 Many thanks to Wyder and Rachel for this invitation to revisit a study, an update, a study that we conducted originally in 2013 and that led to a range of publications and projects, mainly focusing on the comparison of Mozambique and Angola for several projects. One of them a collection on aid and authoritarian rule in Africa, edited by Hagman and Reitens. My presentation today evaluates this research that we conducted, both in the light of important and substantial political developments in both countries, now that roughly five years have elapsed, but also mainly in the light of developments in the literature and specifically in one of the frameworks that we used in the original research that has experienced quite phenomenal expansion and development and that is the political settlements framework and specifically Mushtaq Khan's framework and I'll explain what that entails in a minute. So in the light, as I said, of these political changes and in the light of this development of the literature, the question arises about the relevance of re-examining and rethinking where this framework and these new iterations of the framework have something to offer to thinking or thinking about age and fragility. So this is an invitation and it's more of a provocation than anything else. So to revisit a bit and obviously in a very succinct manner, because we don't have a long time, kind of like the gist of our original arguments, we set out originally in 2013 to interrogate dominant narratives about two countries that had a lot in common and some stark differences, Angola and Mozambique and to interrogate what were prevailing narratives and to a great extent narratives that still prevail about Mozambique as a case in point of a driven success story and Angola as emblematic of the resource course. The starting point of the paper was exploring the effects, the availability of very different types of rents, foreign aid in the case of Mozambique and oil revenue in the case of Angola, had in the process of institution building in these two countries that as I said had such stark structural and historical commonalities. Our comparative exercise we thought was feasible because while we had these commonalities they were significant. There was also evidence showing that whereas Angola's post-independence state building process had relied extensively on the oil rent and that in a contrastive manner the contribution of aid or development assistance had been marginal. In a very kind of like striking contrast, Mozambique had received massive amounts of aid. It was considered for a long period of time a very emblematic case of aid dependence and despite more lately developing some capacity in instructive sectors Mozambican elites or the Mozambican state rather had largely failed to effectively capture resources from, sorry, rents from resources. So in this sense our paper first explored those implications of the very different material foundations of the political settlement in both countries, also charted the way in which both states had structure, it's their fiscal basis and also attempted to explain the difference in the performance of both states. Finally putting forward hypothesis about the conditions that led these countries to diverge and the role that the presence or the absence of aid had had in that process. Among other ideas and concepts used at the time we also engage with the political settlement framework and as I said this is the political settlement framework as developed originally by Moush Takan which is different and if I have time I'll probably go into those differences because they're relevant to our discussion from other uses of the concept of political framework. In a nutshell the idea of the political framework captures the fact that studying the formulation and the implementation of institutions and policies can obviously not be done in isolation from understanding a specific context in which these policies and institutions are attempted or introduced but unlike other traditions that also look at power constellations in the context where policies are implemented, Kant's framework focuses on how power is distributed among different organizations in society and how those distributional balances determine economic and political effects. The idea being that institutions and policies are ultimately translated into decisions about resource allocation in society and result in the creation of rents and these rents taking us streams of income or benefits that are accrued from these political decisions are prone to are conflictive and create tensions among groups in society because these groups are affected differently by the creation of those rents and in relation to how much power they can wield their capacity to either support or resist transformation or new policies is sort of like determined. So ultimately the political settlement framework studies the foundations and changes over time of the way that power is distributed among organizations in society and how these results in their relative ability to determine the effectiveness and outcomes of institutions and policies. Obviously the political settlement framework was not originally developed to account for the impact and the effectiveness of aid and in contrast it's been used most traditionally to think about processes of industrial strategies to think about structural transformation and in later years it's been applied to the study of trade and service delivery and many other kind of debates and most strikingly the framework has been more widely utilized in the study of African development trajectories and now there's a number of case studies on Angola, Ethiopia, Ghana, Mozambique, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda that uses the framework and so my interest today is to explore to what extent these new developments in the framework can be applied to thinking about development assistance and the relation of donors and domestic economies. What's happened in this last five years is that the framework has also become more conceptually coherent and therefore there's room for asking these questions. At the center of the question is the observation that aid flows operate as a form of rent and that donor strategies and conditions of disbursement can be conceptualized as institutional and policy initiatives. The key insight of the political settlement frameworks that has applications to thinking about aid is that rather than studying the local power relations and the power balances simply as the context in which aid policies and strategies are implemented it is probably more helpful to shift our focus to analyzing squarely the interaction between aid programming and a more informed understanding of the history of the political economy of organizational power distribution as proposed by Ken in his framework. Secondly, the framework could help understand how institutions will find their interests affected by different initiatives in terms of aid delivery and conditionalities and how different organizations in societies may be able to mobilize politically either in support or against the aid initiatives. Thirdly, it would be extremely interesting to explore how aid is aligned with developmental prospects for structural economic transformation so breaking free from a kind of like discrete study of aid effectiveness and a more mainstream study of aid as one rent among many others having effects in society. In fourth instance, it would be extremely interesting to ask how does the delivery of aid-related rents interact with other incentives in the actual making of political settlements? And lastly, in a way endogenizing donors less as kind of external entities and more as parties to the creation and sustainance of the political settlements. So briefly, if we move away from the idea of power constellations and power relations as the context in which aid strategies and aid programming is received and move towards an understanding where we see aid effectiveness constructing and being an essential party to the formation of political settlements, we are probably into a more interesting understanding of the challenges experienced by aid. I'm not sure I'll have time. I'll probably leave it for the question and session to discuss the differences between Mushda Khan's approach to political settlements and other alternative neo-institutional economics or conflict studies definitions of and uses of the term. But what I think is distinctive about Mushda Khan's framework and which probably is useful in these debates is that in his use of the political settlement concept, he is recognizing that the conflicts created in the allocational decisions, it is rather more useful to stop seeing them as a distortion or an aberration of fragile and violent polities, but instead inherent to development processes. Both in cases where the rule of law administers such conflicts and in cases where violence continues unchecked. So to wrap up, if we think about the core insights of this more coherent and developed framework of political settlements that has been coming out in publications in the last five years, there's a couple of insights that may be more provocative into problematizing political settlements, local power constellations and age. As I said, and I think this is the main takeaway, this epistemological shift away from thinking about power relations merely as the context for the introduction of institutions and policies and in our case the rents that translate age programming and age implementation in the sense that the political settlements framework proposes to refocus the study instead to the relative alignment or misalignment between on the one hand institutions that can be formal or informal and as we know in the classical understanding of institutions as the rules of the game that are present in the state in the rule of law and constellations of governance and local power balances, the capacity of organizations in societies and different groupings, societal groupings to effectively make claims on the stage. And the idea here is that clientelism and other forms of patron-client relations are ripe or exacerbated when our patterns of organizational power distribution are more disaligned or misaligned with institutional settlement, institutional patterns. And these four important historical reasons linked to colonialism, linked to the processes of late capitalist development, is more the case in former colonies with less productive economies as is the case of some of these countries that I mentioned in Africa. There are three ways in which political settlements framework proposes to understand the channels of and the dimensions of political settlements. The one is the vertical distribution of power that speaks about the relative difference in power between the ruling coalition and the excluded factions. And the gist of the argument here is that the greater the difference in power between the ruling coalition and the excluded factions, the larger the space, the wider the space that the ruling coalitions has to develop a more long-term horizon of strategizing. Where when competition is tighter, the ruling coalition has to obviously spend more resources and more efforts into just remaining in place. And this links to a core concept within the framework which is holding power, the ability of the ruling coalition to remain in power. The second dimension that has been proposed is the horizontal distribution of power. And this, if I have a chance to elaborate later on, it's quite key to what makes different or the difference between cancer political settlement framework and other understandings of political framework. Because whereas other understandings of political framework, for instance, emphasize elite bargaining, this horizontal distribution of power claims that elites have and groups in power, coalition groups, are differentiated and heterogeneous internally. And that part of their power or this horizontal dimension refers to their capacity to mobilize within their group politically to resist effectively or to support any institutional transformation and in this case, age delivery or age programming. So in this sense, Cam and others that have adopted the framework reject the idea that elite bargaining explains the totality of the tension happening and claims on the contrary that other than this vertical distribution of power, there is this horizontal distribution within the ruling coalition, the capacity of actors within the ruling coalition to politically mobilize other parts of the coalition. So the higher echelons mobilizing their bases, which are not necessarily contained within the elite. And this obviously is a manifestation of elite legitimacy or group legitimacy and creates when the higher echelons of these organizations have a greater capacity to politically mobilize their bases. They also have a greater space for coherence in action and effectiveness. So it's not purely that contestation between ruling coalitions and groups in the opposition, but also the ability within ruling coalitions to act coherently and effectively. And the third dimension, and one dimension that was key to our original study is to do with the material foundations of the political settlement and the way in which the settlement is maintained. And so finally back to Angola and Mozambique. If we go back to the commonalities of the two cases, we had two countries where the liberation struggle and independence led to socialist powers getting into power. And a process that was followed in both cases by internal armed challenges and in both cases, oppositional factions received important external support from international actors. Both countries experienced long lasting civil wars ending on a transition to multi-party democracy and market economy. And in both countries, incumbent parties have retained power and opposition parties remain marginal. But here is where some important differences begin. And just as a note, obviously more recently we've kind of like moved on from where Mozambican and Angola were five years ago. And in these five years we've had, in both cases, important corruption scandals. And in both cases, a relatively peaceful power transition within the ruling party, but in the case of Mozambique, stronger internal opposition growing and expressed now in form of armed unrest and a very transformed relationship with donors. And to zero in on the differences, well, when the war ended early on in Mozambique in the early 90s, it ended with a negotiated agreement that mediated, that was mediated by third party countries. And it sort of like brought together Mozambique and a number of donors and the kind of relationship became quite strong. And when fiscal effort was necessary to fund the political reconstruction in the post-conflict period, donors were very forthcoming and did support the reconstruction of the state. Very differently in Angola, the war did not end with a negotiated agreement. It dragged on for a decade more. And the war was funded by a resource that Mozambique did not have and Angola did, which was kind of like oil and to a great extent also diamonds, which meant that by the time Angola kind of like the war came to an end in Angola, Angola had not developed this dependence on aid and retained largely a relative autonomy because it could fund part of the reconstruction process from the revenues of its resource extraction. And here we formulated at the time a couple of hypotheses that would be interesting to revisit and to assess the extent to which they succeeded in explaining the contrast between two countries. We found that indeed the different sources of rents in the two countries led to different outcomes, that the different sources of the rents in one case age and in the other natural resources created very different fiscal structures during the post-work reconstruction period and were very central to differences in the state building process. But these structures were not merely different because they are based on different rents, but in rather respond to the effect that the different types of revenue and very importantly the timing of their use in the consolidation of the political settlement in each country was made effective. So for instance, whereas in Angola, the contemporary process, contemporary to the process of contestation during the war, there was the availability of this rent and this resulted in the consolidation through the rent of a very strong ruling coalition in Mozambique after the resources were only made available after the violent consultation was over and resulted in elites that sort of like cohesed and formed before the kind of like resources were forthcoming. In Angola, we find a case of a more unified command with capacity to prospect and to and with the fiscal imperative to use resources aid to propped up the ruling coalition, but also to combine with an in combination with some despotic rule also to create some legitimacy through a modicum of public service provision. What is remarkable about Angola is that in the process the country did craft a highly performing national oil company and secured to a great extent the appropriation not necessarily with progressive outcomes, but the appropriation by the state of the oil rent. Of course, the Angolan regime had an incentive to ensure the oil sector performed because it was the basis of its functioning not only of the state, but of the party and of its very centralized ruling coalition. The ruling party needed the oil rent as much as the oil rent in this case the oil company required a coherent ruling coalition. On the contrary, Mozambique relied on aid in the process of state building and post-conflict reconstruction. From the beginning, aid in Mozambique was a governance rather than growth driven and importantly was focused on strengthening the opposition and on strengthening the electoral process, both processes that had very uneven outcomes. This led to a ruling stage that is comparatively less autonomous and the management of rents is a bit of opposite than what we found in Angola, with emerging interest groups and private accumulators very much linked to the ruling party being considerably autonomous and not necessarily ruled by the top by a very, very centralized opposition. I think that with this I will close and continue discussing the case in the Q&A session. Thank you.