The study of social-service provisioning in low- and middle-income countries has appropriately focused on the capacity and motivations of states. Governments remain the dominant providers of basic services for citizens of the global South. Yet available evidence suggests that non-state service providers are playing an increasing role in these regions. Despite their growing importance, the political causes and consequences of such provisioning have lacked systematic scholarly attention. This volume thus makes an extremely valuable contribution by placing the politics of non-state service provision front and center. Two leading scholars of non-state providers (NSPs) have assembled an impressive collection of essays, which cover broad conceptual and empirical terrain.

The organizing principle of these contributions is to focus on non-state actors who attempt to directly provide or indirectly facilitate access to basic welfare services. This inclusive framework incorporates a broad array of NSP types: corporate social responsibility wings of foreign oil companies in Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan (Chapter 3), faith-based organizations in Tanzania (Chapter 6), and informal brokers in India (Chapter 9), to name but a few. The authors also consider NSPs that have widely varying relations with the states in which they operate. Private firms in Argentina bid for contracts from the government to provide water to fee-paying consumers (Chapter 4), and nongovernmental organizations in Kenya (Chapter 5) often substitute for poor government services in health and education, while sectarian health-care providers in Lebanon (Chapter 7) deliver services financed by the public exchequer.

Such diversity can often undermine the coherence of an edited volume, but here it is a major asset. First, an inclusive conceptualization of NSP types is necessary for motivating research on an understudied topic. Second, by selecting individual contributors who have studied each of these varied NSPs through intensive fieldwork, the editors leverage the comparative advantage of edited volumes in offering both depth and breadth. Third, an inclusive framework provides opportunities for unexpected comparisons that prior studies of NSPs, which have focused on specific providers in isolation, are unable to make. For example, the literature on the welfare efforts of religious parties across Asia and Africa has rarely attempted to explore parallels with secular providers. Yet Chapters 5 (Jennifer Brass) and 6 (Michael Jennings) highlight how secular NGOs in Kenya and faith-based organizations in Tanzania are similarly inclusive, locally rooted providers that have largely salutary effects on local welfare provisioning.

The heterogeneity of organizational types examined in the volume does carry certain costs. For example, Anirudh Krishna’s work on informal brokers in India (Chapter 9) and Lauren MacLean’s analysis of informal social networks in Côte d'Ivoire and Ghana (Chapter 8) are two of the most compelling contributions in the entire volume. Yet both examine how non-state private actors (often individuals) enable citizens to access state services. Such mediation seems markedly distinct from organizations that directly deliver services themselves. Given that many, if not most, citizens in the global South draw on friends, families, and local power brokers for help in accessing government services, the inclusion of these intermediaries as non-state providers does raise concerns of conceptual stretching.

In addition, the variety of cases examined can sometimes hamper efforts to advance precise, falsifiable, theoretical claims about the political causes and consequences of NSPs. However, the editors smartly eschew such efforts, and instead use the cases to develop a theoretically motivated typology that identifies particular attributes of NSPs as especially worthy of future attention (Chapter 2). Specifically, Melani Cammett and MacLean emphasize the importance of organizational attributes over particular ideological orientations in determining the impact that NSPs have on three crucial outcomes: citizen access to welfare, accountability to beneficiaries, and state capacity. Specifically, they focus on whether NSPs are motivated by profit, have formalized procedures and locally rooted leadership, and are inclusive in those whom they deem eligible for their offerings.

Such inductive theorizing is the best way to leverage the volume’s rich empirical material. However, firmly linking any particular organizational attribute and outcome is difficult. For example, formal organizations with routinized and transparent procedures appear more likely than informal organizations to improve access to welfare. Yet Krishna and MacLean show how informal brokers and social networks play a crucial role in enabling poor citizens to access public services. Similarly, the emergence of multiple NSPs can weaken accountability pressures by complicating whom to hold responsible for service provisioning. Yet Alison Post carefully shows how the entry of private water providers in Argentina increased expectations regarding service quality, and thus actually elevated accountability pressures from dissatisfied consumers. Isolating the impact of NSPs on state capacity is perhaps the most difficult task, given that such effects are inevitably conditioned by prior state capacity.

Yet these challenges do not minimize the considerable contributions of this volume. Cammett and MacLean are thoughtful editors who anticipate and acknowledge the difficulties of imposing theoretical parsimony on the complexities revealed by their contributors. Instead, they embrace this complexity in ways that yields tangible theoretical dividends. The clearest illustration of these payoffs is in the ways that the authors show how the political consequences of non-state social welfare are shaped by longer histories of state-based service provisioning. For example, Cammett’s chapter traces the historically limited role of the Lebanese state, and the concomitantly extensive role of NSPs, in providing welfare. Consequently, even as public financing of service provisioning increased, a large portion of these resources was funneled to entrenched and powerful NSPs, who remain responsible for much of the actual delivery of services. Similarly, MacLean argues that variations in the ways in which colonial and postcolonial states in Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire mediated risks in service provisioning and agriculture importantly shaped the depth and breadth of provisioning furnished by non-state social networks.

Relatedly, the volume provides a nuanced perspective concerning how NSPs were affected by market reforms adopted by many low- and middle-income nations during the 1980s and 1990s. The authors avoid mechanical arguments that neoliberal reforms hollowed out state-based providers, automatically enabling NSPs to thrive. Instead, they illustrate how a range of political factors mediated the impact of reforms. Linda Cook’s chapter shows how the dense bureaucracies of Soviet health care resisted being privatized as part of a larger restructuring of the post-Soviet Russian economy. However, economic stagnation did force down the official pay of public health-care providers, incentivizing them to collect informal “private” payments from beneficiaries. By contrast, Brass’s chapter shows how reductions in state spending on health and education in Kenya during market reforms did lead to a growing role of NGOs. However, such growth occurred only after the Moi administration hostile to NGO activities gave way to the Kibaki presidency that saw these groups as political allies.

Overall, The Politics of Non-state Social Welfare makes a substantial contribution to the study of social provisioning in the global South. The volume would be a useful addition to undergraduate or graduate courses on the political economy of development, and individual chapters could be taught in courses on NGOs, religious politics, distributive politics, and political parties. Most importantly, the rich collection of essays succeeds in illustrating the vast potential for future work on an understudied and increasingly crucial topic.