Globalisation, governance and development: A political economy perspective

The article is an attempt to identify those theories on the role of the state in development which have stood up well against the critique from neo-liberal economics. It then proposes to integrate these theories with perspectives that integrate domestic with global political economy. The latter represent both internationalisation processes such as decisions to liberalise the economy and take part in multilateral co-operative institutions at the global and regional level, and transnationalisation processes associated with corporate and civil society actors at the national and transnational level. The author argues that globalisation is a complex process consisting of partly conflicting sub-processes and that it is in disaggregating the globalisation process that one also discovers new options for agency and alliance building across national boundaries. © 2002 European Association of Development Research and Training Institutes.