stages of development, the bureaucracy had a relatively clear and given problem definition of the ‘catching up’ exercise and the basic universal good of socio-economic development. In Singapore, however, that singular over-arching criterion as discussed earlier had been development for survival. The Evans and Rueschemeyer thesis provides a theorisation of how bureaucratic rationality is linked with the issue of state power and state-society relations in the context of the developmental state. Judgement is a process, or form of substantive rationality, that is so necessary in the type of ever-changing policy environments that face states today, as mentioned by Peters, and as discussed for the case of Singapore.
