State culture, building and renewing the Botswana developmental state

Abstract

The post-colonial Botswana elite built a developmental state.The Botswana Democratic Party (BDP) inherited a developmental state-promoting state culture, which it used to modernise state institutions, to focus on creating new wealth for the nation, to build a small but coherent state structure and to centralise the exploitation of natural resources. However, the BDP developmental state reached a point of collapse and two revolutions from above were instituted to try to revive it. This is what this paper argues.