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AbstractThis article analyses how political settlements can help deepen our understanding of how underlying rules of the game and power relations shape patterns of inclusion and exclusion, and prospects for political, social and economic transformation. Drawing on insights from a growing body of research in the area of the politics of development, the paper explores what kinds of factors have helped to foster more inclusive institutions across the developing world. By way of conclusion, it offers reflections on how a political settlement approach can enable donors to engage more effectively in efforts to foster progressive change. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

This paper is intended to analyse two leading approaches that have guided international efforts to promote peace and development in conflict-afflicted fragile states since the 1990s, namely peacebuilding and state-building. In a relatively recent development, a growing number of donors has sought to bring these two closer together, based upon the perception that the challenges posed by (post-) conflict fragile states need to be ad-dressed through an approach that combines both – "statebuilding for peace", as the UNDP has put it. The paper thus seeks to explore how the processes of building peace are related to the processes of building more resilient, effective, and responsive states in (post-) conflict settings. The paper provides an overview of the evolution of these two concepts and analyses key complementarities between peace-building and state-building. It also explores the challenges that arise for both on the basis of these complementarities. The paper goes on to examine some of the most significant tensions that arise between the two, and what these tensions may imply for the international assistance community. By way of a conclusion, the paper offers a few key lessons that emerge from the analysis for improved donor policy and practice in state-building for peace efforts.

Under his administration (1994–2000), President Ernesto Zedillo replaced Pronasol, the targeted poverty alleviation programme created by his predecessor, with his own programme, Progresa. Pronasol had come under severe attack as a politicised federal welfare programme intended to generate votes for the PRI. In contrast, the Zedillo administration insisted that Progresa was a genuine poverty-alleviation programme devoid of any political agenda. The purpose of this article is to assess whether Zedillo's claim is valid. To do so, I build a statistical model with the aim of identifying the factors that may have influenced the reach of Progresa in 1999, an important year of electoral preparation for the July 2000 elections. The picture that emerges is not entirely clear-cut. On the one hand, poverty indicators played a key role in determining who should benefit from the programme. On the other hand, Progresa also displayed a political edge, revealing that, in certain respects, the executive and the PRI continued to resort to old tricks in an attempt to alter electoral results.

AbstractPolitical settlements are now at the centre of international development efforts to promote more peaceful and inclusive states and societies. This special issue brings together a collection of theoretical and empirical contributions that engage critically with the political settlement concept and the question of how to navigate inclusion, with a focus on underlying politics, power and institutional dynamics, and how these influence trajectories of change. Three insights, in particular, emerge from the analysis in this issue. Firstly, the relationship between inclusion, stability, violence and resilience is complex and non‐linear. Secondly, peace processes on their own are not sufficient to alter political settlements and tend to yield formalised political unsettlement instead. Lastly, processes of institutional transformation often involve trade‐offs and dilemmas. Therefore, efforts to engage with political settlements need to adopt a long‐term framework that overcomes idealist models of change. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.