progress is, however, we note that at present this has not been a result of systematic policy planning to encourage bottom-up accountability, but rather because of a perceived greater space for engagement; heightened access to communications tools (i.e., mobile phones), which facilitate more active participation; and individual enterprise (i.e., the abilities of local administrators, staff and village elites). Integrating and institutionalizing emerging state-led policy mechanisms with local-level initiatives will be crucial to ensuring that initial achievements are consolidated and expanded, and that potential (or actual) tensions between them are coherently and amicably resolved.

Findings are grounded in four years of data from the Qualitative Social and Economic Monitoring (QSEM) research program, a large-scale longitudinal panel study on village life in Myanmar, which has tracked 54 villages across the country over six research rounds since 2012.<sup>1</sup> The study is based on in-depth interviews and focus group discussions held with approximately 1,000 people in each round. Its scale, longevity, and scope make it a unique lens through which to understand how Myanmar’s transition is playing out in everyday village life.<sup>2</sup> The following sections explore these arguments in greater detail. Section 2 briefly reviews the existing literature on Myanmar’s social transformation as it pertains to prevailing governance institutions, economic networks, and state-society relations. Section 3 explores how changes in the structure and functions of village governance institutions have led state-society relations to evolve. Section 4 examines changes in citizens’ expectations of the state. Section 5 addresses the nature and extent of the steadily expanding economic and social networks of Myanmar’s rural citizens. Section 6 considers the interplay between these three vectors of change. Section 7 concludes with preliminary implications for policy and practice, and identifies key areas in need of further examination.

2. Previous and Ongoing Research on Myanmar’s Social Transformation Any study seeking to examine Myanmar’s ongoing transition to democracy needs to locate its findings in the scholarly research and policy analysis that has been undertaken since these momentous processes were put in motion in 2011. We thus begin with a brief review of the literature on Myanmar’s governance institutions, economic networks, and citizens’ expectations of the state.

The literature explicitly examining Myanmar’s state-society relations at the village level is limited. Most studies undertaken during military rule focused on particular aspects of engagement with the state (e.g., Thawnghmung 2003) in a context where access to rural communities was limited. Starting from the 2008 Constitution, the Government of Myanmar has been implementing policies to decentralize what has historically been a heavily centralized structure (UNDP 2014). A growing body of research analyzes this decentralization process, including The Asia Foundation’s policy research on state/region and township governance (Inada 2014, Nixon 2014) and UNDP’s local governance mapping project (UNDP 2015). Most of this work focuses primarily on institutions at the township level and above. Research looking at institutions below the township level is more limited, and includes work by Susanne Kempel on village governance (Kempel 2012, 2014, 2016). The QSEM builds on this by examining how rural communities have engaged with these institutions as they have evolved, and by examining how the transition has affected village leadership and decision-making.<sup>3</sup> 3