This collection of essays (some of them previously published in the Hague Journal on the Rule of Law) emerges from a 2010 workshop organized by the “Justice for the Poor” initiative in the World Bank. The book, like the workshop, brings together scholars and practitioners (a dichotomy curiously maintained even in the list of contributors). The hope, expressed in the excellent introduction by Caroline Sage and Michael Woolcock (a version of which had been circulated to the conference participants in preparation) was to initiate a dialogue to instill better mutual knowledge.
Indeed, some contributions to the book suggest that the classic definition of legal pluralism as the coexistence of plural laws in the same social space, and the ensuing discussion in scholarship, are still not yet universally known. Daniel Adler and Sokbunthoeun So, in their paper, confine “law” to state law and discuss how state law is sometimes not effective. David Kinley discusses, as pluralism, varieties of human rights law between states, but not interaction with non-state law. Varun Gauri does adopt the classical definition, but his list of shortcomings of non-state law—substantive defects, lack of enforcement power, lack of publicity—still uses an idealized vision of state law as the yardstick.
Appropriately, several other chapters are conceived largely as brief introductions into legal pluralism made for non-experts. William Twining even calls his chapter “Legal Pluralism 101” and provides a highly sophisticated analytical survey. Sally Merry gives a very lucid and succinct introduction to legal pluralism, legal culture, legal consciousness and legal mobilization, from the lens of anthropology, and links this with the concrete example of women's courts in Gujarat. Lauren Benton presents the historical link between pluralism and Empire/colonialism. Brian Tamanaha and, somewhat more systematically, Gordon Woodman, link more explicitly the two topics of the book and invite development practitioners both to take pluralism more seriously as a concept and to view it with less suspicion as a phenomenon. Julio Faundez shows how such rather theoretical considerations play out in a wide variety of contexts. Christian Lund points out that institutional pluralism exists also between state institutions, and shows this in the example of property rights in Niger. Meg Taylor and Nicholas Menzies apply academic insights faithfully (perhaps too much so) to the example of mining.
Fortunately, most authors reject the simple question whether legal pluralism is a problem or an opportunity, and respond either with “yes and no” or assert that legal pluralism represents simply the background conditions against which development agencies operate (thus Patrick Glenn). Deborah Isser even considers the question itself irrelevant: she suggests that what matters is not legal pluralism as such but instead how to work best with the existing realities of state and non-state norms. The two most interesting contributions make more constructive use of the concept. Kanishka Jayasuriya suggests that state and non-state institutions should not be viewed as alternatives but rather as coming together to form a hybrid. Instead of hoping for non-state institutions to replace the state, he suggests seeing legal pluralism itself as a regulatory project. Doug J. Porter demonstrates how much the phenomenon of legal pluralism has always been familiar to development agencies, and then lists a number of challenges that this pluralism poses for traditional state-focused development initiatives.
Such chapters make it clear that the dialogue which the book aims for will have a long way to go in both directions. Some development initiatives may indeed still be too focused on the state as regulator, despite the long existing critique by legal scholars (a literature that is, unfortunately, rarely referenced in this book). But the book makes it clear also that legal pluralists will need to update their understanding of development initiatives, which, as several contributions by “practitioners” make clear, have a far more sophisticated understanding of the interactions of state law and non-state norms than they are given credit for.
In the end, the initiated debate between practitioners and scholars suggests that legal pluralism may be of limited use for practitioners, for two reasons. First, the instrumentalist and reformist ambition of development initiatives is only partly compatible with the descriptive and often conservatory attitude of proponents of legal pluralism. Even if development and pluralism know more of each other, they may therefore not lose their mutual suspicion. Second, legal pluralism, as a general theory, may be of only limited use to development agencies. They know about normative pluralism from their work, and whether these plural norms are law or not matters little to them. The book is most instructive where it goes beyond generalizations and presents concrete examples—and here, it turns out that the practitioners sometimes have more to teach than the scholars.
