This chapter introduces the central theme of a dual crisis threatening humanity: a planetary crisis driven by environmental degradation and climate change, and a societal crisis rooted in extreme wealth concentration. The author recounts the foundational work on “planetary boundaries,” highlighting climate change and biodiversity loss as the two most critical threats. Despite the overwhelming complexity of global issues, the text argues that solutions are already known—ending fossil-fuel extraction and shifting to plant-based diets. However, implementation remains elusive due to political, economic, and societal inertia. The narrative explores humanity’s climate “niche,” showing how most people live in a narrow temperature range and how global warming threatens to push billions outside that comfort zone. Parallel to the environmental crisis, the chapter delves into the implications of wealth inequality, illustrating how economic power undermines democratic institutions and perpetuates the very systems harming the planet. The author stresses that inequality arises not from merit but from structural mechanisms, both in society and in nature.

Introductory chapter. Why I wrote the book, background, definitions of grand corruption, state capture, kleptocracy, criminal governance and other explanations of the new scope and virulence of systemic corruption; Latin American precursors and experience; organization of chapters.

Here I bring together the arguments from the previous chapters of the book. My reading of Young’s work on structural injustice leads us to an uncomfortable political realisation. The usual tools deployed for addressing social harms and injustices – the tracing of liability in contextual moral or legal terms – are not useful for structural injustice, which is much more complex and amorphous in shape, not least in the context of AI and Repro-tech. Even though no simple political solution is apparent, I argue that one essential approach is to focus specifically on the question of whose interests are at play in the governance of transformative technologies as they operate in the background conditions of structural injustice. Thinking back to the arguments made in Chapter 3 about the functioning of regulators, I argue that the macro-level coordinating powers of a state can be redeployed to address background conditions of structural injustice through the direct reweighting of private and public interest within the mechanisms of governance itself. This is an alternative to current attempts in the context of tech governance to deploy a politics grounded in tracing fault or leaving structural patterns outside of political focus altogether. I advocate for a radical reshaping of large-scale regulatory public body landscapes in which a new form of lay-centric governance can be incorporated to deliver the sorts of decisions that a state defined by its current relationship with tech industries cannot.

As the 1978–1979 revolution approached, Khomeini’s reactionary conceptions of the ideal social order were all but forgotten. The popular assumption was that Khomeini and, along with him, the rest of the clerical establishment were “revolutionary” in the true sense of the word. But the clerical establishment, which had long been divided among itself, had engaged in little innovation of any kind, either on its own or through the institution of the howzeh. Equally valuable for the victors of the revolution has been the howzeh, a hallowed institution of religious teaching and learning for the better part of a century. For nearly as long, it has been a bastion of jurisprudential traditionalism. Khomeini saw it as archaic. Two decades later, Khamenei extended the state’s capture to the howzeh, bureaucratized it, ensured its financial dependence, and, through added administrative units, made it a practical extension of the state. If the howzeh was ever a forum for jurisprudential innovation, that rare possibility is even rarer now. Not surprisingly, what jurisprudential innovation has taken place, by Khomeini and by successive generations of religious scholars, has been overwhelmingly outside of the howzeh.

Political parties play an important role in mobilizing public opinion and articulating ideas that make their way into policy. In a competitive political environment, parties use their identity to carve out a distinct position in the public policy space. In the established democracies in Western countries, this space is defined in left–right terms and is shaped by underlying socio-economic factors. The relative constancy and stability of the party system has long characterized mainstream Comparative Politics research on the subject. This connection between ideology, party organization, and the emergence of a durable party system is less applicable to the African situation because countries there lack the social base that holds the party system in check. This chapter examines how political parties in African countries, like in other developing and democratizing regions, suffer from a low level of party institutionalization because political parties tend to be either just personalized factions or dominated by a single organization with little interest in opening space for other parties. Elections may occasionally produce changes in who holds power, but they rarely reflect real differences in policy. Instead, the consequence of political change is no more than a rearrangement of communities of consumption competing for access to power and government resources. Political parties do not need ideology to attract followers. Party strategies in Africa therefore are built around finding individuals with the qualities to serve as champions of as many consumption communities as possible. Where state capture, as in Africa, is the prime objective, party politics easily becomes both transactional and authoritarian. This form of politics that has been a dominant feature of African countries since independence sets limits on a democratic transition. Above all, it slows down the emergence of a political culture infused with democratic values.

This chapter provides a description and an analysis of the relationship between government and the business sector, mostly large firms, a key aspect of Tanzanian development. The situation observed today, with a lack of a well-articulated industrial policy and the executives volatile attitude with respect to market rules and the role of big business, may be seen as strongly path-dependent in a country that went in a few decades from a colonial market economy to a socialist nationalized economy and then transitioned back to the market amid great disorder. The chapter emphasises several key challenges in the regulation of the business sector. The most important of these is the strong link between businesspeople and factions within the dominant political party, whose interests may diverge from those of the executive. The chapter elaborates on the need for better central control by the government to counteract this situation, while drawing the lessons of a move in that direction by the previous president. In her discussion of the chapter, Hazel Gray underscores the downsides of too much centralisation while emphasising the regional dimensions of Asian-led firms’ strategies.

This chapter uses a novel database on contractual arrangements between politicians, political brokers, and businessmen in Benin to investigate the way the nature of these arrangements depends on the level of political competition. We find that firms provide financial support to local and national politicians in exchange for policy concessions, direct budget support of firms, ‘favourable’ procurement auctions (bid-rigging), and various forms of state capture. In addition, while bid-rigging features constantly in politician–firm contracts, increased electoral uncertainty is associated with less demand for policy concessions and stronger preference for direct forms of state capture, that is, the appointment of firms’ agents or cronies to key government positions. In other words, electoral uncertainty could simultaneously contribute to democratic consolidation through political turnover, and to worse forms of corruption through state capture by business elites.

Part III applies the suggested analytical framework at the micro level by delving deep into China’s corporate and capital market development puzzle. It uses the explanatory power of law and political economy to bring more clarity to China’s evolving approach to corporate governance. The purpose is to better understand the role played by formal law in governing Chinese public firms and ultimately in China’s capital market growth and to unpack the political–economic determinants that drove its evolution. The chapters in this part of the book pay particular attention to the creation and efficacy of corporate governance institutions, both traditional and idiosyncratic, that operate in the Chinese market.

This part of the book finds that law and political economy dynamics have produced operational results. They have mobilized market participants (both economic and political) to design and deploy various growth-promoting mechanisms within firms and in the market at large. The analysis shows how such mechanisms at times triggered, supported, boosted, or replaced more conventional corporate governance institutions in ways that eventually marched the market forward.

This chapter seeks to understand why hustling is such a prevalent theme in post-apartheid cultural production. It traces what Raymond Williams calls ‘structures of feeling’ – here, aspiration and frustration – back to the dissonant political economic vision of the ANC. As entry into the middle classes is repeatedly impeded for the poor by lack of structural change, so hustling becomes an ever more enticing mode of self-fashioning. But hustling can also be identified at the other end of the class spectrum, where white and black businessmen alike engage in nefarious practices in the pursuit of riches. Here I examine the stranger-than-fiction examples of Brett Kebble and Joe Modise. I connect the insights of novelists Niq Mhlongo and Carel van der Merwe to the findings of the Zondo Commission of Inquiry into state capture, which exposes the many ways in which corruption and fraud took place during Jacob Zuma’s presidency.

The theme of this volume – constitutionalism and the right to effective governance – has important connections with the fight against public corruption.1 This short contribution to the volume will briefly introduce three aspects of this topic: (1) How might corruption pose a threat to effective constitutional governance? (2) How might anticorruption efforts also put strain on the constitutional system? (3) In what ways might constitutional design choices affect the scope, prevalence, or type of corruption? The hope is that, by sketching out these relationships, this discussion can help to stimulate more dialogue and engagement between constitutional theorists and anticorruption specialists, who sometimes occupy separate intellectual and professional universes despite the close connections between their subject areas.

Early adopters of wind and solar power often chose these forms of electricity becasue they have few greenhouse gas emissions. This chapter suggests that a climate framing of electricity choices is threatening to incumbent fossil fuel sources of electricity as it implies that they must be curtailed to meet climate ambitions. The chapter has a theoretical focus on state capacity: in the positive sense that states must be able to plan for long-term interests like climate change and in the negative sense that states must be able to take on powerful actors for whom such action is an existential threat. This policy arena separates the two cases. South Africa has depended on coal-powered electricity provided by a powerful state-owned enterprise, Eskom, and built strong economic sectors around it. These fought hard against adopting wind and solar power; further headwinds came from the government’s corrupt preference for nuclear power. In contrast, given its hydropower, Brazilian climate politics was heated over deforestation, not electricity choices. Wind, but not solar power, was unproblematically added to annual electricity planning – a decision that defies the climate lens.