Although a long tradition of research shows that the correlation between economic growth and well-being is imperfect, the sociology of development continues to focus on economic growth. In this paper we take a first step toward a sociology of social development by defining which indicators other than economic growth best capture different facets of citizen well-being, theorizing what social phenomena explain the variance in these indicators, and specifying causal mechanisms that connect the two. We show quantitatively that one main predictor of social development is basic sanitation, and that a key correlate of poor sanitation is corruption in law enforcement. We use direct measures of experiences with corruption, rather than subjective measures of perceptions of corruption. We then draw on qualitative data to suggest why and how corruption in the judiciary enables poor sanitation. Where the state does not efficiently deliver municipal services, intermediaries facilitate illegal access to services, and can only perform their work if law enforcement can be bribed. But by providing access to some citizens and not all, these intermediaries fragment citizens’ interests. Politics develops around lines of patronage rather than programmatic policies, and those who do not have the material resources to bypass the poor municipal systems, or the political resources to participate in patronage, are left without access to basic sanitation.

Sociologists have much to contribute to the study of global health and development. Our discipline's fundamental concerns with power and inequality uniquely position us to leverage theoretical, conceptual, substantive, and empirical insights for the understanding of engines, outcomes, and processes of global health and development. This special issue highlights the diversity and depth of sociological engagements with the topics of global health and development. In this introduction to this special issue, I briefly outline how sociologists have approached the study of global health and development despite the fact that this is a nascent and not yet fully coalesced field. While medical sociologists and political sociologists have historically studied these topics, they have also marginalized them. Exciting sociological research is, however, underway. The challenge is in ensuring that scholarship on global health and development is in conversation across subfields in order to propel research on global health and development forward, both substantively and theoretically.

In this paper, we apply Polanyi's double movement to characterize the potential and observed impacts of public-private and public-philanthropic partnerships for the development of pro-poor value chains. We highlight the contradiction between the goals of these partnerships in international agricultural development, which seek to shift power dynamics and counter market exclusion, and the internal logic of these hybrid governance approaches, which reflect the tensions of market society from which they come. We present case studies from Honduras, Peru, and Mali of agricultural public-private and public-philanthropic partnerships and their constituent actors, identifying roles and relationships among actors that personify double movement negotiations within pro-poor market-oriented development. The cases highlight the implications for civil society actors of hybrid governance systems that utilize market mechanisms to address the destructive tendencies of capitalist development. We conclude that partnerships characterized by a mismatch of responsibilities and power relations among civil society and private actors generate a new type of double movement that does not generate durable institutions and that limits the impacts of the partnerships for poor farmers.

Although the positive developmental effects of infrastructure provisioning are well documented, research on the potential role of governance in the improvement of infrastructure performance and individual-level service utilization is lacking. I explore the effect of infrastructure provisioning on individual-level health service utilization, paying close attention to whether governance at different levels shapes people's access to health care. The different geographical levels of infrastructure provisioning, governance, and health service utilization require a multilevel analysis, which I perform using Afrobarometer Round 5 survey data on 34 African countries in a three-stage mixed-effects modeling. Results show that the presence of health infrastructure is crucial for enhancing people's health service utilization. However, people encounter certain problems when receiving services at their local health clinics or hospitals, and these problems are directly linked with governance in the health sector as well as overall governance at the country level. Improvements in people's health service utilization therefore require both better infrastructure provisioning and better governance at different levels, as the former does not guarantee the latter. Development scholars need to widen their focus beyond national-level governance and help policy makers identify at which level state interventions are most needed for removing barriers to development.