Summarized highlights from Power Positive | Dieter Zinnbauer
Limitations of Current Political Economy Analysis (PEA)
Economic Dimension Neglected: “PEA has lost sight of the ‘economic’ part of the term. It typically focuses on the political dimension but does not spend sufficient effort on unpacking the economic dynamics that have a significant impact on economic interests, rents and the political preferences that flow from it.”
Oversimplified Actor Analysis: Current approaches lead to “undifferentiated treatment of aggregate actors and their interests — not just for business, but also when it comes to THE government, THE opposition, THE civil society etc.” This results in “a pol-econ map of a sector, a political community or a city that is rather one-dimensional.”
Status Quo Focus: PEAs typically generate “an astute explanation of why things are the way they are and — often implicitly but quite conclusively — why they most likely will not change.” They conduct “a scan of the status quo” that makes change seem “close to untenable.”
Proposed Solution: Political Opportunity Analysis
New Approach Needed: “My suggestion would be to re-orient PEA towards or at least complement it with a sort of political opportunity analysis.”
Multi-level Focus on System Dynamics:
Individual level: “cognitive dissonance, cross-pressured motivations, ambivalent values”
Meso level: “organizational paradoxes and glitches, strategic ambiguities and contradictions, interpretative flexibility and institutional interstices”
Macro level: “adaptability, fluidity and highly differentiated, nested nature of aggregate agents and also as well-known systems properties of tipping points and punctuated equilibria”
Identifying Change Opportunities: “From this vantage points of particular interest are for example pockets of effectiveness, positive outliers, levers and nudges for change. More in focus should also be the nascent rearrangement of economic rents when novel technologies arrive.”
Implementation Strategy: “A first step to nuance and future-orient PEA could be to convene a diverse set of experienced political economy practitioners to excavate inspiring examples from existing analyses and experience.”
Practical Orientation: “The ultimate motivation would be to make PEA more action-oriented, more useful for change agents and transformation projects for whom this type of pol econ analysis is usually commissioned.”
