Governance and the common man

This chapter continues the task of linking together various strands of argument arising from the Social Policy in Developing Contexts (SPDC) research programme at Bath. It is a third attempt. The two earlier incarnations have been ‘Regimes, Mixes And Ground Realities: A synthesis paper’ (Gough and Wood 2000) and my earlier ‘Social Policy and the Peasant Analogue’. This present chapter essentially revises the second of these papers, but draws also on the first and other SPDC materials and discussions. It does not constitute a descriptive overview of whole-team contributions and does not reflect a full consensus of views, positions and analysis. Rather, it represents a particular line of argument which seeks to capture more closely the conditions of the poorer regions in the world, especially South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. In doing so, it challenges many of the normative assumptions made by rich country social policy discourses, especially in respect of the condition of the state and the labour market. Hence ‘Governance and the common man’ (which I think has a better ring to it than the common ‘person’) in the title. It is therefore offering a particular argument rather than a synthetic overview of the Bath project so far.