Relational State Capacity

What is Relational State Capacity?

When a health worker is trusted enough that a family actually follows their advice, or a tax officer listens patiently, and a citizen engages honestly in return, something valuable is being created. Even the best COVID vaccines meant nothing without citizens willing to take them; the most sophisticated contact-tracing apps failed without people willing to share accurate data.

Technical capacity alone doesn't explain why government works in some places and not others.

Relational State Capacity (RSC) is what fills that gap. It is the trust, reciprocity, and mutual recognition that accumulates through everyday interactions between citizens and state agents — and it is a collective asset that shapes what a state can actually achieve.

RSC is a five-year, European Research Council-funded project (2023–2028) led by Dan Honig, Mekhala Krishnamurthy, and Rahul Karnamadakala Sharma. Drawing on political science, sociology, anthropology, economics, history, and public administration, we place the quality of citizen-state relationships at the centre of our understanding of state performance.

We reject the view of citizens and state agents as opaque "black boxes" or mere calculators of self-interest. Instead, we see them as individuals and groups whose everyday interactions build or erode the shared expectations and trust that enable collective action. State capacity, in this view, is not just a government's resource or technical know-how. It is a shared societal asset, co-created through the relationship between citizens and those who serve them. Project outputs can be found here.

How is Relational State Capacity Built?

RSC emerges through three interconnected pathways:

Dyadic Interactions: State agents and citizens approach each other as humans, not adversaries, sparking reciprocal relationships from the ground up.
Spillover Effects: A single positive (or negative) exchange, like a helpful conversation or kind gesture, ripples outward, shaping broader perceptions and experiences for all involved.
Intermediating Environment: Social infrastructures embed state agents and citizens, structuring future interactions and channelling spillovers effectively.

The flow (dyadic interactions) generates spillovers that are often intermediated by states and civic institutions, aggregating into a stock of relational state capacity (RSC). The stock of RSC is a latent societal resource that is activated, expressed, enhanced, or diminished over time, influencing future flows.

Our Projects

Meghalaya’s Human Development Leadership Program (HDLP)

We are partnering with the Government of Meghalaya to study the Human Development Leadership Programme (HDLP), a pioneering initiative reshaping how state workers and citizens connect, collaborate, and build trust at the community level. Our work spans two interconnected roles:

Intervention Design Support: Co-designing program elements that strengthen relationship-building, deep listening, clarity of communication, and cultures of recognition between frontline workers and the communities they serve.
Randomised Controlled Trial (RCT): Rigorously evaluating the HDLP's impact and tracking the emergence and influence of Relational State Capacity (RSC) across Meghalaya.

RSC Scale Development and Validation

How do you measure something as intangible as the quality of a relationship between a citizen and the state? That is precisely what this project sets out to answer.

We are developing a standard survey instrument that can reliably measure the stock of RSC across different geographies and contexts, enabling comparisons, tracking, and ultimately strengthening relational capacity wherever it is being built. The core challenge is empirical: ensuring that what our instrument measures on paper genuinely reflects the rich, multidimensional reality of citizen-state relationships on the ground.

The validated scale will be made publicly available by the end of 2026, offering researchers, governments, and practitioners a shared tool for understanding and investing in this overlooked dimension of state performance.

The RSC Forum

The Relational State Capacity (RSC) Forum is intended as a convening of scholars from across a range of disciplines from whose work RSC as a nascent concept draws inspiration. By bringing together scholars to share and discuss old and new insights on state-citizen relations, the social contract, trust in government, social accountability and community organizing, democracy, bureaucrat-citizen interactions, etc., we hope to help build and sustain an interdisciplinary community for thinking and learning far beyond the scope of the RSC project itself. At the same time, for the RSC team the Forum also provides an invaluable steering group as we test ideas, concepts, methods, and measurement tools, as this is all very much work-in-progress.

Hosted at University College London (UCL), the first RSC Forum was held in London on May 13-14, 2024.