Politics of Development: Power, Institutions, and Prosperity

Harvard HKS

Development is a political process. It creates winners and losers while requiring cooperation among powerful competing interests and coalitions. This course is a broad-gauged introduction to how politics works (and fails) to manage conflict, generate economic growth, and ensure the representation of broad rather than narrow groups. We examine core theories of political competition, institutions, state-building, conflict, regulation, culture, and entrepreneurship and evaluate these theories…