Since the 1980s, state capacity has been a major explanation for countries leaving the middle-income trap. However, this literature is unable to explain the failed experiences of countries with relatively high state capacity. This was the case of Chile after the unsuccessful enaction of a series of policies in the mid-2010s to upgrade the country’s position in the lithium value chain. To understand this failure, we combine the literature on developmental states and the literature on business power. We use the concept of institutional business power to understand how business actions erode state capacities leading to countries’ persistent inability to leave the middle-income trap. In the case of Chile, despite the relatively high levels of state capacity, previous processes of deregulation and privatization in the country configured a situation favorable to business’ monopolization of information and technical knowledge about lithium production and innovation processes that directly affected the capacity of the state to regulate the sector, let alone implement policies designed to upgrade the industry. The article highlights the need to investigate further the role of not just the state, but of the private sector in either facilitating or blocking value chain upgrading in countries caught in the middle-income trap.

This paper draws together the connections between the concepts of critical human security and state capacity and explores their relevance as a novel analytical framework for exploring the global pandemic and its aftermath, with a particular focus on Europe and East Asia. The paper highlights the relevance of integrating a ‘state capacity for human security’ analytical lens and policy philosophy to inform an understanding of human (in)security as well as its relevance for concerns around social protection, sustainability, and inequality. We argue that the long-held and taken-for-granted assumption that larger, high-spending welfare states produce greater well-being security can no longer be an automatic supposition given the nature and sources of risk and insecurity in the contemporary world. We argue that that widening the parameters and focus of social policy analysis towards state capacity for critical human security might better highlight the multi-dimensional challenges that welfare states should seek to address.

The papers in this special themed section reflect on, explore, and analyse national and local government policy responses to the recent pandemic between 2020 and 2022, and the short- and longer-term impacts on human security for different groups of people and places, with a particular focus on the UK and Korea. Drawing on an integrated critical human security and state capacity approach and qualitative methodology, they contribute to and further develop debates on the social policy responses to the pandemic and their scarring effects. They also highlight the key role that a state capacity for human security approach can play in promoting inclusive risk governance, recognising and addressing constellations of vulnerability, risk and insecurity, and highlighting the rapid and uneven distribution of the benefits of digital technologies and its potential from compromising as well as enhancing human security.

This section highlights and provides details of a range of key sources and databases that were either central to or provide further material on the issues explored in the papers in this special themed section. Building on the analysis of the UK and South Korea’s policy responses to the COVID-19 pandemic and its integration with the key concepts of critical human security and state capacity the section is organised around the following themes: Critical human security, vulnerability and the pandemic; State capacity and social infrastructure; Risk governance and systemic risk; Digitalization, public services, and the pandemic; Cities and local social policy; and finally, Data Sources. These additional resources provide some general sources but are otherwise tailored to the social and public policy contexts of the UK and South Korea.

State capacity is critical for development. Yet, the question of how states learn – that is, how they acquire and incorporate information to improve performance over time – has received little attention. In this paper, we draw from organizational theory and the political economy of knowledge and innovation to study the components of effective learning in states as organizations. We focus on three functionally simple, but well-documented early states in ancient Greece: Sparta, Athens, and Macedon. We argue that Macedon’s superior performance relied on a learning model capable of integrating both experiential and experimental knowledge within existing structures. By directing our attention away from the early modern period, where much work in economic history and historical political economy is concentrated, our account challenges the focus of the existing literature on processes of centralization. Instead, we highlight organizational factors that may promote capacity-enhancing learning even in the context of weak centralization.

Do societies with more extensive welfare states also perform better environmentally? Surprisingly, the empirical evidence for this relationship remains inconclusive. We focus on CO2 emissions in lower-income countries and argue that considering state capacity as a moderator helps achieving greater theoretical and empirical clarity in understanding when the welfare state – climate change mitigation relationship. We hypothesize that lower-income societies with more developed welfare states exhibit lower carbon emissions when they also have more state capacity. The underlying mechanism centers on the ability of the state to compensate losers from policy change and its enforcement power required for policy implementation. Using data on CO2 emissions, social protection, and labor market regulations, as well as state capacity in 66 lower-income countries since 2005, we find that carbon emissions tend to be lower in countries characterized both by a welfare state focused on reducing socio-economic inequality and high state capacity.

Research shows that meritocratic recruitment (MR) in public administration is positively related to improved government performance and developmental outcomes. However, the mechanisms behind these improvements remain understudied theoretically and empirically. This paper addresses this gap by theorising and testing two simultaneous pathways through which MR influences development outcomes. First, by prioritising competence over nepotism or political expedience, MR enhances the epistemic quality of bureaucratic personnel (the competence mechanism). Second, by creating incentive misalignment between bureaucrats and politicians, it enables bureaucrats to resist undue political influence, prioritise public interests in governance, and ultimately contribute to development (the impartiality mechanism). Applying mediation analysis to fourteen years of cross-national data, we examine whether changes in recruitment systems are associated with competence- and impartiality-laden indicators of government performance and developmental outcomes. The findings provide robust empirical support for these mechanisms, advancing theoretical understanding and empirical insights into the effects of MR.

What explains the geography and timing of contestation in civil war? We propose a theory of opportunistic rebel tactics, in which insurgent commanders react to temporary shifts in the local balance of power to attack the state. We argue that these opportunistic strikes are enabled by two jointly necessary factors: (1) negative fluctuations in local repressive state capacity and (2) the expectation of civilian compliance with rebel incursions. We evaluate this argument on data from the Colombian civil war. Leveraging exogenous variation in local state capacity caused by landslide-induced road closures, we find that short-term negative shocks to repressive capacity increase the likelihood of insurgent-state clashes. However, this effect does not hold when local communities harbor strongly anti-insurgent attitudes, suggesting that state capacity and civilian behavior jointly shape rebel strategy and that popular opposition can substitute for state strength.

Typically, neoclassical realist scholars who prioritise state capacity as an intervening variable in their studies have often implied that states directly convert increased state capacity into improved military capabilities, leading them to engage in internal balancing and, occasionally, war. This article argues that the causal chain from state capacity to military modernisation and balancing is not as straightforward as the existing literature makes it look like. Using Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine as a plausibility-probe study, we propose that before states move from underbalancing to balancing, the process by which state capacity is translated into improved military capabilities might depend on conditional mechanisms. This novel theoretical model is labeled ‘conditional state capacity neoclassical realism’ and provides more case-specific explanatory power than the old state capacity theory.

This paper examines the effects of state capacity on the reported Covid-19 infection (and mortality) rate and its policy implications. We analyse two dimensions of state capacity which were critical during the pandemic. The healthcare capacity acted to contain the virus outbreak (an effect we call containment). The information capacity acted to detect contagious yet asymptomatic cases (an effect we call detection). We argue that containment pushes down the reported infection rate. In contrast, detection pushes it up, thus generating a non-linear combined effect that we estimate systematically using Colombian municipality-level as well as country-level data, different data sources, and various empirical strategies. Our findings indicate that the infection (and mortality) rates were likely under-reported, especially in areas with a low state capacity level, due to their poor capabilities to detect the virus. Our study put the emphasis on the many facets of state capacity, each affecting in complex ways our understanding of important phenomena, such as the Covid-19 outbreak.