There is a certain flip-flop mentality at play when it comes to assessing the green revolution. In many popular accounts, in reflections by scientists, or in policy discourses, the green revolution often comes across as all good or all bad. In the context of the prevailing charged debate around the subject, it may be better to assess the green revolution with a historical contextualization that highlights the contingencies and pitfalls of agrarian transformation. Its history reveals that HYVs are no magic wand that can transform agrarian lives for the better anywhere, anytime. A historical analysis also implores us to not to criticize the green revolution for not solving every problem of poverty and underdevelopment.

This chapter analyzes the ideological roots of social medicine in Latin America, its diffusion through institutional and interpersonal networks, and how they translated into social policy. It argues that Latin American social medicine was a movement with two distinct waves, bridged by a mid-century hiatus. First-wave social medicine – whose protagonists included figures such as Salvador Allende of Chile and Ramón Carrillo in Argentina – had its roots in the scientific hygiene movement, gained strength in the interwar period, and left its imprint on Latin American welfare states by the 1940s. Second-wave social medicine, marked by more explicitly Marxist analytical frameworks, took shape in the early 1970s amidst authoritarian pressures and crystallized institutionally in Latin American Social Medicine Association (ALAMES) (regionally) and Brazilian Association of Collective Health (in Brazil, ABRASCO). A dialectical process links these two waves into a single story: early social medicine demands, once institutionalized in welfare states and the international health-and-development apparatus, led to ineffective bureaucratic routines, which in turn sparked critical reflection, agitation for change, and a new wave of social medicine activism.

Since the early 1930s, a broad acceptance of the need for social planning had been growing in Britain. Neurath naturally became involved in debates on this matter, not only with British and American scholars (C. H. Waddington and James Burnham) but with fellow Central European émigrés in the UK, Karl Mannheim and Friedrich Hayek. Neurath and Mannheim concurred on the possibility of ‘planning for freedom’, whereas Hayek feared that any socialist planning would lead inevitably to totalitarianism. Neurath took issue with this, not least in his reading of Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, which can be reconstructed from Neurath’s copious notes in his own copy. Neurath’s ideas of the 1920s for a socialized ‘economy in kind’ were moderated by his situation in Britain, with its democratic ‘muddle’ of the 1940s. By contextualizing Neurath’s views in relation to other prominent figures of the era, we point out what made him unique among them.

Chapter 3 shows how Prime Minister Modi’s government oscillates between populist anti-elitism and forms of technocratic expertise to produce a distinct form of nationalism that is both seemingly pragmatic and extremely ethnocentric. It starts off by looking at how policy organisations channel dominant policy debates in certain directions, enable particular classifications of target groups, and legitimise certain policy solutions while marginalising others. In opposition to scholarship that sees technocracy and populism as contradictory forces (see Laclau 2005; Rosanvallon 2011), this chapter argues that they have emerged as two complementary arms of governance in contemporary India: (1) populist politics, which appeals to the masses/majority by defining nationalism through rigid boundaries of caste, class, and religion; and (2) technocratic policy, which produces a consensus of pragmatism and neutralises charges of hyper-nationalism. I emphasise the relational dynamic between the two: they function through different, often contradictory, logics and content, yet are able to work towards the same goals in key moments of mutual reinforcement.

Chapter 1 examines India’s dominant technocratic paradigms of expertise in relation to the flurry of anti-intellectual movements in a global context that includes Europe, the United States, and the United Kingdom. While in many of these instances a distaste of intellectuals emerges from mass anti-elitism or religious anti-rationalism, anger against intellectuals also stems from wanting to replace the disconnected ‘eggheads’ with the pragmatic businessman and rational technocrat. Cultural commentators have made pronouncements of ‘the end of politics’ as the result of capitalist instrumentality and economic rationalism in a range of political contexts. Significantly, however, I urge readers not to diagnose a depoliticisation, or ‘disappearance’, of politics in everyday life. Rather, I determine that it is incumbent upon social scientists to pay attention to what Havelka (2016) calls hérrschaft: ideas about how political life is organised, and how possibilities of social, cultural, and political futures are reframed.

The Member States of the European Union have created an internal market where movement of goods, services, persons and capital should be as easy across borders as it is within a single Member State. This is achieved by Treaty Articles which prohibit restrictions on free movement and discrimination, and by harmonisation. The process of harmonisation is complex and contested because it goes to the heart of how much power the EU has, and how much uniformity between Member States is required. The creation of common standards, although done by legislation, is a technocratic process in which it is sometimes claimed that non-scientific interests such as culture and identity are not adequately represented. As well as this, a well-functioning internal market has side-effects, such as regulatory competition, which put pressure on national standards and may undermine national preferences.

The chapter is devoted to the relationship between power and the cultural arena. The importance of public discourse, its requirements and limits, is illustrated. Gramscis notions of hegemony and dominance are applied, with modifications, to our analysis of power. The role of the masses is discussed, together with the notion of totalitarianism and the importance of culture in dictatorial regimes such as the fascist and Nazi ones. Different notions of civil society, as contrasted to the state, and its role are considered, then religion as a charismatic-traditional form of power. Technocratic knowledge leads to a discussion of the role of the elites. Specialization is counterposed to general culture, recalling the debate on the two cultures (literary culture and social culture, Snow) or the three cultures (also including the humanities) and the importance of interdisciplinary culture and research. Positive and negative aspects of the new social media (Blogs, Twitter, WhatsApp, etc.) are illustrated, with cautions against the risks of corruption of the social discourse.

By the end of the Second World War, the professional class presided over a massive alignment of national and global institutions with virtue capitalism. This global ‘welfare state’ moment makes it seem that virtue capitalism went hand in hand with state control. However, professionals were often ambivalent about their connection to the state. When Canada first ventured into nationalised healthcare, for example, doctors in Saskatchewan went on strike to avoid it. Despite often rejecting state interference, which many professionals feared might impede the integrity of their work, professionals held a moral relationship between knowing and doing, where they sought to use expertise to effect material change in the world and in individual lives. Such technocratic planning was fundamentally moral, embedding into mid-twentieth century capitalism the internalized, disciplining practices known as governmentality. Professionals were, to use Giorgio Agamben’s framing of the governmental economy, angels of the state. Human capital investment entangled industry, military, and education but, perhaps most importantly, led to an internalized, universal industriousness. The material effects of this ‘angelic’ work were sometimes deeply damaging, building social and economic ‘dependencies’ through the economy that mirrored, in individual lives, the hierarchies constructed by the colonial world.

In the Epilogue, I consider the ways that the rise and fall of the professional class has left the world in thrall to a conflict between managerial capitalism and professional technocracy. Unlike labour versus capital, this intra-bourgeois conflict is not productive of change. Rather, self-perpetuating cycles seeking material and moral authority have infected workplaces and global politics, impeding reform. Much is at stake, including climate change. Professionals, whose work remains necessary to a good society, need to separate virtue from capitalism, disaggregating their moral goals from their own class interests – even to the point of turning the hierarchy that they made on its head. The Epilogue draws inspiration from the reversals of hierarchies made possible by acts of decolonization.

Political science has long claimed that African political systems are dysfunctional because they are too embedded in social and material relations. This assumption informed the rise of the World Bank’s good governance agenda in the late 1980s. This chapter situates this technocratic vision of how to fix African politics in a longer ‘epistocratic’ political tradition that emphasises the knowledge-based, epistemic dimensions of governance. In this context, the Lagos model, developed first in Lagos state, southwest Nigeria, and then extended to nearby Oyo and Ekiti, was celebrated by donors as an example of ‘home grown good governance’, where governance reforms were not imposed by donors through conditionality but actively adopted by the government itself. By tracing how this domesticated version of the good governance agenda was contested in the twenty-first century electoral competition, this book re-evaluates the social, material and epistemic dimensions of good governance. This chapter offers a brief overview of the history of good governance in Nigeria. It then considers the methods and methodologies we can use to study competing conceptions of good governance, connecting the empirical study of politics ‘on the ground’ to more theoretical debates in political theory, before summarising the key contributions of the book.

The previous chapter demonstrated how politicians and voters in southwest Nigeria value accessibility as a form of accountability: in order to be accountable, leaders should maintain spaces for direct face-to-face communication with their constituents. This chapter builds on further empirical examples to give a theoretical account of accountability as accessibility and argues that it helps reveal the ontological limits of dominant scholarly approaches to accountability, namely, principal–agent models. It starts by asking what makes communication an intrinsically valuable part of accountability. Theories stressing the power of communication in the public sphere to confer recognition and dignity on citizens are considered and found to capture part of the lived experience of accessibility. However, they neglect the way accessibility draws on social sanctions to constrain rulers in the context of unequal power relations. A review of the historical roots of the principal–agent models in liberal theory explains why dominant theories struggle to accommodate the sanctioning power of communication. More generally, the assumed desirability of an anonymous and impersonal modern state leads to a neglect of the more socially embedded aspects of governance. In contrast, Yoruba political vocabulary fluently expresses the political importance of social sanction via the concept of olá (social honour).

Politics in Nigeria teaches us that power must be socially embedded for it to be accountable. Previous chapters drew on in-depth qualitative fieldwork in southwest Nigeria to theorise alternative conceptions of the constituent parts of the good governance agenda, namely, accountability, transparency, and the public–private divide. If we are to take the social dimension of these “ethnographically derived political concepts” seriously, then we need to rethink the neo-classical economic ontology of the dominant approach to good governance, which relies on principal–agent models. Thus, the book’s empirical analysis gives rise to normative political prescriptions which entail a methodological critique. The second part of the chapter argues that by neglecting the social dimension of governance, technocracy is vulnerable to populist challengers who leverage unmet demands for closeness and connection. Socially embedded governance intersects with three key debates of interest to theorists of democratic politics, concerning scale, inequality and conflict. By rethinking the contours of politics, we discover that the struggles of Nigeria’s fourth republic are not marginal to democratic theory – the struggles of a democracy yet to really get started – rather, they lie at the crux of what it means to wield power responsibly.

This chapter zooms in on the dynamics of decision-making in the EU. Whereas Chapter 4 sketches the structures and procedures used to take decisions in the EU, this chapter discusses the processes that take place within those structures and procedures. It distinguishes between three types of decision (history-making, policy-setting and policy-shaping) that show different decision-making dynamics. In relation to history-making decisions, the chapter provides an introduction to negotiation theory and identifies the various strategies actors use in negotiations. In relation to policy-setting decisions, it discusses the dynamics of interinstitutional decision-making, using Tsebelis’ veto player theory. This is followed by a discussion of the role of different types of policy networks in EU policy-making. The chapter ends with sections on the role of technocracy in the EU (using the better regulation programme as an example) and the debate about flexibility and inertia in EU policy-making (engaging with Scharpf’s joint-decision trap thesis).