The Institutional Imperative: The Politics of Equitable Development in Southeast Asia (review)

Southeast Asia’s “miracle” growth was both rapid and relatively equitable. Much work has been done to analyse the causes of growth and the development of a capitalist class in Southeast Asia, but far less attention has been paid to understanding how lower income groups came to benefit from this process. In this book, Erik Martinez Kuhonta asks how the politics of Southeast Asian countries can account for differing outcomes in poverty reduction and equity across the region. His answer is that poverty reduction requires appropriate institutions, particularly political parties.

Kuhonta provides us with an in depth comparison of the political economy of growth in Malaysia (equitable) and Thailand (less so) and a shorter extension of these findings to Vietnam (equitable) and the Philippines (less so). He argues that in the success cases the poor achieved significant institutional representation in political parties embodying a broad-based social coalition. The breadth of coalition ensured that parties were “pragmatic” in the sense that they rarely pursued poverty reduction at the expense of social stability and growth. At the same time, to secure an important rural support base, parties created institutions that penetrated the local level in rural areas. These institutional structures sustained political support and provided channels for rural concerns to be fed upwards from the local level to relatively receptive central policy-makers.

In the less equitable cases, the poor were represented by civil society organizations (CSOs) but they failed to find an institutional place in the party system, which remained elite dominated, despite constitutional democracy. In both the Philippines and Thailand, elite-dominated parties in fragmented party systems tended to obtain rural support through vote-buying and patronage. CSOs were sometimes able to influence the policy agenda to overthrow particular groups of elites or affect specific policy areas but this success was not institutionalized into sustained political influence.

Kuhonta argues that institutional analysis tells us more than explanations based on democratization, class alliances or the interethnic balance of power. Democracy can fail to represent the poor where they remain excluded from party systems. Different historical experiences of state formation in Southeast Asia mean that there are few examples of the archetypal European alliance between middle and working classes emerging in opposition to a traditional ruling elite, though Malaysia perhaps comes closest. While the equilibrium between Malay political power and Chinese economic power might appear to explain the structure of Malaysian politics, similar balances in Fiji or Sri Lanka (reviewed in the book’s appendix) turned out very differently.

However, Kuhonta does not argue that institutions explain everything. They are a necessary, rather than sufficient, condition for pro-poor growth and institutions themselves to emerge from complex historical processes. The case studies therefore present a rich historical picture, which is a particular strength of the book. Given the relative lack of studies of inequality and poverty reduction in the literature on Southeast Asia, Kuhonta’s excellent histories should provide a widely useful resource for those interested in Southeast Asian poverty policy. Many readers will know little, for example, about agricultural extension work in Malaysia during the 1970s, the precursors to Thaksin’s 30 Baht health card scheme, or the history of attempted land reforms across the region.

Kuhonta’s choice to emphasize aspects of politics and policy that are self-consciously concerned with equity and rural development is what makes this book an important contribution to scholarship on Southeast Asia. With that base to start from, it would now be interesting to re-integrate his work with the traditional emphasis on Southeast Asian patterns of economic structure and capital formation. Kuhonta’s argument emphasizes active attempts to promote equity through government policy, responding to the political influence of poorer groups. The (largely implicit but discernable) economic model in Kuhonta’s book is one in which poverty reduction takes place through support for agriculture, human capital building (health and education policy) and deliberate efforts to help rural workers make the...