When Does Service Provision Support Or Undermine State Legitimacy? Higher Education and Processes of State (De-) Legitimation in Sri Lanka
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University of Birmingham When Does Service Provision Support or Undermine State Legitimacy? Higher Education and Processes of State (de-) Legitimation in Sri Lanka Claire Mcloughlin A thesis submitted to the International Development Department of the University of Birmingham for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, Birmingham, May 2017 1 University of Birmingham Research Archive e-theses repository This unpublished thesis/dissertation is copyright of the author and/or third parties. The intellectual property rights of the author or third parties in respect of this work are as defined by The Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 or as modified by any successor legislation. Any use made of information contained in this thesis/dissertation must be in accordance with that legislation and must be properly acknowledged. Further distribution or reproduction in any format is prohibited without the permission of the copyright holder. 2 Acknowledgements My thanks go first and foremost to all those who supported the fieldwork in Sri Lanka. I am particularly indebted to my research assistant, Anusha Fernando, who taught me much more than I could have anticipated about Sri Lankan life and culture. Many people in Colombo and Kandy generously gave up their time to talk to me about the history of higher education. I am particularly grateful to Shahul Hasbullah at the University of Peradeniya and Nirmal Dewasiri at the University of Colombo for helping me find my feet there. Several others long since retired from research and politics took a special interest in seeing me succeed with this project. Among them are Eric de Silva, Sunimal Fernando and Sunil Bastian. I am deeply appreciative of their help. I am enormously grateful to my two supervisors, Heather Marquette and Richard Batley. I would never have embarked on this journey without their initial encouragement. They have inspired and supported me throughout the process with a generosity and kindness that I will never forget and hope to someday emulate. I also want to thank all my colleagues in the International Development Department, which has been my intellectual home for more than a decade, for reassurance along the way. It would have been difficult to see this project through to completion without the support of Brian Lucas, who helped me to manage it alongside my other work commitments. I also owe a debt of gratitude to the Developmental Leadership Program for funding the fieldwork and writing-up phase, and for providing invaluable opportunities for me to publish some of the findings and present them to a ready-made policy audience. My greatest thanks must go to my friends and family. I have been overwhelmed by their support over the years. My husband Max helped me believe in my ability to see this project through. His patience, understanding and optimism along what has at times been a bumpy road have been limitless. I simply could not have done this without him. Finally, to my two young children Macy and Lincoln, who learned what a ‘PhD’ is earlier than most. This was ultimately for you. I hope you will forgive my absences, and be inspired that you can do anything you put your mind to. 3 Abstract This thesis examines the received wisdom in international aid and state-building debates that service provision can improve state legitimacy. It presents an in-depth, historical study of the relationship between state-provided university education and processes of state (de- )legitimation in Sri Lanka. The analysis focuses on three critical junctures when the social contract around higher education was being made, broken and defended. The major finding is that service provision can matter for state legitimacy, but not in the instrumental sense depicted in state-building models. Service provision needs to satisfy certain shared values and normative criteria in order to be significant for state legitimacy. When it does, it can express and reinforce the key legitimising ideas of the state. Indeed, it can become formative to the idea of the state. However, service provision can also undermine legitimacy when it sends messages that the state is contravening shared values or acting on the basis of unfair rules and procedures. This process is not automatic, but politically engineered by elites who manipulate service provision to make legitimacy claims. Services can become tied to state legitimacy at critical junctures of crisis and change. These critical junctures can be historically reinforcing and institutionalise path dependency not only in the significance of the service for state legitimacy, but in the functioning of the service itself. These findings call for an expansion of the remit of empirical enquiry into the services-legitimacy relationship in three senses: from the material to the non-material, from snapshots to longer-term observations, and from politics as background to politics as the locus of explanation. 4 Contents CHAPTER I THE PUZZLE OF SERVICE DELIVERY AND STATE LEGITIMACY 13 The meaning and significance of state legitimacy 16 Sri Lanka’s paradox of performance and de-legitimation 18 Why higher education? 21 Structure of the thesis 24 CHAPTER II SERVICE DELIVERY AND STATE LEGITIMACY: VIRTUOUS OR VICIOUS CIRCLES? 27 Building state legitimacy via service delivery? Received wisdoms in the aid debate 28 Questioning the received wisdom 30 The non-linear relationship between services and state legitimacy 35 From virtuous to vicious circles 45 Politics as the missing link? 48 This study’s analytical framework 51 Conclusions 54 CHAPTER III METHODOLOGY: FROM MEASURING LEGITIMACY TO RESEARCHING THE POLITICS OF LEGITIMATION 56 (De-)legitimation as a political process 57 Features of the research design 59 Legitimacy markers 66 Operationalising the analytical framework 73 Conclusions 80 5 CHAPTER IV MAKING THE SOCIAL CONTRACT: HIGHER EDUCATION AND POST-COLONIAL STATE LEGITIMATION 82 Free education in the social contract 83 The political environment for escalating legitimacy claims 90 Legitimation practice I: Democratising higher education 93 Legitimation practice II: Nationalising higher education 99 Legitimation practice III: Escalating state control of higher education 103 Conclusions 108 CHAPTER V BREAKING THE SOCIAL CONTRACT: HIGHER EDUCATION AND STATE DE-LEGITIMATION 110 Legitimacy Crisis I: Higher education and Sinhalese insurrection 112 The destabilising effects of state control 114 The economic limits to democratisation 118 The unmet promise of nationalism 121 Legitimacy Crisis II: Higher education and Tamil militancy 126 Pursuing a Sinhalese interpretation of fairness 128 Justificatory failure 130 Perceptions of procedural unfairness 133 A symbol of wider exclusion 136 Conclusions 138 CHAPTER VI DEFENDING THE SOCIAL CONTRACT: HIGHER EDUCATION AND POST-WAR CONTESTED LEGITIMACY 140 Cracks in the post-war social contract 142 Defending the social contract: FUTA’s campaign to ‘save state education’ 146 6 The popular appeal of saving state education 150 Navigating a line in the sand: the state’s response to FUTA 154 Functions and dysfunctions of the social contract 162 Conclusions 167 CHAPTER VII SERVICE PROVISION IN PROCESSES OF STATE (DE-)LEGITIMATION: AN HISTORICAL INSTITUTIONAL PERSPECTIVE 169 Social contracts as the origin of legitimising ideas 171 Politics in the virtuous – or vicious – circle 174 The special place of education in legitimacy politics 176 Justifiability: A turn to fairness? 179 Bringing history back 184 Conclusions 191 CHAPTER VIII CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS 193 Contributions and limitations of the thesis 194 Explaining Sri Lanka’s paradox of performance and de-legitimation 198 When does service provision support or undermine state legitimacy? 200 Refining the received wisdom 204 Implications for research 207 APPENDIX: Data sources 211 References 216 7 Figure i. Political map of Sri Lanka Source: http://ontheworldmap.com/sri-lanka/sri-lanka-political-map.jpg 8 Abbreviations ADB Asian Development Bank APIT Asia Pacific Institute Of Information Technology CID Criminal Investigation Department DFID Department for International Development EU European Union FUTA Federation of University Teachers Association GDP Gross Domestic Product HE Higher Education HI Historical Institutionalism IUSF Inter University Students’ Federation JVP Janantha Vimukthi Peramuna LKR Sri Lankan Rupees LTTE Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam MOE Ministry of Education MoHE Ministry of Higher Education NCHE National Council of Higher Education NGO Non-Governmental Organisation NORAD Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation ODA Overseas Development Assistance OECD Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development SAITM South Asian Institute of Technology and Medicine SLFP Sri Lanka Freedom Party UGC University Grants Commission UF United Front UNP United National Party 9 10 Timeline of critical junctures Developments in higher education Political environment Making the social contract: Higher education and post-colonial state legitimation 1931 First elected State Council and universal franchise ( Donoughmore Commission) Passing of Free Education Bill 1945 1947 Election of D.S. Senanayake (UNP) as first PM of Ceylon 1948 Independence (dominion status) 1952 Election of Dudley Senanayake (son of D.S. Senanayake) (UNP) as PM 1953 Hartal (people’s uprising) 1953 Election of PM Sir John Katelawala (UNP) 1956 Election of PM S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike (SLFP) Switchover to swabasha language of 1957 instruction/expansion begins Pirivenas University Act 1958 1959 Election of Wijeyananda Dahanayake