Abstract This article critically examines the role of political leadership in shaping and sustaining institutional reforms. While leadership has recently attracted a great deal of attention from other social scientists, law and development scholars have only begun to seriously consider the influence of leaders on institutions and development outcomes. The article explores the new mantra that “leadership matters” as cause for both careful optimism and renewed attention to some deeper anxieties about the future directions of law and development. On one side, emerging models of leadership provide important insights about how to change dysfunctional institutions and how to sustain those changes over the long run. A number of major studies published in the last few years have made some version of the claim that successful reforms inevitably require the dedicated leadership of one or more prominent individuals, positing good leaders as a necessary condition for institutional transitions. But the argument that good leadership itself determines good institutions also risks reproducing one of the most obstinate dilemmas in modern social theory: the contest between “structure” and “agency” as causal explanations of social change. If the new mantra that “leadership matters” represents a shift in focus away from the structure of law and politics and towards the influence of individual agents’ choices, actions, talents and beliefs, there is good reason to be sceptical about whether simply privileging agency over structure—or the inverse—has any greater chance of success than the many failed attempts to do just that in other fields of knowledge over the past several decades. Instead, the present moment could be a valuable opportunity to assess whether alternative and more integrative approaches to the longstanding structure-agency impasse in development law and policy are possible.

中文翻译：

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领导力，法律与发展

摘要本文批判性地考察了政治领导在塑造和维持体制改革中的作用。尽管领导力最近引起了其他社会科学家的广泛关注，但是法律和发展学者才刚刚开始认真考虑领导力对制度和发展成果的影响。本文探讨了“领导力至关重要”这一新口头禅，这既是谨慎乐观的原因，又是对法律和发展未来方向的更深层次忧虑的重新关注。一方面，新兴的领导模式提供了有关如何改变功能失调的机构以及如何长期维持这些变化的重要见解。过去几年中发表的许多重大研究提出了某种说法，即成功的改革不可避免地需要一个或多个杰出人士的专门领导，并将优秀领导者定为体制过渡的必要条件。但是，关于好的领导本身决定好的制度的论点也冒着重现现代社会理论中最顽固的难题之一的风险：“结构”与“机构”之间的竞争是对社会变革的因果解释。如果“领导力很重要”这一新口号代表着焦点已从法律和政治结构转移到个人代理人的选择，行为，才能和信念的影响上，与过去几十年在其他知识领域进行失败的许多失败尝试相比，有充分的理由对此表示怀疑，即仅仅对结构进行私有化（或相反）是否具有更大的成功机会。相反，目前可能是一个宝贵的机会，可以评估对发展法律和政策中长期存在的结构性机构僵局采取替代和更综合的方法是否可行。