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The political settlements approach emerged out of a critique of new institutional economics developed by Mushtaq Khan in the 1990s. Since then, the political settlements approach has proliferated in donor programming and academic scholarship on African countries. This has led to some confusion about its core conceptual and methodological features. This Research Note starts by setting out our understanding of political settlements and provides an overview of existing political settlements literature on African countries. The note then explores how the key concept of ‘holding power’ has been employed in varied ways in the political settlements literature, which in turn has led to various methodologies to study power. The note discusses a number of these methodologies, including studying political ruptures as a window into analyzing the distribution of power in African countries, and emphasizes the importance of studying economic structure, ideology, violence rights and rents as sources of holding power. The overall contribution of the note is to illustrate the varied strategies used in studying political settlements and to place them in conversation with one another.

This article examines the political economy of grand corruption in Tanzania in the era of rapid growth and global integration. Grand corruption in Tanzania is linked to intra-elite conflicts within the ruling CCM party. However, the underlying dynamics of these struggles and how such elite politics interacts with the wider process of socio-economic transformation unfolding in Tanzania are not well understood. This article draws on the political settlements approach in building an analytical framework to examine four major grand corruption scandals that occurred within public finance from 2000 until 2014. In particular, it sets out the key actors and patterns in the factional struggles over corruption in order to demonstrate how the elite within the ruling CCM party is not centralized but composed instead of internal factions that have equal weight. The article explains how the enduring control of this elite, despite its internal divisions, can be explained by examining the balance of power in society beyond the institutions of the ruling party or the state itself. The article then establishes the mechanisms through which grand corruption shapes paths of accumulation within the domestic economy in Tanzania. In concluding, it argues that the fragmented distribution of power within the ruling party means that policy responses of the donor community, in particular the halting of aid disbursements, have been ineffective and are likely to continue to be ineffective in stopping grand corruption in Tanzania.