Embedded Autonomy

The concept

Embedded autonomy does not treat state autonomy as complete isolation from society. For Evans, autonomy is the capacity to construct long-term projects of social change that transcend the short-term interests of specific groups, while embeddedness means the state is not heavily insulated but works in a deep alliance with people active in the economy, since no bureaucratic apparatus can accumulate alone the information such a project requires. Princeton University Press summarizes the concept as the combination of coherent internal organization and close links to society.

History

Evans first set out the concept in his 1989 article "Predatory, Developmental, and Other Apparatuses: A Comparative Political Economy Perspective on the Third World State" (Sociological Forum 4(4): 561-587), which contrasted the "incoherent absolutist domination" of the klepto-patrimonial Zairian state with the embedded autonomy of the East Asian developmental state and treated Brazil as an intermediate case. Already there he stated the core thesis that the efficacy of the developmental state depends on a meritocratic bureaucracy with a strong corporate identity and dense institutionalized links to private elites. The 1995 book gave it full formulation (published March 9, 1995; named a Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 1995).

Examples and typology

States differ in how they are organized and tied to society. Some, like Zaire, are predatory, "ruthlessly extracting and providing nothing of value in return"; some, like Korea, are developmental, "promoting industrial transformation"; others, like Brazil and India, are in between, "sometimes helping, sometimes hindering." Evans and collaborators measured bureaucratic efficiency with a "Weberianness scale" and ran regressions on the economic performance of 35 countries; Singapore, Taiwan, Korea and Hong Kong scored at the high end and Zaire among the lowest. An increase of half a standard deviation in the Weberian score was reported as worth a 26% increase in GDP from 1970 to 1990, controlling for human capital and initial GDP per capita.

Relations and distinctions

The concept belongs to the developmental-state literature first seriously conceptualized by Chalmers Johnson, who contrasted a state focused on economic development with the predatory or weak state. Embedded autonomy is a refinement of, not identical with, plain state autonomy: the earlier literature stressed separation and autonomy from society, and embeddedness was added to capture linkage. Korean critical scholarship, notably Cho Hee-yeon, argues that demanding the state be separated from society and linked to it at the same time is contradictory, and criticizes the developmental-state school for reducing state autonomy to a techno-administrative dimension rather than grounding it in class and social conditions. Evans himself noted in 2004 that the theory needed modification for the coercive constraints of the global neoliberal regime, and that a party with a strong non-elite base may have a better chance to rebalance where embeddedness is too strong, that is, where elites are too powerful. A rival reading in Korean scholarship, advanced by Yun Sang-woo, holds that Evans proposed extending embedded autonomy beyond capital to the labouring classes and popular sectors so that growth and distribution could be achieved together, a social-corporatist "post-developmental state" possibility, while adding that this type has not in fact emerged.