Developmental state in the context of globalization: definitional, conceptual, and methodological issues

Developmental state has offered one of the most widely used analytical toolkits to study political economy of development. One of the intriguing debates in the scholarship is whether ‘conceptual stretching’ undermined the analytical usefulness of the framework. While for some scholars the developmental state has just become a buzzword because the framework is applied to many different regions inappropriately, for others there are varieties of developmental states in the context of globalization. We address this debate by systematically and critically examining the developmental state scholarship, including its main trends and evolution, key discussions, methodology, and emerging areas of research. We conclude that the developmental state remains a valuable approach for researchers in the post-neoliberal political economy context, but scholars would benefit from more precise definitions, clearer justifications of why a particular conceptualization is chosen over others, and more rigorous application of research methods.