The Promise of Political Settlements Analysis (PSA)

Abstract Few concepts have captured the imagination of the conflict and development community in recent years as powerfully as the idea of a ‘political settlement’. At its most ambitious, ‘political settlements analysis’ (PSA) promises to explain why conflicts occur and states collapse, the conditions for their successful rehabilitation, different developmental pathways, and how to better fit development policy to country context. As such, it provides an analytical framework for development agencies increasingly tasked with working in fragile and conflict-affected states, and frustrated by frequently disappointing ‘good governance’ results in more stable ones. Yet despite the approach’s tremendous promise, not all is well in the world of PSA. Rival definitions of the concept abound, there are disagreements about its scope and the way it should be used, a growing schism between conflict specialists and economists, basic concepts are ambiguous, and little progress has been made on measurement. As an introduction to the book, this chapter provides a genealogy of PSA, situating it within a wider ‘post-institutionalist turn’ in development studies, before providing illustrations of some PSA highlights, problems to date, and proposals for a way forward.