Summarized highlights from Relational State Capacity: Conceiving of Relationships as a Core Component of Society’s Ability to Achieve Collective Ends | Dan Honig, Mekhala Krishnamurthy, Karnamadakala Sharma

“We are wrong—or at the very least, incomplete—in our mainstream conception of state capacity. Society’s ability to achieve ends is not just a function of the technical and institutional capacities of the state, such as the availability of physical infrastructure, money, skills, and personnel. The character and quality of human relationships between citizens and state agents are also an essential component of state capacity.”

“This paper makes the case for greater conceptual and empirical attention to the character and quality of the quotidian relationship between the humans known as citizens and their fellow citizens who, by dint of the role they occupy in these moments, serve as human agents of the state.”

“Relational state capacity (RSC) integrates the quality of citizen-state relationships into the concept of state capacity, emphasizing mutual recognition between citizens and state agents as foundational for societal problem-solving.”

“If relational state capacity has been hiding in plain sight, one of the most interesting features of trying to uncover and better understand it in the literature is the sense that it is everywhere and nowhere at once.”

“Relational state capacity is characterized by latency, another form of hiddenness, of not being immediately manifest or tractable to direct observation. This makes it very easy to ignore in favor of the immediately observable.”

“This lack of recognition of the critical role that relationships play in creating and maintaining good outcomes—and the consequent privileging and mis-attribution of success to factors that enhance state control and authority—is rather common and even understandable. But perhaps precisely for this reason, it is all the more perilous.”

“The stock of RSC is the collective expectations and understandings of the complex network that is a society. The existing stock, in turn, structures—intermediates—understandings of the interaction. For relational state capacity ultimately, the current stock influences the future flow.”

“We can use the term relationship here because learning and updating occur not just at the individual level but around the collective noun of ‘citizens’ and ‘the state.’”

“The interaction and exchange between citizen C1 and health worker B1 can be a source of updating by the citizen and the clinic staff about the generalized other. Other spillovers can also occur.”

“When the citizen provides accurate information to the contact tracer, it is because the citizen has made a judgment that is in effect unmonitorable, uncontrollable, and incoercible.”

“The problem of credibility is easier to solve and has received more attention than the second problem in building relational contracts, i.e., clarity. Clarity is ‘the problem of communicating the terms of the relational contract.’”

“In a world of high RSC, what we normally call co-production would be called implementation; co-design would be called planning. The need for the adjective ‘co-‘ or ‘participatory’ points to our need to schematize, to induce in the ‘spot market’ of a particular policy what we have failed to develop at a more fundamental level.”

“A perhaps parallel phenomenon can be seen in the albeit smaller body of literature on ‘pockets of effectiveness’ in public administration—limited parts of states that function particularly effectively. Where these pockets of effectiveness flourish, it is often because of positive deviants in terms of relational state capacity.”

“But in ‘disinfecting’ government we drive out not just disease but also ‘good bacteria’: the processes and actions that build relationships and connection between state agents and citizens.”

“This is not because headquarters meant ill or sought to undermine performance; much the opposite, headquarters was trying to make things better. Headquarters simply acted on its incorrect understanding of what drove success.”

“We believe a fair bit of the decline in social function we are experiencing today—populism, democratic backsliding, the fraying of the social contract—has at its core a decline in the more fundamental ways in which humans relate to each other and strive toward collective outcomes.”

“We need to understand much more clearly when RSC is causal of better outcomes; the factors that mediate and moderate the relationship between RSC and outcomes; the precise manner in which spillovers occur; and how RSC can be built and maintained.”

“Causal pathways: When is RSC causal (either as a necessary or supportive condition) of better outcomes of interest? What mediates the relationship between RSC and outcomes?”

“Mediators & Mechanisms: What are the precise structures of spillovers and intermediation?”

“Modeling equilibria: How is RSC best built and maintained?”

“Exogenous technological (& other) shocks: How and when can emergent technologies foster (rather than undermine) RSC?”

“Making relational state capacity legible as a complement to existing notions of state capacity is not a prescription for all society’s ills, but it is a foundational element of what it is to be a state that we have collectively undervalued. It is essential that we acknowledge and engage the relational in order to strengthen societal capacities to respond to the existential challenges of our times.”

“We hope thinking and research about and around relational state capacity might extend beyond the confines of a paper to helping foster a community of thought and practice on common, urgent questions and concerns that many of us share.”