Book Release “Garments and Growth: State, Ideas, Policy Learning, and Globalization in Bangladesh” (2026) by Dr. ASM Mostafizur Rahman
About the Book:
How did one of the poorest countries on earth become a global leader in garment exports, lifting millions out of poverty and achieving remarkable socio-economic transformation?
In the 1970s, half of Bangladesh's population suffered from malnutrition. Public health infrastructure was almost non-existent, and preventable diseases cut lives short in their forties. Floods and cyclones caused devastating loss of life and livelihoods.
The policymakers contemplated how to build resilience against climate catastrophes and improve socio-economic conditions. By developing export strategy, the garments sector not only mobilized resources, but also enabled investments in infrastructure, education, healthcare, and women's empowerment. Learning was how embracing globalization could drive growth.
The book “Garments and Growth" explains how Bangladesh's policy deliberation that promoted garment exports also shaped broader pathways for development and how local stories can have global implications. This research has earned an international science award from the city of Mosbach and HGB Stiftung.
In this book, ASM Mostafizur Rahman explores the complex policy dimensions that had an impact on the rise of Bangladesh's garment sector. Once one of the world's poorest countries, fully dependent on foreign aid, the country has undergone significant socio-economic transformation through export-led growth and industrialization—a remarkable outcome.
The study explores the evolution of policy learning in Bangladesh through the concept of the policy committee—a unique contribution to governance studies in the Global South. The book analyzes technocratic ideas and political agencies in facilitating garment exports and driving socio-economic transformation in a post-aid agrarian society.
Conceptually, the book tests policy learning theory through the mechanisms of “puzzling and powering". Top technocrats and political executives are identified as key agents who interact with exogenous pressures and domestic social groups. The study centers their puzzling and ideas around an innovative concept, the policy committee, a novel framework in policy studies. This research demonstrates empirically that gradual and incremental policy adjustments had an impact on the development of the export-orientated garment industry.
The author traces the process of an incremental and evolutionary policy path within a historical institutional framework spanning 1972 to the 1990s, under governments led by Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, Ziaur Rahman, H.M. Ershad, Khaleda Zia and Sheik Hasina. The policy paradigm shifted from state intervention toward embracing neoliberal globalization in a tipping point moment of democratic transition. The outcome was socio-economic transformation driven by garment exports and private sector growth. Bangladesh today stands as one of the world's largest garment exporters, with this success underpinning broader resource mobilization, climate resilience, better public health, improvements in infrastructure and human capital, and women's empowerment.
Political decision-making through interaction with social groups and external pressure illustrates how power is puzzling and how the ideas of top technocrats and political executives redirected economic policy in an agrarian society where women's participation in mainstream economic activities was traditionally limited, thus fostering social change. The causal mechanism of this change is identified as the policy committee by using an understanding grounded in the policy learning theory of Hugh Heclo and Peter Hall. The committee's puzzling interactions with stakeholders propagated a political economy understanding of Bangladesh's globalization through the prism of export orientation and private sector development.
This book challenges conventional explanations focused on the class struggle or an external donor-driven policy paradigm, offering an alternative explanation to policymaking in a non-industrial, emerging economy context. The book's conceptualization offers compelling implications for studies of the Global South and emerging economies. It is an essential reading for scholars and practitioners interested in policy studies, governance, political economy, globalization, garment-driven growth, and state-society interactions in the Global South, and more specifically in Bangladesh's economic struggle under specific and politically diverse government regimes.
The book is forewarned by Professor Rahul Mukherji in association with the South Asia Institute, Heidelberg University and published by Springer.
About the author
Dr. A.S.M. Mostafizur Rahman is an adjunct faculty member in the Department of Political Science and an associated researcher at the South Asia Institute of Heidelberg University. He earned his PhD in political science from the Institute of Political Science (IPW) within the Faculty of Economics and Social Sciences at Heidelberg University, graduating Magna Cum Laude (great distinction) with his dissertation, entitled “Globalization and Transformation: State, Ideas, and Economic Policy in Bangladesh". He has an MA in International Relations (Peace and Conflict Studies) at the European Peace University, Austria, with an 'excellent' distinction and studied economics, sociology, and literature in his BA in Bangladesh. He is an associated member of the South Asia Institute, a member of the Heidelberg Postdoctoral Network, the European Association for South Asian Studies (EASAS), the International Peace Research Association (IPRA), the Bangladesh Studies Network in Europe, and Heidelberg Alumni International.