Grugel Hammett Handbook of International Development 2016

The Palgrave Handbook of International Development Edited by Jean Grugel and Daniel Hammett

The Palgrave Handbook of International Development

Jean Grugel • Daniel Hammett Editors

The Palgrave Handbook of International Development

Editors Jean Grugel Department of Politics University of York Heslington YO10 5DD United Kingdom

Daniel Hammett Department of Geography University of Sheffield United Kingdom

ISBN 978-1-137-42723-6 ISBN 978-1-137-42724-3 DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-42724-3

(eBook)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016938062 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 The author(s) has/have asserted their right(s) to be identified as the author(s) of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. Printed on acid-free paper This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature The registered company is Macmillan Publishers Ltd. London

Acknowledgements

This collection would not have been possible without a huge amount of support from a range of colleagues. We would especially like to thank the team at Palgrave who have supported us through the production of this Handbook, in particular, Christina Brian and Ambra Finotello. We would also like to thank the contributors for their chapters as well as the work of Stephanie Gamauf in helping us to prepare the manuscript. We also thank Deniz Ay, Yagiz Karahan, and sendika.org for permission to reproduce images contained within this book, as well as Taylor and Francis for permission to reproduce a number of tables from the International Economic Journal.

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Contents

1

Introduction: A Call for Action in a Multidisciplinary World Jean Grugel and Daniel Hammett

Part I 2

Theories of Development

Classical Approaches to Development: Modernisation and Dependency Wil Hout

1

19

21

3

Postcolonial Approaches to Development Pat Noxolo

41

4

Ethical Issues in Development Jay Drydyk

55

5

Democracy and Development: A Relationship of Harmony or Tension? Matthew Louis Bishop

77

Global Citizenship and Development: From Benevolence to Global Justice? Matt Baillie Smith

99

6

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Contents

Part II The Changing Role of the State and Capital in Development 7 The Developmental State Christopher Wylde

119 121

8 Natural Resource Extraction and the Development Conundrum Håvard Haarstad

139

9 Intellectual Property Rights and Development: A Contingent Political Relationship Valbona Muzaka

155

10 Governing the Formal Economy: The Convergence of  Theory and Divergence of Practice Tony Heron

169

11 Outside the State: The Shadow Economy and Shadow Economy Labour Force Friedrich Schneider

185

Part III The Changing Role of Citizens, Civil Society and Privatisation in Development

205

12 Urban Informality and the State: A Relationship of  Perpetual Negotiation Tom Goodfellow

207

13 Civil Society: Management, Mismanagement and Informal Governance Sarah A. Radcliffe

227

14 Security Privatisation, the State, and Development in  the Global South Rita Abrahamsen

243

Contents

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15 Alternatives to the Privatisation of Water and Sanitation Services: Lessons from Latin America Susan Spronk

259

Part IV

277

New Flows of Development Finance

16 Emerging Powers in International Development: Questioning South–South Cooperation Giles Mohan

279

17 The New Philanthropy: Private Power in International Development Policy? Michael Moran and Diane Stone

297

18 Recipients and Contributors: The Dual Role of  Middle-Income Countries Jose Antonio Alonso, Jonathan Glennie, and Andy Sumner

315

19 Migrants, Remittances and Hometown Associations in  Promoting Development Ninna Nyberg Sørensen

333

Part V

347

(In)Security, Mobility and Geopolitics

20 Mobility, Immobility and Migration Ronald Skeldon 21 ‘Make Migration a Choice not a Necessity’: Challenging the Instrumentalisation of Migration as a Tool for  Development Nicola Piper 22 Slavery, Human Trafficking, and Forced Labour: Implications for International Development Genevieve LeBaron

349

365

381

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23 International Development and the Global Drugs Trade Neil Carrier and Gernot Klantschnig 24 The Violence of Development: Guerrillas, Gangs, and  Goondas in Perspective Gareth A. Jones and Dennis Rodgers

399

415

25 Aid and the ‘Circle of Security’ John Overton and Warwick E. Murray

433

Part VI

Rights, Activism and Citizenship

451

26 What do Human Rights Mean in Development? Paul Gready and Jonathan Ensor

453

27 Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights Rosemary Morgan

471

28 From Objects to Subjects? Children and Youth in  Development Nicola Ansell

487

29 Disability and Development: Critical (Dis)Connections Shaun Grech

513

30 Mental Health and the Mindset of Development China Mills

535

31 Invented Spaces of Activism: Gezi Park and Performative Practices of Citizenship Deniz Ay and Faranak Miraftab

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Contents

Part VII

Science, Technology and Innovation

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575

32 New Social Media Practices: Potential for Development, Democracy, and Anti-democratic Practices Matthew Adeiza and Philip N. Howard

577

33 The Role of Transport and Communication Infrastructure in Realising Development Outcomes Jean-Paul Rodrigue

595

34 Smart City: Neoliberal Discourse or Urban Development Tool? Nancy Odendaal

615

35 Crowdsourcing Development: From Funding to Reporting Johan Hellström

635

36 The Problematic of Biofuels for Development Kate J. Neville and Peter Dauvergne

649

Part VIII Vulnerability and Adaptation to Environmental Change

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37 Food Security, Land, and Development Philip McMichael

671

38 Livelihood Adaptation and Climate Variability in Africa Lindsey Stinger, Claire Quinn, Rachel Berman, and Jami Dixon

695

39 Can Regional Cooperation Promote Sustainable Development? Karen M. Siegel

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40 Rethinking the Vulnerability of Small Island States: Climate Change and Development in the Pacific Islands Jon Barnett and Elissa Waters

731

41 Running Dry: Water, Development and Conflict Ashok Swain

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Index

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Notes on Contributors

Rita Abrahamsen is a Professor at the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, University of Ottawa. She is the author (with M.C.  Williams) of Security Beyond the State: Private Security in International Politics (2011) and Disciplining Democracy: Development Discourse and Good Governance in Africa (2000), as well as a number of articles in refereed journals. She was joint editor of African Affairs from 2009 to 2013. Matthew  Adeiza is a PhD student in the Department of Communication at the University of Washington in Seattle, USA, where he studies the adoption of digital media by political parties in sub-Saharan Africa with specific focus on Nigeria, Ghana, and Kenya. The research explores how parties and candidates adopt technology to mobilize support and engage users. He holds an MSc in African studies from the University of Oxford, and is currently the project manager for the Digital Activism Research Project at the University of Washington. José  Antonio  Alonso is Professor of Applied Economics at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid and a member of the Committee for Development Policy at the United Nations Economic and Social Council, the Development Cooperation Council at Spain and the European Advisory Group of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. His main research areas focus on growth and development, international economic relations and foreign aid policies. His most recent books are Development Cooperation in Times of Crisis (with J.A. Ocampo; 2012) and Alternative Development Strategies for the Post 2015 Era (with G.A. Cornia and R. Vos; 2013). Nicola  Ansell is Reader in Human Geography at Brunel University, London. Her research interests focus on three interrelated themes: how young people in Africa are affected by and negotiate social and cultural change; the production and implementation of children- and youth-focused development interventions; and the intersections between international development and social justice. Specific areas of interest xiii

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include the role of schooling in young people’s lives and the impacts of HIV. Her publications include Children, Youth and Development (2005) and Children’s Lives in an Era of Children’s Rights: The Progress of the Convention on the Rights of the Child in Africa (co-edited with A. Twum-Danso Imoh; 2014). Deniz Ay is a PhD candidate in Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She trained as an economist before starting her doctoral studies in Planning. She holds a BA degree in economics from Sabanci University, Istanbul, and an MS degree in economics (specializing in Development) from the London School of Economics and Political Sciences (LSE), London. Her research focuses on the paradoxes of development and ‘public interest’ narratives in city planning. She studies the interplay between local and transnational processes in ‘resilience’ planning. Ay is currently working on her dissertation entitled ‘Is it Possible to Plan Displacement-Free Urban Renewal? Urban Redevelopment Policy Assemblage through Institutions, Organizations and Actors’. Matt  Baillie  Smith is Professor of International Development and Director of the Centre for International Development at Northumbria University, UK. Following a master’s degree at Cambridge University and PhD at Warwick University, Smith worked for a development non-governmental organisation (NGO) before returning to academia. His research interests address the relationships between development, civil society, citizenship and subjectivity, explored through research on volunteering and development, development education, global citizenship, global civil society and NGO activism in South India. He is an advisor to the Department for International Development (DfID) Global Learning Programme, the NGO ‘Think Global’ and the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies. Recent publications are articles in Canadian Journal of Development Studies/Revue canadienne d’études du développement, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Geoforum, and Antipode. Jon Barnett is Professor in the School of Geography at the University of Melbourne. He is a political geographer whose research examines the impacts of and responses to environmental change on social systems. His work includes research on vulnerability and adaptation to climate change with a particular focus on conflict, cultures, mobility and peace. In recent years, he has conducted fieldwork in Australia, China, the Marshall Islands, Niue and Tuvalu. Barnett is Lead Author of the Human Security chapter in the most recent IPCC Assessment Report, and he co-edits the journal Global Environmental Change. Rachel  Berman is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in socio-ecology and environmental policy at the University of Edinburgh. She holds a PhD from the University of Leeds. Her research addresses household coping strategies in response to climate variability in rural communities in the Global South, specifically Uganda. Her recent publications include papers in Geoforum, Climate and Development, and Environmental Development.

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Matthew  Bishop is Senior Lecturer in International Relations at the University of the West Indies, Trinidad and Tobago. He holds a PhD from the University of Sheffield, and he remains an Honorary Research Fellow of the Sheffield Political Economy Research Institute (SPERI). Bishop has held visiting appointments at the Institute of Social Studies (in The Hague), the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (in Leiden), the University of Warwick and Wuhan University in China. His main research interests are in the field of international political economy, with a particular focus on questions of development, democratization, global trade politics and the political economy of small states in both the Caribbean and beyond. He has published two books: The Political Economy of Caribbean Development (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) and Democratization: A Critical Introduction (with J. Grugel; Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). Bishop is also the founding managing editor of the Caribbean Journal of International Relations & Diplomacy. Neil  Carrier is Lecturer in African Anthropology at the University of Oxford. He holds a doctorate in Social Anthropology from the University of St Andrews. Since then, he has been based at Oxford, working on a number of different projects from photography in Africa to Somali transnational trade and its impacts within Kenya and beyond. Much of his research has focused on the topic of drugs in Africa, resulting in a number of publications including Kenyan Khat: The Social Life of a Stimulant (2007), Africa and the War on Drugs (with G. Klantschnig; 2012) and Drugs in Africa: Histories and Ethnographies of Use, Trade and Control (co-edited with G. Klantschnig and C. Ambler; Palgrave, 2014). Peter Dauvergne is Professor of International Relations at the University of British Columbia. He is the author of the award-winning books Shadows in the Forest (1997) and The Shadows of Consumption (2008), as well as Loggers and Degradation in the Asia-Pacific (with J. Clapp; 2001), Paths to a Green World (2005/2011) and Timber (with J. Lister; 2011). His most recent books are Eco-Business (with J. Lister; 2013) and Protest Inc. (with G. LeBaron; 2014). In addition to publishing 12 books and 46 refereed journal articles and book chapters, he is the founding and past editor of the MIT Press journal Global Environmental Politics. Jami Dixon submitted her PhD in 2015 at the University of Leeds and is currently a research associate at LTS International, working on the interconnections between poverty and biodiversity. Her research interests engage with issues of adaptive capacity and climate change adaptation in Uganda and, more broadly, issues of food security, rural livelihoods and climate change resilience. Her publications include articles in Geoforum and Resources. Jay  Drydyk is Professor of Philosophy at Carleton University in Ottawa. He is a past president of the International Development Ethics Association. His co-authored book Displacement by Development: Ethics, Rights, and Responsibilities (with P. Penz and P.S. Bose; 2011) was the first to give systematic ethical attention to the plight of

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people displaced by development projects. He is a Fellow of the Human Development and Capabilities Association and has published on intercultural foundations for human rights and the foundations of global ethics. Jonathan  Ensor is a Lecturer at the Centre for Applied Human Rights at the University of York. Prior to his current role, Ensor worked for Practical Action and the Immigration Advisory Service. His research focuses on human rights and development, food and environment, with a specific interest in climate change adaptation and natural resource management. His recent publications include articles in Global Environmental Change and IDS Bulletin. Jonathan  Glennie is a writer and researcher on development cooperation, with a particular focus on development finance issues, human rights, conflict land use, sustainability, inequality and governance. He is a columnist in the Guardian and has consulted for a wide variety of global development organisations. Since leading Christian Aid’s work in Colombia and ODI’s research into the future of aid, Glennie is now Director of Policy and Research at Save the Children UK. In 2008, he wrote ‘The Trouble with Aid: Why Less Could Mean More for Africa’ (2008). He has degrees in theology and sustainable development and a post-graduate certificate in economics. Tom Goodfellow is a Lecturer in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at the University of Sheffield. He holds a PhD in international development from the LSE, where he also worked as a Teaching Fellow. His research is concerned with the politics of informality, planning, urban conflict and development in sub-Saharan Africa, especially Uganda, Rwanda and Ethiopia. He has acted as an advisor to Oxfam on urban development issues and provided policy analysis for the Department for International Development and UK Parliamentary Select Committee on International Development, as well as UN-HABITAT. His work has been published in a range of journals including Urban Studies, Geoforum, Development and Change, Oxford Development Studies and Comparative Politics. He is also co-author of the book Cities and Development (2015). Paul Gready is a Professor and the Director of the Centre of Applied Human Rights at the University of York. He has extensive experience in working for and advising a range of NGOs on human rights and development, including Amnesty International, Novib and Oxfam. His research focuses on transitional justice, and human rights and development. His recent publications include papers in Third World Quarterly, African Affairs and Journal of Human Rights Practice as well as The Era of Transitional Justice: The Aftermath of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa and Beyond (2011). He is co-author with Olivia Ball of No-Nonsense Guide to Human Rights (2006). Shaun  Grech is Founder and Director of The Critical Institute and a Visiting Research Fellow at Manchester Metropolitan University. His research primarily addresses disability and poverty in the Global South and the application of critical disability studies across cultures. He is editor-in-chief of Disability and the Global

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South. He has authored the monograph Disability, Poverty and the Global South: Critical Reflections from Guatemala (Palgrave Macmillan) and his articles have appeared in Disability and Society, International Journal of Inclusive Education, and Journal of Human Development, Disability and Social Change. Jean  Grugel is Professor of Development Politics at the University of York. Her research background is in Latin American politics and she has extensive experience working on projects around human rights and global justice, democracy and the post-2015 development agenda. She set up the Sheffield Institute for International Development, is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences (AcSS) and the Royal Society of Arts (RSA) and editor of the book series International Development, Justice and Citizenship (Palgrave Macmillan). Her recent publications include The Politics of Poverty Reduction (co-authored with Paul Mosley and Ben Thirkell White; 2012) and Governance after Neoliberalism in Latin America (co-authored with Pia Riggirozzi; Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). Hårvard Haarstad is a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Bergen, Norway. He holds a PhD in human geography from the same department. His research interests concern politics of natural resources and energy, with publications appearing in Political Geography, Geoforum, Journal of Development Studies and Globalizations. He has also edited New Political Spaces in Latin American Natural Resource Governance (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). Daniel  Hammett is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Geography, University of Sheffield. He previously held posts at the University of Edinburgh and University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. His research and teaching interests relate to citizenship, identity and democratisation in the Global South. He is co-editor of International Development Planning Review and has recently authored Research and Fieldwork in Development (with Chasca Twyman and Mark Graham; 2015), as well as articles in Political Geography, Environment and Planning A and International Migration. Johan Hellström is a PhD candidate at the Institution of Computer Science (DSV), Stockholm University, Sweden, where he focuses on ICT-facilitated participation and crowdsourcing in developing contexts. He also runs Upgraid consultancy, providing expertise in the Information and Communications Technologies for Development (ICT4D) field. Hellström authored the report The Innovative Use of Mobile Applications in East Africa (2010) and is co-author of ‘ICT4D Donor Agencies and Networks’ in the International Encyclopaedia of Digital Communication and Society (2015). Tony Heron is Professor of International Politics, University of York, UK. He previously taught at the University of Sheffield between 2002 and 2012. His main research and teaching interests relate to the theory and practice of international relations and international and comparative political economy. He has a particular interest in North–South relations and the global politics of trade, production and development. Heron’s recent publications include The Global Political Economy of Trade Protectionism

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and Liberalization: Trade Reform and Economic Adjustment in Textiles and Clothing (2012) and Pathways from Preferential Trade: The Politics of Liberalisation and Adjustment in Africa, the Caribbean and Pacific (Palgrave, 2013). He is co-editor of the journal New Political Economy. Wil  Hout is Professor of Governance and International Political Economy at the International Institute of Social Studies of Erasmus University Rotterdam. A political scientist by training (PhD, Leiden University, 1992), he has specialised in the analysis of governance reform and development assistance policies. His articles have appeared in such journals as the European Journal of International Relations, Development and Change, The Journal of Development Studies, Development Policy Review and Third World Quarterly. His most recent book is Political Economy and the Aid Industry in Asia (coauthored with J. Hutchison, C. Hughes and R. Robison; Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). Philip N. Howard is a Professor, holding faculty appointments at Central European University in Budapest and the University of Washington in Seattle, and a fellowship at Columbia University’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism. He is the director of the Center for Media, Data and Society and Founding Professor at the School of Public Policy at Central European University. He investigates the impact of digital media on political life around the world with projects on bots, digital activism, global information access and political Islam supported by the National Science Foundation, US Institutes of Peace, and Intel’s People and Practices Group. He is the author, most recently, of Pax Technica: How the Internet of Things May Set Us Free or Lock Us Up (2015). He holds a BA in political science from Innis College at the University of Toronto, an MSc in economics from the LSE and a PhD in sociology from Northwestern University. Gareth  Jones is Professor of Urban Geography at the LSE where he teaches on urban theory and ethnography. He is a founding member of the International Institute on Inequalities and is a co-editor of the Journal of Latin American Studies. His research has focused on the politics and representations of the urban poor, youth and violence, elite identities and gated communities and comparative urban theory. He is presently involved with an ESRC-NWO-DFG grant with colleagues at universities of Amsterdam and Munich on the commodification of poverty and violence in Brazil, Jamaica, Mexico and the USA. Gernot Klantschnig has been based at the University of York since 2014 and before that he worked for six years at the University of Nottingham’s China campus. His PhD from the University of Oxford addressed Nigeria’s role in the international trade and control of illegal drugs and this has been the basis for three books and several articles on the politics of international crime, policing and healthcare in West Africa. His current research and publications continue to focus on drugs and crime and their role in broader debates about trade, development, security and health. His major publications are Crime, Drugs and the State in Africa: The Nigerian Connection (2013),

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Africa and the War on Drugs (co-authored with N. Carrier; 2012) and Drugs in Africa: Histories and Ethnographies of Use, Trade and Control (co-edited with N. Carrier and C. Ambler; 2014). Genevieve  LeBaron is Vice-Chancellor’s Fellow in Politics at the University of Sheffield. Her research investigates the global growth and governance of forced labour in retail supply chains and the politics of corporate social responsibility. She is the coauthor of Protest Inc.: The Corporatization of Activism (with P. Dauvergne; 2014,) and has recently published articles in Brown Journal of World Affairs, Review of International Political Economy, New Political Economy and Review of International Studies. She is Co-Founder and Editor of openDemocracy.net’s Beyond Trafficking and Slavery. Philip  McMichael is Professor and Chair of Development Sociology, Cornell University. He is an active member of the Civil Society Mechanism in the UN Food and Agricultural Organization’s Committee on World Food Security. His current research is on agrarian movements, land questions, food sovereignty and food regimes. He is author of the award-winning Settlers and the Agrarian Question (1984), Development and Social Change: A Global Perspective (2012) and Food Regimes and Agrarian Questions (2013), and is editor of Contesting Development: Critical Struggles for Social Change (2010). China  Mills is Lecturer in Critical Educational Psychology at the University of Sheffield. Her research focuses on global mental health and the effects of globalisation on psy-disciplines, with a particular engagement with critical global mental health and well-being. Her recent publications include Decolonizing Global Mental Health: The Psychiatrization of the Majority World (2014) as well as papers in Children and Society and Annual Review of Critical Psychology. Faranak Miraftab is Professor of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her interdisciplinary work crossing planning, geography and transnational studies concerns cities and citizenship and is empirically based in a range of cities of Latin America, Africa, Middle East and North America. As an urban scholar of globalization, she is interested in the global and local development processes and contingencies involved in the formation of the city and citizens’ struggles to access dignified livelihood. Her most recent publications include Cities of the Global South Reader (with N. Kudva; 2014), Cities and Inequalities in a Global and Neoliberal World (edited with D. Wilson and K. Salo; 2015) and Making a Home in the Heartland: Immigration and Global Labor Mobility (2016). Giles Mohan is Professor of International Development at the UK’s Open University and received his doctorate from the University of Liverpool. He is a human geographer who studies African governance and the transnational connections to and from Africa, especially migrants. His recent work focuses on China’s engagement with Africa and has been funded by a series of grants from the Economic and Social Research Council. Mohan has published extensively and has consulted for a range of BBC documentaries on issues of international development. His recent publications

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include China’s Resource Diplomacy in Africa: Powering Development? (with M. Power and M. Tan-Mullins; Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) and Chinese Migrants and Africa’s Development (with B. Lampert, M. Tan-Mullins and D. Chang; 2014). Michael Moran is Lecturer in the Centre for Social Impact in the Faculty of Business and Law at Swinburne University, Australia. Before joining Swinburne, he completed his PhD at the University of Melbourne; a version of his thesis appeared as Private Foundations and Development Partnerships: American Philanthropy and Global Development Agendas (2014), and worked in corporate research and trade policy advocacy in the development NGO sector. His research interests include private actors and international public policy, institutional philanthropy and international development, cross-sectoral partnerships and global health and global health governance. Rosemary  Morgan is a Research Fellow at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health on the project ‘Research in Gender and Ethics (RinGs): Building Stronger Health Systems’. Previously, she was Lecturer in Global Health Policy at the University of Edinburgh, and a Research and Teaching Fellow at the University of Leeds. Morgan holds a PhD in international health and development from the University of Leeds, where she explored HIV/AIDS prevention policy processes within faith-based NGOs in Tanzania, an MSc in policy studies from the University of Edinburgh, and a BA in sociology from the University of British Columbia. Her main research interests include sexual and reproductive health and rights, gender, research ethics, health systems, health system strengthening and qualitative research methods. Her recent publications have appeared in Journal of Health Planning and Management, The Review of Faith & International Affairs and Health Policy Plan. Warwick  Murray is Professor of Human Geography and Development Studies in the School of Geography, Environment and Earth Sciences at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. He has received a number of awards for research and teaching excellence. His research is focused on development, economic and rural geography, with a particular focus on Latin America. His publications include the textbook Geographies of Globalization as well as articles in a range of journals including Antipode, Asia Pacific Viewpoint, Development Policy Review and Globalizations. Valbona  Muzaka is Senior Lecturer in International Political Economy at King’s College London, UK. She studied economics and holds a PhD in international relations (2008). Her research interests are in the area of global governance, especially of intellectual property rights (IPRs), trade and development. She has authored The Politics of Intellectual Property Rights and Access to Medicines (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) and a number of journal articles and chapters on the political economy of IPRs, governance and development. Kate  J.  Neville is a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Post-Doctoral Fellow at Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment. She holds a BSc (Honours) in biology from Queen’s University, a Master’s of Environmental

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Science from Yale University and a PhD in political science from the University of British Columbia. Neville has published articles on the emerging political economy of biofuels in Global Environmental Politics, Political Geography, The Journal of Peasant Studies and Third World Quarterly. Her current work looks at contestation over unconventional energy developments—including hydraulic fracturing—in northern Canada. Pat Noxolo is Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Birmingham with 20 years’ experience lecturing and researching in higher education. Her research is at the confluence of international development, culture and in/security, and uses postcolonial, discursive and literary approaches to explore a range of Caribbean and British cultural practices. Recent publications have appeared in Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography and Annals of the Association of American Geographers. Nancy  Odendaal is Senior Lecturer in the School of Architecture, Planning and Geomatics at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. She coordinated the Associations of African Planning Schools from 2009 to 2012, and is the incoming chair of the governing council of the Global Planning Education Association Network (GPEAN). Odendaal’s research addresses the role of technology in urban change, the use of technological tools in the urban planning process and the relationship between spatial change, service delivery and networked infrastructure. Her current work focuses on infrastructure and spatial change in cities of the Global South, with recent publications in URBE: Brazilian Journal of Urban Management, Cities and Urban Studies. John  Overton is Professor of Development Studies at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. He holds a PhD from the University of Cambridge (1983) and he has held a variety of positions in Geography and Development Studies in New Zealand, Fiji and Australia. His recent research interests focus on the Pacific Islands and issues of aid and development and he has also written on the global wine industry. He is currently involved in two major research projects on migration, education and development in the Pacific and ethical value chains. His most recent book is the second edition of Geographies of Globalization (with W. Murray; 2015). Nicola  Piper is Professor of International Migration at the University of Sydney’s School of Social and Political Sciences. She is a political sociologist and holds a PhD from the University of Sheffield, UK. Her main research interests are migrant workers’ rights issues from a social movement as well as developmental perspective, primarily in the context of intra-Asian migratory movements. Her latest books are South-South Migration: Implications for Social Policy and Development (co-edited with K. Hujo; Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) and New Perspectives on Gender and Migration— Rights, Entitlements and Livelihoods (2008). She is Co-Founder and Vice President of the Global Migration Policy Associates and member of the editorial board of AntiTrafficking Review and Refugee Survey Quarterly.

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Claire  Quinn is Associate Professor of Natural Resources Management at the Sustainability Research Institute, University of Leeds. Her research focuses on the socio-ecological dimensions of environmental change in agricultural systems, examining livelihood vulnerability and adaptation to environmental change in agricultural communities and property rights in multi-resource systems and their implications for management. Recent articles have been published in Applied Geography, Climate and Development and Ecology and Society. Sarah  Radcliffe is Professor of Geography at the University of Cambridge. Her research focuses on Latin America, particularly Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia and Chile. Trained as a geographer and anthropologist, she has published extensively on social exclusions, postcolonial state and policy formation, and socio-spatial articulations of resistance. Her recent books include Indigenous Development in the Andes: Culture, Power and Transnationalism (2009) and Indigenous Women and Postcolonial Development (2015). Recent articles have been published in Geoforum, Development and Change, Comparative Studies in Society and History and Gender, Place and Culture. Dennis  Rodgers is Professor of International Development Studies at the University of Amsterdam, and holds honorary positions as a Visiting Professor at the School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Glasgow, and as a research associate at the Centre on Conflict, Development and Peacebuilding in Geneva, Switzerland. A social anthropologist by training, he works on issues relating to urban development, conflict and violence in Nicaragua, Argentina and India. Recent publications include the volumes Popular Representations of Development: Insights from Novels, Films, Television, and Social Media (co-edited with D.  Lewis and M. Woolcock; 2014) and Global Gangs: Street Violence Across the World (co-edited with J. Hazen; 2014). Jean-Paul  Rodrigue holds a PhD in transport geography from the Université de Montréal (1994) and has been a Professor at Hofstra University since 1999. Rodrigue’s research interests cover the fields of transportation and economics as they relate to logistics and global freight distribution, including maritime transport systems and logistics, global supply chains, gateways and transport corridors. His textbook, The Geography of Transport Systems (with C. Comtois and B. Slack), is in its third edition. He is a member of the World Economic Forum’s Council on the Future of Manufacturing and a board member of the Canadian Transportation Research Forum as well as of the International Association of Maritime Economists. Friedrich  Schneider is Professor of Economics at Johannes Kepler University of Linz, Austria. He holds a PhD in economics from the University of Konstanz and has held a range of academic positions throughout his career, as well as holding key positions in both the Austrian and German Economic Associations. His research focuses on public choice and public finance as well as the shadow economy. His recent publications include The Shadow Economy (with C. Williams; 2013).

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Karen Siegel is a Lecturer at Edinburgh Napier University and holds a PhD from the University of Glasgow (2014). Her research interests cover regional environmental cooperation, particularly in the Global South, environmental and natural resource governance, Latin America and South–North relations. Her current work examines regional environmental cooperation in the Southern Cone of South America over the last two decades. She has presented papers at numerous international conferences and has taught at the University of Glasgow and Edinburgh Napier University. Ronald  Skeldon is a Professorial Fellow in the Department of Geography at the University of Sussex and Professor of Human Geography in the Graduate School of Governance, Maastricht University. He holds a PhD in geography at the University of Toronto, with a dissertation on Migration in a Peasant Society: the Example of Cuzco, Peru. For many years he was on the faculty of the University of Hong Kong, and he has also worked for the United Nations and has been a consultant for many international organizations. His research revolves mainly round issues of population migration, both internal and international. He is author of Migration and Development: A Global Perspective (1997) and of many articles on migration in books and professional journals, including a recent paper in Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies. Ninna  Nyberg  Sørensen is a Senior Researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies and Head of the Global Transformations unit. She has worked extensively on the nexus between international migration, development and conflict, transnational processes, global care chains and lately the migration industry and markets for migration control. Susan Spronk is an Associate Professor in the School of International Development and Global Studies at the University of Ottawa. Her research focuses on the experience of development in Latin America, more specifically the impact of neo-liberalism on the transformation of the state and the rise of anti-privatization movements in the Andean region. Her latest research project examined the local democracy and water service delivery in Bolivia and Venezuela. She is also a research associate with the Municipal Services Project (2008–2013), an IDRC-funded research project that focuses on policy alternatives in municipal service delivery in Africa, Asia and Latin America (http://www.municipalservicesproject.org). Her most recent book is Crisis and Contradiction: Marxist Perspectives on Latin America in the Global Political Economy (co-edited with J.R. Webber; 2014). Diane  Stone is Centenary Professor in the Institute of Governance and Policy Analysis at the University of Canberra. She is also a Professor at Warwick University in the Department of Politics and International Studies. From 2004 to 2008, she was a European Commission Marie Curie Chair and Founding Professor of Public Policy at Central European University. At the World Bank, she was a member of the Secretariat that launched the Global Development Network, subsequently becoming a member of its governing body. From 2005 to 2008, she was co-editor of Global

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Governance: A Review of Multilateralism and International Institutions. Her professional interests are in the areas of global and regional public policy, network governance and the influence of ideas and expertise on policy. Her most recent book is Knowledge Actors and Transnational Governance: The Private-Public Nexus in the Global Agora (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). Lindsay  C.  Stringer is Professor of Environment and Development at the Sustainability Research Institute, University of Leeds. Her research is interdisciplinary and focuses on the links between environmental change (including climate change), livelihoods and development. She also works on environmental governance and the mechanisms and processes through which different types of knowledge can inform policy. Recent publications include those in Environmental Management, Applied Geography and Regional Environmental Change. Andy  Sumner is Reader in International Development and Co-Director of King’s International Development Institute, King’s College London. His research focuses on poverty theory and concepts and the causes of poverty both at a global level and with reference to Southeast Asia and Indonesia in particular. In recent years, his research has focused on the fact that about a billion people or three quarters of the poor live in middle-income countries, addressing the causes of poverty, distributional patterns of economic development and dominant country analytical categories. He holds associate positions at Oxford University at the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative and the Center for Global Development in Washington, DC. Ashok  Swain is Professor of Peace and Conflict Research at Uppsala University, Sweden, and a Professor at Uppsala Centre for Sustainable Development, Department of Earth Sciences. He received a PhD from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, in 1991, and since then he has been teaching at the Uppsala University. He has held a number of visiting posts, including being a Mac Arthur Fellow at the University of Chicago, as well as posts at UN Research Institute for Social Development, University of the Witwatersrand, University of Science, Malaysia, University of British Columbia, University of Maryland, Stanford University and McGill University. He has written extensively on new security challenges, international water sharing and democratic development issues. His publications include The Environmental Trap (1996), Managing Water Conflict: Asia, Africa and the Middle East (2004), Struggle Against the State: Social Network and Protest Mobilization in India (2010) and Understanding Emerging Security Challenges: Threats and Opportunities (2012). Elissa Waters is a Researcher and PhD candidate in the School of Geography at the University of Melbourne. Her work focuses on the social and institutional dimensions of climate change and disaster governance in Australia and the Pacific. Waters has also worked as a Researcher for the Australian government, developing policy on natural resource management, climate change adaptation and international development.

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Christopher  Wylde is Assistant Professor of International Relations at Richmond, the American International University in London. He holds a PhD from the University of Leeds in the political economy of global development. He has published widely on post-2001 crisis Argentina, as well as more broadly on the role of the state in the development process. His publications include Latin America After Neoliberalism: Developmental Regimes in Post-Crisis States (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), nominated for the BISA-IPEG Annual Book Prize 2013, and Argentina Since 2001: Reclaiming the Past, Recovering the Future (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).

Abbreviations

AAAQ AKM AMC APPG ASEAN BAPA BIRPI BMGF BPOA BRICS CARAM CBR CCD CCTV CMS CPR CRC CRPD CSO DAC DfID DID DPO DPT ECLA ECOSOC ECOWAS

Available, accessible, affordable, acceptable quality services Ataturk Cultural Centre Asian Migrant Centre All-Party Parliamentary Group Association of Southeast Asian Nations Buenos Aires Plan of Action United International Bureaux for the Protection of Intellectual Property Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Barbados Programme of Action Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa Coordination of Action Research on AIDS and Mobility Community-Based Rehabilitation Climate Compatible Development Closed Circuit Television Convention of Migratory Species Contraceptive Prevalence Rates Convention on the Rights of the Child Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Civil Society Organisation Development Assistance Committee Department for International Development Disability-inclusive Development Disabled People’s Organisation Democratic Peace Theory Economic Commission for Latin America Economic and Social Council Economic Community of West African States xxvii

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Abbreviations

EITI ENSO EU FAO FDI FDW FOCAC GBS GDP GEF GFATM GFC GFMD GLA GNI GRO HDI HIC HIPC HLF HRBA HTA IBRD ICDP ICESCR ICT ICT4D IDU IDWN IFFIm IFI ILO IMF IMM INCB IOM IP IPCC IPR IR ISI JICA LAC

Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative El Nino Southern Oscillation European Union Food and Agriculture Organisation Foreign Direct Investment Foreign domestic workers Forum on China–Africa Cooperation General Budget Support Gross Domestic Product Global Environment Facility Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria Global Financial Crisis Global Forum on Migration and Development Gross Leasable Area Gross National Income Grassroots Organisation Human Development Index High Income Country Heavily Indebted Poor Countries initiative High Level Forum Human Rights-Based Approach Home Town Association International Bank for Reconstruction and Development International Conference on Population and Development International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights Information and Communication Technology Information and Communications Technologies for Development Injecting Drug Users International Domestic Workers Network International Finance Facility for Immunization International Financial Institutions International Labour Organisation International Monetary Fund Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality International Narcotics Control Board International Organisation of Migration Intellectual Property Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Intellectual Property Rights International Relations Import Substitution Industrialisation Japan International Cooperation Agency Latin American and Caribbean

Abbreviations

LDC LIC LMIC L-MIC LNHO LPI MDG MFA MIC MINT MIRAB MRI MTA NAFSN NAFTA NELM NGO NIC NIEO NIMC NPM N11 ODA OECD OSE OSF PD PGA PPP PRAI PRSP PSC R&D RBA SAARC SADC SAP SDG SIDS SJC-CT SLF SMTC

Least Developed Country Low-Income Country Lower Middle Income Country Low- to Middle-Income Country League of Nations Health Organisation Logistics Performance Index Millennium Development Goal Migrant Forum in Asia Middle-Income Countries Mexico, Indonesia, Nigeria, and Turkey Migration, Remittances, Aid and Bureaucracy Migrant Rights International Technical Water Tables New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition North American Free Trade Agreement New Economics of Labour Migration Non-Governmental Organisation Newly Industrialised Country New International Economic Order Not In My Country New Public Management Next 11 Official Development Assistance Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development Obras Sanitarias del Estado Open Society Foundation Participatory Development People’s Global Action on Migration, Development and Human Rights Public–Private Partnerships Principles for Responsible Agricultural Investment Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers Private Security Company Research and Development Rights-Based Approach South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation Southern African Development Community Structural Adjustment Programme Sustainable Development Goal Small Island Developing States Social Justice Coalition Cape Town Sustainable Livelihoods Framework Social Media Tracking Centre

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xxx

SOWC SRH SRHR SSC STI SWAps TCDC TNC TRIPS UHC UMIC UN UNCCD UNCTAD UNESCO UNFIP UNODC UNOSSC WDR WIPO WTO

Abbreviations

State of the World’s Children Sexual and Reproductive Health Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights South–South Cooperation Sexually Transmitted Infections Sector-Wide Approaches Technical Cooperation among Developing Countries Transnational Corporation Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights Universal Health Coverage Upper Middle-Income Country United Nations United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification United Nations Conference on Trade and Development United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation United Nations Fund for International Partnerships United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime United Nations Office for South–South Cooperation World Development Report World Intellectual Property Organization World Trade Organisation

List of Figures

Fig. 7.1 Fig. 11.1 Fig. 11.2

Fig. 18.1 Fig. 18.2 Fig. 25.1 Fig. 31.1 Fig. 31.2 Fig. 31.3 Fig. 31.4 Fig. 31.5 Fig. 31.6 Fig. 33.1 Fig. 33.2 Fig. 33.3 Fig. 33.4 Fig. 38.1

Effectiveness of different types of interventionist states according to Kohli (2004) 125 Average size of the shadow economy of 162 countries, 1999–2007: originally published in International Economic Journal 191 Size and development of the shadow economy of various country groups (weighted averages), in % of official total GDP of the respective group 192 Distribution of located ODA among income groups (%) 317 Proportion (%) of global poverty (at $1.25, $2, and $10/day) in MICs, 2010 and projections for 2030 320 ODA disbursements, 1970–2010 (constant US$million 2012) 436 Taksim area: Gezi Park, Taksim Square, Istiklal Avenue, and Ataturk Cultural Centre (AKM) 560 (a) Views from the Taksim Gezi Commune tent area (left), (b) Street view from the park with a banner at night (right) 564 (a) Views from the Taksim Gezi Commune: community garden (left), (b) Taksim Gezi Commune public library (right) 565 Taksim Square and the ‘Resisting Piano’ recital 566 Standing men and women. People joining the Standing Man in Taksim Square, facing the Ataturk Cultural Centre (AKM) 568 (a) Table on Earth, Istiklal Avenue, July 2013, (b) Soma Protests, Kadikoy, May 2014 571 Economic impacts of transportation infrastructure 597 Passengers mobility transition 599 Socioeconomic benefits of transportation 601 Lifespan of main transport assets 611 Path dependency (Adapted from Wilson 2012) 704

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List of Tables

Table 5.1 Table 5.2 Table 11.1 Table 11.2 Table 11.3 Table 11.4 Table 11.5 Table 11.6

Table 18.1 Table 25.1 Table 26.1 Table 26.2 Table 26.3 Table 28.1 Table 28.2 Table 33.1

Simple typology of different perspectives A multidirectional relationship? The main causes determining the shadow economy Average informality (unweighted) by World Bank’s regions: originally published in International Economic Journal Average informality (weighted) by total GDP, 2005: originally published in International Economic Journal Percentage share of informal employment in total non-agricultural employment by five-year period Estimates of the size of the ‘shadow economy labour force’ in some OECD countries, 1974–1998 Share of informal employment in total non-agricultural employment, by country, region and gender (%), 1990s and 2000s Distribution of located ODA among income groups (%) Ranking of top twenty aid recipients in selected years (ODA disbursements from DAC donors) Paths to convergence Hierarchies of convergence Rights-based analysis of and illustrative actions on adaptive capacity (Adapted from Ensor et al. 2015) Occurrence of keywords in World Development Report, 1978–2014 Occurrence of keywords in State of the World’s Children, 1980–2013 Main transportation economies

81 84 192 192 194 195 196

197 316 434 459 460 466 493 496 607

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1 Introduction: A Call for Action in a Multidisciplinary World Jean Grugel and Daniel Hammett

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Introduction

Our aim in this Handbook of International Development is to present some of the very best scholarship in the broad and interdisciplinary field of international development. The authors within this Handbook have made enormous contributions, over many years, to shaping academic debates, teaching and the ‘doing’ of international development. All of our contributors willingly accepted a demanding brief from us—to write a relatively short, yet fully comprehensive and intellectually challenging introduction to a major topic in international development—and their enthusiastic responses to our invitations demonstrated that the time was ripe for a bold restatement of the field and a collection that would showcase some of the most vital areas of research and teaching in the field. There are two reasons above all for a new Handbook of International Development. The first is that, as we wrote this collection, a new era in international development was opening up: the 2015 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) should mark a new era in global development and set out the most comprehensive understanding of the content and the processes of development to date. Negotiated through a more inclusive global process than their predecessors, the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), the SDGs J. Grugel ( ) University of York, UK D. Hammett University of Sheffield, UK © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 J. Grugel, D. Hammett (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of International Development, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-42724-3_1

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propose an ambitious and inclusive set of 169 targets for development within 17 broad themes: • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

•

•

End poverty in all its forms, everywhere. End hunger, achieve food security and promote sustainable agriculture. Ensure healthy lives and promote well-being. Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education. Achieve gender equality. Ensure the availability and sustainable management of water. Ensure access to affordable, reliable and sustainable energy for all. Promote sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment and decent work. Build resilient infrastructure, promote inclusive and sustainable industrialisation and foster innovation. Reduce inequality within and between countries. Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable. Ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns. Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts. Conserve and sustainably use the oceans, seas and marine resources for sustainable development. Protect, restore and promote sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems, sustainably manage forests, combat desertification, halt and reverse land degradation and halt biodiversity loss. Promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all and build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels. Strengthen the means of implementation and revitalise the global partnership for sustainable development.

The SDGs will shape government targets, civil society activism and societal expectations in the field of international development for the next generation. As we note elsewhere, the new SDGs require ‘a greater understanding of development needs and practices [that] can better sustain a new agenda for change, and a key step in this process is to identify priorities [and] new and longstanding knowledge gaps, to help orient decision-making processes and funding allocation in academia and beyond’ (Oldekop et al. 2015). They bury the idea, once and for all, that development is solely about aid or finding a technical ‘fix’ for poverty and they set a genuinely new approach to development. To quote from our paper with Oldekop et al. (2015), the SDGs suggest that

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any solution to global poverty must be ‘embedded in long-term strategies that combine inclusive and sustained economic growth, social development, and environmental protection’. The increasing focus on ‘green growth’ as well as efforts to develop alternative measures of both economic progress and rightsbased development implicate developed and low- and medium-income countries in radically new ways (Oldekop et al. 2015). The SDGs are not a panacea to development challenges and have already been criticised for failing to present an adequately progressive alternative vision to neo-liberal development thinking. Informed by this thinking, McCloskey (2015: 186) argues: The development sector’s preoccupation with overseas development assistance has diverted our efforts away from larger, arguably more significant issues for the global South such as illicit financial flows, debt and unfair trade rules. Above all, we have failed to relate the dominant neoliberal economic model to persistent levels of poverty and climate change. Unless the SDGs come to terms with these larger obstacles to development they will fail to meet their targets.

Others from within civil society have set out an even stronger and more direct critique. The advocacy movement Global Justice Now (formerly the World Development Movement) pre-empted the announcement of the SDGs by setting out an agenda for development based on an analysis of global power. In  their report, The Poor are Getting Richer and Other Dangerous Delusions (Global Justice Now 2015), the SDGs were castigated as ‘business as usual’ for failing to sufficiently challenge the global distribution of wealth and power and therefore being inadequate to tackle global inequality (http://www.globaljustice. org.uk/resources/poor-are-getting-richer-and-other-dangerous-delusions). We certainly share some of those criticisms. Like Kothari (2015), we are particularly concerned that the rights of migrant workers, refugees and others fleeing climate change and conflict are insufficiently addressed. We would also contend that the rights of women, the disabled, the infirm, the young, as well as adolescent caregivers and workers all require further attention. While the SDGs are not, in themselves, the radical promise of redistribution that the world needs for reasons of survival and equity—rather they are infused with the compromises, adjustments and consensual language that come with the terrain of international negotiations—their progressive potential lies in the efforts of global society to realise them in particular ways. The SDGs provide a template for demanding more intensive, focused action by governments and civil society to tackle some of the pressing challenges around global inequalities and to hold power-holders to account. For this promise to be made real, we

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need knowledge, information and activism. This book, therefore, sets out to contribute new knowledge that is useful to scholars and practitioners in pushing the SDG agenda as far as it can go towards fair and equitable international development policies during the next decade and beyond. There is another, equally significant, reason why we believe that this Handbook is needed and it is this: the field of international development has never been as alive, diverse, dynamic and interdisciplinary; nor has it been so open to new ideas, approaches and concepts. It is for this reason that our contributors come from sociology, geography, politics, international relations (IR), law, political economy, education, migration studies, global health and economics, as well as international development itself. International development has become a meeting point for social science and a site of new insights about how the social world works and the interconnectedness between society and the planet we inhabit. We wanted, in short, to celebrate the richness of the field. Our intention, along with all our collaborators in this volume, was to showcase outstanding and thoughtful contributions to social science-led debates in, around and for a more just global world.

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Our Vision of International Development

We do not intend here to pre-empt or summarise the contributions of the various chapters in this Handbook. Instead, we briefly set out our own approach to international development, outlining the framing we have adopted in some of our own works and engagement with development (Fontana et al. 2016; Grugel and Piper 2007, 2009, 2011; Piper and Grugel 2015; Grugel and Uhlin 2012; Hammett 2007, 2008, 2014a; Hammett et al. 2015; Shortt and Hammett 2013; Staeheli and Hammett 2013). It is important in the context of this Handbook since we were not random in our selection. Extensive as it is, this volume does not cover every single topic that could fall under the rubric of international development; no Handbook could achieve that task. Instead, we have tried to incorporate not only a range of the more established and crucial issues facing scholars and practitioners but also a series of emergent concerns and issues that are likely to be of increasing importance within the field. At its core, our understanding of international development is founded on a belief that notions of development should be conceptualised as a creative space for the promotion and realisation of a fairer and more just world. Fundamental to this vision is our belief that international development scholarship should not only critically engage with the structural concerns and obstacles to development and equality but also place the multiple, lived

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experiences of ordinary people at the heart of these engagements, allowing understandings and recommendations to be grounded in the daily realities and contextual experiences of individuals affected by development planning, policy and practice. In other words, international development should be, above all, a contribution to the creation of more socially just and sustainable global society that puts the needs and rights of ordinary people first. To deliver this ambitious agenda, international development research must engage with the multiscalar, multiactor struggles for justice whilst simultaneously making visible the injustices reproduced through current social arrangements. Underpinning these efforts is a need to rigorously engage and explore contemporary injustices, whether social, economic, political, cultural or environmental and the global pathologies of power that uphold and replicate them (Farmer 2004). In developing this understanding, we draw inspiration, for example, from scholars such as Nancy Fraser (2000) who insists that injustice and exploitation across economic, political and cultural terrains are actively institutionalised through the intersections between the ‘rules’ of the global market and the enforcement of conservative ideologies, misogynistic social values and practices, racialised fears of the ‘other’ and global discourses of (in) security. This thinking reminds us why a ‘global sense of place’ and geographies of connection matter (Massey 1994), that geographies of responsibility and the ethics of development are not simply about those closest to us but are owed to those who may be distant from us but who are affected by our (in)actions (Bosco 2007; Massey 2004) and that development is not somehow happening somewhere else or those who are the object of international development ‘other’ to ourselves (Payne and Phillips 2010). Instead, we contend that we are all implicated in international development, and both the development and outcomes of development policies and practices affect (and are affected by) people around the world, whether in the ‘global north’ or ‘global south’. Our thinking, therefore, is not solely aligned to key thinkers who have emphasised the significance of the global division of material and cultural resources but is also wedded to the need—methodologically and theoretically—to reveal injustice nationally, locally and in communities so that context-specific outcomes (and their resonance with outcomes elsewhere [Katz 2001, 2004]) can be identified, as well as the agency of ordinary people who seek to contest injustices (Hammett et al. 2015). Struggles for a more just global or national settlements are played out in structured and unfavourable contexts, whether locally, nationally or globally. They confront established and embedded frameworks of power and privilege. Development, then, like justice itself, does not come easily. But contestation matters, because it is only by challenging injustices that change happens. The injustices that create the

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field of international development are not inevitable; they have been made by human agency and, as such, they can be transformed. To best realise this agenda, we suggest that international development should continue to explicitly and actively draw lessons from other areas of the social sciences and humanities that have not always directly fed into the discipline. In compiling this Handbook, we have endeavoured to source material from a range of disciplinary fields in order to engage with differing approaches and ideas and to bring new ideas to debates within international development.

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The Importance, Richness and Limitations of Theorising International Development

Our emphasis on agency, diversity and activist scholarship does not, of course, suggest that we ignore structures in the study of international development. Relatedly, nor would we want it to be taken to imply that theorisation of development is not important either. Our engagements fit within a conceptual landscape marked by a diversity and heterogeneity of theoretical approaches to international development, one which continually shifts in response to emergent trends and experiences. Within such a complex and dynamic field, theorising development remains an essential task. Traditional development theory trains the eye on important aspects of development and reflects two unique tensions that underpin, consciously or not, how we engage with the idea of development. Traditional theories ensure that we ask questions about not only the proper level—global or national—for discussing development but also, and relatedly, the significance and dominance of the West, Western imperialism and the expansion of capitalism in development. International development, as an academic discipline and a policy field, emerged in the aftermath of the post–World War II settlement, although the intellectual origins of contemporary international political economy scholarship on development can be traced back to Karl Marx and Marxist scholars’ theorisation of the spread of global capitalism in the nineteenth and first quarter of the twentieth century. This lineage is evident in the locating of development processes and debates ultimately within the creation and expansion of a global capitalist economy. Nevertheless, as a distinctive field of study and policy, international development really took off after the Bretton Woods conference in 1944 and establishment of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF). These organisations, amongst others, foregrounded the current apparatus of aid, loans of development interventions—a set of interventions given impetus by Harry Truman’s inauguration speech as

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American President in 1949 which emphasised the global north’s responsibility to assist the development of countries in the global south. These factors influenced the field of international development in at least two distinct ways. First, it linked development as a set of practices to European/Atlantic versions of modernity. And second, mainstream understandings of international development were, consequently, fixed to the geopolitical strategies of the West. It followed that international development was fused for many years with the creation and strengthening of new nation states and the task of establishing national strategies for economic growth. Indeed, until the 1980s, the study of international development seemed to be concerned, above all, by questions of (national) economic transformation, shifts from one mode of production to another and whether the transition to capitalism that had occurred in Western Europe, white settler economies and the Atlantic world could be replicated elsewhere. Interestingly, it was not until the 1980s that the view took hold that this transition would derive from market opening; the 1950s and 1960s displayed more faith in the modernising state to act as an agent of ‘development’ than would become the mainstream consensus after the debt crisis of the 1980s and the rise of Washington economics. How to study the rise, decline, resistance and complexity of the state in relationship to development has proved one of the perennial challenges within the field, and the origins of contemporary debates can be found in the origins of the discipline itself (for further discussion, see Hammett et al. 2015). Given where the discipline started, it is not surprising that capitalism and development were presumed to be intimately and symbiotically connected. This normative assumption formed one of the foundations of early thinking about the development process. This was certainly the case within the international organisations such as the World Bank that were created to ‘manage’ the global development process. But it was also true for many early development scholars, in particular, in the influential school of modernisation, the influence of which can still be found today. But it would be wrong to imagine that this view was uniformly accepted. In fact, there was always some level of dissatisfaction—especially outside the West—with the insistence that getting the (capitalist) economics right would end poverty, conflicts, strengthen citizenship or create effective and liberal states. The dependency and world systems debates that thrived in the 1970s and 1980s laid out the crucial role that the colonised world had played in the rise of capitalism from as early as the 1500s, challenging the idea that the so-called less developed world was isolated, backward or disconnected from the rise of capitalism as a world order. Indeed, it was precisely Europe’s global search for profits that, as

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Walter Rodney famously argued, meant that Europe ‘underdeveloped’ Africa and created the structural and geographical inequalities that persist today. Meanwhile, students of Asian development such as John Hobson (2004), in a magisterial and detailed analysis of the Asian origins of contemporary development, showed quite clearly that the notion that capitalism was simply a product of the expansion of the West was erroneous. These debates certainly had an enormous impact on scholarly thinking about development, to the point that they created a theoretical ‘impasse’ (Corbridge 1990; Schuurman 1993). Unable to move forward on the false premise of development as capitalist modernisation, academics began to struggle to articulate an alternative conceptualisation that they could share. But it would also be true to say that the real crisis of international development came not with the academic challenges but as a result of real-world events. Between the early 1970s and 1990s, global changes, both geopolitical and economic, fundamentally buried the idea that development equals a replication of the European transitions to development. First, the rise of Asian capitalism, from South Korea to China—and the contrasting relative decline or even stagnation of Latin American economies, the closest in terms of political culture to Europe—inevitably led to a rethink of paths to ‘development’. And second, the speeding up of globalisation, especially since the 1990s, led to the recognition that the interconnectedness of the world economy rendered any notion of a lineal repetition of complex change from one social and economic space to another simply impossible to credit. This account of development began to sound increasingly, almost like an act of faith, impossible to sustain scientifically. At the same time, globalisation disrupted the idea that the nation state—so essential to the concept of pre-globalisation growth—was necessarily either the primary driver or the principal container, of economic growth and innovation, as the authority of corporations, networks and production chains in moving resources, wealth and indeed people around the global at a pace never witnessed in the past. One inevitable result here was the loosening of the idea of ‘development’ as economic growth—and the emergence of alternative paradigms, such as human rights, well-being, sustainability or quality of life. Some scholars of International Political Economy, it is true, bravely sought to recapture and reinvest the concept of development with a chiefly economic meaning by linking it to the idea of ‘development strategies’ or national positioning. Payne and Phillips (2010) posited the view that globalisation meant that all states, whether in the global ‘north’ or ‘south’ face the challenge of development in the face of footloose finance, global growth poles and global cities. But this argument has had less purchase than it might have

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had because, on the one hand, there is no doubt that there is still some intuitive relevance in the idea of a North–South divide, at the very least in terms of extreme poverty, the prevalence of degrading and exploitative labour, migration flows, cultural ideas and unequal global power and, on the other, the relentless separation of development debates from the sphere of the economic. Postcolonial scholars played a particular role here. Indeed, Arturo Escobar (1995) described the development industry in the 1990s as little more than an attempt to use the highly politicised global divisions between the rich and the poor as an opportunity for the West to assert—now in a post-empire environment—its own moral and cultural superiority. Development was, he argued, not a neutral exercise at all, but another act of imperialism. Yet, despite the major influence postcolonialism has played in unpicking the pretensions and dubious motivations of the West in development, it has been slower at articulating an entirely convincing alternative paradigm. This is, of course, not surprising, given that ‘development’ as such does not really exist for postcolonialists. Whatever the truth of this, however, it has left the theorisation of international development fragmented and fractured. But in its place has come an enormous vitality, born of the fact that scholars have been freed of tight theoretical constraints. We will draw attention to just three of the new approaches that have emerged in recent years and that, in different guises, influence some of our contributors to this Handbook: human rights-based approaches; participation and development; and the sustainability agenda.

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Human Rights and International Development

Human rights approaches to development were first articulated in the 1990s. Understandings of international development based on human rights, now one of the most established of the new approaches, became influential within civil society organisations and various international organisations at the start of the new millennium. The value of this approach is recognised as being in its combination of emphasis on the moral imperative that lies behind international development and the way in which the rights of ordinary people are intertwined with the duties of states to deliver policies that uphold those rights (Grugel and Piper 2009). As such, human rights-based approaches to development put the spotlight on the accountability of the powerful, as well as on the abuses that are experienced by the poor and disenfranchised. To talk of rights is thus, inevitably, to talk about power and, from this, to then address issues of inequality, oppression and development. Thus, internationally agreed

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charters of rights act as a template for demanding change and challenging the pathologies of power that uphold inequalities. These charters of rights provide one means through which rights-based approaches to development link international development with international law and legal standards as set out in international human rights treaties and conventions. These agreements encompass United Nations (UN) declarations on civil and political liberties and economic and social rights, as well as the new generation of human rights declarations such as the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) (1989, entering into force 1990) and the Convention on the Rights of All Migrant Workers and their Families (passed in 1990, entering into force in 2003) and the International Labour Organisation (ILO) Conventions, such as the Convention 189 on the Rights of Domestic Workers (2011, entering into force 2013). One consequence of rights-based development is, therefore, that it takes international development into the terrain of international law. The idea that international development should be understood as a set of rights-based obligations has been enthusiastically endorsed by global civil society actors, such as Oxfam and PLAN International. It is not hard to see why. It presents global civil society organisations with a text for global advocacy and it allows them to take the high ground in debates about development. It also provides a raison d’être for those development non-governmental organisations (NGOs) that recognise that it is not their job to deliver ‘development’ and that attempting to do so can quite easily—and justifiably—be seen as another example of the West telling the rest of the world what to do. Rights have not just informed civil society organisations in the West, though; local civil society organisations in Latin America have used the CRC to advance policies for children (Grugel and Peruzzotti 2007, 2010, 2012), while the Treatment Action Campaign used rights-based discourses in its legal recourse to pressure the South African government to provide antiretroviral treatment to those suffering from human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) (Robins 2004). But there are also issues with the rights approach that have made some scholars uncomfortable. The very idea of human rights is, in its origins, based on the canon of Western philosophy and individualism. It is quite difficult to talk about collective rights since rights discourses are based on the fundamental and inalienable value of each individual person. As such, rights represent a very liberal worldview. And, in the canon of rights, it is often said that civil and political rights are regarded as taking precedence over other rights, especially social and economic ones. More evidence is still needed that rights chime with social movements on the ground in the ‘global south’ and

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that they can be put to work through processes of translation and made relevant to local struggles for justice and development (see also Cornwall and Nyamu‐Musembi 2004).

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Participation and the Thorny Question of Who Speaks in International Development

‘Participatory development’ became an established approach to ‘doing’ development with NGOs in the 1980s, in defiance of ‘top-down’ approaches in which donors and Western agents claimed, or seemed to claim, to know best. It is based on values of respect and partnership and takes seriously the notion that ordinary people, whether in rural or urban settings, understand how to advance their lives and protect their livelihoods (Chambers 1983, 1997). Participation, of course, comes in different degrees, and not all forms of participation can be said to be aimed at empowerment but can—and should— be used as a means of decolonising development and methodologies used in development research (Smith 1999; Hammett et  al. 2015). But, certainly, all participatory approaches to development emphasise the centrality of local voices and local people, and in reclaiming local knowledge and local spaces for articulating the meaning of development itself. The impact of the participation agenda has been huge in international development (Cornwall 2006). Participatory development ideas have transformed how NGOs engage in the field and how scholars think about the development process itself. It has also rendered the meaning of development itself more complex and more fluid. Over time, the agenda of participation has moved out of the terrain of individual development projects, especially in the rural sector, to agendas for transforming governance in a range of different ways. As such, it has led to a range of experiments to encourage voice in practices of development. Participatory approaches have included moves to decentralise institutions of government, the introduction of consultations and the creation of spaces for democratic deliberation and discursive participation. Calls for participation were also taken up by the development planning community (Hickey and Mohan 2004) and in the environmental sector, partly because of the added value that local and community actors are thought to bring in terms of local and socially embedded forms of knowledge in relation to resource management and the commitment to equitable, rather than market-driven, solutions to environmental management (Agrawal 2003).

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But, despite endorsements from international organisations and planners, questions have been raised about the value of the participatory turn. Cooke and Kothari (2001) expressed scepticism as to whether organised participation genuinely contributes to the quality of democracy or shape more inclusive decision-making in development planning and the concerns they set out have not really gone away. Part of the problem is that participation can easily be in the service of a fundamentally conservative or depoliticised idea of development. Without policies to reduce economic equalities, participation can slip into tokenistic forms of ‘invited’ participation or can lead to forms of ‘invented’ participation that may be aimed at disrupting and challenging dominant development paradigms and policies (Cornwall et  al. 2011; Miraftab and Wills 2005). More broadly, we are witnessing changes to the ways in which individuals, communities, civil society and governments are seeking to engage with development concerns. From the growth of smart cities and use of ‘e-portals’ by governments to foster certain forms of participation to the mobilisation of local and global campaigns and protests relating to service delivery failures, human rights abuses, climate change or poverty, we are seeing a diversification in the modes and practices of participation (Hammett 2014b). Shifting flows of information, as well as the changing mobility of people further complicate the ways in which participation can be expected, not only in research about, but also the focus of, design and implementation of international development policies.

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Sustainability and Development

Perhaps the most novel feature of the SDGs is the explicit link that is established between international development, planetary boundaries and the impact of climate change. The SDGs blend concerns about poverty with anxieties about how human beings can continue to pursue economic growth in a sustainable manner in ways that reduce and mitigate habitat and species loss, and the degrading of oceans and the air we breathe. This emphasis comes at a time when recognition is growing that while countries in the ‘global north’ have historically been the key polluters and drivers of climate change, emergent powers and both population and economic expansion in the ‘global south’— including the rapidly growing consumer-orientated middle classes in the ‘global south’—are creating new pressure points for planetary sustainability. Sustainability now infuses development debates in a way never seen in the past, recognising the interconnectedness of planetary concerns and the

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spatially dislocated outcomes of unsustainable development practices. Going beyond this, there is growing awareness of, and calls to respond to, the ways in which land appropriation and degradation, the lack of sustainable and clean energy, biodiversity loss, and natural resource over-exploitation exacerbate poverty. These concerns were given prominence by The Stern Review (Stern 2007), which drew political and popular attention to the links between environmental health, human well-being and the quality of the economy. More broadly, critical engagements with the commodification of ecosystems and their services—including Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD) and REDD+ and carbon trading—have, for the past 20 years, dominated environmental policy debates (Brockington and Duffy 2011; Skjaerseth and Wettestad 2010; Sullivan 2013). But what is still not clear is how to articulate—and even less implement—an economic and social agenda that will enable both a redistribution of resources in a more equitable manner and slow down or even reverse the scale of destruction of the planet. Research programmes such as Future Earth (http://www. futureearth.org/) set out to address this scholarly deficit and advance understanding of the scholarly and policy communities of how we might begin to bridge the developmental and the sustainability needs that face us. Moreover, this is not just a technical challenge; as with all development dilemmas, this is an intensely political issue. It brings into question whether capitalism and profit can act as the primary drivers of a sustainable global economy, of how to hold states to account for the global and non-local environmental impacts of their economic and industrial practices (Skjaerseth and Wettestad 2010), whether the UN should play a much more aggressive role in demanding that global companies consider the environmental costs of future investments and whether governments should distance themselves more from business if they are genuinely committed to a sustainable future.

7

New Challenges and the Persistence of Embedded Inequalities

In 2014, Oldekop et al. (2015) carried out an exercise with academic experts, civil society and representatives of international organisations to establish the research questions that should underpin research in international development, in advance of the SDGs. They reveal a remarkable persistence of certain issues including education, gender and the tensions surrounding globalisation and sovereignty, with key questions including:

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• What are the most effective ways to encourage women’s political participation in contexts of resistance to gender equality? • What are the consequences for development outcomes of the shift from national sovereignty to global governance? • Under what conditions can natural resource extraction and exploitation deliver joint social and environmental benefits? • What effective policy mechanisms can lower- and middle-income countries adopt to ensure multinational companies comply with tax obligations? The apparent intractability of these concerns, alongside considerations of contemporary challenges including sustainability, trafficking, migration and urban violence, gives scholar and activists in international development some pause for thought. It means that despite the vitality, richness and dynamism of scholarly research on international development, the challenges ahead are as big as ever. We cannot hope to cover all of these challenges in one Handbook. Instead we have drawn together 40 chapters that cover a range of both long-standing and emergent development concerns. The first section provides a critical appraisal of the evolution of Theories of Development encompassing classical and postcolonial approaches and delving into consideration of key themes including the ethics in and of development, the relationship between democracy and development, and the changing dynamics of citizenship and global justice. In  bringing together these chapters, this section illustrates the continually evolving nature of theories of development while highlighting some specific areas of critical concern moving forwards. The second section, The Changing Role of the State and Capital in Development, takes up this notion of change and evolution to examine the ways in which the roles of the state and both intellectual and financial capital are simultaneously addressing previous and causing new development challenges. Considering the role of the developmental state, natural resource extraction, intellectual property and the challenges of managing the formal and informal economies, this section provides evidence of not only the changing role of the state and capital over time but also the cross-scalar nature of these. The subsequent section addresses The Changing Role of Citizens, Civil Society and Privatisation in Development. In this section, our contributors look at the everyday practices and outcomes of development as played out in relation to urban informality and informal governance, and the privatisation of basic rights including security and water. Integral to these chapters is a concern with recognising the complexities and both possibilities and limitations of

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individual agency in development and the ways in which state governance and private capital are implicated in these experiences. Expanding from this engagement with privatisation, Section  4 deals with New Flows of Development Finance, exploring how new donors are driving changes in the development agenda. Here, our contributors explore the role of South–South development cooperation, as well as of middle-income countries as new donors, the growing role of private philanthropy and the importance of remittances as a tool for development. The impetus behind these chapters is to widen debates around what constitutes development finance, who is involved in providing this and the changing priorities relating to this shifting landscape. Section  5’s engagement with (In)Security, Mobility and Geopolitics again expands debates around migration and security to provide critical consideration of the contested role of migration in development as a source and product of both security and insecurity on multiple levels. In identifying a set of chapters around (in)security, we endeavour to go beyond traditional IR  concerns and instead open discussions to think about the links between slavery, human trafficking, drugs trade, and gang violence with aid, development and a more complex comprehension of the notion of security. In Section  6, the chapters pick up on various engagements with human rights and development to explore Rights, Activism and Citizenship. The contributions here focus on struggles to realise rights and citizenship as integral to the development process and agenda. The chapters here explore the importance of human rights to development, the use of different spaces and practices to claim citizenship within development, the realisation of sexual and reproductive rights, the specific location of youth as agents of or subjects of development, as well as hitherto under-researched areas in development relation to disability and to mental health. Section 7 explores a set of emergent concerns under the heading of Science, Technology and Innovation. Here, the chapters provide examples of areas of research for and in development that are often overlooked or yet to be developed. Our intent here is to open up newer areas of interest, from the growing role of new technologies and social media in providing scope for (anti)development practices to the emergence of ‘smart cities’, while recognising ongoing concerns relating to infrastructure, biofuels and mobility. Our final section picks up on concerns with sustainability and precarity as key issues in contemporary development agendas, examining Vulnerability and Adaptation to Environmental Change. The chapters in this section explore key questions relating to food, livelihoods, and water against a backdrop of climate change and sustainable development agendas. Each of these contributions highlights the importance of multiscalar, multiactor engagement with

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issues that are critical for not only local or national development but also global justice and the sustainability of the planet. We end this introductory chapter, therefore, with a call for action—for more research, for more mobilisation and for more people to make more demands for a fairer and more just world. We hope this Handbook, and the excellent work of our colleagues who gave up their time and ideas to contribute to it, can go some small way to supporting that fight.

References Agrawal, A. 2003. Sustainable governance of common-pool resources: Context, methods, politics. Annual Review of Anthropology 32: 243–262. Bosco, F. 2007. Hungry children and networks of aid in Argentina: Thinking about geographies of responsibility and care. Children’s Geographies 5(1–2): 55–76. Brockington, D., and R.  Duffy. 2011. Conservation and capitalism. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Chambers, R. 1983. Rural development: Putting the last first. London: Prentice Hall. Chambers, R. 1997. Whose reality counts? Putting the first last. London: ITDG Publishing. Cooke, B., and U. Kothari. 2001. Participation: The new tyranny? London: Zed. Corbridge, S. 1990. Post-marxism and development studies: Beyond the impasse. World Development 18(5): 623–639. Cornwall, A. 2006. Historical perspectives on participation in development. Commonwealth & Comparative Politics 44(1): 62–83. Cornwall, A., and C. Nyamu‐Musembi. 2004. Putting the “Rights‐based approach” to development into perspective. Third World Quarterly 25(8): 1415–1437. Cornwall, A., S. Robins, and B. Von Lieres. 2011. States of citizenship: Contexts and cultures of public engagement and citizen action. IDS Working Papers. Escobar, A. 1995. Encountering development: The making and unmaking of the third world. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Farmer, P. 2004. Pathologies of power: Health, human rights and the new war on the poor. Berkeley: University of California Press. Fontana, L., J. Nem Singh, J. Grugel, and A. Uhlin (eds.). 2016. Demanding human rights in the global south. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Frans J. Schuurman (1993), Beyond the Impasse: New Directions in Development Theory London: Zed. Fraser, N. 2000. Rethinking recognition. New left review issue 3. Available at http:// newleftreview.org/II/3/nancy-fraser-rethinking-recognition Global Justice Movement. 2015. The poor are getter richer and other dangerous delusions. Available at http://www.globaljustice.org.uk/resources/poor-are-gettingricher-and-other-dangerous-delusions

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Grugel, J., and N. Piper. 2007. Critical perspectives on global governance: Rights and regulation in governing regimes. London: Routledge. Grugel, J., and E.  Peruzzotti. 2007. Claiming rights under global governance: Children’s rights in Argentina. Global Governance 13(2): 199–216. Grugel, J., and E.  Peruzzotti. 2010. Global norms, domestic politics: Children’s rights in Argentina. Journal of Latin American Studies 42(1): 39–57. Grugel, J., and E. Peruzzotti. 2012. The domestic politics of international human rights law: Implementing the convention on the rights of the child in Ecuador, Chile and Argentina. Human Rights Quarterly 34(1): 178–198. Grugel, J., and N. Piper. 2009. Do rights promote development? Global Social Policy 9(1): 79–98. Grugel, J., and N. Piper. 2011. Global governance, economic migration and the difficulties of social activism. International Sociology 26(4): 435–454. Grugel, J., and A. Uhlin. 2012. Renewing global governance: Demanding rights and justice in the global south. Third World Quarterly 33(9): 1703–1718. Hammett, D. 2007. Cuban intervention in South African health care service provision. Journal of Southern African Studies 33(1): 63–81. Hammett, D. 2008. The challenge of a perception of ‘Un-Entitlement’ to citizenship in post-apartheid South Africa. Political Geography 27(6): 652–668. Hammett, D. 2014a. Physician migration in the global south between Cuba and South Africa. International Migration 52: 41–52. Hammett, D. 2014b. Understanding the role of communication in promoting active and activist citizenship. Geography Compass 8(9): 617–626. Hammett, D., C. Twyman, and M. Graham. 2015. Research and fieldwork in development. London: Routledge. Hickey, S., and G. Mohan (eds.). 2004. Participation: From tyranny to transformation. London: Zed Press. Hobson, J.M. 2004. The eastern origins of western civilisation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Katz, C. 2001. On the grounds of globalization: A topography for feminist political engagement. SIGNS: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 26(4): 1213–1234. Katz, C. 2004. Growing up global: Economic restructuring and children’s everyday lives. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press. Kothari, U. 2015. Business as usual on migration and climate change will not Produce sustainable development. http://blog.policy.manchester.ac.uk/posts/2015/09/ business-as-usual-on-migration-and-climate-change-will-not-producesustainable-development/ Massey, D. 1994. Space, place and gender. Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis. Massey, D. 2004. Geographies of responsibility. Geografiska Annaler Series B Human Geography 86(1): 5–18. McCloskey, S. 2015. From MDGs to SDGs: We need a critical awakening to succeed. Policy and Practice: A Development Education Review 20: 186–194.

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Miraftab, F., and S.  Wills. 2005. Insurgency and spaces of active citizenship: The story of the western cape anti-eviction campaign in South Africa. Journal of Planning Education and Research 25(2): 200–217. Oldekop J., L.  Fontana, L.  Grugel et  al. 2015. 100 questions for International development. Development Policy Review (forthcoming). Payne, A., and N. Phillips. 2010. Development. Cambridge: Polity Press. Piper, N., and J. Grugel. 2015. Global migration governance, social movements and the difficulties of promoting migrant rights. In Migration, precarity and global governance challenges for labour, ed. C.-U. Schierup. Oxford: OUP. Robins, S. 2004. “Long live Zackie, long live”: AIDS activism, science and citizenship after apartheid. Journal of Southern African Studies 30(3): 651–672. Shortt, N., and D. Hammett. 2013. Informal settlement upgrading in South Africa: Outcomes for health and community well-being. Journal of Housing and the Built Environment 28(4): 615–627. Skjaerseth, J., and J. Wettestad. 2010. Making the EU emissions trading system: The European commission as an entrepreneurial epistemic leader. Global Environmental Change 20: 314–321. Smith, L. 1999. Decolonizing methodologies: Research and indigenous peoples. London: Zed Books. Staeheli, L., and D.  Hammett. 2013. “For the future of the nation”: Citizenship, education and divided societies. Political Geography 32(1): 32–41. Stern, N. 2007. The economics of climate change: The Stern review. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sullivan, S. 2013. Banking nature? The spectacular financialisation of environmental conservation. Antipode 45: 198–217.

Part I Theories of Development

2 Classical Approaches to Development: Modernisation and Dependency Wil Hout

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Introduction

Writing in the first half of the 1980s, Richard Higgott (1983: vii) described modernisation and dependency approaches as ‘the two dominant perspectives on political and social change in the Third World’. Higgott was able to capture the main elements of the debate in a book of approximately 120 pages. If he were writing his book today, the proliferation of research in and theorising on development issues, both in and beyond the Global South, would surely take Higgott far beyond the classical theories of development and would require a much longer manuscript. A proper understanding of the classical theories is still useful for contemporary researchers on international development. This is the case not only because researchers need to know about the antecedents of the intellectual field they work in but also because the modernisation and dependency approaches have had important influences on more recent theorising, and because the classical theories ‘live on’ in contemporary studies of issues such as democratisation, identity and global production. Modernisation and dependency theories represent two rather different points in the spectrum of approaches to international development. Politically, the two theoretical positions have pointed at fundamentally different strategies W. Hout ( ) International Institute of Social Studies, Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Netherlands © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 J. Grugel, D. Hammett (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of International Development, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-42724-3_2

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for the improvement of the situation in developing countries. Yet, at the same time, modernisation and dependency approaches have important features in common. In the first place, and this is more important in the light of critiques of the linearity assumption in development theorising voiced in recent decades, the two approaches share the conviction that development is essentially a process that is able to bring about progress. In the second place, the approaches clearly focus on ‘macro-structures’ (Nederveen Pieterse 2010: 12) in their explanation of, and the barriers to, development. This chapter addresses various dimensions of the classical theories of development. Sections  2 and 3 discuss the main features of the two classical approaches to development, modernisation and dependency theories. Sections  4 and 5 present some examples of the way in which the classical approaches are manifested in contemporary thinking about development. Section 6 contains some brief concluding remarks.

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The Modernisation Approach

The modernisation approach took an important lead from the classical concern of Western thought with notions of social, economic and political transformation. In his classical analysis of the sociological tradition, Nisbet (1966: viii) traced back the inspiration of the great social theorists of the nineteenth and early twentieth century to ‘the conflicts between traditionalism and modernism in European culture’. An important inspiration for modernisation theory is derived from the work of American sociologist Talcott Parsons. Parsons, whose sociological theory is often labelled as structural functionalist, focused on the evolution of societies from ‘traditional’ to ‘modern’ forms.1 Parsons’ evolutionary approach of social change draws on biological analogies and revolves around the notion of adaptation or the capacity of a social system to respond to changes in its environment (Parsons 1964: 340). Parsons posited that societies that are able to adapt successfully to changes in the environment, notably to fundamental long-term changes of the magnitude of the Industrial and French Revolutions, demonstrate certain ‘evolutionary universals’. In his own words, ‘An evolutionary universal, then, is a complex of structures and associated processes the development of which so increases the long-run adaptive capacity of living systems in a given class that only systems that develop 1

The most important works by Parsons include The Social System (Parsons 1951) and Structure and Process in Modern Societies (Parsons 1960).

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the complex can attain certain higher levels of general adaptive capacity’ (Parsons 1964: 340–341). The evolutionary universals that Parsons (1964: 342–350) distinguished were social stratification, cultural legitimation, bureaucratic organisation, and money and markets. His conclusion was that societies are better able to adapt to change to the extent they have developed more complex social hierarchies (going beyond the ‘two-class system’ of rulers vs. ruled), more elaborate ways of legitimation of the rulers, more effective bureaucracies and better functioning markets and monetary systems. The distinction between the ‘traditional’ and the ‘modern’ became the hallmark of modernisation theory. Contributions to the approach were decisively multidisciplinary, and derived from most of the social sciences, including sociology, economics, political science and anthropology. The analytical categories of ‘traditional’ (or ‘simple’) and ‘modern’ (or ‘complex’) showed a clear resemblance to ‘Western’ and ‘non-Western’ forms of social, political and economic organisation. For this reason, modernisation theory was often criticised for its normativity: as essentially being an ethnocentric representation of Western values (e.g., Nederveen Pieterse 2010: 23; Frank 1969: 21–95). Various critics of the modernisation approach made a connection between the ideas that were produced and the role these played during the Cold War era (e.g., Nederveen Pieterse 2010: 23; Ross 1998). Among the great variety of authors who contributed to modernisation theory, economist Walt W.  Rostow stands out. In his classic The Stages of Economic Growth, Rostow distinguished five stages ranging from traditional to modern (‘mass-consumption’) societies, on the basis of an ‘analytic bonestructure’, determined by production relations, more specifically ‘the distribution of income between consumption, saving, and investment … the composition of investment and … developments within particular sectors of the economy’ (Rostow 1960: 13). Traditional societies are characterised by the dominance of agricultural production and limited productivity. The preconditions for take-off, Rostow’s second stage, result from scientific innovations, which lead to surpluses that can be used for investment. The takeoff stage is a phase of self-sustained growth, when manufacturing, initiated by an entrepreneurial elite, becomes the driving force of development. The drive to maturity leads to the replacement of original growth sectors by new ones, such as heavy industry, during the Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Europe. The age of high mass consumption, Rostow’s final stage, leads to an emphasis on consumption rather than production (Rostow 1960: 17–92).

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Bert F.  Hoselitz used the concept of ‘pattern variables’,2 derived from Parsons (1951), in his sociological analysis of economic development. Hoselitz, together with Rostow one of the main targets of Andre Gunder Frank’s critique of modernisation theory (Frank 1969: 24–47), emphasised that the increasing complexity of the division of labour is the main reflection of economic development. In terms of the pattern variables, Hoselitz (1960: 47) argued that ‘The very needs of economic advancement must bring about a gradual replacement of ascription as a standard by achievement, and associated with this a replacement of functional diffuseness by functional specificity and particularism by universalism.’ In addition to economists and sociologists, political scientists contributed significantly to modernisation theory. Among the most influential contributions in the early phase of the modernisation approach was an edited volume by Almond and Coleman (1960) on the politics of the developing areas. The volume started from the functions performed by structures in political systems ‘in all societies regardless of scale, degree of differentiation, and culture’ (Almond 1960: 5). The functional categories distinguished by Almond (1960: 17) included four input functions (political socialisation and recruitment, interest articulation, interest aggregation and political communication) and three output functions (rule-making, rule application and rule adjudication). This approach to political modernisation assumes that a single political structure—such as a ruler, a legislature or a bureaucracy—can perform multiple functions. Yet, the approach argues that ‘modern’ political systems are characterised by structural differentiation or specialisation, implying that political structures are increasingly seen to perform only a single function, ‘What we mean when we speak of modern systems as being specialised is that certain structures emerge which have a functional distinctiveness, and which tend to perform what we may call a regulatory role in relation to that function within the political system as a whole. … What is peculiar to modern political systems is a relatively high degree of structural differentiation (that is, the emergence of legislatures, political executives, bureaucracies, courts, electoral systems, parties, interest groups, media of communication), with each structure tending to perform a regulatory role for that function within the political systems as a whole’ (Almond 1960: 18). The authors contributing to a second wave of modernisation theory, the beginning of which is usually dated in the second half of the 1960s, were, in Higgott’s (1983: 18) assessment, less optimistic about the prospects for 2

The pattern variables distinguished by Parsons were universalism versus particularism, ascription versus achievement, orientation towards the collective versus self-orientation, and diffuseness versus specificity and neutrality versus affectivity (Parsons 1951: 105).

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progress and democracy than modernisation theorists in the first half of the decade. Samuel Huntington’s work on political order was the prime example of the emergent concern with political stability. Huntington focused on the existence of a ‘political gap’ between more and less developed countries in terms of the level of political institutionalisation, in parallel to the more evident difference in levels of economic development. According to him, political violence and instability ‘was in large part the product of rapid social change and the rapid mobilisation of new groups into politics coupled with the slow development of political institutions’ (Huntington 1968: 4). In Huntington’s view, many developing countries experience a growing problem of political institutionalisation as a result of contrary movements of social mobilisation and economic development. Social mobilisation, ‘a change in the attitudes, values and expectations of people from those associated with the traditional world to those common to the modern world’ (Huntington 1968: 38), leads to wants and aspirations among developing country populations that cannot be satisfied given the level of economic development. The frustration that is induced by the growing disparity between social mobilisation and economic possibilities leads to increased pressure on the political system to deliver, in the form of enhanced political participation. The strength of political institutions is key to dealing with this pressure: in Huntington’s interpretation, political systems that are more successful in developing strong institutions can deal better with the increasing pressure generated by political participation and will turn out to be more stable. Political instability is likely to emerge when political institutions are not able to cope with increased participation (Huntington 1968: 78–92). Modernisation theory came under increasing attack in the second half of the 1960s. Apart from the criticism targeted at the approach’s ethnocentrism, critics increasingly pointed at the neglect of influences deriving from the role and position of developing countries in the international system. Analysts of economic underdevelopment of countries in Latin America, in particular, referred to the impact of colonialism and economic dependence on the USA as major sources of distorted development. The analysis of underdevelopment and dependence gave rise to an understanding of development that was generalised in dependency theory.

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The Dependency Approach

In a similar way to the modernisation approach being inspired by nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century social theorists who focused on the roots of European social and economic modernity, many dependency theorists

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continued the radical tradition that was set in by Marxist and neo-Marxist analyses of capitalism and imperialism in the same epoch. Central ideas derived by dependency (and later by world-system) theory from the (neo-) Marxist tradition concern the imperative of capital accumulation as an element of the capitalist political-economic order and the inherently exploitative nature of relations of production. Dependency theory originated in the Latin America of the 1960s and was built on earlier structuralist work on development pioneered by Raúl Prebisch and others in the Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA) in the late 1940s and early 1950s (Kay 2011: 117). As analysed by Kay (2011: 117–118) in his classical work on Latin American theories of development and underdevelopment, Latin American dependency theory consisted of two positions: reformist and Marxist. The reformist position is reflected in the work of authors such as Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Enzo Faletto, Celso Furtado and Osvaldo Sunkel, while Marxist-inspired dependency theorists include Andre Gunder Frank, Theotonio dos Santos and Ruy Mauro Marini. Although the reformist position was significant from an academic/analytical point of view, the Marxist position obtained more widespread international appeal and was generalised to a more general theory of development by including perspectives from Africa and Asia through the work of scholars such as Samir Amin and Walden Bello. The reformist position was epitomised in Cardoso’s (1972) analysis of dependent capitalist development and Cardoso and Faletto’s (1979) seminal work on dependency and development in Latin America. The analysis put forward in these reformist works focused on the change in the nature of dependency, away from the simple exchange of primary products for manufactured ones, to a situation in which industrial production for the market in Latin America became more important. There would be a continuation of dependency, as in Cardoso’s words, ‘in spite of internal economic development, countries tied to international capitalism by that type of linkage remain economically dependent, insofar as the production of the means of production (technology) are concentrated in advanced capitalist economies (mainly in the US). … Some degree of local prosperity is possible insofar as consumption goods locally produced by foreign investments can induce some dynamic effects in the dependent economies. But at the same time, the global process of capitalist development determines an interconnection between the sector of production of consumption goods and the capital goods sector, reproducing in this way the links of dependency’ (Cardoso 1972: 90–91). A key element in this work is the notion that dependency cannot be understood solely as a characteristic of the external environment of developing

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countries, but that the internal dynamics need to receive equal attention for understanding the historical dynamics of relations between countries from the centre and those in the periphery. Cardoso and Faletto (1979: xvi) place emphasis on the importance of understanding ‘the social practices of local groups and classes which try to enforce foreign interests, not precisely because they are foreign, but because they may coincide with values and interests that these groups pretend are their own’. The dominant position within the dependency approach has undoubtedly been the Marxist-inspired interpretation, which emphasised the impact of the outward-oriented nature of developing countries. Within the Marxist tradition of dependency, Andre Gunder Frank became a leading figure, emphasising the ‘development of underdevelopment’. Frank’s work is built on the difference between the experience of Western and developing countries—this is reflected in his famous formulation, ‘The now developed countries were never underdeveloped, though they may have been undeveloped’ (Frank 1969:4). Andre Gunder Frank (1969: 9) analysed development and underdevelopment as ‘opposite sides of the same coin’, as the outcome of the history of the capitalist world system. According to Frank, the driving force of global capitalism has always been exploitation of the working class by the capital owners and of the countries of the periphery by those in the centre. The bourgeoisie in peripheral countries share in the benefits of exploitation of their own population through their links to the centre, but is essentially a ‘lumpenbourgeoisie’ that is fully dependent on forces in the centre of the world system (Frank 1972: 13–14). In Frank’s analysis, the capitalist world system, which originated in the fifteenth century, revolves around the logic of capital accumulation. Through unequal trade, investment and labour relations, the centre has been able to siphon off economic surpluses from the periphery. The main mechanisms of surplus extraction have changed over the history of capitalism. The classical colonial relationship between the centre and the periphery concerned trade in raw materials produced by the colonies for manufactured goods produced by the colonial powers of Europe (Frank 1979: 103–110). Next to this, investments have been a second means of surplus extraction: capital owners ensure that the benefits of the investments flow back to the centres of capitalism, which implies that the benefits for the periphery are minimal (Frank  1979: 189–199). Labour has been incorporated into the production process at adverse terms throughout the history of capitalism. Various forms of forced labour, including slavery during the first few centuries of capitalist history, were succeeded by proletarianisation and informalisation of labour in different parts of the world (Frank 1979: 160–171).

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In similar ways to Frank but with different emphases, Egyptian-born Samir Amin (1974) analysed issues of dependence and (under)development in terms of ‘accumulation on a world scale’. In his view, the expansion of capitalism over the past five centuries has been the consequence of falling rates of profit in the centre of the capitalist world system. The centre and periphery of the capitalist system are linked through mechanisms of ‘unequal exchange’ of different types of commodities, while those mechanisms are based on the unequal remuneration of labour in the various parts of the system (Amin 1974: 62–63). In Amin’s view, unequal exchange leads to a transfer of value from the periphery to the centre in the form of undervalued commodities and manufactured goods ‘traded’ between both poles of the system. Underdevelopment in the periphery is manifested in three main structural features (Amin 1974: 262–299): the existence of extreme disparities in productivity across sectors in the periphery, the absence of linkages (‘disarticulation’) among productive sectors in the periphery and the outward orientation to meet demands from the centre, and the highly unequal international division of labour, reflected in ‘unequal specialisation’ and the periphery’s dependence on foreign capital. Frank and Amin reached similar conclusions from their analysis of the political strategies of developing countries. The notion of ‘dissociation’ of developing countries from the world system that Frank (1984: 215–229) proposed closely resembled Amin’s (1987, 1990) ideas of ‘delinking’. Amin’s proposal to delink developing countries from the world system derived from his understanding that development policies can only be beneficial for developing countries if they are truly ‘autocentric’. Developing countries’ export orientation would need to be reversed and instead of producing mainly primary products for world markets, they should steer their economies towards the production of goods for consumption and capital goods (Amin 1990: 18–19). The proposal for delinking involved a political programme, as ‘delinking, whether one likes it or not, is associated with a ‘transition’ – outside capitalism and over a long time – towards socialism’ (Amin 1990: 55). Since the early 1970s, world-system3 theory started to emerge in an attempt by Immanuel Wallerstein and several dependency theorists to develop a socialscientific interpretation of the history of the capitalist world system. The world-system approach gradually occupied the place of dependency theory. Wallerstein’s historical–sociological interpretation of the rise and expansion of

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Wallerstein started to use the term world-system (instead of world system) theory to reflect Fernand Braudel’s (1992: 22) usage of ‘économie monde’ (world economy) as something different from ‘économie mondiale’ (world economy), where the former notion denotes a part of the world that is economically autonomous and characterised by a single division of labour.

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the capitalist world economy since the ‘long sixteenth century’ (1450–1600) revolves around the notion of the single division of labour. According to Wallerstein, the focus of theories of long-term development should not be on societies or polities, but rather on ‘social systems’. As he phrased it himself, ‘My own unit of analysis is based on the measurable social reality of interdependent productive activities, what may be called an “effective social division of labour” or, in code language, an “economy”’ (Wallerstein 1984: 2). The history of the capitalist world economy, in Wallerstein’s view, is the history of the expansion of the global division of labour, which has integrated all parts of the world and reached its peak in the period of neo-liberal globalisation (Wallerstein 2000). Capital accumulation has always been the main drive of capitalists worldwide, and the main political strategy to continue the deepening of this process has been ‘the relocation of given sectors of production to other zones of the world economy that are, on the average, lower-wage areas’ (Wallerstein 2000: 261). The history of the modern world system, which has been a capitalist world economy, has seen the decline of accumulation mechanisms other than the production for (world) markets. Politically, the world economy has been able to survive despite the fundamental contradictions and tensions among social groups thanks to the fact that the global division of labour was never controlled by one political entity which would, in Wallerstein’s (1974: 347–348) words, have turned the world economy into a world empire. An important element in the political organisation of the modern world system has been the middle tier of areas between the core and the periphery: the semiperiphery. The semiperiphery, which is ‘both exploited and exploiter’ (Wallerstein 1979: 23), is understood in terms of its middle position in relation to such features as the capital intensity of production, the mode of labour control and the strength of the state. The role of the semiperiphery is seen mainly in political terms, in that it consists of ‘middle areas [that] partially deflect the political pressures which groups primarily located in peripheral areas might otherwise direct against core-states and the groups which operate within and through their state machineries’ (Wallerstein 1974: 350). Throughout their history, dependency and world-system theories have been criticised for their emphasis on the material and economic dimensions of their explanatory model, as well as for the seemingly deterministic nature of the explanations of development processes. Other approaches, such as postcolonial theory and post-structuralism, have been formulated by scholars who have an affinity with the radical criticism of dependency but stress other dimensions of development, such as culture and identity issues.

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Contemporary Manifestations of the Modernisation Approach

The criticism aimed at modernisation theory since the second half of the 1960s did diminish the appeal of this approach to development but has not led to its complete demise. Although the heydays of modernisation theory are long past, many scholars have remained inspired by notions that were brought forward as part of the theorisation of modernity and tradition. In most cases, the ideas of modernisation theory were not followed uncritically, so that more recent manifestations of the thinking on modernity and tradition have incorporated part of the criticism levelled at the approach. Four examples of the influence of modernisation theory are discussed in this section: the work of Ronald Inglehart on democracy and democratisation, reflections by Shmuel Eisenstadt on multiple modernities, Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit’s interpretation of occidentalism and North et al.’s work on social order and economic development. American political scientist Ronald Inglehart has contributed importantly to research on the changes in social and political values that are brought about by processes of industrialisation. Since the early 1970s, Inglehart has been a proponent of the view that industrialisation and increased wealth bring about a change in value orientation of younger generations that sets these apart from the older ones. Analysing data from the advanced industrialised countries, Inglehart showed that older generations typically place more emphasis on so-called acquisitive priorities, linked to law and order, stability and material wealth, while younger ones adopted ‘post-bourgeois’ or ‘post-materialist’ values, related to freedom of expression and political participation (Inglehart 1971: 994–996). Inglehart concluded that the embrace of post-materialist issues by certain newer political parties would likely lead to a ‘silent revolution’ in advanced democracies, as the changed preferences of younger groups of voters would strengthen the post-materialist parties and erode the support base of traditional parties (Inglehart 1971: 1009–1013). In later work, based on the World Values Surveys, Inglehart (1997: 4) argued that the shift from materialist to post-materialist values was only one element of a broader cultural change, involving a range of orientations from religious beliefs to sexual norms. The inspiration he has taken from modernisation theory becomes clear in his position that ‘[e]conomic development, cultural change, and political change go together in coherent and roughly predictable patterns’ (Inglehart 1997: 324). In an attempt to broaden the analysis of modernisation and cultural change into ‘new modernisation’, Inglehart and Welzel (2009: 36) argued that democracy is the expected outcome of processes of social and economic

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modernisation. Focusing on modernisation as ‘a syndrome of social changes linked to industrialization’ (Inglehart and Welzel 2009: 34), they posited that ‘economic development brings social and political changes only when it changes people’s behaviour. Consequently, economic development is conducive to democracy to the extent that it, first, creates a large, educated and articulate middle class of people who are accustomed to thinking for themselves and, second, transforms people’s values and motivations’ (Inglehart and Welzel 2009: 42–43). In his work on the impact of globalisation, sociologist Shmuel Eisenstadt has tried to come to grips with the nature of modernity in contemporary society. Taking issue with the position that modernisation would be akin to Westernisation, Eisenstadt (2002: 2–3) argued that ‘Western patterns of modernity are not the only ‘authentic’ modernities, though they enjoy historical precedence and continue to be a basic reference point for others.’ According to Eisenstadt, the ‘programme of modernity’ consists of cultural, political and identity-related elements. The cultural dimension of modernity relates to ideas that human beings can shape their future through ‘autonomous human agency’ (Eisenstadt 2002: 3) and are not limited in their action by traditional political and cultural relations of authority. The political element consists of the demise of traditional ways to legitimise the political order. The identity dimension of modernity is linked to the tendency to adopt more universalistic definitions of identity and collectivity. Eisenstadt argued that modernity has taken different shapes in various parts of the world, among others under the influence of social movements (Eisenstadt 2002: 9–12). As a result, variants of modernity coexist, and frequently conflict with each other. In particular, ‘the encounter of modernity with non-Western societies brought about far-reaching transformations in the premises, symbols and institutions of modernity’ (Eisenstadt 2002: 14). The result of this development, according to Eisenstadt, was that multiple modernities have come into existence: these are modernities that share the elements of the above-mentioned programme, but start from radically different values and therefore privilege contrasting political, cultural and social ordering principles. Referring to fundamentalist movements, Eisenstadt argued that these should often not be seen as traditionalist. Rather, ‘the distinct visions of fundamentalist movements have been formulated in terms common to the discourse of modernity; they have attempted to appropriate modernity on their own terms’ (Eisenstadt 2002: 18). Buruma and Margalit (2004) have been inspired by modernisation theory in a different way than Eisenstadt. These authors have attempted to interpret variants of ‘anti-Westernism’ on the basis of the usage of modernity and

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modernisation as instruments in a political struggle. According to Buruma and Margalit (2004: 3–10), so-called occidentalism is spurred by the essentialisation of ‘the West’ in terms of certain features of modernity, such as industrialisation, urbanisation, democratisation and individualism, which are felt to run counter to the fundamental values held by the opponents. The anti-Westernism that was analysed by Buruma and Margalit (2004: 6–8) does not exclusively stem from the non-Western world: their example of German Nazism makes clear that the attack on Western values and ideas can also stem from within the West itself. Occidentalism, according to Buruma and Margalit, is not tied to any particular political position, as it may be embraced by both the left and the right. What unites the various occidentalist groups is their aversion to the modernity embodied by Western forms of social, cultural, economic and political life. The common method of occidentalists is to ‘diminish an entire society or a civilisation to a mass of soulless, decadent, money-grubbing, rootless, faithless, unfeeling parasites’ (Buruma and Margalit 2004: 10–11). Grounded in the new institutional economics of development, North et al. (2009) have worked out a ‘conceptual framework’ for the understanding of long-term social-economic change that is rooted North’s earlier work, while also clearly taking inspiration from the tradition of modernisation theory. While the authors guarded against the simplistic developmentalism characteristic of earlier modernisation approaches—‘The dynamism of social order is a dynamic of change, not a dynamic of progress’ (North et al. 2009: 12), the main categories of their thinking were the ‘natural state’ or ‘limited access order’ and the ‘open access order’. The natural state is described as ‘the default social outcome … Until two hundred years ago, there were no open access orders; even today, 85 per cent of the world’s population live in limited access orders’ (North et al. 2009: 13). Modernisation as a theoretical category comes in when North et al. (2009: 2) refer to ‘[t]he transition from the natural state to an open access order [as] the second social revolution, the rise of modernity’. For North et al. (2009: 18–21, 30–41), the natural state is characterised by the possession of special privileges, notably access to economic rents, by a dominant coalition of elites. Violence among the elites is limited because they know that the organisations they are using for the extraction of rents from land, labour and capital all depend on the support of the state. The balance among the elites is inherently fragile, since external shocks or the unintended consequences of agreed policies may lead to distortions of the balance among interests and hence infighting among elites. Open access orders are understood as orders where, in a Weberian sense, the state has the monopoly on the legitimate use of violence, and economic and social relations are

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no longer personalistic but become ‘impersonal’ (North et al. 2009: 21–25, 112–117). Open access orders are the result of a ‘transition’, which can take place when elites ‘find a common interest in transforming some elite privileges into impersonal elite rights shared by all members of the elite’ (North et al. 2009: 190). North et al. define three so-called doorstep conditions that develop in the natural state and lead to a transition to an open access order: the creation of a rule of law for elites, the opportunity to establish stable impersonal organisation and control of the military (North et al. 2009: 26, 154–181).

5

Contemporary Manifestations of the Dependency and World-System Approach

On a similar note as was made above on the modernisation approach, the fact that the writings of dependency and world-system scholars were criticised did not result in the disappearance of the approach. Contemporary research reflecting the dependency and world-system approach is still very visible.4 The global financial crisis even seems to have resulted in a revival of the critical analysis of worldwide capitalism that has always been the hallmark of this approach. This section discusses three examples of the contemporary influence of the dependency and world-system approach: Castells and Laserna’s discussion of the new dependency inherent in global technology, recent world-system scholarship on commodity chains and Christopher Chase-Dunn et al.’s analysis of the global crisis since 2008. With certain regularity, scholars have returned to the idea of dependency to argue that particular forms of relations in the contemporary global capitalist system reflect forms of ‘new’ or ‘neo’ dependency. Castells and Laserna’s analysis of new forms of dependency deriving from the application of modern technologies is a typical example of the application of classical notions of dependency theory to new areas. According to Castells and Laserna (1989: 536), the application of information technologies in production processes, coupled with the dynamics of economic globalisation, and socio-economic restructuring in the core and periphery have produced new 4

An important element in the visibility of world-system theory is the existence of two journals dedicated to publishing research findings of scholars working in the approach. Review, the journal of the Fernand Braudel Center for the Study of Economies, Historical Systems and Civilizations, was founded by Immanuel Wallerstein in 1977. The Journal of World-Systems Research was established by Christopher Chase-Dunn in 1994 as an open-access journal and has been an official journal of the American Sociological Association since 2009.

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forms of dependency. Technological dependency has, in their view, had major impacts on the countries in the Global South, such as those in Latin America. According to Castells and Laserna (1989: 539), ‘[w]ithout a minimum level of endogenous productive capacity in high-technology capital goods, countries must import almost all the new productive machinery in a period of rapid technological change’. Importation of sophisticated technology requires increased exports of manufactured goods, particularly those with lower technological content, and this produces a ‘new unequal exchange in the international economy … between goods and services with different technological components’ (Castells and Laserna 1989: 540). Notions of unequal specialisation have also been traditional concerns related to the notion of global commodity chains that was pioneered by scholars working in the world-system tradition.5 In the original use of the term by Hopkins and Wallerstein (1986: 159), ‘[t]he concept “commodity chain” refers to a network of labour and production processes whose end result is a finished commodity. In building this chain we start with the final production operation and move sequentially backward … until one reaches primarily raw material inputs.’ A 2014 special issue of the Journal of World-Systems Research has provided an assessment of the political economy of commodity chains, more in particular of ‘the way in which commodity chain analysis can be mobilised to illuminate the contours, composition, and character of the modern worldsystem’ (Bair 2014: 2). The contributors analyse a range of contemporary issues related to the functioning of commodity chains, from the impact of interstate rivalry between the USA and China on the governance of the transnational cotton commodity chain to gendered divisions of labour in the commodity chain, and the value generated in the production and marketing of iPads by Apple. Amy Quark (2014) argues, in relation to the example of the transnational commodity chain of cotton, that the divide between state governance and private-sector governance is much less pronounced than often pretended. The US-dominated cotton industry attempted, together with US government agencies, to withstand the challenges to US hegemony in setting standards for cotton production: according to this analysis, the US government with transnational firms tried ‘to persuade others involved in the transnational cotton trade around the world to support their governance arrangements before the Chinese state and textile manufacturers in China developed the scientific, technological and institutional capacities to launch their own hegemonybuilding campaign, which would be backed by the coercive power of being 5

The roots of this approach are in the work by Hopkins and Wallerstein (1986) and Gereffi and Korzeniewicz (1994).

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the largest cotton market in the world’ (Quark 2014: 50–51). Despite the rise of China and the challenge to US hegemony, the US government and US cotton producers, in alliance with European and US transnational merchants, managed to keep Chinese influence on standard setting to a minimum and give only limited concessions to China (Quark 2014: 52–53). In the spirit of dependency and world-system theory, contemporary research into commodity chains also focuses on the way in which transnational mechanisms that support surplus creation have differential effects throughout the world system and serve to maintain inequalities. As a witness to this orientation, Dunaway’s (2014) research focuses on the role of women in transnational commodity chains. She argues that much of mainstream work on production creates a ‘false analytical divide between household and market’ (Dunaway 2014: 71). Non-waged and unfree forms of labour are disproportionally done by women, although their invisible, since not counted, contribution to the household and care for children is often not included in official calculations (Dunaway 2014: 73–75). In a similar way, Clelland’s research on the production of iPads focuses on the flow of value in the commodity chain that has been created for the production of Apple’s tablets. Clelland argues that two types of value need to be taken into account: visible, monetised or ‘bright’ value and hidden or ‘dark’ value. ‘Dark’ value derives from ‘hidden inputs in the form of externalised costs that often contribute to create value than the visible elements’ (Clelland 2014: 86). By applying a commodity-chain analysis to the production of iPads, Clelland claims that Apple’s value extraction is the result of not only its dominance of the chain from producers through to marketing and sales (Apple’s monopoly position within the commodity chain) but, very importantly, also the company’s ‘monopsonistic externalisation of costs’ (Clelland 2014: 94). Apple derives substantial ‘dark’ value from such sources as the exploitation of Chinese migrant workers, undercompensated waged labour, unpaid household labour, informal sector labour and ecological externalities (Clelland 2014: 95–103). Following central class-oriented elements in dependency and world-system approaches, Clelland (2014: 105) concludes that ‘most of the appropriate dark value is realised, not as corporate profit, but as consumer surplus in the form of cheaper goods. … In this manner, core citizens become a global consumerist aristocracy.’ The contributions to the symposium on the crisis in the global system since 2008 in the Journal of World-Systems Research reflect the core tenets of worldsystem theory, which are to interpret global issues as part of the long-term evolution of the world capitalist economy. Chase-Dunn (2013: 176–179) analyses five interlinked crises in the contemporary world system (in global governance, inequality and democracy, the biosphere, the global capitalist

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system and the global left) as the outcome of the dialectics related to the sequence of hegemonies in the system. He argues that the US hegemony— understood as the political and economic preponderance of a great power— has been on the decline for several decades. In his view, the interconnections among the crises are likely to result in a ‘new stage of capitalism’ (ChaseDunn 2013: 179). According to Sassen (2013), the crisis of capitalism has resulted in the ‘expulsion’ of people from the economy in large parts of the world. In her view, the deepening of global capitalism—which has replaced earlier waves of expansion into new parts of the world—requires the natural resources of large parts of the developing world, rather than their populations. These populations are increasingly expelled to the urban areas or, as migrants, to other countries, and they end up as underclasses (Sassen 2013: 199). Other continuing elements in the world-system approach—resistance and repression—are presented by Reifer (2013) and Robinson (2013) in their analyses of antisystemic movements and the coming into being of a global police state. Resistance, in the form of antisystemic (or anti-capitalist) movements, has gained prominence as a consequence of the Great Recession, but this should not, according to Reifer, be interpreted as a new form, but as a continuation of earlier instances of antisystemic action. In his view, the same persistent ‘structural world-systemic factors’ have been responsible for the seemingly different antisystemic forces manifested in the World Social Forum, the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street (Reifer 2013: 187). Repression is, according to Robinson (2013: 193), an evitable outcome of the current crisis of capitalism given ‘transitions from social welfare to social control states around the world’. Overaccumulation and rising inequalities within and across societies have resulted in increased polarisation, which may no longer be governable by consensual policy making and hence may require the ‘policing’ of global capitalism (Robinson 2013: 196).

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Concluding Remarks

This chapter has described modernisation and dependency theories as the two most important classical approaches to development. The approaches have evolved since the 1950s and 1960s as anchor points in the debate on how to best understand international development processes. The distinction made by modernisation theorists between ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ forms of society, politics and the economy led to analyses of the circumstances and policies that were supposed to lead countries on the path to higher levels of development. Dependency theory’s focus on the long-term historical processes that were

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locking in the progress in the countries of the Global South produced analyses of the impact of colonialism and the persistent forms of neo-imperialist exploitation that characterise the contemporary international political economy. Modernisation and dependency theories both were the subject of profound criticism, directed at their core messages. The modernisation approach was attacked because of its tendency to treat the Western experience as benchmark for developments in other parts of the world. The ethnocentric character of its analyses and recommendations led to a declining interest in modernisation theory among development scholars. In a similar way, dependency theory was criticised because of its perceived deterministic character, which was felt to overemphasise the barriers for developing countries in achieving a meaningful level of development. The observed weaknesses of modernisation and dependency theories have not resulted in the complete disappearance of the research programmes they formulated four or five decades ago. While its coverage of the literature has necessarily been limited, this chapter has argued that many scholars have remained inspired by the intellectual agenda of the modernisation and dependency approaches. In important ways, contemporary analysts of development have distanced themselves from the early tenets of the two approaches, which are seen either as too dogmatic or as simplistic. Although it is generally critical of unilinear thinking, current research on such diverse issues as democratisation (Inglehart 1997; Inglehart and Welzel 2009), globalisation and modernity (Eisenstadt 2002), anti-Westernism (Buruma and Margalit 2004) and long-term socio-economic transformation (North et al. 2009) shows the influence of a generic modernisation paradigm. In a similar way, the criticism of dependency theory’s determinism is embraced by contemporary worldsystem analysts. Yet, adherents of world-system analysis who study issues such as technological change (Castells and Laserna 1989), the nature of international commodity or value chains (Clelland 2014; Dunaway 2014; Quark 2014) or the crisis-ridden character of contemporary society (Chase-Dunn 2013; Reifer 2013; Robinson 2013; Sassen 2013) continue to be inspired by a materialist world view that places the persistence and reproduction of inequalities centrally.

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Amin, S. 1974. Accumulation on a world scale: A critique of the theory of underdevelopment, vol. 2. New York: Monthly Review Press. Amin, S. 1987. Democracy and national strategy in the periphery. Third World Quarterly 9(4): 1129–1156. Amin, S. 1990. Delinking: Towards a polycentric world. London: Zed Books. Blair, J. 2014. ‘Editor’s introduction: Commodity chains in and of the world-system’, Special issue on the political economy of commodity chains. Journal of WorldSystems Research 20(1): 1–10. Braudel, F. 1992. Civilisation and capitalism, 15th-18th century, The perspective of the world, vol. 3. Berkeley: University of California Press. Buruma, I., and A. Margalit. 2004. Occidentalism: A short history of anti-westernism. London: Atlantic Books. Cardoso, F. 1972. Dependency and development in Latin America. New Left Review I/74: 83–95. Cardoso, F., and E.  Faletto. 1979. Dependency and development in Latin America. Berkeley: University of California Press. Castells, M., and R. Laserna. 1989. The new dependency: Technological change and socioeconomic restructuring in Latin America. Sociological Forum 4(4): 535–560. Chase-Dunn, C. 2013. ‘Five linked crises in the contemporary world-system’, symposium on the global system since 2008: Crisis of what? Journal of World-Systems Research 19(2): 175–181. Clelland, D. 2014. ‘The core of the apple: Degrees of monopoly and dark value in global commodity chains’, special issue on the political economy of commodity chains. Journal of World-Systems Research 20(1): 82–111. Dunaway, W. 2014. ‘Bringing commodity chain analysis back to its world-systems roots: Rediscovering women’s work and households’, special issue on the political economy of commodity chains. Journal of World-Systems Research 20(1): 64–81. Eisenstadt, S.N. 2002. Multiple modernities. In Multiple modernities, ed. S.N. Eisenstadt, 1–29. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers. Frank, A. 1969. Latin America: Underdevelopment or revolution. Essays on the development of underdevelopment and the immediate enemy. New York: Monthly Review Press. Frank, A. 1972. Lumpenbourgeoisie: Lumpendevelopment. Dependence, class and politics in Latin America. New York: Monthly Review Press. Frank, A. 1979. Dependent accumulation and underdevelopment. New York: Monthly Review Press. Frank, A. 1984. Critique and anti-critique: Essays on dependence and reformism. London: Macmillan. Gereffi, G., and M. Korzeniewicz (eds.). 1994. Commodity chains and global capitalism. Westport: Praeger. Higgott, R.A. 1983. Political development theory. London: Croom Helm. Hopkins, T., and I.  Wallerstein. 1986. Commodity chains in the world-economy prior to 1800. Review 10(1): 157–170. Hoselitz, B. 1960. Sociological aspects of economic growth. Glencoe: The Free Press.

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3 Postcolonial Approaches to Development Pat Noxolo

1

Introduction

Postcolonial approaches to development can be understood as an ongoing negotiation with the developmental imagination in relation to the global that is a negotiation with the main foci, constructs and disciplinary centres of international development. The relationship is a two-way negotiation because reactions to development have just as much influenced and helped to shape postcolonial approaches as vice versa: the relationship has been one of mutual influence and critique. After all, what development and postcolonial theory have in common is their shared engagement with the poorest and most vulnerable people in the world, and their shared insistence that the richest and most powerful engage with them too, with a shared goal of changing global inequalities. Nonetheless, there are tensions between postcolonial theory and development theory. These surround their contrasting attitudes to the means by and the extent to which not just global poverty but also global inequality should be addressed. It is perhaps fair to say that where development theory is structured around eradicating global poverty (albeit with a close critical concern with how poverty works through national, regional and global inequalities), postcolonial theory is more closely structured around eradicating global inequality (with a politicised anger about the diverse forms of poverty and discriminaP. Noxolo ( ) School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences, Univesity of Birmingham, UK © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 J. Grugel, D. Hammett (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of International Development, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-42724-3_3

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tion that global inequality perpetuates, at intimate as well as at global scales). These tensions are neatly summed up in Christine Sylvester’s statement of their contrasting views of the poorest and most vulnerable: ‘development studies does not tend to listen to subalterns and postcolonial studies does not tend to concern itself with whether the subaltern is eating’ (Sylvester 1999: 703). After a short introduction to postcolonial theory, this essay will run through some of the development practices, constructs and disciplinary centres with which postcolonial theory has been engaging. Other contributors to this volume introduce development theories (see Part I), but the figure of the subaltern forms a convenient stepping off point from which to introduce postcolonial theory as a body of work. Postcolonial theory is an interdisciplinary set of critiques of inequality in the global system. It varies from discipline to discipline in terms of its basic approaches, but is marked by an anti-colonial, anti-hegemonic political agenda. Because it emerged in the latter half of the twentieth century, postcolonial theory was concerned with Eurocentrism as a legacy of European colonialism and has been concerned with insisting on a greater voice for those marginalised outside the west—or with ‘the rest’ as Stuart Hall (1992) memorably put it. However, changes in geopolitics in recent years (most notably the end of the Cold War and the rise of Asian and other powers) have laid bare the underlying concern with inequality itself as a legacy of a range of colonial conditions: the geographical locations of centres and margins have been revealed as less fixed than the continued existence of centres and margins in the global system (Raghuram et al. 2014). The subaltern emerges as, by definition, the unheeded other (Said 1995), no matter where she/he emerges from, and postcolonial theory has been concerned with how the subaltern can be heard, let  alone heeded, in a global system that is rooted in imperialism (Spivak 1988). The genocides, misrepresentations and silences of colonial archives, practices and processes were inevitably distorting (Power et al. 2006; Slater 2004): no counter-historical authentic voice of the untouched indigenous other is now available (Spivak 1988). In the post-imperial era, this ‘white noise’ (Cox 2006) is only compounded by the ‘epistemic violence’ (Spivak 1988: 281) and obscuring biases of development frameworks and agendas (Kapoor 2008). So postcolonial theory is not just concerned with increasing the participation of the subaltern in global wealth—in Sylvester’s (1999) terms, one could see a will to participation in wealth as development theory’s concern that the subaltern eats. Postcolonial theory is more concerned with interrogating the terms of that participation: what must the subaltern become in order to participate in global wealth? What space is there in the systems that reproduce global wealth

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for radically different cultures and perspectives to coexist and to emerge as equally valued? In Sylvester’s (1999) terms (themselves borrowed from Spivak 1988), how can the global system really listen to the subaltern? Ultimately, postcolonial theory is marked by an underlying appreciation that only by rigorously interrogating the terms and conditions of global wealth and wealthmaking—its roots and complicity in colonial oppression, and its continued reproduction through exploitation, inequality and the silencing of cultural difference—can any lasting form of global equality be established.

2

Postcolonial Approaches to Development Foci

Postcolonial theory has repeatedly engaged in shifting the focus of the development imagination from a range of agents of change and forms of agency to a range of subalterns and forms of subalternity. If we focus on what is often thought of as the development era, that is, the years immediately following the Second World War, we can see that the immediate post-independence focus on the developmental state, though clearly initiating a postcolonial moment of independent rule, was dominated by developmental visions of transformation from traditional societies to (post)modernity (Cardoso 1982). When the vision began to go awry, when the geopolitical centres did not shift, the vision was reversed, so that newly independent states were forced to recognise their continued dependence on state actors elsewhere (Manzo 1991). It was in this context that postcolonial approaches examined the individuals that made up the state, not just as policymakers, but as exemplifying a peculiarly hybrid form of subalternity: they were European-educated postcolonial elites who could not assume but needed to actively forge relationships with ‘the people’ before they could begin to engage with and represent them (Fanon 1967). Many writers who have become foundational to postcolonial approaches addressed the contradictions in the position of these elites, and made this emblematic of the hybridity of what might be understood as the postcolonial condition (James 1992). V.S. Naipaul (2012 (1967)), for example, critiqued post-independence elites as ‘mimic men’, tragically trained and enculturated into a doomed yearning for western knowledge and culture, but never being fully integrated either into western culture or into the culture of the places that they were governing and representing. This fractured form of subalternity (in which elites were relatively powerful but still unable to find voice) can be understood as the cultural condition for the emergence of a cadre that Achille Mbembe (2001: 42) calls ‘postcolonial potentates’, ruling through

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kinship connections and offers of sinecures in ineffective bureaucracies. These top-heavy systems arguably left a governance deficit when the state was shrunk due to structural adjustment in the 1980s (Hewitt 2000). In an extension of their own arguments, postcolonial theorists have often been subject to the same fractured subalternity, and postcolonial theory itself has been dismissed by some as merely a sign that ‘Third World intellectuals have arrived in First World academe’ (Dirlik 1994: 329). In other words, postcolonial theory has been criticised as the intellectual musings of the elite cosmopolitan, or, to borrow a phrase from a similar critique of cosmopolitanism, as ‘the class consciousness of frequent travellers’ (Calhoun, quoted in Ley 2004: 160). Key theorists like Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha, Stuart Hall and Trinh Minh-Ha are portrayed as academics whose Global South or diasporic allegiances are in tension with their Global North education and roles, making them restless in the world because they have no genuine constituency in it (see, e.g., Hall 1996). This conflation of the theory with the identity of the theorist is an interesting source of tension in postcolonial theory, one that is linked very directly to the source of fracturing of this particular form of subalternity. Many postcolonial theorists share national or ethnic identity with people in the Global South, whilst at the same time being radically different from the poorest and most vulnerable due to their elite status (money, often place of residence and most obviously education). Whilst postcolonial theory is an academic, often rather esoteric, set of theories and approaches, particularly in terms of language and concepts, it insists on voice for the most marginalised subalterns, many of whom have little access to literacy, let alone to academic theory. For many development theorists, postcolonial theory is almost perversely ‘obfuscating’ (McEwan 2003: 346) and inaccessible in its language, making postcolonial theory at best a distraction, at worst an irrelevance, in the context of continued insecurity of food, accommodation and basic needs. For postcolonial theorists, however, the difficult language and concepts of postcolonial theory arise not just from cosmopolitan theorists struggling to express their own subalternity: it arises from a struggle to acknowledge the condition of subalternity that is present in global relationships. Difficulty of expression comes from the need to express difference or at least to make space for something radically other to express itself, whilst having for the moment only mainstream language and concepts to work with (Noxolo and Preziuso 2012). This is an important point for postcolonial approaches to development: where development has traditionally been action-oriented, focussed on initiating and advancing processes of change (albeit often with a critical awareness of the destruction that change can bring), postcolonial approaches to development are often

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more stubbornly reflective, focussed on identifying what is omitted, what is lost, what is left unsaid or what cannot be said (because the frameworks and languages make it impossible) in development processes and relationships. In other words, postcolonial approaches are committed to acknowledging the presence of subalternity in development (Raghuram et al. 2014). This constant reflection in order to acknowledge subalternity can be seen more intensely in postcolonial approaches to another focus of development that emerged towards the end of the twentieth century, that is, a focus on the developmental roles of non-governmental organisations (NGOs). Postcolonial approaches can be said to have again shifted the focus from NGOs’ agency as developers to the reproduction of subalternity that their actions facilitate. This shift has been executed in two ways. First, postcolonial approaches have focussed on the colonial antecedents and continuities of large development organisations (Bell 2002), including intergovernmental agencies (Power 2009), and of NGO workers and developmental civil servants (Kothari 2005). These approaches explore the historical legacies that help to explain why the subaltern is still unheeded in development: inequality was effectively institutionalised within development organisations and practices as it emerged out of colonial institutions and practices. Second, postcolonial approaches have focussed on the power relationships between NGOs and communities, the subtle coercion and power relations inherent in forms of participation (Cooke and Kothari 2001), NGO managerialism (Dar and Cooke 2008) and even development volunteering (Smith and Laurie 2011; Noxolo 2011b). In other words, these approaches explore the processes by which inequality is often reproduced in contemporary development practices: even developers’ mechanisms for listening to subalterns can reproduce silence.

3

Postcolonial Approaches to Development Constructs

In addition to its foci, postcolonial theory has repeatedly engaged development theory around its constructs. There has been a particularly strong critique of the temporalities and spatialities of development. In terms of temporality, most heavily critiqued have been notions of teleology. In common with other post-theories (postmodernism, postdevelopment, etc.), postcolonialism has been sceptical of versions of history that move in one direction, setting out only one version of the future. Development has been the sine qua non of this kind of theory, its teleology set out in the very word ‘development’. This

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word has a biological root, and produces an image of nations developing in particular directions, as plants and animals do (from smaller to bigger, or from immature to mature) (Esteva 1992). Although the development of biological organisms is cyclical rather than linear, involving the process of decay and death as well as the process of maturation (Cowen and Shenton 1995), many argued that developmentalism, particularly in the form of modernisation, suggested a single direction for the development of post-independent countries (Escobar 1995). This route ran from an unproductive traditionalism to a productive modernity, from the diversity of non-western cultural forms (characterised by superstition and static social systems) to a more homogeneous westernised global system (characterised by scientific rationalism and a focus on human improvement). In this view of development as progress, colonialism’s ignominies and inequalities have been a necessary route to an inevitable future. As a consequence of this temporal critique, postcolonial theorists have questioned both spaces at the ends of this teleology—both the globalised future and the pristine past. Many development researchers have demonstrated that globalisation is highly uneven and not necessarily experienced by all as an improvement (Sparke 2003; Sousa Santos 2003). Postcolonial theorists have in addition pushed for recognition that the global is enormously diverse, and that there is a wide range of different modernities that coexist under globalisation (Bhabha 1994). In fact, it is the unequal relationships between these different modernities that characterise the global, and that can be understood as shaping some of the development issues faced by people in the Global South (Mbembe 2001). For example, some of the long-standing wars and civil conflicts in central Africa can be understood as a feature of the movements of resources and ideologies across the uneven terrain of the world so that the minerals and resources consumed in richer countries are paid for in blood by those caught in enclaves that are impossible to govern because of the competing demands both of those within and of those outside national borders (Mbembe 2003; Sidaway 2003). However, if progress is not inevitable and the future is no longer a comforting dream, there is no possibility of refuge in a pristine past in which might be found all the answers. Postdevelopment theorists have often been accused of romanticism in relation to a precolonial indigenous past, and there has been a wide range of movements such as negritude or antillanite that have focussed on revalidating the precolonial past as a response to its undervaluing due to colonialism and modernisation theories (Mudimbe 1988). However, it is core to postcolonial theory that precolonial societies were also immensely complex: not only is it impossible to return to the precolonial past, we cannot

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expect to find paradise if we do. In fact, postcolonial theorists have argued that it is the specificity of the hybridity of nations—the irresolvable knitting together or syncretism between precolonial and colonial legacies—that is core to the particularity of each of their modernities (Mbembe 2003). As a consequence, postcolonial theories emphasise not a developed future but an entangled, irreducibly diverse present (Raghuram et al. 2014).

4

Postcolonial Approaches to Development’s Disciplinary Centres

Finally, postcolonial approaches to development have tended to shift the disciplinary centre of development away from political economy to cultural approaches, or in geographical terms, to shift the centre of development geography away from political and economic geographies towards cultural geographies. This reorientation (effectively from the social science leanings of human geography to its humanities leanings) is not surprising given that postcolonial theory has emerged largely via comparative literature and via the ethnographically oriented histories of the Subaltern Studies group (Guha 1982). Most obviously, this routing has entailed a methodological shift in terms of approaches to development. Methodologically, there is a move away from grand universal theories (such as modernisation or dependency theories) towards an emphasis on multiple viewpoints and a range of located perspectives and values. This is true throughout development, but in postcolonial approaches it is an attention to the minutiae of relationship—to the particular located understandings of the values and meanings of everyday activities and interactions—that postcolonial theory looks in its emphasis on diversity and equality. Theory about global culture and its diversity therefore arises from multiple localities, rather than being applied to multiple localities (Raghuram and Madge 2006). However, in distinction to similar methodological moves, such as grounded theory, there is also a deeply politicised emphasis on decentering the European and westernised centres of theory production that have characterised development, so that localities in the Global South are not simply case studies for western theory but are themselves recognised as spaces in which theories are produced that arise out of their own complex postcolonial realities (Chakrabarty 2000). This aspiration towards a decentring of western theories in favour of building theory out of the postcolonial everyday leads to an extreme sensitivity to the difficulty of seeing past one’s own perspectives to arrive at the minutiae of others’. This sensitivity also arises from the fact that postcolonial theo-

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rists may aspire to decentering, but most are in fact either located in western institutions or heavily influenced by western-centred theory, either through their training or through the postcolonial formations of the institutions in which they were trained (Dirlik 1994; Madge et al. 2008). At the very least, this manifests as an inability to see that which one has been trained not to see—historically in development the economic role of women was one such unseen phenomenon (Boserup 1970), but contemporary blind spots can be a range of non-economic or non-marketable resources. For example, sacred knowledges or spaces often only become visible when they stand in the way of a development goal (e.g., when they affect health-seeking behaviours, such as condom use) or when they can be co-opted for development (such as the increasing roles of faith communities in social care and in devising discourses that justify wealth acquisition) (Comaroff 2009; Olson 2008). This anxiety about not being able to see that which one has been trained not to see has led to a deeper and deeper ethnographic interrogation of development practices and of subalternity. On an individual level, it has led to a deeper self-interrogation on the part of the postcolonial researcher, a ‘hyperreflexivity’ in an ongoing effort to ‘unlearn’ the blinkers of western-centred training (Kapoor  2004). This hyper-reflexivity is an increasing interrogation of the terms and conditions of development research: for what purposes are we researching, whom will our work benefit, why these questions, why these frameworks, why now? Ultimately, postcolonial theory’s search for a decentering tends towards a fundamental question: what gives the development researcher the right to do this research at all? The answer to this question may not be the demise of development research (there are many careers invested in it and of course many good intentions and effects relating to it), but having to justify rather than assume the right to research is at least a starting point towards shifting the unequal power relations that often underpin it (Tuhiwai Smith 1999). On the level of development as a set of practices and institutions, this hyper-reflexivity has led to a range of ethnographic work that interrogates development itself rather than its traditional research ‘objects’. This can be participant observation of not only development practitioners in the ‘field’ as it were (Crewe and Harrison 1998) but also development practitioners in development forums (Mawdsley et  al. 2014; Trotz and Mullings 2013), development practitioners across the length of their careers (Harriss 2005), as well as tracing the highly contingent development of development ideas from development forum to development forum (Scoones 2009). Perhaps more counter-intuitively, postcolonial approaches’ hypersensitivity to the difficulty of seeing past one’s own perspective has also led towards

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textual and discursive research methods, the interrogation of books, films, social media (Lewis et al. 2008) as well as of development archives and reports (Slater and Bell 2002; Noxolo 2011a), as a means of understanding the minutiae of everyday relationships in development. The routing of postcolonial theory through history and literature is an obvious historical reason for an emphasis on novels and archives: these are the loci out of which postcolonial theory has historically been crafted, and their continued importance testifies to the importance of the location of theoretical production (Spivak 2003). The specificity of the foundation of theory affects the formation of that theory, and this is true for postcolonial theory’s methodological approaches, just as it is true for its overall political project of decentering theory. However, I mention textual approaches in the context of a postcolonial sensitivity to the difficulty of seeing past one’s own perspectives. This is because methods of close reading are used in postcolonial approaches as a means of seeing the world otherwise, effectively of retraining the eye in order to see others in less blinkered ways (Spivak 2003). Particularly important in the reading of western-centred reports or colonial archival material has been processes of seeing that which has been marginalised within the text, but that continues to make its presence felt. This can be understood as ‘reading along the grain’ (Stoler 2009), an attention to the logics and epistemologies that guide the writing of the text, such that certain elements are mentioned whilst others can only be mentioned tangentially if at all. One can think of this, at the smallest scale, in terms of the logics of writing itself so that the postcolonial researcher effectively reads a development text like a writer, with a sense that the process of writing entails a number of choices and rules that in turn necessitate marginalisations or absences even where the writer does not explicitly intend them. As Toni Morrison (1993: 17) has put it, in relation to the marginal presence or invisibility of black characters in mainstream North American writing: I began to rely on my knowledge of how books get written, how language arrives; my sense of how and why writers abandon or take on certain aspects of their project. I began to rely on my understanding of what the linguistic struggle requires of writers and what they make of the surprise that is the inevitable concomitant of the act of creation.

Alternatively, one can think of this type of reading at a range of larger scales, in terms of interrogating the global, national and local conditions that make a particular text possible. This approach routes through Said’s contrapuntal reading (Said 1994), which most famously read Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park as a text that has as an unspoken condition of its existence the dependence

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of the English country house on the Caribbean slave plantation, not only in terms of revenues but also in terms of assumptions of hierarchy that related to differently gendered and racialised bodies in both places. This kind of contrapuntal reading allows development analyses that look across international boundaries to critique and question key development dynamics that are coproduced through relationships between Global South and Global North (Noxolo and Featherstone 2014). These include conflicts and insecurities, which many have noted are emblematic of global interrelationships (Sidaway 2003; Duffield 2007), and the presence of which can be traced both through development texts and through postcolonial literature (Noxolo 2014).

5

Conclusion

This chapter has worked towards a notion of postcolonial and development theories as locked in negotiation one with another. Postcolonial theory has responded to changes in development theory, arguing repeatedly for shifts in the foci, constructs and disciplinary centres of development theory. So if we return to Christine Sylvester’s (1999: 703) succinct summary with which I began this chapter, ‘development studies does not tend to listen to subalterns and postcolonial studies does not tend to concern itself with whether the subaltern is eating,’ we can say there is still some truth in this. Development is concerned with the pressing materialities with which the most vulnerable live, whether or not people can find enough to eat this very day. Postcolonial approaches are stubbornly critical of processes of subalternity, and remain insistent on questions of equality and voice. However, it is also true to say that development theories are strongly characterised by critical tensions and contestations, many of which arise explicitly from the challenges of postcolonial theory. At the same time, postcolonial approaches are increasingly addressing questions of methodology to improve the quality of listening in development research (Raghuram and Madge 2006), with an increasing awareness of the materiality of everyday living in vulnerable situations. So postcolonial and development theories are concerned with both poverty and inequality: they negotiate to fundamentally address the latter, whilst not ignoring the reality of the former.

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4 Ethical Issues in Development Jay Drydyk

1

Introduction

Discussions of ethical issues in development begin with concerns that development projects or processes have gone wrong. Among these discussions, we can distinguish two broad kinds. Some focus on the nature of development, or on the nature of worthwhile development (as distinguished from undesirable maldevelopment). The anti-development or post-development school of thought is an example of the former, and the development ethics school that traces its roots back to Denis Goulet exemplifies the latter. These ‘intrinsic’ issues will be discussed in Sect.  1. Other discussions focus more on ethical issues that arise from ways in which development is practiced—or not practiced. Attempts to bring about development may bring about dilemmas, or it may be difficult to realise some values of worthwhile development without also realising others. Finally, there are questions of who is responsible for bringing about worthwhile development. All of these can be called ‘issues arising’, and they will be discussed in Sect. 2. Two notes on terminology are in order. First, what I am presenting here as ‘ethical issues in development’ is only part of what others have called ‘development ethics’, which calls for integration of theory and practice. This can be thought of in a range of ways, from Goulet’s ideal of activism (Goulet 1995) to something more akin to professional ethics (Gasper 1994; Lera St.Clair J. Drydyk ( ) Carleton University, Canada © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 J. Grugel, D. Hammett (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of International Development, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-42724-3_4

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2007; Cortina 2008; Gasper and Lera St.Clair 2010), with many shades in between (Crocker 1991; Dower 2008; Schwenke 2009). Second, one may well wonder what people have in mind for the meaning of ‘development’ when they discuss ethics in development. The answer is that there is no consensus. The meaning of ‘development’ is as varied among development ethicists as it is among other development scholars, and perhaps even more so. According to one leading development ethicist, ‘development is a process of socioeconomic-political change which takes place in a country (locality, region, etc.)’ (Dower 2008: 184), while according to others it is ‘enhanced production or distribution of perceived public or private goods’ (Penz et al. 2011: 42).

2

Intrinsic Issues

Anti-Development/Post-Development Theory As Cowen and Shenton have observed, the meaning of ‘development’ has been ambiguous since the nineteenth century. In one conception, development is inexorable, a juggernaut that remakes societies and sweeps away vestiges of the past. Respectable Victorians may have labelled this ‘progress’ but others drew attention to its destructive, harmful, and exploitative nature, especially as experienced by workers (Cowen and Shenton 1996). In the words of Marx and Engels, ‘the bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society…. All that is solid melts into air’ (Marx and Engels 1848/2010: 16). Meanwhile, ‘the modern labourer … becomes a pauper, and pauperism develops more rapidly than population and wealth’ (Marx and Engels 1848/2010: 20). The contrasting conception regarded development not as inexorable but as an intentional reforming process. It was the remit of ‘development’ in this sense to clean up the mess left behind by ‘development’ in the former sense (Cowen and Shenton 1996: 6). By the end of the twentieth century, anti-development (or ‘postdevelopment’) thinkers had reworked these ideas in novel ways. Following Foucault, Arturo Escobar (1995) argued that development is a nexus of knowledge and power that begins by conceiving of people as ‘underdeveloped’ and therefore in need of development as a project. Neocolonial aspects of this enterprise have been highlighted by Gustavo Esteva (1992). Other antidevelopment thinkers gave greater attention to development as an inexorable process, especially insofar as it is environmentally destructive (Sachs 1992). The central point on which they agreed is that development (whether project

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or process) is inherently harmful and destructive. It cannot be reformed; it must be replaced with projects or processes that are fundamentally different. Later the approach was given a new name, ‘post-development’, but the central idea was the same (Rahnema and Bawtree 1997; Rist 2008; see also Noxolo, this collection). Its opponents have criticised it for inconsistency (Nederveen Pieterse 2000) and for overlooking important differences both among development strategies and among political alternatives (Kiely 1999). The idea that outsiders can sometimes make valuable contributions to local development, without colonising it, has been explored by David Crocker (2006).

Worthwhile Development Versus Maldevelopment Alternatively, we may want to discriminate between cases in which development goes badly and cases in which it goes well (or, at least, not so badly). This requires starting from a conception of development that is descriptive rather than normative, a sense in which good development and bad development alike can be categorised as ‘development’. If we choose the concept of economic growth for this role, then the question becomes when growth is worthwhile and when it is undesirable. However, in contrast, we may also want to talk about ‘development’ with a normative connotation, as we do when we say things like ‘There is more to development than growth.’ What is meant here is that worthwhile development is not reducible to growth. What this reveals is that two concepts of development are actually in use: a descriptive concept of what development is and a normative concept of what development ought to be. In the former sense, development is a mere means; in the latter sense, it is a goal or standard of achievement. Drawing on earlier work by his mentor Louis-Joseph Lebret, Denis Goulet (2006: 50–62) began to champion this approach in the 1970s. In his 1971 book The Cruel Choice, he characterised worthwhile or ‘authentic’ development as a process of change leading from practices and conditions of life perceived as ‘less human’ to a better, ‘more human’ life. As he was fond of saying, the goal of authentic development is not having more, but having enough to be more, that is, to lead a more full and flourishing human life (Goulet 2006: 128–138). To achieve this kind of change, he argued, there are two further requirements. One is human solidarity: recognising that the good of any people is both causally and morally interdependent with the good of all—and acting on this recognition. The second and last requirement is broad popular participation in decision-making (Goulet 2006: 144–152). While many people were influenced by Goulet (Crocker 2008: 4–5; Gasper 2011), the discussion of worthwhile versus undesirable development had

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been taking place for as long as development policy had been proposed and debated after the Second World War. Much of the debate over what development is was at least implicitly concerned with what development ought to be, though at the time the values distinguishing worthwhile from undesirable development were not often made explicit, much less discussed systematically. In retrospect, then, Goulet’s distinction can be fleshed out more fully by reviewing those debates to discern which values were used to distinguish what development ought to be from what ought to be avoided. When this is done, seven broad values stand out (Penz et al. 2011: 116–152; Drydyk 2011: 251–254). Worthwhile development consists not merely in economic growth but in (1) enhancing people’s well-being, and, indeed, (2) doing so equitably, not in ways that create or reproduce social inequality or elite capture of advantage. It should also (3) involve people’s free participation, and (4) it should be environmentally sustainable. Worthwhile development supports and enhances (5) human rights along with (6) cultural freedom and social inclusion; and, finally, (7) it is carried out not by corrupt means or for corrupt purposes but with integrity. It is best to leave these broad values somewhat undefined, understanding that their meaning and interpretation is subject to further debate among development theorists, practitioners, policymakers, and stakeholders. This approach also expands and enriches the field of development ethics considerably by including many of the significant debates in development policy over the past six decades (see Gasper 2004). Over the past 25 years, one school of thought has had more influence within these debates than any other: the human development and capability approach, initiated by the collaboration between Mahbub ul Haq and Amartya Sen to create the Human Development Index (HDI). This school of thought has become a sizeable network worldwide, organised by the Human Development and Capabilities Association (www.capabilityapproach.com), and its members have made significant contributions to the meaning and interpretation of six of the seven values defining worthwhile development. A full presentation of ethical and philosophical debate and discussion of the capability approach exceeds the scope of this article; readers wishing to delve deeper into this debate can begin with Robeyns (2011) and Qizilbash (2008). With the aim of putting people and human welfare back into a development discourse that had become too narrowly economistic, ul Haq proposed a human-centred conception of development as the cornerstone of the human development approach. Thus, ‘the basic purpose of development is to enlarge people’s choices … to create an enabling environment for people to enjoy long, healthy, and creative lives’ (Haq 1995: 14). Hence, development is not

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reducible to economic growth, since the kinds of gains that people value ‘do not show up at all, or not immediately, in income or growth figures: greater access to knowledge, better nutrition and health services, more secure livelihoods, security against crime and physical violence, satisfying leisure hours, political and cultural freedoms and a sense of participation in community activities’ (Haq 1995: 14). While this is the primary characteristic that distinguishes worthwhile development for ul Haq, it is not the only one. The human development paradigm, as ul Haq understood it, also called for equity (reducing inequalities of choice and opportunity for living well), environmental sustainability, expanded human productivity, and empowerment (Haq 1995: 17–20). Over the past 25 years, the capability approach has added a more precise understanding of the basic concepts of human development as well as methodologies for measuring poverty, inequality, and change (Alkire 2005; Robeyns 2005; Crocker 2008: 107–214; Deneulin and Shahani 2009). This approach has been rich in implications for ethics in development (Esquith and Gifford 2010). The starting point of the capability approach is actually not the concepts of capability or capabilities but the concept of functioning: the project begins by identifying those ways of being and doing that constitute essential dimensions of living well. Sen (1992: 39) typically gives examples that ‘vary from such elementary things as being adequately nourished, being in good health … to more complex achievements such as being happy, having self-respect, taking part in the life of the community, and so on’. The capability approach does not prescribe these as elements of living well; rather, it derives its ideas of living well from observation of what people have reason to value. The approach also assumes that these functionings, abstractly conceived, can be realised in different ways in different cultures. The extent of a person’s overall capability is the extent of those functionings, in combination, that this person can actually manage to achieve. This is, in short, the person’s substantive freedom to live well, or well-being freedom (Sen 1993). Capabilities can also be considered individually, for instance, capabilities to be well nourished, to be in good health, to learn, to have good personal relationships, and so on. Martha Nussbaum has argued for a list of ten central capabilities: to live a life of normal length, to be in good health, bodily integrity, using senses, imagination and thought in truly human ways, emotional life and associations, practical reason, engaging in social and personal relationships conducive to self-respect, living with concern for other species, play, and having control over the social, economic, and political environment (Nussbaum 2000: 75–85; Nussbaum 2006: 69–81; Nussbaum 2011b: 17–45). Sen, on the other hand, has argued

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for a more contextual approach (Sen 2005: 157–160). Once a capability that everyone (or everyone in a particular context) has reason to value has been identified, measures can be devised for comparing the magnitude of that capability among different persons and over time. Poverty, then, can be conceived and measured as a shortfall in capabilities (Sen 1999a: 87–110). In this way, capability concepts have played a formative role in developing the non-monetary measures of poverty included in the HDI and related indices published by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). The HDI was first released in 1990. It was followed in 1995 by a Gender Empowerment Measure and a Gender Development Index, which were replaced by a Gender Inequality Index in 2010, at which time an InequalityAdjusted HDI and a Multidimensional Poverty Index were also introduced (see http://hdr.undp.org/en/data). One reason why the capability approach has become influential in development ethics is the extent to which it has contributed to the ongoing task of interpreting the broad values of development ethics, to which I turn next.

Specific Values of Development: Interpretations 1. Well-being. Agreement that development ought to enhance well-being broaches the question of how well-being ought to be conceived and measured. One persistent proposal argues for basic needs (Streeten et al. 1981; Doyal and Gough 1991) rather than income measures. The capability approach also argues against income or resource measures of well-being on grounds of human diversity: two people with equal resources may be far from equal if one has much greater needs, for example, due to a disability (Sen 1992: 73–87). The capability approach also opposes subjective satisfaction as a criterion for well-being, due to adaptive preferences, which arise when ‘deprived people tend to come to terms with their deprivation because of the sheer necessity of survival, … and they may adjust their desires and expectations to what they unambitiously see as feasible’ (Sen 1992: 63). Someone in this condition may feel as little dissatisfaction as someone with much better life conditions (see Nussbaum 2000: 135–147; Khader 2011). 2. Equity/equality. Similarly, opposition to unequal or inequitable development raises the question of which inequalities matter. Thus, the philosophical ‘Inequality of what?’ debate is central to ethics in development. Once again, the capability approach answers with well-being freedom or capabilities rather than resources or subjective satisfaction. Since implicitly we

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are asking which inequalities are most significant for distributive justice, it is natural to ask for criteria of justice or, as Sen has proposed, for comparative justice (Sen 2009: 15–17). In particular, does justice unrelentingly call for continuous reduction of inequality, or only to a point of sufficiency where everyone has enough? For Sen, the imperative of justice is for equality, though he also recognises a need to balance this against an imperative of efficiency, to raise the well-being freedom of all (without merely subtracting it from others). For pragmatic reasons, Martha Nussbaum contends that it is sufficient to work out how to ensure that everyone has sufficient capabilities: achieving full equality may well be the ultimate goal, but this is a goal that can be consigned to the future; for the present, achieving sufficiency for everyone will be difficult enough. There is one caveat: for civil and political freedoms, only equality is sufficient (Nussbaum 2006: 291–295). For all capabilities, what is sufficient must be determined by public reason both in the context of each particular society (Nussbaum 2000: 77) and as a global standard set by the international community (Nussbaum 2006: 291). 3. Participation/agency/empowerment. Criticism of top-down development that does not adequately include people in decision-making has a long history, tracing back to colonial times, and in the postcolonial period the value of participatory development slowly gained recognition by development institutions (Brohman 1996). Often it was regarded as a necessary means, without which development projects were less likely to succeed (Griffin 1999), but as early as 1971 Goulet (1971, 148) argued for its intrinsic value on grounds that people ‘are entitled to become agents, not mere beneficiaries, of their own development’, a value echoed later by the UN General Assembly in its Declaration on the Right to Development (United Nations, General Assembly 1986). However, it became evident that the meaning of ‘participation’ could be stretched quite thin: ‘participatory’ consultations could be conducted in way that still deprived stakeholders any real influence on development decisions, and merely working for a project could be considered ‘participation’ in it. Arguably, then, it is not participation per se that marks worthwhile development, but agency: expanding people’s agency in and through development, and in particular linking expansion of agency freedom with expansion well-being freedom (Sen 1999a: 190ff; Crocker 2008: 215–294). Capability theorists and others embraced and redefined the concept of empowerment as expansion of agency (Alkire 2002: 131; Ibrahim and Alkire 2007), so that empowerment has arguably taken the place of participation as a distinguishing feature of worthwhile development. One further issue arising from this change is

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whether defining empowerment as expansion of agency does not make the concept of empowerment too individualistic, lacking the reference it once made to relations of power (Drydyk 2014; Koggel 2007). Disempowering practices are almost too varied and numerous to discuss systematically. Persons affected by projects can be ignored, their existence can be denied, project information may not reach them (or may be concealed), their recognised representatives may not represent the people at all or may put their own interests over those of the community, assistance or recourse may be available on paper but it may be difficult to make claims for lack of facilitation, and so on (Penz et al. 2011: 198–207). On the other hand, some disempowering practices are disarmingly simple, such as ‘not listening’ to the intended beneficiaries of aid and having an imbalanced ‘accountability fixation’ towards aid agencies that eclipses any attempt at ‘downward’ accountability towards aid beneficiaries and stakeholders (Parkinson 2013: 137–138). David Crocker invokes the values of agency and empowerment to advocate for the deepening of democracy. He draws upon Sen’s arguments that democracy has intrinsic value, instrumental value, and it is also constructive of the values that a society carries forward (Crocker 2008: 297–308). These values are realised all the more when public decisions emerge through deliberation conducted not just by representatives but by citizens at large— such as the participatory budgeting processes that are held in Porto Alegre, Brazil, and elsewhere (Crocker 2008: 309–337; Baiocchi 2003). The capability approach also supports a framework for judging when a governance system is functioning ‘more democratically’ (Drydyk 2005). 4. Sustainability. The Brundtland Commission achieved widespread acceptance of the principle that worthwhile development must be environmentally sustainable development that ‘meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’ (World Commission on Environment and Development 1987: 8). Debate on the meaning of ‘sustainable development’ has splintered environmental ethics into a multitude of alternative views (Light and Rolston 2002), most of which hold that sustainability should be understood not just in terms of human well-being but also in terms of the well-being of non-human organisms, or the well-being of species, or the health of ecosystems, or the integrity, simplicity, and beauty of the land (Light and Rolston 2002). With a few exceptions, there has been little uptake within development ethics of these ideas from environmental ethics. Anti-development theorists have argued that ‘sustainable development’ is an oxymoron—that it is in the nature of economic development to cause environmental damage affecting

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humans and non-humans alike (Sachs 1992). Vandana Shiva’s ecofeminism (Shiva 1989; Mies and Shiva 1993) focusses more precisely on the damaging impacts of capitalist agriculture but does not go so far as to say that development per se is inherently unsustainable. She uses the term ‘development’ in a contextualised way, as for instance specifying ‘land development’ and ‘water development’ (Shiva 2002: 63,110), ‘development and growth’, and ‘economic development’ (Shiva 2006: 15ff). She has consistently indicated spurious forms of ‘development’ with scare quotes, which suggests that she is distinguishing implicitly between development that is undesirable and alternative forms of development that would be worthwhile. The buen vivir movement in the Andes draws on indigenous cultures to reconceive worthwhile development as living well within communities, and those communities include their natural environments (Gudynas 2011). In Ecuador, this movement has led to constitutional entrenchment for the rights of nature (Becker 2011). More philosophically, Martha Nussbaum has proposed bridging between justice for humans (present and future) and non-humans by considering non-damaging interactions with other species as an element of human well-being: thus, environmentally damaging consumerism or agricultural practices should be contrasted and excluded from our idea of living well. Any remaining chasm between human and non-human welfare has also been challenged by the problem of climate change (discussed at greater length in Section 2). 5. Human rights and cultural freedom. These are inevitably and appropriately discussed together. Lee Kuan Yew made explicit the belief, held implicitly in other countries, that economic growth and development should be given priority over human rights. His rationale was that growth in Asia was based on Asian values: individuals pulling together for the common good of family and society (Zakaria and Lee 1994: 113–114). Allegedly, the individualism that underlies human rights is inimical to these values. Yet the contrary view, that human rights and development are not opposed but linked, has been advocated by leaders of other developing countries, as expressed in the Declaration on the Right to Development and reiterated in the Report of the South Commission, both of which affirm that worthwhile development employs growth to progressively realise human rights (UN General Assembly 1986; South Commission and Nyerere 1990). The ‘Lee thesis’ has been criticised on both factual and normative grounds. Prior to his election as President of South Korea, Kim Dae-Jung replied that Asian governments are far from being as family-friendly as Lee contended, that there are pro-democratic ideas and values in Asian traditions, and that there are no practical alternatives for Asian societies besides democracy

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(Kim 1994). Amartya Sen argued not only for the intrinsic value of human rights but also that there is no negative correlation between human rights practice and economic growth; in addition, he cited historic South Asian precedents for human rights (Sen 1999b). Nussbaum and others have argued that the capability approach not only supports both human rights and cultural pluralism but also shows how they can harmonise (Drydyk 2011; Nussbaum 2011a). Policies of multiculturalism and inclusion that derive from these ideas are reviewed in Human Development Report 2004 (UNDP 2004). 6. Discussion of integrity has been led not so much by ethicists as by policymakers and social scientists. Long gone are the days when it could be argued that corruption is beneficial to development (Leff 1964; Leys 1965). The 1990 report of the South Commission, led by Julius Nyerere, labelled corruption as one of six ‘flaws in the development experience’ (South Commission and Nyerere 1990: 51–52). Five years later, the Commission on Global Governance construed it as simple theft (Commission on Global Governance 1995: 63–64). More recent research has shown that corruption is not only inequitable but also inefficient, reducing growth (Mauro 2002). Moreover, it undermines state legitimacy (Rose-Ackerman 2002) and democratic politics (Johnston 2005) while disproportionately harming the poor (Thomas et al. 2000). Most recently, Michael Johnston (2013) has argued that ‘deep democratisation’ is essential to overcoming corruption, though different kinds of corruption require distinctive responses. Hence, there are links between integrity and several of the other values of worthwhile development.

3

Issues Arising

Other ethical issues concerning development seem less bound up in the nature of development or the distinction between worthwhile development and maldevelopment.

Dilemmas: Value Conflicts Development practitioners often encounter ethical issues as dilemmas. David Crocker gives this challenging example: A national planner has to choose between two policies. The first policy would establish a national park in an area noted for its exotic but endangered flora and

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fauna. The land has also been home for generations to scores of small-scale slashand-burn farmers. The second policy would permit the farmers to stay on their land and sell their trees to sawmills. Moreover, this second policy would contribute to the economic growth of the region and save these farm families from severe poverty. Which policy would be morally better? Would the answer be different if fears were justified about deforestation’s role in global warming? If the crop were coca leaves rather than trees? Is there some third policy that would provide environmental protection without uprooting or undermining the economic livelihood of the human populations? Now suppose that the planner cannot get the third policy adopted unless he resorts to bribery and deception of other officials. What should the planner do? (Crocker 1991: 461–462)

The reason why development practice is prone to dilemmas like these is that worthwhile development has multiple values that may be difficult to realise simultaneously. In Crocker’s example, human well-being seems pitted against environmental values in the short term, and possibly, through climate change, against the well-being of future human communities. The ethical path, as the example suggests, lies in trying to harmonise these values, although this is a path that cannot always be seen, and, in some cases, blocked. Here ethics in development is best seen not in terms of duty but as virtue. It seems overly demanding to say that only the practice that resolves all of the dilemmas is right, doing anything else is wrong. It seems more reasonable to focus on the difference between doing better and doing worse, and ‘doing better’ means doing better at finding and choosing practices that harmonise the many values of worthwhile development. In the field, development ethics is better seen as a worse-or-better ethics of virtue, rather than a right-or-wrong ethics of duty.

Interdependence of Values In some of the most significant issues of ethics in development, we find that development offends against many—if not all—of these values. Gender, displacement, and climate change are three examples. A full discussion of any of these issues would exceed the scope of this chapter: therefore, I focus on the interdependence of values that they illustrate. Gender The pioneering research of Ester Boserup (1970) showed how often development is not very good for women, in some cases adding to their disadvantages. Several decades of policy debate and practical response ensued. The growth of research on and advocacy for women in developing countries has provided development ethicists with a knowledge base that in principle enables

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them to avoid Eurocentric distortions (Mohanty 1991) about gender inequalities in the Global South. Martha Nussbaum, for example, familiarised herself thoroughly with gender research and issues in India before writing Women and Human Development (Nussbaum 2000: xvi–xviii). This greater North/ South openness has provided opportunities both for wide-ranging dialogue on gender inequality in development (Glover and Nussbaum 1995) and for critical contextual discussion of more general approaches to women’s well-being and inequality, such as the capability approach (Agarwal, Humphries and Robeyns 2005). Some feminist approaches to gender justice in development have shown what can be learned from a relational approach, that is, by examining inequalities as situated within social relationships (Koggel 2002; Koggel 2003; Bisman and Koggel 2012). How to understand women’s empowerment in the context of development also continues to be discussed, from relational and other perspectives (Khader 2011; Koggel 2014; Palmer 2014). One theme running throughout these discussions is that women’s well-being, equality, and empowerment cannot be understood in isolation from each other. Displacement by development affects millions of households every year as lands on which people relied for habitation or livelihood are appropriated by development projects. Well-being and inequality issues usually are linked in these cases, since forced migration can be impoverishing for those who are resettled, while benefits of the project that causes displacement may be reaped by others. One central challenge is to find ways in which project management and governance might empower displaced people so that they are able to achieve just outcomes (Penz et al. 2011). Climate change threatens many of the values of development ethics. It has already increased exposure to both flooding and drought, affecting livelihoods. There are numerous equity questions, in that low-income countries will be least able to pay for adapting to these effects, while the countries that have contributed most to the causes will be best able to cope with adaptation. The question of who should pay for reducing carbon emissions as well as adaptation measures is commonly linked with past emissions and responsibility for climate change (Gardiner et al. 2010). Risks to future generations are clear, and we face no greater issue of sustainability. In the worst-case scenarios, cross-border migration may lead to loss of citizenship and other failures of human rights. So the results of climate change either already are or likely will be damaging to at least four of the values of worthwhile development: well-being, equity, sustainability, and human rights. The development that has produced climate change is accordingly a case of undesirable development. So it would seem obvious that climate change should be a central

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issue of development ethics. However, the intellectual division of labour has not unfolded accordingly. People contributing to climate ethics do not regard themselves as contributing to development ethics, and few of those who see themselves as working in development ethics have contributed to climate ethics. There are two hopeful exceptions. Donald Brown and Christian Becker have published several papers presented at a conference designed to promote greater interaction between climate ethics and development ethics (Becker and Brown 2013). Asunción St Clair and Des Gasper have promoted human security as a value that must be realised as we respond to the problem of climate change (O’Brien et al. 2010; Gasper 2010, 2013). Human security is contrasted with state security: it is concerned principally with the security of citizens against severe downside risks to well-being, both precipitous (e.g., through disaster, epidemic, economic crisis, armed conflict), and chronic (e.g., endemic poverty). Amartya Sen has used capability concepts as foundations for these ideas (Commission on Human Security 2004).

Responsibilities Discussions of who is responsible for promoting worthwhile development, and why, are subsumed within a much larger literature on responsibilities towards distant others. In what follows, an initial sketch of some prominent positions and trends in the larger literature will be followed by discussion of responses that are more centrally concerned with development. The starting point for this discussion was Peter Singer’s (1972) article ‘Famine, Affluence, and Morality’. Using the need for famine relief resulting from the East Pakistan conflict that led to the independence of Bangladesh as a case in point, Singer (1972: 231) proposed that ‘if it is in our power to prevent something bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, then we ought, morally, to do it.’ Distance or proximity may be relevant to whether we do help others, but not to whether we ought to help them, because no principle of impartiality or universalisability will allow us to discriminate against people merely because they are far away from us (Singer 1972: 232). However, this argument has not gone uncontested (Chatterjee 2004). Moreover, as Singer points out, this principle elevates aid to distant strangers from being charitable (good to do, but not obligatory) to being a duty (wrong not to do). One objection is that this creates an overload of duties that would make morality unbearable (Singer 1972 237ff; Fishkin 1982). In response, one might weaken the principle somewhat, exempting us from making sacrifices of any moral significance (Singer 1972, 241) or from

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doing more than our fair share (van Wyk 1988), although these proposals have met with extensive debate (Arneson 2004). Alternatively, duties across borders could be regarded not as duties of beneficence but as duties of justice. But does the concept of justice apply globally, or only within societies? The latter was affirmed by John Rawls, who held that justice is a property of the basic structure of a society. His approach, justice as fairness, held that a just structure is one that could be agreed to by fair procedures, modelled iconically by the ‘veil of ignorance’, behind which people choosing a social structure do not know where they will end up within it. Rawls argued that this would yield two principles of justice, the first equalising civil and political liberties, and the second limiting inequalities of primary goods. He observed that these specific principles were ‘a special case of a more general conception of justice’ limiting all inequalities to those that work to everyone’s advantage, so that ‘injustice, then, is simply inequalities that are not to the benefit of all’ (Rawls 1971: 62). However, it is arguably arbitrary not to apply fairness worldwide. If global structures were decided behind a veil of ignorance, with decision-makers unaware of where in the world they would end up, would they not apply the general conception of justice globally? These and related arguments were made for globalising the scope of justice as fairness (Beitz 1973; Pogge 1989, 1992), which came to be known as the ‘cosmopolitan’ approach to justice. Critical responses to cosmopolitanism have been many and varied, but they can all be described as holding that justice (and duties of justice) apply only amongst people who are associated in some specific ways, by social practices with shared goals (MacIntyre 1981; Walzer 1983), by nationality (Miller 1995), or by being subject to the coercion of a state (Nagel 2005). The debate has continued unabated for the past 20 years (see Blake and Smith 2013). To people familiar with and committed to resolving problems of international development, the idea that there may be no international obligations in aid of development will seem challenging, to put it mildly. Several responses to this challenge have emerged. Onora O’Neill (1986) offered a Kantian alternative to cosmopolitan Rawlsianism in Faces of Hunger. Kantian ethics offers two ways of attacking global inequality. Kant took pains to show that duties to help others in distress or need can be derived in several ways from the categorical imperative. Kant classified these, however, as duties of virtue: one may distinguish oneself as a better person by performing them more frequently and extensively. More to the point, they are ‘imperfect duties’ that do not specify exactly who must be helped, and how, by each of those who can. They are not perfect duties of justice, which must always be performed. Therefore, the development aid that the developed world is obligated to provide to the developing world has no clear

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upper or lower limits (i.e., above zero). While O’Neill (1986: 181) includes these imperfect obligations as part of a contemporary Kantian response to world inequality and poverty, she does not regard it as a central part. More central are the perfect duties of justice not to engage in coercion or deception. These apply to global poverty because extreme need subjects people to coercion, to accepting oppressive governance and exploitative remuneration. From colonial times to the present, this has enabled countries and corporations of the Global North to establish exploitative institutions and relationships with countries and people of the South (O’Neill 1986: 146–155). In a similar vein (though not on Kantian grounds), Kok-Chor Tan (2006) proposed that reparations arguments for slavery and colonialism should be used to supplement cosmopolitan arguments for reducing global inequalities. Thomas Pogge, on the other hand, has contended that reparative arguments can stand on their own feet insofar as world institutions facilitate the continuation of poverty and thereby share responsibility for it. The perpetuation of poverty in developing countries is cause in large part by ‘the incompetence, corruption, and tyranny entrenched in the governments, social institutions, and cultures of many developing countries’ (Pogge 2002: 21). The international system facilitates these tendencies by granting states two unrestricted privileges: a resource privilege, to sell the resources of the country at will, and a borrowing privilege, to borrow funds for the state on international markets. Those who govern are thereby enabled to use these privileges to build up military forces that can stifle internal opposition and dissent, buy votes and elections, and build personal fortunes. And then there is no need to respond to public demands for poverty reduction. The developed world contributes to this as an enabler by facilitating the resource and borrowing privileges (Pogge 2002: 112–116), and that is why developed countries share in responsibility for poverty in the developing world. More recently, drawing on the work of Iris Marion Young (2011) and others, Joan Tronto (2012) has developed an account of responsibility that is not causal but relational, finding the sources of responsibility in relationships beginning with kinship and history but extending to include market relations—for example, responsibilities towards the low-wage workers who make our clothing. Arguably, Pogge and O’Neill may have given up too easily on cosmopolitan egalitarianism. It is true that the duty to come to the aid of others in need does not specify who should be aided by each of those who can. But it may therefore impose a duty upon those who can contribute to design a plan in which each party has a definite role, which then becomes its strict duty. Sen (2004: 338–341) touches on this when he argues that an imperfect duty to achieve a given result imposes duties on those who can contribute

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to give reasonable consideration to how they can do so, although, if there is one group who can collectively provide needed assistance to another (without thereby shirking other duties), surely their duty is not merely to give reasonable consideration but to see to it that this is done. Sen (2009: 205–207) does seem to adopt the second position, ‘can implies ought’ in The Idea of Reason. Adela Cortina has invoked the discourse ethics of Karl-Otto Apel and Jürgen Habermas to argue that the legitimacy of ethical discussion requires realising people’s discursive rights to participate in such discussion, which in turn requires realising their human rights. Responsibility for realising both kinds of rights is a shared ‘co-responsibility’ (Cortina 2003: 114). More recently, Sarah Clark Miller has combined a Kantian perspective with feminist care ethics to support responsibility to care for the needs of others (Miller 2012).

4

Conclusions

Cowen and Shenton (1996) show that issues of ethics in development date from at least the nineteenth century, but many development ethicists would date the beginning of the current round of discussions to Denis Goulet’s work in the 1970s. Since that time, a vast number of voices, issues, and theoretical approaches have entered into the discussion. In light of this, one may well wonder: is there much hope of finding convincing answers, or just puzzling questions? Do we need a new ethical theory of some sort to set everything straight? Many ethicists now regard moral pluralism as a fact of social life in modernity (Rawls 2001: 32–38). There are many reasonable moral paradigms, many reliable intellectual constructions for working out differences between right and wrong, and they are not reducible to or replaceable by any single grand theory. Nevertheless, it would be wrong to conclude ‘anything goes’. Ethical discussion of development takes place in the context of what has been called ‘public reason’ or ‘public reasoning’. There are several features of public reason that provide us more traction in discussing ethics in development. First, argumentation is required which must be adequately value-based and adequately evidence-based. Second, if my account of the seven values of worthwhile development is correct, we have considerable agreement on the applicable values. Third, the capability approach points in the direction of facts and measures that can be very useful as ethically relevant evidence. Fourth, public reason demands impartiality (Sen 2009: 114–142) in two senses: (a) everyone’s relevant ideas and arguments must be considered and (b) everyone’s well-being matters, and matters equally. All of these are valuable constraints, tools for narrowing disagreement on all questions of ethics in development and giving decisive answers on some.

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5 Democracy and Development: A Relationship of Harmony or Tension? Matthew Louis Bishop

1

Introduction

If you regularly watch the television news and listen to politicians, you could be forgiven for believing that there is an obvious and undeniably positive relationship between democracy and development. We are bombarded regularly with a simple and reassuring message: more of the former equals more of the latter, and vice versa. Since most of us are, in a normative sense, democrats of some kind, and we tend to favour improving local and global living standards through development, it is easy to accept intuitively that the two are mutually reinforcing. In academia, likewise, many are convinced that democracy and development exist in symbiosis. Since the 1950s, claims have regularly been made in political science and development studies that the ‘modernisation’ of less developed countries would result from, and continue to provoke, greater development, democratisation, and human advancement and security (Gilman 2007). More recently, the emergence in the more conventional quarters of International Relations (IR) of the ‘Democratic Peace Theory’ (DPT)—that is, the notion that rich, democratic countries do not wage war against each other—has reinforced such a view (Geis and Wagner 2011). It is hardly surprising, then, that these ideas have been readily accepted by Western governments, global governance institutions, and non-governmental M.L. Bishop ( ) University of the West Indies, Trinidad and Tobago © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 J. Grugel, D. Hammett (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of International Development, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-42724-3_5

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organisations, and they consequently underpin both the widespread promotion of democratic change and official global development agendas and discourses. None of this is inherently misguided: democracy and development can and do exist together, they are usually regarded as desirable in and of themselves, and they can reinforce each other in positive ways. However, what is misguided is the assumption that they simply reproduce each other, in some kind of linear fashion. It is, therefore, but a short step to believing that the kinds of existing liberal democracy and development that can be identified in Europe and North America are essentially the only kinds available. Any relationship that they might share is seen to be so compelling as to contain a degree of truly scientific merit, and is, therefore, worthy of active reproduction beyond the West. Such a view is problematic, in both theory and practice. First, neither ‘democracy’ nor ‘development’ can be reduced to that which exists in the West: they are both highly contested concepts embodying myriad unresolved debates. Second, even if we ignore this and accept the liberal account of human progress on its own terms, the causative link between the two, nonetheless, remains highly ambiguous. Third, there is a heavy dose of teleology within liberal theories of modernisation: from such a vantage point, democracy and development are seen as end-states that, by definition, certain ‘developed’ and ‘democratic’ countries somehow achieved at an unspecified moment in the past (Leftwich 2000). They, therefore, become ideal-type cases against which everyone else is judged, often unflatteringly. Yet in reality, both democratisation and development exist on a spectrum: the extent of either in any society is subject to improvement or deterioration over time, and should therefore be understood as ongoing processes of change which are inherently contingent on the behaviour of actors within specific political, economic, social, geographic, and cultural contexts (Payne 2005). These issues are explored in the following way. In the first substantive section, I discuss the two concepts in greater depth and demonstrate how narrow, liberal understandings have become hegemonic in official discourse and policy. In the second section, I show how this is problematic through the analysis of three contemporary phenomena: the ambiguous role that external interventions often play in shaping democratic or developmental change; the challenge posed by new patterns of authoritarian growth and development that appear to be insulated from democratic reform, with a specific focus on China; and the apparent decline in both development and the quality of democracy that exists in much of the West.

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Conflicting Debates

Before we begin to consider the nature of the relationship between democracy and development, we must first grapple with these contested concepts. As Anthony Payne and Nicola Phillips (2010: 1) have suggested in relation to the latter, ‘The concept of development has never been in greater need of analysis and clarification than in the present era. Indeed, a point has been reached where it urgently needs to be unpacked by informed, rigorous thinking. The reasons for this are twofold and connected: on the one hand, the word has come to be extraordinarily widely used in public discourse, probably more so than ever before in its history; on the other hand, it has perhaps never been deployed so glibly, and in general so little questioned and understood, as in the early years of this century.’ To substantiate this claim, we can consider the many trade-offs that characterise development, of which the most enduring is between the imperative to improve material living standards globally through growth and the consequent transformation of society, on the one hand, and the protection of the biosphere and traditional ways of life, on the other. For example, many pundits champion industrial expansion in China, which is often said to have ‘lifted’ hundreds of millions of people ‘out of poverty’, yet how do we reconcile this with the fact that the resultant pollution threatens, through climate change, the existence of other societies, most of them small and marginalised island states in the Caribbean, Pacific, and Indian Ocean (Bishop and Payne 2012)? It is also striking that, if we were to substitute the word ‘democracy’ for development, the lengthy quote above would make just as much sense. Compared to radical interpretations in the past, contemporary understandings of ‘democracy’ have been largely stripped of meaning. This is, firstly, because of ideology, meaning the pre-eminence of a neo-liberal global order and associated official discourses, and, secondly, because narrow definitions are amenable to quantification, measurement, and consensus. Yet this necessarily involves glossing over various problems and trade-offs, including the fact that democracies are a relatively recent development, they are notoriously unstable, their creation can be extremely painful, and, although it may sound contradictory, greater democratisation is not always a guarantee of greater democracy. These concepts, therefore, need to be unpicked in some detail before we even consider the broader challenge of working out what the relationship between the two might be.

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What Are Democracy and Development? Democracy, at its most basic, simply means rule by the people (i.e., the ‘demos’), and there are many different ways that this might be achieved: liberal democracy is therefore but one, distinctly modern, possible form. Development is a thornier concept, but it, nonetheless, essentially refers to a situation whereby an actor—an individual, community, country, and so on—undergoes a systematic process of change resulting in the progression from one kind of state of being to another. The formal ‘development project’ initiated by Western modernisation theorists after 1945 represented the institutionalisation of a specific, modern understanding of development as something ‘developed’ countries had achieved and the rest of the world had not. Consequently, by stripping democracy and development back to their conceptual essence, we can see how competing views have emerged based upon prevailing ideological trends, political commitments, and geographical foci. Thus, Table  5.1 shows a simple (far from comprehensive) typology of different perspectives, employing somewhat crude dividing classificatory lines that are, in reality, far fuzzier (see Payne and Phillips 2010; Grugel and Bishop 2013). This table illustrates how there exists a distinct theoretical tradition in the study of both that descends from classical liberalism. In short, the liberal view is a narrow one: democracy is measured in terms of form—that is, the existence of a free press, elections, rule of law enshrined within democratic constitutions, and upheld by an independent judiciary—rather than substance, and development is effectively considered a mirror of this, as something that follows organically once a limited, democratic state permits free markets to develop and generate growth. It is these values, underpinned by Western power, which have shaped the global order, in general, and official democracy and development agendas, in particular, at least since World War II and the end of the Cold War (Gamble 2009; Cerny 2010). Indeed, for much of the political elite—and mainstream theorists alike—democracy and development can essentially be reduced to the liberal view. However, this is intellectually problematic as it precipitates the dominance of two distinctly emaciated global political agendas while obscuring both alternative perspectives and radical possibilities, along with the full conceptual richness of philosophical ideas about democracy and development. In Table  5.1, these are divided into ‘statist’ and ‘radical’ approaches. In the case of ‘statist’ analyses, it must be remembered that liberalism emerged in the eighteenth century as a response to mercantilist approaches to political economy, and it proclaimed the superiority of free markets and

Development

Global agenda

What causes development?

What is development?

View of state

Bodies of thought

Modernisation Theory, Neo-liberalism

Statist Mercantilism, Economic Nationalism, ‘Catch-Up’ Theories, Developmental State

Radical

(continued )

Marxism, Dependency Theory, World System Theory, AntiDevelopment/PostDevelopment, Feminism, Postcolonialism Motor of development: Exploitative: serves interests of Minimal: role of interventionist, market powerful countries, corporate government is to provide distorting role required to interests and elites versus public goods and shape national development marginalised people and nature intervene minimally to ensure efficient operation objectives of free markets Economic growth, greater Fundamental transformation Disengagement from capitalist human freedom in productive capacity of exploitation, celebration of local economy forms of knowledge and behaviour, emphasis on harmony with nature Economic growth via free Economic growth via Liberation and emancipation markets operating (temporarily) protected from capitalism (rejects efficiently and free trade national industries until they mainstream accounts of become internationally development) competitive Union of subordinated classes and Purposeful management of Economic liberalisation, subaltern groups, destruction of global economy to account privatisation, market corporate power reform, MDGs, global free for differences in state capacity trade

Liberal

Table 5.1 Simple typology of different perspectives

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Liberal

Statist

Structuralism/Historical Modernisation Theory, Sociology (in democratisation Neo-liberalism, DPT, Cosmopolitanism, Transition theory); Post-Neo-liberalism; Populism Theory (agency theory) Locus of, and shaped by, class View of state Sovereignty justified but conflict (in historical limited, aggregates sociology); key agent in individual preferences delivering meaningful through liberal citizenship via redistribution mechanisms and of power, wealth, and institutions to safeguard resources individual liberty Arises through class conflict What is democracy Establishment of liberal over the state (historical (and mechanisms and sociology); measured in democratisation)? institutions (constitutionalism, rule of developmental and redistributive outcomes, and law, free press, elections, may require abrogation of etc.) to maximise liberal principles such as individual liberty, albeit constitutionalism in pursuit of with sometimes limited discipline and obeisance citizenship (in populist approaches to politics) What causes Economic development, An effective and penetrating democratisation? growth and modernisation state that is capable of (expansion of middle accumulating power and class), compromises utilising it to redistribute between elites effectively Global agenda Spreading of liberal peace Greater recognition of via democracy promotion, legitimacy of different paths to modernity construction of liberal global governance order

Democracy Bodies of thought (democratisation)

Radical

Ideal outcome is human emancipation, privileging of community over individual; democratisation of all areas of life (e.g., through cooperatives, social organisations, and active participation); rejection of liberal democracy as bourgeois, incomplete, and, for feminists, patriarchal (e.g., ‘citizen’ and ‘voter’ are inherently male) Pushing of boundaries of ‘political’ so that all areas of life, public and private, between family and planetary levels, become democratic Revolution and class solidarity (for Marxists); greater participation and bringing economic and social spheres under popular control; greater respect for difference

Communitarianism, participatory democracy, associationalism, anarchism, socialist democracy, feminism Frequently seen as intrinsically bourgeois (and, for feminists, patriarchal), privileging interests of business and other elites

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free trade. However, such rhetoric is misguided: Britain, Germany, and the USA did not industrialise and develop during the nineteenth century according to market principles, but rather through protectionism (Chang 2002, 2010). The same was true of the ‘Asian Tigers’ in the twentieth century and, more recently, China in the twenty-first century—examples of ‘developmental states’ that deliberately distorted free markets to stimulate the growth of infant industries and achieve rapid development (see Kyung-Sup, Fine, and Weiss 2012; Fine, Saraswati, and Tavasci 2013). This is very different to a communist or socialist state that becomes the repository for development and eschews private markets completely. Statist approaches to development, though, have foundered amidst the dominance of global liberalism. This is partly because the developmental states of the 1970s have gradually liberalised and integrated into global markets as their infant industries have become competitive, attendant with wider patterns of globalisation. Most critically, perhaps, statism (as I have called it) actually has comparatively little to say about democracy, at least in the liberal sense, because it is either subordinated to the wider developmental needs of the nation as a whole or suspended—whether explicitly or implicitly—until an unspecified future point when the state has achieved the (also unspecified) requisite level of development and accumulated sufficient power to be redistributed. One of the major criticisms of most nationalist projects, therefore, is the way in which individual liberty is often disregarded. At times, developmentalist and populist projects have also been marked by authoritarianism, repression, and the suppression of human rights. Radical approaches are marked by widespread diversity, although all reject the ontological, epistemological, and methodological concerns that illuminate liberalism, and they emphasise the structured patterns of inequality that shape social processes, rather than reducing social life to individualised, selfinterested, utilitarian transactions. For example, Marxists often reject the very idea of liberal democracy as an illusion designed to conceal the continued dominance of the powerful over subordinated classes, and development as a pattern of accumulation that enriches capitalist elites at the expense of the wider population. Radicals also push the boundaries of ‘the political’ beyond the state and the public sphere. For example, feminists emphasise the inherently patriarchal nature of existing political systems and the gendered foundations of capitalist liberal democracy and thus critique claims about greater ‘development’ (in terms of economic growth) and ‘democracy’ (in terms of legal and civil rights) for masking enduring realities of female marginalisation (see Waylen 2007). Finally, radicals also emphasise the substance and content of democracy and development, and not simply the form: it is not enough to have equality before the law if only the well connected have genuine access to

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Table 5.2 A multidirectional relationship? Examples Development facilitates democracy

Critique(s)

Liberal view: growth and Radical: capitalist development expansion of middle class is inherently socially and demands leads to expansion ecologically destructive; of franchise (e.g., the USA democracy lacks substance and Western Europe) Democracy facilitates Liberal view: establishment Radical: liberal democracy is development of rational, predictable, and essentially a sham that poses accountable democratic no challenge to destructive institutions, property rights capitalist order, little and rule of law permits meaningful redistribution of expansion of capitalist power, and, therefore, economy (e.g., the USA and legitimises continued Western Europe) dominance of elites Development Authoritarian resistance Liberal: authoritarian without democracy (e.g., China, Singapore, development is unsustainable Vietnam) and rentierism in long-term due to (e.g., Middle East Gulf inefficiency and monarchies) unpredictability of the state, the need to use coercion domestically, and essential logic of economic expansion leading to demands for rights and accountability Democracy without Constitutionalism Liberal: constitutional development (e.g., Caribbean), democracy is evidence of and supervised democracy development, regardless of (e.g., Iraq) economic consequences. Radical: supervised democracy is meaningless as state is so weak, and rests on violent external imposition that violates democratic norms Absence of Authoritarian resistance Liberal: lack of ‘stateness’ democracy and (e.g., parts of Middle East), requires external supervision development and state ‘failure’ (e.g., by international community parts of Africa) (e.g., Fukuyama 2005). Radical: authoritarian resistance is not enduring (e.g., Arab Spring), it is often legitimised/supported by hypocritical Western/liberal policy that sustains authoritarians in power, and discourses of state failure provide cover for Western intervention and reordering of world along neo-liberal lines

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justice; nor is a high rate of growth or a democratic constitution meaningful if wealth, power, and influence are concentrated in the hands of a small elite. There are, therefore, many ways to understand democracy and development, and the perspective that we take regarding their meaning and significance is necessarily conditioned by our ontological and epistemological preferences. They are, in short, deeply political ideas and ideals. Development can be viewed as something that is inherently individualistic and characterised by an expansion of human freedom that is, in turn, facilitated economically by open markets (as in the liberal view), or as something highly communitarian that rejects or transcends capitalism (as in many radical perspectives). In between these two opposing views, statist ideas are not inherently anticapitalist but they tend to reject the logic of freedom intrinsically equating to development, recognising genuinely developmental outcomes as those which fundamentally transform an economy or society. Much the same is true of democracy and democratisation. For liberals, it is sufficient to create institutions that act as vessels to carry the procedural elements of democracy in which individuals can exercise their preferences. Some statists, by contrast, view an illiberal and populist system of rule—for example, Venezuela under the late Hugo Chávez—as equally legitimate in democratic terms, and perhaps even more so, given that such a project involves consciously redistributing wealth and resources from the centre. Radicals go much further, arguing that hegemonic understandings of (liberal) democracy often fail in their own terms, because they do not involve any kind of challenge to prevailing power relationships and the hegemonic norms and values that facilitate them.

The Relationship Between Democracy and Development If the two concepts remain so contested, it naturally follows that the relationship between them is highly contingent too (see Table 5.2). The conventional—that is, liberal—account has held sway since the heyday of modernisation theory in the 1950s, arguing that as societies move through the process of capitalist development, the middle class expands and becomes increasingly enfranchised, both economically and politically, and this, in turn, leads to greater demands for rights, redistribution, and a share in the fruits of progress. While this offers an empirical description of how the West developed and democratised, it is not clear whether it can be simply abstracted as a road map for contemporary global political and economic change (Grugel and Bishop 2013).

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So, democracy and development can be intertwined with each other, but the relationship is neither simple nor lacking in caveats. As Adam Przeworski (2004) has suggested, while evidence supports the thesis that democracy survives better in wealthier nations, the proposition that democracy is a simple consequence of economic growth is far more questionable. Rather, capitalism and economic development can lead to (liberal) democracy in some places, at some points in history, and once a democratic transition is underway, help to sustain it (Diamond 2009: 77). But democracy has also survived in states with limited economic growth, while capitalist accumulation elsewhere has regularly contributed to maintaining authoritarian rule. There also exist a great number of poorer countries where self-described democrats rule autocratically. Here, poverty and privilege operate as barriers to democratic incorporation. This explains the great appeal across much of the developing world for theories of democracy that take into account issues of cultural, social, and economic empowerment, beyond the formal creation of liberal rights, and prioritise the common good alongside—or, in some cases, instead of—the individual. It also explains the resistance on the part of many non-Westerners to hegemonic forms of democracy and development, and associated global discourses that act as disciplinary tools through which often weaker and poorer countries have to ‘learn’ from their considerably more powerful and richer counterparts (Grugel 2003). The relationship between democracy and development is—at best—an ambiguous one, manifest in the plethora of economically poor but democratically thriving states in places like the Caribbean (Bishop 2013) and, conversely, those rapidly developing countries that remain stubbornly undemocratic, such as China. Others that lack genuine democracy, such as Singapore, are extremely well governed (Barr 2012). In fact, it may be that, as many statists have long contended, the strength and governing effectiveness of the state are more important for satisfying developmental objectives than any democratic credentials (Leftwich 2005). Consequently, scholars such as Marc Plattner (2004: 109) have insisted on drawing a distinction between what he calls ‘democraticness’ (or quality of democracy) and ‘effective governance’ (or state capability). Of course, not all strong states necessarily prize developmental objectives, or are good at achieving them, and democracy, because it tends to create demands for social protection at the bottom, may be more stable (Carbone 2009; Stockemer 2012). Nevertheless, it remains difficult to sustain the idea that there is a linear trajectory linking growth and democratisation beyond a loose degree of correlation in specific contexts.

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Unresolved Tensions

The liberal hegemony in the theory and practice of democracy is highly problematic. To illustrate this empirically, I discuss in this section three contemporary empirical examples: ambiguities in global democracy and development promotion; new patterns of authoritarian development; and, finally, democratic and developmental decline in the liberal heartlands of the West.

Ambiguities in the Global Democracy and Development Agendas The neo-liberal era has seen the ascendancy of two distinct global agendas, both predicated on a liberal, modernist reading of development and democracy as interrelated, desirable, and symbiotic. The former is characterised by the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), a process that has guided global policy in this area since 2000. Around this time, Jean-Phillipe Thérien (1999) observed two distinct trends in official development discourse: a ‘Bretton Woods paradigm’ characterised by, initially, the strident neo-liberalism of the IMF, and, later, the post–Washington Consensus agenda in the World Bank; and a ‘United Nations paradigm’ reflected in more human-centred notions of development encompassed within the Human Development Index (HDI) and the MDGs themselves. The former is about off-the-shelf liberalisation and global market integration; the latter is about incremental improvements in specific areas, such as education, access to clean water, sanitation, and so on. Notwithstanding the success of the MDGs—progress has certainly been made towards achieving many of them around the world—they embody a distinctly narrow vision of development. Specifically, by conflating symptoms of development with development itself, they tacitly deny the kind of transformation of economy, state, and society that was so central to the development debates of the post-war period, and in which an activist state was often seen to be so central (Chang 2002). In allowing the UN agenda to dominate much thinking and policy, therefore, more transformational notions of development are implicitly prevented from taking root. Similarly, the global democratisation agenda, which is encapsulated in attempts by powerful states and global governance institutions to export democracy to the rest of the world, is predicated on Western-centric assumptions about the nature of democracy. As a consequence, something that is, at its most basic, a wide-ranging philosophical ideal, is reduced to a set of

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technical changes that seek to mirror the political systems extant in the West. Newly democratising countries are, therefore, expected to adopt familiar aspects of the institutional settlement that are seen to be the hallmark of a liberal democratic state, regardless of whether they actually facilitate truly democratic outcomes in practice. Moreover, democracy promotion offers not only a limited kind of change but the impulses driving it are also extremely vexed. Most striking is the DPT, which, to reiterate, contends that liberal democracies are unlikely to go to war with each other, a highly contentious—but also intuitive—idea that has been gleefully taken on board by significant sections of the US foreign policymaking establishment, underpinning its often violent attempts to export democracy. Yet this agenda is fraught with problems, because of both serious theoretical deficiencies within the DPT itself and it has legitimised many of the most brutal aspects of the contemporary global securitisation of democratisation (see Grugel and Bishop 2013: 186–189). Democracy promotion has, perhaps unsurprisingly, triggered an enormous ‘backlash’ of late (Carothers 2006, 2010), and it has even undermined nascent processes of democratisation in those countries which are tentatively either on the cusp or in the midst of an uncertain and contingent transition (Levitsky and Way 2010). Iran provides a good example. Reforms initiated by the moderate Khatami government during the 1990s and early 2000s created a climate in which civil society organisations flourished. At the same time, Washington rebuffed cautious attempts by the Iranians to begin a rapprochement after decades of tension and mistrust, and instead poured tens of millions of dollars into democracy promotion activities in the country. Yet this provocative policy backfired spectacularly. Initially, it strengthened the hand of hardliners against the reformists, including Khatami himself, who was eventually defeated by the deeply conservative Mahmoud Ahmadinejad who rolled back many of the reforms. By the time the ‘Green Protests’ erupted in 2009, it gave those very same hardliners an excuse to crack down on a movement that could easily be painted as part of a Western plot to destabilise the Islamic regime, setting back Iran’s political opening by years (Tezcür 2012). In sum, misguided attempts at democracy promotion have much to answer for: as Laurence Whitehead (2010: 25) has argued, the fact that many ‘liberal internationalists lost their sense of reality in their hubristic desire to remake the entire world in accordance with their utopia’ is a major explanation for the ‘backlash which will last for a substantial period’. A similar story can be told—in a developmental sense—by looking at the severe underdevelopment of many African countries. Reform of the state became the mantra of the International Financial Institutions (IFIs) such as the IMF and World Bank in the post–Washington Consensus era as

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they implemented neo-liberal ‘good governance’ projects in ways that were favourable to market and civil society-led governance (see Payne 2005: 87–89). Eventually, these processes even resulted in the liberalisation and marketisation of the state itself (Harrison 2010). However, the longer-term effect has been to undermine the state to such an extent that in many places it can no longer perform the developmental (or democratic) tasks reasonably expected of it. This has led to a range of problems in parts of Africa: the institutionalisation of weak states controlled by powerful autocrats; rent-seeking, looting, and corruption; the rise of armed militias, feeding off of the vacuum caused by constrained state power; and widespread poverty in many places. In sum, the dominance of liberal approaches to democracy and development often conceals deeply ideological and contradictory policymaking. For example, during the global financial crisis, Western countries immediately engaged in the kind of interventionism that they had spent three decades denouncing to the rest of the world (Chang 2010). Similarly, as the Arab Spring unfolded in 2011, they were at a loss regarding how to respond, despite continued protestations about their wider commitment to democracy. As Marion Dixon (2011: 310) describes it, the ‘image of Western governments as defenders and promoters of democracy and development fractures before a fumbling, reticent reaction to mass democratic movements confronting authoritarian rule.’ In Egypt, it took the Obama administration a conspicuous amount of time to disavow Mubarak, a leader that the USA had backed for decades, and, since the end of the short-lived experiment with electoral democracy that saw President Mohamed Morsi deposed in June 2013, Washington has supported the Egyptian military as it has reasserted itself. In Tunisia, as the uprising began, the French government initially offered weapons and logistical support to the dictatorial Ben Ali regime—which had been in power since a coup in 1987—to violently put down the protests before quickly back-pedalling once the scale of the revolt became clear (Noueihed and Warren 2012: 65). These hypocrisies and contradictions are actually well understood by critical thinkers (see, e.g., Harvey 2014). However, what is often not fully recognised is the extent to which global liberalism sows the very seeds of deficiency that it promises to overcome. This is principally because development is seen to be very much something that bypasses the state; a state, moreover, which is considered to be in need of structural change to render the governance it provides ‘good’ in a neo-liberal sense. By emaciating states and other public institutions in this way, particularly those in the poorer parts of the world, the forms of democracy and development that emerge are emasculated. When liberal institutions are simply ‘grafted onto weak states’ that cannot infuse them with substance, outcomes will be predictably poor (Møller and Skaaning

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2011: 1). For the statist approaches described earlier in the chapter, development is characterised by wide-ranging social transformation brought about by fundamental shifts in the productive capacity of a political economy, which, in turn, permits it to transcend its contemporary plane of existence. Similarly, meaningful democratisation can only occur in a polity where the state is both sufficiently institutionalised and sufficiently powerful to ensure that democracy is engendered in substance—including a genuine expansion of citizenship, access to power, and the equitable redistribution of resources—and not just in form.

New Patterns of Authoritarian Development This is no more obvious than if we look at those countries, particularly in Asia and the Middle East, that have resolutely avoided democratisation while often generating impressive levels of development. The rapid growth of countries as disparate as China, Vietnam, Qatar, or Singapore in recent years certainly challenges the idea of a simple link between democracy and development, and as Adrian Leftwich (2000) outlined in reference to the rapid growth of the ‘Asian Tigers’ during the 1970s, this occurred when the countries were, if not overtly authoritarian, certainly possessed of a highly penetrating and illiberal state apparatus. Questions of human rights, in particular, were systematically subordinated to developmental objectives during periods of rapid development. China undoubtedly represents the most striking example of authoritarian development today. The past 30 years or more have seen double-digit growth year on year: at the turn of the millennium, China’s GDP was approximately US$1.1 trillion, or a tenth of the US equivalent; in 2015, it was over $10 trillion, or well over half that of the USA (Jiang 2014). This economic expansion has afforded a wide range of broader developmental improvements, including massive infrastructural investment and a growth in GDP per capita from that of a low-income country (i.e., less than $900) to something approximating that of a middle-income country at around $7000. This is particularly remarkable given that there are still hundreds of millions of people comprising the country’s rural peasantry, whose lives the economic transformation has not yet fundamentally changed, and who are subsisting on a dramatically lower income than the mean average (Yeh, O’Brien, and Ye 2013). It is no understatement, then, to suggest that China’s recent development has been spectacular and has been directed by its highly interventionist state institutions which have shepherded capital to serve the purposes of industrial development.

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This is not to say, of course, that Chinese authoritarianism does not embody serious contradictions. Many have argued that the country’s political settlement is highly unstable, and it potentially faces ‘a looming crisis of authoritarianism that will generate a new opportunity for democratic transition in the next two decades’ (Diamond 2012: 6). However, critics have been saying much the same thing about China since the collapse of the Soviet Union. As Giovanni Arrighi (2007: 14) recounts, just as the disastrous IMF ‘shock therapy’ experiments got underway in Russia in the 1990s, neo-liberal cheerleaders argued loudly that China’s transformative growth would falter if it did not copy the Russian example and abandon its incremental, state-led development approach in favour of its own version of rapid privatisation, liberalisation, and deregulation. Yet, as we now know, the Russian trajectory of the post-Communist period is hardly one worth celebrating: a state reliant on resource rents in which the development of productive industry has been inhibited; where grotesque patterns of inequality reign and powerful oligarchs control many of the primary levers of the economy; and the emergence anyway of an altogether more irrational form of authoritarianism than the Chinese example. It is certainly the case that the post-1949 Communist settlement in China was marked by large-scale mobilisation and terror, along with a misguided approach to agricultural collectivisation and centrally planned economics that resulted in millions of deaths. These legacies, along with a single-party state, represent serious obstacles to the creation of liberal democracy. Equally, though, Chinese authoritarianism cannot be comprehended outside of the context of a huge territory, with historically highly unstable borders and pockets of contested sovereignty, along with a history of foreign domination and humiliation (see Hobson 2004). Consequently, the judicious deployment of state power in satisfying development objectives and maintaining social and economic control has simultaneously allowed the state to protect nascent industries, direct capital to privileged sectors of the economy, and thereby sustain the Chinese ‘economic miracle’, albeit with great social upheaval and major environmental trade-offs (see Lin 2011). Most importantly, then, and contra the expectations of liberal theory, Chinese development has not (yet) been accompanied by democratic change. To sustain its dominance, the government has invested heavily in ‘the great firewall’ to retain control over information flows. As Fukuyama (2012: 22) notes, this serves a dual purpose: on the one hand, the government today often allows a degree of online critique to flourish as a pressure-release valve for political discontent, and on the other hand, a process that also serves as a learning device through which the state can gauge and respond to public

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opinion. MacKinnon (2012) has described this process as ‘networked authoritarianism’, whereby a greater degree of online freedom is permitted than in a classical totalitarian context, yet fundamental guarantees and rights remain absent. Nonetheless, despite the refinement of contemporary Chinese authoritarianism, a number of scholars have emphasised the essential fragility of the state. This seems counter-intuitive given how increasingly powerful contemporary China appears to be. Yet problems are mounting. Communist elites, especially in the provinces, often seem to operate beyond the control of the central party with little oversight and regularly engage in the most pernicious forms of repression and corruption, often with impunity. The everyday reality for many, therefore, is of a ‘decentralised predatory state’ where party elites are able to amass private fortunes through the arbitrary and unchecked abuse of public power (Pei 2006: 16). This is, in turn, causing antipathy among the broader population and widespread protests encompassing economic, social, ethnic, and cultural grievances, leading many to question the longer-term sustainability of the country’s contemporary political settlement (Pei 2012). There is, in sum, no reason why China’s development will cause it to ‘modernise’ along liberal democratic lines, posing a potentially paradigm-testing example for those who equate the two processes. Existing frameworks cannot, therefore, be unproblematically applied to China, because its rise is nothing less than that ‘of a country sui generis, a civilisational state, a new model of development and a new political discourse which questions many of the Western assumptions about democracy, good governance and human rights’ (Zhang 2012: x). On this reading, China does not require the kind of liberal institutions advocated by its critics, because it is increasingly forging a unique developmental and political path, firmly grounded in its own conception of its history and values. There is no preordained democratic path that intrinsically flows out of China’s rapid development of the past 30 or more years: it may democratise, it may not; either way, the brand of Chinese politics (and development) that emerges over time will probably be quite distinctive and reflect the prevailing balance of state–society relationships.

Democratic and Developmental Crisis in the West One crucial dimension of the challenge that this poses to our understanding of democracy and development is that both can be seen to be ongoing processes; they are not end-states. This is plainly evident in much of the supposedly ‘developed’ and ‘democratic’ West, which is currently in the midst

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of an increasingly perceptible period of decay. I explore this with reference to three interlinked issues: the impact of neo-liberal globalisation and the still-unfolding global crisis; the declining purchase of domestic democratic forces over political decision-making; and, finally, the insidious patterns of securitised violence that have come to characterise the behaviour of Western states at home and abroad. Since the 1980s, many Western states have engaged in neo-liberal restructuring. However, in contrast to prevailing descriptions of this process as the creation of liberal, free-market political and economic orders, the broad changes are more accurately distinguished by the ‘embedding’ of a political economy characterised by the widespread outsourcing of state functions and the concomitant creation of ‘competition states’ (Cerny 2010). These commission and manage the private provision of public services: a rather different affair to the genuinely free market imagined in classical liberal economic theory. These shifts have been critiqued from a democratic perspective as inherently detrimental to both their quality—as costs are ruthlessly cut in the pursuit of private profit—and their crucial role in facilitating access to welfare and the exercise of citizenship. The ‘emancipatory potential of democracy’, on this reading, is inherently ‘undercut by its alliance with, or subservience to, capitalism’ (Hobson 2011: 1919). Many have long worried that these processes are further intensified by the most malign aspects of globalisation, such as the increasing inability—or reluctance—of states to deal with mass leakage of tax revenues offshore, races to the bottom in labour or environmental standards, and wider patterns of environmental degradation. They, therefore, derive directly, as Mathew Watson (2005: 201) has put it, from the fact that globalisation ‘infers a spatial mismatch between the essentially rooted social relations that underpin the economy and essentially rootless capital’. These problems have reached their apotheosis with the broader fallout of the global crisis, which can be viewed as a profound crisis of neo-liberalism (Kotz 2015). This is characterised by at least three overlapping phenomena— financial crisis in the heartlands of Western capitalism, shifting economic and political power to emerging states, and an unfolding environmental catastrophe—which combine to fundamentally challenge prevailing modes of development (Hay and Payne 2013). Pessimistic analyses suggest that, in fact, we are living through nothing less than a ‘crisis without end’ that is precipitating the ‘unravelling of Western prosperity’ and consequently undermining the liberal democratic world order, established patterns of growth and capital accumulation, and the fiscal basis of the tax state itself (Gamble 2014). In essence, we have reached something of a crossroads: it is not clear whether nationally bounded democracy, state sovereignty, and global capital can

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coexist; something potentially has to give for the tensions between all three to be resolved (Rodrik 2012). The domestic implications of these shifts—both developmental and democratic—are extremely troubling. Many scholars have argued that the decline in political engagement in much of the West—at least through the formal political process, if not through alternative methods of citizen activism—plausibly reflects a fundamental crisis of liberal democracy (Stoker 2006; Hay 2007). Yet this is not only a consequence of the neo-liberalisation of the civic sphere that has undermined the broader process of public deliberation that is required to make legitimate democratic choices regarding the control and distribution of public goods (Hay and Payne 2015). It actually runs much deeper: political parties, the carriers and aggregators of societal preferences ‘have become so disconnected from the wider society, and pursue a form of competition that is so lacking in meaning, that they no longer seem capable of sustaining democracy in its present form’ (Mair 2013: 1). In a similar vein, this is something that Colin Crouch (2004, 2013) has called ‘postdemocracy’, under which politics has increasingly become an ‘empty shell’, and characterised by a vacuous competition between elites rather than meaningful contestation between competing visions of the ‘good society’ predicated on a wide range of different societal interests. This analysis, focused on the rise of a self-referential political elite which is detached from subaltern demands and increasingly enmeshed within broader webs of corporate and financial influence, has given weight to many recent analyses of ‘oligarchic’ power in, especially, Britain and the USA (see inter alia Winters 2011; Mount 2012; Gilens and Page 2014; Jones 2014). Whether or not the specific charge of oligarchy sticks, there is no doubt that, on a wide range of measures—including poverty, inequality, and wealth distribution—the grotesque dislocation of Western societies under the crisis of neo-liberalism poses a clear challenge to the quality of development and democracy that can be said to exist. The final point to note is that such decay is further compounded by the belligerent agenda on the part of much of the West, in general, and Britain and the USA, in particular, in their failed attempts to remake world order after 9/11. This, of course, links into the broader critique of democracy promotion discussed earlier, and is deeply problematic, not least since there is an inherent contradiction in trying to coercively impose liberal goods like democracy and good governance amidst horrific transgressions of sovereignty and human rights. As Geis and Wagner (2011: 12) have suggested, this represents nothing less than ‘the violent manifestation of a liberal world ordering and governance project, attempting—but often failing—to export Western forms of rule, statehood and democracy’. Perhaps even more troubling in developmental

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terms is the fact that the political and economic system imposed on countries like Iraq reflects, in the worst possible ways, the darker side of the contradictions of neo-liberalism, serving primarily as a source of enrichment for foreign contractors in a newly securitised and privatised state underpinned by what Naomi Klein (2007: 358–359) calls ‘the disaster capitalism complex’. Crucially, this broad agenda could be provoking a concomitant decline in democracy in the West itself. The centrality of anti-democratic methods, processes, and legislation—from the flattening of whole cities, torture, and legal black holes abroad to authoritarian legislation, the use of often unaccountable coercive powers, increased monitoring and surveillance, as well as expansion and decreased oversight of the security services at home—all belie Western claims to democratic probity and even serve to legitimise anti-democratic processes elsewhere in the world (see inter alia Beetham 2009; Whitehead 2009; Ramsay 2010).

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Conclusion

The primary assumptions that underpin liberal ideals about democracy and development are simple, straightforward, and appear to be intuitively true. Because of this, the resultant dominant discourse is difficult to challenge in accessible ways: a neo-liberal politician advocating on television for the logic of supposedly ‘free’ markets or the beauty of electoral democracy cannot be countered with a sound bite; the arguments of critics are inherently more complex, nuanced, and steeped in caveats. It is, therefore, worth reiterating the central argument in this chapter: democracy and development, especially of the liberal kind, can and do exist in symbiosis in many places at different points in history, but neither idea, when considered in a much wider philosophical, intellectual, or political sense, can be reduced to a liberal version which is but one possible flavour. Consequently, the way in which we conceive of these concepts and the relationship between them is dependent on our existing ideological and theoretical preferences, the context in which we are thinking and writing, and our interpretation of real-world events. Recognising this complexity forces us into a more substantive engagement that highlights how we should be suspicious of: firstly, the teleology inherent in much liberal and modernist theorising about democracy and development; secondly, the situations in which they are not conducive to each other; and, especially, global policy that is constructed on such questionable foundations. As David Runciman (2014) has persuasively argued, a major practical problem with liberal democracy and its more ideological proponents is a

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complacent belief in its inevitable superiority. In a world marked by a range of converging crises and other processes of upheaval which threaten existing patterns of order—debt and financial apocalypse, the war on terror, the rise of emerging powers like China, and a looming environmental catastrophe—this is, at best, a dangerously presumptuous view.

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Mair, P. 2013. Ruling the void: The hollowing of western democracy (Verso Books). Møller, J., and S.-E. Skaaning. 2011. Stateness first? Democratization 18(1): 1–24. Mount, F. 2012. The new few: Or a very British oligarchy. London: Simon and Schuster. Noueihed, L., and A. Warren. 2012. The battle for the Arab spring: Revolution, counterrevolution and the making of a new era. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Payne, A. 2005. The global politics of unequal development. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan. Payne, A., and N. Phillips. 2010. Development. Cambridge: Polity Press. Pei, M. 2006. China’s trapped transition: The limits of developmental autocracy. Cambridge,MA: Harvard University Press. Pei, M. 2012. Is CCP rule fragile or resilient? Journal of Democracy 23(1): 27–41. Plattner, M.F. 2004. A skeptical afterword. Journal of Democracy 15(4): 106–110. Przeworski, A. 2004. Economic development and transitions to democracy. Working Paper. New York: New York University Department of Political Science. Ramsay, M. 2010. Liberal democratic politics as a form of violence. Democratization 17(2): 235–250. Rodrik, D. 2012. The globalization paradox: Democracy and the future of the world economy. New York: W. W. Norton. Runciman, D. 2014. The confidence trap: A history of democracy in crisis from world war i to the present. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Stockemer, D. 2012. Regime type and good governance in low and high income states: What is the empirical link? Democratization 21(1): 118–136. Stoker, G. 2006. Why politics matters: Making democracy work. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Tezcür, G.M. 2012. Democracy promotion, authoritarian resiliency, and political unrest in Iran. Democratization 19(1): 120–140. Thérien, J.-P. 1999. Beyond the north–south divide: The two tales of world poverty. Third World Quarterly 20(4): 723–742. Watson, M. 2005. Foundations of international political economy. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Waylen, G. 2007. Engendering transitions. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Whitehead, L. 2009. Losing “the force”? The “dark side” of democratization after Iraq. Democratization 16(2): 215–242. Whitehead, L. 2010. State sovereignty and democracy: An awkward coupling. In New challenges to democratization, ed. P.J. Burnell and R. Youngs, 23–41. London: Routledge. Winters, J.A. 2011. Oligarchy. New York: Cambridge University Press. Yeh, E.T., K.J.  O’Brien, and J.  Ye. 2013. Rural politics in contemporary China. The Journal of Peasant Studies 40(6): 915–928. Zhang, W. 2012. The China wave: Rise of a civilisational state. Hackensack, NJ: World Century.

6 Global Citizenship and Development: From Benevolence to Global Justice? Matt Baillie Smith

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Introduction

Ideas and practices of global citizenship are a significant feature of the history and present of international development. From the use of ‘universal’ ethics to justify missionary efforts in the global South, to NGO fundraising, state efforts to encourage support for aid, corporate social responsibility strategies, and the activities of global justice networks, global citizenship has been evoked and deployed in multiple and often contradictory ways. This is despite significant challenges with the concept. Whilst Kant’s idea of a ‘citizen of the world’ may be politically and emotionally appealing, the desirability or feasibility of constructing moral or political communities beyond the nation state is neither conceptually nor empirically straightforward. The identification of certain values and behaviours as markers of global citizenship is problematic when ideas and practices rooted in particular histories and places become presented as if they are universal. Since the 1990s there has been growing attention to new forms of ‘global citizen action’ (Edwards and Gaventa 2001), the activities of global social movements (Waterman 1998; Cohen and Rai 2000) and global justice networks (Routledge and Cumbers 2009), and the emergence of a ‘global civil society’ (Anheier et  al. 2001a; Taylor 2004). Through recent popular events such as Make Poverty History and Live 8, the apparent significance M.B. Smith ( ) University of Northumbria, UK © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 J. Grugel, D. Hammett (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of International Development, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-42724-3_6

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of ‘ordinary’ citizens in shaping global decisions and international development trajectories has been increasingly celebrated and promoted. The idea of ‘global citizenship’ has gained increasing scholarly attention, popular currency, and policy framings (e.g., Biccum 2010; Dower and Williams 2002b; Baillie Smith and Laurie 2011; Schattle 2007). In the UK during the 1990s and early 2000s, global citizenship became an increasingly important feature of school curricula, initially as the result of encouragement by NGOs but subsequently supported by the state under the banner of ‘development education’ (Smith 2004b). In June 2014, Concord Europe (the European Confederation for Relief and Development NGOs), Oxfam, UNESCO, and others sponsored a conference and explored the potential role of global citizenship education within the education goals to be agreed on the expiry of the Millennium Development Goals in 2015 (Concord 2014). In this chapter, I argue that policy-framed, celebrated, and mainstreamed approaches to global citizenship only offer a partial account of the multiple conceptual and empirical links between global citizenship and development. They obscure some of the unequal and divisive ways in which global citizenship is experienced and realised, and the conceptual limitations of the idea of citizenship beyond the nation state. This is not to deny the importance or utility of the idea. But we need to look beyond the ‘hope’ and euphoria that sometimes surrounds accounts of global citizenship and global citizen’s movements. This means paying attention to some of the contradictions and disappointments of global citizenship and its relationship to development; theories and practices of global citizenship need to be treated with the same critical analysis as other features of the global development landscape. If we are to reimagine international development as a project of global justice (Grugel 2013), then we need to recognise not just the importance of global citizenship to such a shift, but the ways different conceptions of global citizenship can support or hinder such a change. How global citizenship is conceptualised is intimately connected to how development is defined and practised, with different conceptions of global citizenship mobilising agencies, affiliations, and knowledge across national borders in different ways. In the first section of the chapter, I outline some of the key theorisations of global citizenship, delineating a difference between approaches focused on status and process. In the second section, I explore the mainstreaming of global citizenship in the context of the popularisation of development, drawing on research on development education and international volunteering. I show how particular conceptions and realisations of global citizenship bolster and bring together established North–South imaginaries of poverty and neo-liberal ideas of agency. In Section  3, I decentre dominant accounts

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of global citizenship and development through attention to silences in current scholarly and practitioner debate, the subjectivities of global South civic actors, and inequalities in access to global civic space. The chapter concludes with reflections on recent calls for greater citizen engagement in development, and consideration of the future of scholarship and practice on global citizenship and development in a changing geopolitical landscape.

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Global Citizenship: Key Conceptual Debates

Whilst ‘global citizenship’ is increasingly and variously evoked by international development actors as well as scholars to mobilise groups and activities or define certain sets of behaviours (e.g., Biccum 2007; Baillie Smith and Laurie 2011; Desforges 2004; Edwards and Gaventa 2001), it remains conceptually contested. So despite, or indeed because of, the apparent easy affinity between global citizenship and development, as captured in events such as Make Poverty History (2005) and practices such as international volunteering, we need to pay attention to some of the theoretical foundations and contradictions at the heart of global citizenship. Any such discussion is not only inevitably partial, both geographically and historically, but also critical to offering a conceptual architecture for assessing the present and future of global citizenship and its relationship to development. What it means to be a ‘citizen of the world’ is not new, as evidenced in the thinking of the stoics of Ancient Greece and more recent European political philosophy. It is also not an invention of the liberal West, with ideas of community and subjectivity beyond the local expressed in multiple ways by diverse groups globally and over time. It is, however, both resilient and malleable, being debated across multiple academic disciplines and in relation to diverse social, cultural, and political circumstances. We can helpfully locate the resurgence in debates around citizenship in the context of a set of recent social and political shifts at local and global scales that have important implications for the contemporary meaning of citizenship. Globalisation and debates around its implications for political community and democracy (e.g., Archibugi et al. 1998) have been particularly significant, as have new experiences and ideas of mobilities and belonging (e.g., Calhoun 2003; Szerszynski and Urry 2006). In the context of international development, the emergence of a ‘global civil society’ has been centrally important, ‘What we can observe in the 1990s is the emergence of a supranational sphere of social and political participation in which citizens’ groups, social movements, and individuals engage in dialogue, debate, confrontation, and negotiation with each other and with

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various governmental actors—international, national, and local—as well as the business world’ (Anheier et al. 2001b: 4). The idea of a ‘global civil society’ is contested, empirically and conceptually, particularly in terms of a lack of common political culture and notion of political community (Lupel 2003: 20) and the dominance of emergent civic spaces by self-appointed private actors in the forms of international NGOs (Anderson and Rieff 2004). However, such spaces are providing new contexts in which citizenships are being developed and expressed, although uncritical celebration of them elides some of the theoretical challenges of global citizenship. Isin (2008: 15) highlights how the increasingly complex and varying levels of social, political, and economic integration of states is implicating ‘their citizens involuntarily in a web of rights and responsibilities concerning the environment (wildlife, pollution), trade (copyright, protection), security, refugees, crime, minorities, war, children and many other issues’ and ‘implicating them in various social, ethical, political and social decisions’. Secondly, he points to the fact that ‘many citizens and non-citizens (illegal aliens, immigrants, migrants) of states have become increasingly mobile, carrying these webs of rights and obligations with them and further entangling them with other webs of rights and obligations’ (Isin 2008: 15). Citizens are then already part of contestations around what counts as ‘justice’ in ways that cut across the traditional North–South imaginaries that have framed development. To this might be added Falk’s (2002: 15) identification of the ‘increased normativity of international life; a neo-liberal ideological climate; the erosion of statist responsibility, creativity, capacity, and autonomy; and the general technological and economistic embrace of corporate or neo-liberal governance’. These changes not only have provoked and enabled expressions of transnational civic action around issues such as global poverty, corporate accountability, climate change, and human rights but also have shaped approaches to aid and development that privilege the mobility of capital in ways that deny citizen rights, such as through the privatisation of indigenous knowledge and undermining of the land rights of the poor. Citizenship in the contemporary period is characterised by growing complexity, with the different layers, connections and inequalities through which citizenships are formed and practised complicating both ‘status and habitus (ways of thought and conduct that are internalised over a relatively long period of time)’ (Isin 2008: 15). This complexity may open new possibilities for ‘global citizenships’, but they are not given. Acknowledging this complexity is an important part of engaging with often highly normative debates around the possibility of global citizenship or current claims for its existence.

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Dower (2002: 1) identifies the core feature of a global citizen as someone who ‘is a member of the wider community of all humanity, the world or similar whole that is wider than that of a nation-state or other political community of which we are normally thought to be citizens. This membership is important in the sense that it involves (or would involve if people accept that they are global citizens) a significant identity, loyalty or commitment beyond the nation-state.’ Global citizenship then has moral and institutional dimensions: it can be about not only membership of something but also an expression of particular ethics or values, or both. This connects global citizenship to debates around cosmopolitanism which help elucidate some of the key conceptual and empirical challenges around the status and habitus of global citizenship (e.g., Appiah 2006; Archibugi and Koenig-Archibugi 2003; Beck 2006; Vertovec and Cohen 2002a), and have increasingly been brought into dialogue with debates in development (e.g., Baillie Smith and Jenkins 2012; Baillie Smith et al. 2013; Gidwani 2006; Kothari 2008; Pogge 2002). Vertovec and Cohen (2002b: 8–22) usefully delineate a range of approaches to cosmopolitanism as ‘a) a socio-cultural condition; b) a kind of philosophy or world-view; c) a political project towards building transnational institutions; d) a political project for recognising multiple identities; e) an attitudinal or dispositional orientation; and ⁄ or f ) a mode of practice or competence’. We can find strong resonances between ideas of political community beyond the nation state, openness to difference, recognition of universal values, and commitments to the equal value of all humans, and some of the rhetorics and practices of development (see Yanacopulos and Baillie Smith 2007). Commitments to ‘distant others’, manifest in global civic action and state aid, resonate with cosmopolitanism’s broad focus on ‘thinking and feeling beyond the nation’. So, at one level, we can see development as producing and being produced by forms of global citizenship that are premised on ‘identities, loyalties and commitments beyond the nation state’ (Dower 2002: 1). But as the history and present of international development shows, these identities and commitments are not without problems. Whilst we might understand global citizenship in relation to particular moral and ethical commitments that go beyond the nation state, there is a question of where these ethics originate from and what should be the ‘core norms’. Whilst sometimes constructed as if ‘from nowhere’, cosmopolitan or global citizenships are in reality rooted in histories and places. Appiah (2006: xvi), writing about his father, who was a leader of the independence movement in what was the Gold Coast, says ‘he never saw a conflict between local partialities and a universal morality—between being part of the place were and a part of a broader human community.’ However, the kinds of global citizenship

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that have become increasingly popular do not suggest such an easy accommodation. As Jefferess points out, a number of political philosophers (Dower, Singer, Rawls and Ignatieff) have ‘all argued for a particular responsibility for the Other that is either explicitly or implicitly theorised as an expression of global citizenship’ (Jefferess 2008: 27). In this, global citizenship’s contribution to development becomes a matter of those who are responsible, and those for whom others are responsible, denying agency to the poor and reinforcing the structural inequalities and historical legacies. Global citizenship in this sense bears little relation to a democratic reconceptualising of development as a project of global justice in which historical silences and exclusions are addressed (see also Noxolo, this collection). A final problem is that without a set of shared values and understanding of relations, rights, and duties that can be effectively governed—in other words, without a global state—and given the persistence of national varieties of citizenship (Turner 2001: 135), it could be argued that global citizenship is neither possible nor desirable. To some extent, these problems arise if we think of global citizenship in terms of status and behaviours built from the ‘container concept of citizenship’ in which the nation state is the ultimate arbiter (Kivisto and Faist 2007: 102). Appiah (2006: xvii) suggests we should not think about cosmopolitanism as ‘some exalted attainment: it begins with the simple idea that in the human community, as in national communities, we need to develop habits of coexistence: conversation in its older meaning, of living together, or association’. Focusing on citizenship in terms of process provokes different questions and possibilities, ‘[t]he relationships, practices, and acts that construct, regulate, and contest citizenship are at least as important as the status assigned to individuals. In this way, citizenship is always in formation, is never static, settled, or complete, and identities or subjectivities as citizen are similarly unstable’ (Staeheli 2011: 6). This focuses attention on the ways in which global citizenship is produced and changes, seeing instability not as a ‘problem’ for global citizenship in particular, but as a feature of citizenship. It also draws attention to the factors that shape participation and the process of participation, as much as the status of the participants. When Dower argues that what is important about global citizenship is the ‘the very fact of participation in public deliberation and activities for the global common good’ (Dower and Williams 2002a), and Arneil (2007: 314) suggests that ‘citizenship is not the either/or proposition of liberal theory (either one is a citizen or not) but a process that evolves towards equality,’ our attention is drawn not simply to the status of the participants but to what has shaped their participation or exclusion. Understanding global citizenship in these ways makes it central to the processes of reconceptualising development

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as a project of global justice and highlighting the importance of democratic participation. In these ways, it is perhaps unhelpful to see global citizenship as something that contributes to development, but rather, as a part of what development does and is. Examining some of the ways global citizenship has been mainstreamed in the popular lexicon of international development reveals ways in which it limits a move towards conceiving of development in terms of global justice.

3

Popularising Development and Mainstreaming Global Citizenship

The idea of global citizenship has come to play an increasingly important role in recent strategies to popularise development. In this section, I critically analyse not only some of the ways in which global citizenship has been used to shape the ways citizens in the global North are engaged in development but also the ways development is used to help develop people as global citizens. In recent years, international development has become increasingly popular, or in Cameron and Haanstra’s terms (2008), ‘made sexy’. Large-scale spectacles such as Live8, Make Poverty History, and Jubilee 2000 have made increasingly visible connections between development and contemporary popular culture, aided by the use of new technologies and social media (Nash 2008; Lewis et al. 2014) as well as the rise in celebrity engagement in development (Brockington 2014; Kapoor 2012). Fair trade and ethical consumption have significantly increased and been mainstreamed by international corporations traditionally the target of campaigners for their exploitation of the global South. Increased international mobility has enabled growing numbers of people to visit countries in the global South, and alongside the growing emphasis on mobility as a marker of employability, supported an expansion of international volunteering, voluntourism, and the ‘gap year’ (Baillie Smith and Laurie 2011). The growing popularisation of development has been particularly built around ideas of ‘active’ global citizenship that, at least on the surface, are rooted in concerns that go beyond the nation state. But the various forms of citizenship that are produced in the global North have been widely critiqued, with a particular emphasis on the privileging of acts of charity and consumption which commodify development and emphasise the agency of the ‘giver’ and their capacity to effect change (Baillie Smith 2013; Desforges 2004; Biccum 2007; Jefferess 2008; Darnton and Kirk 2011). NGOs have also been critiqued for shaping campaign engagement through top-down corporate policy objectives over democratic decision-making (Baillie Smith 2008: 14).

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Viewing global citizenship as responsibility rather than in terms of democracy or a process towards equality can underpin a charity and celebrity-mediated imaginary of development. By decontextualising poverty and eschewing a structural account of inequality, acting on development becomes defined in terms of a responsibility that largely sits outside the unequal interdependence that has shaped global poverty over time, and the very ability to act as a global citizen in these ways. In other words, citizens are not implicated in the structural inequality, meaning acts of global citizenship in relation to development are largely framed in terms of colonially rooted ideas of responsibility and care for the poor. This reproduces rather than challenges established power inequalities and unequal access to global resources, positing the ‘here’ as unconnected to the poor over there: an approach that is antithetical to realising development as global justice. This contrasts directly with Massey’s identification of the mutual constitution of distant places as the basis for caring and responsibility over distance (Massey 2004; McEwan and Goodman 2010: 105). A relational approach to responsibility can also be found in the focus on ‘care as a fundamental feature of our human being’, meaning responsibility is located in the ‘recognition of our intersubjective being’ (Popke 2006: 507). These conceptualisations of responsibility and its foundations contrast strongly to an approach in which complicity in historical and present structural inequalities is written out. Responsibility becomes inflected with historically unequal power relationships that privilege the subjectivities, ‘authorities’ and capacities of citizens in the global North, a narrative that has underpinned aid and development since its emergence through mission work and the experiences of colonialism (see Noxolo 2006). As Smith (1998: 32) argues, ‘[s]patial inequalities in capacity to care (or disparities between capacity and need) will thus tend to perpetuate patterns of uneven development which are morally indefensible unless people deserve the luck of being in a particular place with particular resources, and in a particular network of (more or less) caring relationships.’ Global citizenship in these ways becomes about status rather than process, about being a ‘helper’ and of being responsible for rather than with (Jefferess 2008: 28). This does not take place in a political or economic vacuum, as the example of development in the UK shows.

Development Education: Depoliticising Global Citizenship Rooted in Freirean pedagogy and Marxist dependency theory, development education has, historically, sought to counter charity-based approaches to development engagement (Baillie Smith 2008). Development education can

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be broadly conceived as education to foster critical understanding of unequal interdependence, based on the idea that this will, in the long run, produce more equitable relationships between South and North. In the UK it was particularly developed and delivered by international NGOs and a network of local development education centres. The establishment of the Department for International Development (DfID) in 1997 supported an expansion of activities focused on ‘Building Support for Development’ (DfID  1999) amongst UK citizens, encouraging understanding of development but also the potential to act in relation to it. This injected significant funds into development education which, through a partnership between DfID and the Department for Education, became increasingly defined in terms of fostering global citizenship or a ‘global dimension’ in school curricula. Over time, the term development education became supplanted by ‘global learning’ and a focus on education rather than development. These changes succeeded in mainstreaming elements of development, but Bryan (2011) and Humble (2012) have noted how this has led to its professionalisation and depoliticisation. Cameron and Fairbrass (2004) have argued that state funding narrowed space for debate, whilst Biccum (2007: 1114) argues that we can understand the focus on ‘development awareness’ in the UK in terms of a state and INGO-led, and colonially rooted, attempt to produce ‘little developers’ for a neo-liberal world. Andreotti’s (2006) postcolonial delineation of ‘soft’ versus ‘critical’ global citizenship is useful here, with an increasingly professionalised and state-funded development education tending to support a ‘soft’ global citizenship that emphasises poverty and helplessness over injustice, addresses interdependence over unequal power relations and promotes universalism and raising awareness over an ethical relationship to difference. This is not to deny efforts to subvert these pressures or to decontextualise the activities of NGOs or development education centres. I have noted elsewhere how engagement strategies reflect much wider features of a neo-liberal economy or ‘liquid modernity’ in Bauman’s terms (Baillie Smith 2008). Relatedly, Desforges (2004) argues that the limited form of global citizenship offered by INGOs can be understood as representing what is wanted by supporters, although it is worth noting that we know relatively little about the complex ways citizens’ subjectivities shape their engagement with development (Baillie  Smith 2013). But we can see how the mainstreaming of development education has produced an increasingly depoliticised version of global citizenship. So far, we have seen how the contemporary focus on global citizenship for development can reproduce dominant North–South imaginaries and privilege the agency of individuals in the global North. By emphasising charity and consumption, many people are excluded from engagement with development

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and other more radical forms of ‘active citizenship’ can become marginalised. The dominance of this version of global citizenship also shapes development in the global South in problematic ways. As Korf comments when discussing post-tsunami aid in South East Asia, ‘Most undermining of the social esteem of tsunami “victims” were rituals and practices of relief delivery. The visual reproduction of “our” generosity and “their” gratefulness as a kind of consumption good required a number of practices, which have had humiliating effects for those who needed support after the tsunami. Aid brokers were under pressure to identify and focus funding on publicly attractive, easily marketable projects’ (Korf 2007: 369). Here, unequal South–North power relations are reinforced and expanded by the mainstreaming of particular ideas of global citizenship in the context of the increasing marketisation of development. The emphasis on development as a commodity rather than a project of justice underpins the ways development is used to achieve forms of global citizenship that support personal, strategic, and political objectives, as the example of international volunteering shows.

International Volunteering and Neo-liberal Citizenships In recent years, international volunteering has grown in popularity, not only through the activities of commercialised and not-for-profit gap year companies and international NGOs but also through its promotion by states in the global North. The recent focus on volunteers as development actors (Baillie Smith and Laurie 2013) has focused attention on the role of volunteering in delivering aid and development, whilst it has long been associated—if contentiously— with being a ‘global citizen’ in the sense of an act that explicitly transcends national boundaries and is built around a contribution to the well-being and openness towards distant others (Lyons et al. 2012; Lough and McBride 2013; Palacios 2010; Rovisco 2009). Evidence that international volunteering significantly impacts global citizenship remains contested, with some evidence pointing to the ways it can provide an opportunity for people to perform existing subjectivities (Baillie Smith et al. 2013). But it also increasingly plays a role in relation to a range of wider objectives with associated citizenships, which can be conceptualised as employee, professional/partner and socially included citizenships (Baillie Smith and Laurie 2011). International volunteering is marketed for its CV-enhancing abilities, being promoted as a way to ‘get on’ in a global market economy (Jones 2011) or to increase an individual’s chances to get a university place (Baillie Smith and Laurie 2013). It has also come to play a growing role in corporate social responsibility strategies

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(Muthuri et  al. 2009), including through multisector partnerships between volunteering organisations such as Voluntary Service Overseas (VSO) and multinational companies such as Accenture (Baillie Smith and Laurie 2011). Finally, through state-sponsored schemes such as Platform2 in the UK, international volunteering has also come to support policies of interfaith tolerance in a post 9/11 world (Lewis 2006: 20), seeking to bring together different excluded communities in the UK through time spent volunteering. The growing popularity and accessibility of development have meant it has become part of strategies to engender global citizenship. Through the example of international volunteering, we can see how this can—despite the apparent resonances between global citizenship, ethics, and struggles for justice—include highly neo-liberalised citizenships based on capacity for mobility rather than ethical commitments. Mirroring the ways development and poverty have taken a back seat to lifestyle and consumer identities in relation to NGO engagement strategies (Chouliaraki 2013; Cameron and Haanstra 2008), development has taken a back seat in international volunteering. So as well as needing to understand how global citizenship can contribute to development, we can see how development serves to enable the production of global citizenships by creating forms of personal and organisational capital. However, whilst attention to technology-fuelled spectacles such as Live 8 or the increasingly reported and parodied activities of international volunteers (e.g., VM  Productions 2010) reveals layers of co-optation in the relationship between global citizenship and development, such a focus can obscure a range of more complex connections outside the traditional boundaries of the aid industry and beyond the mobilities of the elites and affluent of the global North.

4

Global Citizenship Beyond Northern Benevolence

Scholarship on global citizenship has been dominated by scholars based in Western higher education institutions located in the global North, giving greater emphasis to the European philosophical and enlightenment traditions which have shaped them, as well as colonial histories that underpinned knowledge of the world and its ‘others’. However, the fact that particular ideas of global citizenship have gained particular policy and strategic purchase in the global North should not obscure the breadth and diversity of expressions of global citizenship within and between the global South, nor the emergence of new global civic spaces within which new global citizenships are emerging.

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Whilst global civil society is a contested concept, there are increasing opportunities, mechanisms, and fora which bring together and enable diverse citizens to reflect and act on issues that transcend national borders. This is not to romanticise global civic spaces. The success and growth of online activist groups such as Avaaz (avaaz.org/en/), which defines itself in terms of ‘people powered politics’, provide new opportunities for global citizenship which do not demand mobility and are focused around issues that are not necessarily determined by professional policy staff. But they are built around access to technologies that remain concentrated in the global North. Research on the cosmopolitan subjectivities of NGO activists in South India has revealed often temporary and partial access to global civic spaces (Baillie Smith and Jenkins 2012). But new global civic spaces as well as historic connections are providing opportunities for the expression of multiple global citizenships in ways that are not always defined by the centres of the aid industry in the global North. Perhaps the most well known of these initiatives is the World Social Forum, which, at the Mumbai event, explicitly rejected funding support from donors such as the Ford Foundation, European Union, DfID, and MacArthur Foundation (Smith 2004a: 418). Jeferess notes how movements such as the Narmada Bachao Andalan movement in India, the Zapatistas in Mexico, the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa, the World Social Forum, and the work of the Penticton Indian Band ‘[h]ave been influential in the development of both a transnational politics of identity and solidarity but also in providing the conceptual framework for thinking beyond race and nation; the conception of subjectivity articulated through the southern African concept of Ubuntu, the Zapatista concern with understanding the interconnections of human beings, or the Narmada struggle’s focus on the relationship of humans to other animals and the environment all provide alternative epistemologies to the European enlightenment thought of Kant, Locke, and Hobbes, to which political philosophers of global citizenship confine their theoretical framework. Significantly, as well, these movements and projects have been understood not as ‘development’ initiatives but initiatives seeking economic and social justice’ (Jefferess 2008: 33). The emergence of new transnational social movements and other formations expressly committed to unsettling the Western dominance of global civil society and foregrounding alternative ways of thinking are shaping new ideas of global citizenships and subjectivities. The World Social Forum has sought to provide more inclusive settings in which citizens from South and North have come together to explore alternative social, economic and political models to the dominant neo-liberal one. It has not been without its critics, including those who claim that it has failed to ‘de-colonize’ sufficiently, remaining

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‘too much in the hands of persons from the pan-European world, of men, of older persons, and others defined as coming from the privileged populations of the world’ (Wallerstein 2013). It has been challenged for failing to set a clear strategic direction, and for the ways it is internally structured and organised, including limiting space for deliberation and direction setting, and creating a forum which is daunting for activists who are new to such large events (Smith 2004a: 418). But, ‘despite its limitations, the WSF is undoubtedly the most globally inclusive initiative for fostering transnational civil society’ (Smith 2004a: 420). The global citizenship expressed and produced through such events, at least in terms of ambition, is less about status than it is about participation in a process of knowledge production and relationship towards greater equality. We also need to be sensitive to global citizenships and subjectivities that do not fit easily with the ways in which subjectivities are performed either through well-known social movements or through international NGO activity. For example, Kothari (2008) has explored the subjectivities of migrant peddlers in terms of a ‘non elite openness to difference’ and ‘strategic’ cosmopolitanism, whilst Datta (2009) has addressed the everyday cosmopolitanisms of East European construction workers in London. Research on faith-based volunteering showed how young people from the UK volunteering in Latin America would ‘perform’ their subjectivities during interviews in ways that fitted ideas of activism shaped by popular events such as Make Poverty History, as well as with how their faith identities would normally be expressed (Baillie Smith et al. 2013). But in their diaries, they would offer more reflexive and contingent accounts of their citizenship and subjectivity. As well as presenting methodological challenges, this research revealed the importance of faith in shaping forms of cosmopolitan and global citizenship (Gale and O’Toole 2009; Levitt 2008), which is significant here given the importance of faith organisations in development (Deneulin and Bano 2009; Rakodi 2007; Clarke 2006). Whilst such citizenships may not fit established understandings of global citizenship, global faith communities provide a context in which citizens make connections across national borders, and which offer a transnational community in which there are sets of recognised—if sometimes contested—ideas and values (Baillie Smith et al. 2013). As Levitt (2008: 787) comments, ‘Religious global citizenship has an exclusive and an inclusive variety. It inspires some to care only for the members of their own community, while it inspires others to care for people all over the world.’ Religion can provide a framework for global citizenship which goes beyond— but can overlap with—dominant aid and development modalities. There are a variety of spaces, histories and connections that can shape ideas and practices

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of global citizenship beyond the ways it is been popularly used in relation to international development.

5

Conclusion

In 2011, the Development Awareness Raising and Education Forum (one of the working groups of the European Confederation of Relief and Development NGOs—Concord), published a position paper entitled, ‘Development needs citizens’ (DARE Forum 2011). The paper responds to a perceived lack of citizen engagement in development, arguing that civic engagement is important because it enhances legitimacy, enables people to make a difference in their daily lives, and ‘opens a space for debate on root causes of global poverty, thus it allows discussing and implementing systemic changes required to tackle global justice and poverty issues’ (DARE Forum 2011: 3). The paper makes a call for more citizen ownership and scrutiny of aid and development co-operation. The need for such a position paper highlights the fact that despite the resurgence of debates around global citizenship and development, and growing popularity of global citizenship practices, citizen engagement in development remains focused on supporting development as it is. In the global North, global citizenship is often understood in terms of status and linked to development through the mobilising of particular behaviours centred on ideas of care and responsibility for ‘others’. In this way, it bears little relationship to new forms of democracy and ideas of justice, reproducing colonially rooted ideas of agency and power. On the other hand, ideas and practises of global citizenship can be found outside the confines and instrumentality of an increasingly neo-liberalised aid and development industry. Whilst we should not homogenise these citizenships, or see them as hermetically sealed from other citizenships, settings such as the World Social Forum are instructive in thinking about forms of global citizenship that are less instrumental and more concerned with democratic deliberation and ideas of justice. But, to date, participation in these settings has remained limited and exclusive. For global citizenship to make a significant contribution to development as global justice (Grugel 2013) requires attention to both how we conceptualise global citizenship and how its practices articulate with the changing development landscape. The growth of new development actors (Baillie Smith and Laurie 2013) and sites of development power presents important new challenges for thinking about global citizenship and development, not least as these destabilise the North–South imaginaries that have shaped much policy and thinking on global citizenship to date. Attention is needed to the global

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citizenships that emerge through new development-aid activity from nonDAC donors (Mawdsley 2012), as well as to South–South mobilities and interactions whose long history risks being written out by the new attention to ‘rising powers’. The ways these citizenships come into contact with other global citizenships in particular places and more discursively is a critical site for thinking about the future relationships between global citizenship and development. This demands attention and sensitivity to the different ways caring and responsibility not only work across space, but also time (Massey 2004: 10), linking global citizenship both to what has gone before, but also, particularly in the context of environmental resources and sustainability, responsibility for generations to come. More attention will also be needed to the ways the relationship between global citizenship and development is negotiated through factors such as class, community, gender, place and faith (Baillie Smith 2013). In both scholarly and policy terms, this demands a move away from seeing citizenship as status to recognising that it is temporal, contradictory, and fluid—something that is much harder to align with state, corporate and voluntary organisational strategic objectives, but which presents greater opportunities to articulate ideas of justice that can work across national borders. As long as global citizenship is seen as something to be closely ‘managed’ and ‘audited’, it is unlikely to play a role in transforming development from a project of benevolence, self-interest, and control to one of global justice.

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Part II The Changing Role of the State and Capital in Development

7 The Developmental State Christopher Wylde

1

Introduction

The historical and empirical record of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries is clear: that the creation of effective states within the developing world has generally preceded the emergence of industrialising economies. If development is to be defined in a narrow sense of industrialisation and moving up the value-added food chain, and measured by per capita gross domestic product (GDP) growth as well as improvements in the Human Development Index (HDI), history tells us that an effective state is a necessary prerequisite. The Developmental State concept sets out a vision of an ‘effective state’, with a number of economic, political, and institutional prerequisites. This chapter will begin with a discussion of the East Asian development experience—the rise of the newly industrialised countries (NICs) in the second half of the twentieth century. This provides the empirical grounding for the discussion to extrapolate common theoretical principles of the Developmental State that have formed the basis of scholarly debate in the discipline, in terms of state effectiveness and the different institutional constellations that have formed different Developmental States in history. The discussion is split into four sections. The first section outlines the literature examining the rise of the NICs from within the Developmental State paradigm. The second section then discusses the theory of the Developmental State that

C. Wylde ( ) University of Richmond, UK © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 J. Grugel, D. Hammett (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of International Development, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-42724-3_7

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emerged from this empirical research, highlighting two core strands of thought that have informed the understanding of Developmental State theory: industrial policy and embedded autonomy. These principles will be explained separately but analysed integrally, presenting critiques of the theory to generate a critical analysis of the aetiology of the Developmental State concept. The third section will briefly outline some critiques that fall from outside of the ontology associated with the Developmental State paradigm, including neo-Marxist interpretations of the state. This allows the final concluding section to construct an alternative understanding of the Developmental State paradigm that transcends traditional understandings and seeks to overcome some of these fundamental critiques.

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Origins of the Developmental State and the East Asian Experience

Developmental State theory emerged as a counter-critique to the neoclassical development paradigm and the neoliberal revolution of the 1970s and 1980s through a reinterpretation of the East Asian NICs’ development experience (Öniş 1991: 110; Shaikh 2005: 48). Although its origins lay outside the critical scholarship on development, it became popular amongst that community due to the fact that not only did it offer a critique of the neoclassical model but it also placed the state at the centre of the analysis (Rapley 2008: 135). Therefore, a new critique of the neoclassical model and the structural adjustment programmes (SAPs) of the 1980s emerged that was not rooted in the traditional leftist discourse of structuralism and dependency. The central thesis of this body of literature (e.g., Johnson 1982; Deyo 1987; Wade 1990) is clearly linked to List (1983[1841]) and Gerschenkron (1962), and stipulates that late development should be understood as a process in which states play a strategic role in harnessing domestic and international forces to work for the national interest. The national interest here is defined in terms of long-term developmental gains, although this is not without its critics (Pempel 1999: 144). Key to rapid industrialisation is a strong and autonomous state, providing directional thrust to the operation of the market mechanism, and it is this synergy between the state and the market which provides the basis for successful development (Öniş 1991: 110). Chalmers Johnson (1982) in his book, MITI and the Japanese Miracle, termed Japan a Developmental State, thus becoming the pioneer of this concept. In this book he emphasises that Japanese institutions constituted a system that was favourable for economic growth, with the crucial ingredient being the role of the state in planning and guiding economic activity, through what came to be known as industrial policy (Vogel and Barma 2008: 240).

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Both Amsden (1989a, b) and Wade (1990) built upon Johnson with respect to industrial policy and its impact on industrial performance. Amsden’s (1989) book Asia’s Next Giant: South Korea and Late Industrialisation is an account of South Korea’s Developmental State in action that contains strong parallels with Johnson’s account of Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) and Japanese industrial policy. Amsden argued that during the period in question, South Korea could be characterised as a prototype case of a guided market economy in which market rationality was constrained by the priorities of industrialisation. The government performed a strategic role in shaping domestic and international forces so that they were harnessed to national economic interests. Rapid industrialisation per se was the goal, rather than profit maximisation based on comparative advantage (Amsden, 1989a, b). Key industries were selected (on the basis of potential for rapid technological progress, potential for labour productivity growth, and industries with highincome elasticities of demand in world markets), promoted, subsidised, and exposed to global competition. Thus, the market was guided by a conception of the longer-term rationality of investment formulated by the state’s elites; or, in her famous phrase, ‘getting relative prices wrong’ (Amsden, 1989a 139). State intervention therefore involved the creation of price distortions as well as more direct controls so that economic activity was directed towards greater investment. In the case of Taiwan, Wade (1990) suggested a ‘governed market theory’ of East Asian industrialisation as an alternative to the neoclassical ‘free market’ explanation. The essential elements of Wade’s argument were that superior economic performance was largely the consequence of high levels of investment in certain key industries, levels than would not have occurred in the absence of government intervention. This was the product of policies that enabled the government to guide or govern the process of resource allocation so as to produce a specific production and investment profile. This set of policies can be grouped under the banner of industrial policy, and, for Wade, are in turn supported by specific political, institutional, and organisational arrangements pertaining to state apparatus and private business as well as their mutual interaction (Wade 1990; see also, Öniş 1991: 112). A central insight of Wade and Amsden’s analysis was that the government not only subsidised industries to stimulate growth but also set stringent performance criteria in exchange for these subsidies. Their contribution to the growing debate was about the nature of industrial policy where industrialisation per se was the goal, rather than profit maximisation based on comparative advantage. Therefore, whilst there were relatively high degrees of protection at first, that protection was incrementally withdrawn as the firms became more competitive so that they could gain access to foreign markets. The way in which

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industrial policy was implemented contrasted sharply with the more negative forms of industrial policy in Latin America under import substituting industrialisation (ISI), which involved permanent subsidies to domestically protected industry; or certain Western countries which have subsidised declining firms or industries experiencing financial difficulties (perhaps the most famous and certainly the largest example being the US bailout of huge sections of its automobile industry in the wake of the global financial crisis in 2007–08). The concept of the Developmental State therefore emerged from an analysis of late development tactics of specific states in East Asia. When attempting to explain why these states adopted this specific political economy, many of these analyses concentrate on specific geopolitical factors such as the US confrontation with Communist China (Doner et al. 2005: 329), or to specific sociopolitical factors within the Developmental States themselves, such as the colonial legacies present at the beginning of the industrialising process in South Korea (Kohli 1994: 1270–1271). Certainly, a strong and persuasive body of literature exists that suggests this East Asian development experience was unique as a result of specific colonial legacies and a specific geopolitical context in the second half of the twentieth century (Stubbs 2005; Doner et al. 2005; Cumings 1987: 44–83; Koo 1987). Alternative analysis centres on specific institutional formats, such as Johnson and his analysis of MITI in Japan. It is these alternative formats that form the basis of a theory of the Developmental State.

3

Theorising the Developmental State

In State-Directed Development, Atul Kohli (2004: 2) distinguishes between three ideal types of state involvement in the industrialisation (and therefore development) process: neopatrimonial states, fragmented multi-class states, and cohesive-capitalist states (see Fig. 7.1). Neopatrimonial states are the least effective at state intervention: Nigeria and many other sub-Saharan African states are classic examples. Fragmented multi-class states are a middling category with various degrees of effectiveness in facilitating latecomer industrialisation; better than neopatrimonial states, but certainly less effective than cohesive-capitalist states. This last category can be most closely associated with the Developmental State paradigm, which can therefore be seen as the most effective model for effective state intervention in the development process. Much of the academic work on the Developmental State paradigm has sought to ascertain what specific suite of policies, political organisations, and institutional make-up of the state is necessary in order to facilitate effective catch-up development. It is difficult to underplay the seismic nature of this debate within

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Fig. 7.1 Effectiveness of different types of interventionist states according to Kohli (2004) (Source: Prepared by Author)

a context of neoliberal hegemony whose real-world policy manifestations, in the form of the Washington Consensus, reigned supreme. For the first time, a cohesive explanation—different from neoliberal ones at that time which dominated academia, the media, and the thinking of international organisation (especially the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF)) of rapid industrialisation was offered which had the state at the centre of its analysis. Such a scholarly endeavour has been broadly split between two separate schools: the ‘political school’ and the ‘economic school’. The economic school has tended to focus on what policies are necessary for late development: the state is required to accrue economies of scale and scope, co-ordinate investments within and across sectors, and to harness positive and eliminate negative externalities. The political school, on the other hand, has been concerned with the state itself and whether it has the potential, in general, and the independence, in particular, to adopt the necessary developmental policies (Fine 2013: 8). This school has suggested that the state must be free of capture by particular interests, and therefore possess specific state–society relationships, to be able to promote and implement appropriate (developmental) policies. Much scholarly effort has been spent discussing this autonomy, as it has been presented in the literature as the key to effective state intervention. Lack of autonomy leads to state capture by particular interests, such as family members in neopatrimonial states, whose interests are not a priori appropriate for effective national developmental goals. The basis for this autonomy, its nature and realisation, will form a substantive section of discussion later in this section, which will seek to both summarise and problematise existing scholarship so as to help map the latest thinking on this subject. The two schools have traditionally understood the Developmental State concept in terms of a state–market dichotomy; the economics school seeing the state overruling the market and improving upon it, whilst the political school visualising the state as standing aloof from the market and the economic

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interests found within it. This approach can be significantly critiqued and problematised. From the economic school perspective, this view assumes that market actors would a priori like to extend market forces at all opportunities, whereas states would ideally like to infringe upon the market. In other words, states and markets are viewed as two different if not incompatible sources of resource allocation (Palan and Abbott 1999: 32). States and markets do not comprise two sets of actors and dynamics that are profoundly different. For example, transnational corporation (TNC) activity—a quintessential market agent—has been shown to actively seek and promote state bureaucratisation (Galbraith 2007[1967]), whilst mainstream global governance such as the Bretton Woods Institutions—by definition constituted and run by states— actively promote markets. From the political school perspective, this suggests a theoretically very narrow perception of the state, one that views society as constituted in narrow market terms as well as potentially underplaying the role of class relations through seeing different class interests more in terms of social groups (Chang 2013: 90). Alternatively expressed in the words of Ben Fine, ‘[the state-market dichotomy] conceals the simple fact that economic development is a complex amalgam of processes and outcomes derived from capital accumulation, where state and market—and their interaction— are themselves attached to the economic and political relations and interests which act upon them’ (Fine 2013: 25). Instead, this chapter offers an exposition of Developmental State theory according to two core strands of thought that can be extrapolated from the East Asian experience. The first of these broad categories concerns industrial policy, the second the national business–state (bureaucracy) relationship, and wider considerations of the state–society relationship. Each of these strands will be analysed in turn, drawing attention to key linkages between them.

Industrial Policy Ha-Joon Chang (see, e.g., 1993, 1995, 1999) has contributed more than most to academic understanding of the role of industrial policy and economic policies more widely within the Developmental State concept. His work has facilitated the argument that ‘a fundamental characteristic of the Developmental State is having a strategic industrial policy organised around government directives that are broad-based in scope and leave the operational detail to the individual firms’ (Madjd-Sadjadi and Karagiannis 2007: 244). Chang points out that both national and transnational bourgeoisie in developing countries tend not to invest in new industries because they do not know whether other, complementary investments will come along; hence, there needs to be a centralised

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co-ordination of investment plans (Chang 1999: 192). State intervention can therefore reduce transaction costs, for example, through ‘indicative planning’ (Chang 1993: 53). Furthermore, infant industry arguments can be deployed. First, to raise an industry from the ground requires sums of capital beyond the reach of the private financial sector. The state, therefore, has a role to play, since through its actions it can raise the capital through borrowing, taxation, and the direction of export earnings (Rapley 2008: 141). There is also a role to play in the accumulation of human capital. State investment in education, for example, allows for its population to develop the skills necessary to compete in a global marketplace. Second, to acquire, adapt, and alter production technologies imported from the developed world, firms must be given a learning period during which the state protects them from foreign competition. To make it possible for firms to move into a market in which barriers to entry and brand loyalty favour established producers, the state may need to reserve its domestic market for local producers for a set period of time (Gerschenkron 1962; Rapley 2008: 143). Whilst the infant industry argument was deployed by the structuralists during the 1970s and therefore associated with ISI, the Developmental State concept used it with important differences. First, rather than building an industrial base to satisfy local demand (the very raison d’être of ISI), it focused on building export industries in order to foster new comparative advantages based upon dynamic rather than static efficiency. Second, rather than provide local industry with indiscriminate protection, governments choose winners, strategically selecting a few companies in key industries which they will help raise to maturity, leaving the others to die (Amsden, 1989; Rapley 2008: 143). A final point concerns the nature of industrial and agricultural development. Neoclassical theory has criticised traditional ISI for its urban bias (Rapley 2008), for transferring resources from the rural sector to urban industry when their best comparative advantages lay in that rural economy. However, the early Developmental States of East Asia did not necessarily follow these practices, as they nurtured both agriculture and industry, with protection for agricultural markets also offered. For example, the principle adopted by South Korea was to initially focus on the primary sector and use these surpluses to fund manufacturing industry.

The Business–State (Bureaucracy) Relationship and Embedded Autonomy Scholars draw attention to the strength, capacity, and autonomy required for successful Developmental States (Rapley 2008: 155; Evans et  al. 1985: 9).

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Capacity can be defined as the ability of a state to implement goals, especially over the actual or potential opposition of powerful social groups or in the face of recalcitrant socio-economic circumstances. This capacity should arise less from crude power and more from a marriage between a technocratic state and a well-organised indigenous capitalist class. Thus, in order to have capacity a state must also possess autonomy, defined as when it is able to ‘formulate and pursue goals that are not simply reflective of the demands or interests of social groups, classes, or society’ (Evans et al. 1985: 9): governments may have to enact unpopular or even harsh policies in the name of development. To effectively guide economic development, a state must enjoy the power to direct society and lead it through traumatic changes. Bureaucrats must be able to draft policies that promote national development, not the advancement of private lobbyists. Research on capacity has centred on the nature of the business–state relationship in a Developmental State and the presence of a domestic capitalist class who articulate their interests and concerns via interest groups and chambers of commerce, so the state does not reduce itself to crony capitalism (Wu 2008) and (neo)patrimonial politics (Rapley 2008). Capitalists make up for their shortcomings, which in a developing country are that they do not yet contribute large amounts to the national economy, by linking their businesses to entry points in the state. This produces a two-way information flow as not only can the capitalists express their concerns to policymakers but policymakers can communicate more effectively with chief players in the economy (Rapley 2008). In Japan, this manifested itself at one end in the form of a competent state bureaucracy—usually with a pilot agency with overall strategic responsibility for industrialisation (MITI in the Japanese example)—that had organisational and institutional links at the other end with major private sector firms and capitalists. Somewhat paradoxically, the linkages between state and society (or bureaucracy and domestic bourgeoisie more specifically) must be complemented with state autonomy. Traditional Developmental State theory views the state to be necessarily separate from society in order to insulate it from competing interests (a classic authoritarian state), and those who may bear the costs of economic development incurred due to the lack of perfect mobility of factors of production. Johnson (1987) has argued that whilst there is no necessary connection between the Developmental State and authoritarianism, there is an ‘elective affinity’ between the two, echoing the work of O’Donnell (1973) and his analysis of the connection between bureaucratic-authoritarian regimes in Latin America and their emphasis on heavy industrialisation. However, this link between authoritarianism and the Developmental State has been questioned by a number of

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scholars, with a whole literature on democracy and the Developmental State emerging (see, e.g., Robinson and White 2002). With regard to this link, Bruce Cumings (1999: 69) argues that ‘theoretically speaking… there is no reason why this [the link between the developmental state and authoritarianism] has to be.’ The traditional reason has of course been because of autonomy, but Cumings reminds us that—at least on the level of theory as this is what we are currently concerned with—there are other ways of achieving autonomy that are different from an authoritarian government. Peter Evans (1995) coined the term embedded autonomy to better characterise state autonomy within a Developmental State beyond simple separation of the state from society through authoritarianism. Drawing together the work on capacity and state bureaucracies with the concept of state autonomy, his argument suggests that a Weberian-style bureaucracy in the sense of selective, meritocratic entrance requirements and independent long-term career rewards gives them autonomy. However, here he departs from Weber and suggests that far from being insulated from society, ‘they are embedded in a concrete set of social ties that binds the state to society and provides institutionalised channels for the continual negotiation and renegotiation of goals and policies’ (Evans 1995: 12). These ties are predominantly with captains of industry—or domestic bourgeoisie—and it is this embedded autonomy that best facilitates the state’s role in industrial transformation. It is this embedded autonomy that facilitates the kind of strategic industrial policy witnessed in the East Asian NICs, rather than that seen during the Latin American ISI period. Contributions by Koo and Johnson in Deyo (1987) highlight a key distinction between the political basis for strong, autonomous developmentalist states and the institutional basis for state intervention and effective industrial policy implementation. Analysis suggests that not only did this political basis exist in certain East Asian countries in the form of a specific sociopolitical context that facilitated strategy formulation conducive to rapid industrialisation and economic development, but that this basis, although separate from the institutions and structures through which policies are implemented, represented a fundamental aspect of development capacity (Öniş 1991: 114). Therefore, the strategic power of the East Asian Developmental State depended on the formation of political coalitions with domestic industry, whilst successful state intervention relied on organisational and institutional links between politically insulated state agencies and major private sector firms. Underlying these Developmental State imperatives were the two central features of unusual degrees of both bureaucratic autonomy and public–private co-operation. This facilitated the formulation of independent national goals

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by the state and its bureaucracy, as well as translating these broad national goals into effective policy action. Therefore, the coexistence of these two features was essential. For example, in the absence of bureaucratic autonomy, public–private co-operation could easily degenerate into situations in which state goals are directly reducible to private interests. Argentina and Brazil during their bureaucratic-authoritarian periods could be examples of such a political economy, where close government–business co-operation materialised in the context of a weak state, in the sense that it lacked autonomy from powerful groups in society. The logic of the Developmental State therefore rests on the combination of bureaucratic autonomy with an unusual degree of public–private co-operation; the central insight of which is that the degree of government–business co-operation and consensus on national goals is not purely the product of a given cultural environment but has been largely engineered by the state elites themselves through the creation of a special set of institutions (Öniş 1991: 115). This thought was further developed as Evans and his concept of embedded autonomy was critiqued for having an inadequate or incomplete understanding of state–society relationships; it was not a sufficient explanation of successful development experience as both strong states and strong economic groups in society are needed to create ‘governed interdependence’ (Weiss 1998: 38). Pempel’s (1999: 157) analysis captures this well when he critiques the Developmental State literature for privileging the political and economic role played by state bureaucrats. This is because they are treated as totally depoliticised, socially disembodied, and in rational pursuit of a self-evident national interest (Pempel 1999: 144). In the words of Chalmers Johnson (1982: 356), ‘politicians merely reign, whereas the bureaucrats actually rule’. This led Cumings (1999: 61) to suggest that the state then emerges as a ‘web without a spider’. This can be critiqued through the observation that ‘if not from the politicians from whom do bureaucrats get their sense of direction?’ (Pempel 1999: 145). Bureaucracies may well be rational, but in whose interests are they rational? One answer could be the national interest, derived from the possible interests of the politicians or at least of those in power. This opens the door to the possibility of multiple capitalisms and many varied versions of economic development; or many different capitalisms or forms of development, each promoting the interests of different specific socio-economic groups (Pempel 1999: 145). As a result, different ‘Developmental Regimes’ (see Pempel 1999; Wylde 2012, 2014) are possible, based on different constellations of socio-economic interests rooted in state–society relationships that go beyond the narrow confines of embedded autonomy, authoritarianism, and the Developmental State concept.

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It is this critique that the concept of the democratic Developmental State is grounded in. Early Developmental State literature perceived democracy to be a luxury that was feasible only in countries that had achieved developmental success. Democratic politics were considered to be a barrier to sustained development since unbridled political competition could generate pressures that led to deviation from the appropriate path necessary for sustained economic development (Robinson and White 2002: 1). Whilst developmental democracy is not an assured outcome of a simultaneous process of economic and political liberalisation, it should not be totally discarded. The political and institutional basis for a number of states that have demonstrated broad-based sustainable development combined with a legitimate and inclusive democracy lies in the form of the democratic Developmental State (Robinson and White 2002: 1; White 2002). An effective Developmental State requires a particular mix of politics and institutions that can create, maintain, and deepen democratic structures and shape developmental outcomes in both productive and equitable ways. This mix can move beyond state–society relations characterised by embedded autonomy, achieving the same developmental results—that is, sustained economic growth and industrialisation—yet grounded in a social contract characterised by democratic institutions. This opens the (theoretical) door to the possibility of different constellations of state–society relationships beyond embedded autonomy that can lead to effective development. The Developmental State’s preoccupation with the insulation of state bureaucrats as key to economic development can therefore be (re)interpreted as theoretically constricting. Evans falls into a trap of circular reasoning through emphasising the role and character of the state’s bureaucracy at the expense of other explanatory factors (Woo-Cumings 1999: 31; Pempel 1999: 144). He reduces the basis of legitimacy for state-led developmental intervention to bureaucratic links with industrial capital. The possibility of legitimacy based on other forms of state–society relationship, or indeed multiples and combinations of different relationships, is not considered. As Pempel (1999: 147) suggests, ‘bureaucratic autonomy and mandarinate competence in the absence of numerous other conditions are thin reeds on which to rest a strategy of economic development’. In a critique of the Developmental State literature in terms of its analysis of bureaucracies, Woo-Cumings (1999: 31) contends that ‘trimming some bureaucratic fat off the developmental state does not mean the end of the developmental state; rather, it is a requirement for survival’. In summary, there has been an evolution of thought with regard to the theory of the Developmental State. Traditionally split between the politics school and the economics school, this chapter has instead offered an alternative framework—one based on consideration first of industrial policy and second on the

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institutional and social prerequisites necessary for such a particular form of industrial policy. In terms of industrial policy for a Developmental State, the key message is a suite of policies (subsidies, selective tariffs, and targeted state intervention) designed to promote rapid industrialisation that can change so as to facilitate increasing international competitiveness over time. In terms of the state–society relationships needed to underpin such policies, Evans’ concept of embedded autonomy is key—although this can be critiqued as being too (theoretically) constrictive and East Asia specific. Alternative state–society relationships can also exist that generate similar developmental outcomes; relationships grounded in democracy and more inclusive and broad-based coalitions beyond those between the state and domestic bourgeoisie.

4

Towards a Twenty-First-Century Developmental State?

The Developmental State concept has not been without its critics, from within the theory in terms of imminent critiques (as discussed above) as well as from other theoretical traditions. One critique emerged from the World Bank, which (re)interpreted the East Asian Development experience and suggested that the state was involved in the industrialisation process simply to help facilitate freer markets (World Bank 1993, 1997; see also Page 1994: 199). Alternative criticisms have been more nuanced, focusing on either the narrowness of Developmental State theory’s understanding of development, for example, the repression of labour in terms of wages and welfare in order to maximise dynamic efficiency (Caldentey 2008: 50–51), or on the need to ‘bring class back in’ (Radice 2008: 1168) to its analysis of the state.

Self-Selection Issues As Developmental State literature emerged out of the context of an empirical problem of explaining the East Asian development experience, the theory suffers from the problem of ‘cherry-picking’. Thus, due to a method of ‘identifying developmental states and explaining them in terms of the policies adopted and the capacity to adopt them, case studies with the Developmental State literature have been self-selecting’ (Fine 2013: 10). The extent to which the concept of the Developmental State can be considered a theory at all can therefore be questioned. However, this chapter rejects such a critique as it is itself grounded in the inductive approach

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(see  Pirie  2013: 167). The study of the political economy of development concerns transformations in the social system (Heymann et  al. 2006: 33). Tracking such processes and representing them in a precise way necessarily requires detailed analysis of events and policies before effective interpretation through the application or development of theoretical frameworks. Therefore, the role of theory is to facilitate holistic analysis and interpretation of otherwise apparently disconnected series of events. Furthermore, theory allows analysis to move beyond spatially and temporally specific events and thus facilitates comparative reflections (in the context of the political economy of development) on patterns of production, consumption, and distribution. Such reflections produce heuristic devices that enrich any attempts to characterise specific Developmental States or Regimes (Wylde 2012: 9). At the other end of the scale is the application of the Developmental State concept to any and all instances of state-driven development; the issue of conceptual stretching. The Developmental State must be more than simply an economic strategy based around economic growth. As Fine’s (1997: 3) critique suggests, the Developmental State concept is in danger of being reduced to the statement that ‘[w]herever there is or has been development, there must have been a Developmental State’. This critique is overcome through a more rigorous understanding of the core theoretical tenets of Developmental State theory which moves beyond simple state–market dichotomies and embrace state– society concerns. The concept of embedded autonomy began this process, with the work of Pempel and others on the Developmental Regime taking it further.

Embedded Autonomy Versus Relative Autonomy The ontological theorisation of state–society relationships in classic Developmental State thought as outlined in the previous section can be brought into question. Developmental State theory, and indeed the Developmental Regime concept (at least as understood by Pempel) developed its understanding of society as a set of social groups with different economic functions. Therefore, the actions of Developmental States (indeed all states as we are now talking about general state theory) can be explained through the ‘organisational features’ of a given state. Organisational features can be defined as a set of organisations through which collectivities of officials may be able to formulate and implement distinctive strategies of policies (Evans et al. 1985: 20–21). In terms of a Developmental State, this led to focus on bureaucratic strength and coherence; what matters is the relation between the state and other groups of collective individuals. This was achieved by interpreting the

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state as an independent agent that develops and institutionalises relationships with different groups—for the Developmental State with business sectors and for the Developmental Regime a wider constellation of different social groups dependent upon the specific case under consideration. Such a view of the state has been critiqued by neo-Marxists (see, e.g., Chang 2013; Jessop 2008) as requiring politics to be viewed as analytically separate from economics—or the state as autonomous from classes. Such a view misrepresents or downplays the dependence of the state upon capital (or other class) relations (Chang 2013: 91). That is not to say that the state should be seen as a mere reflection of class interests—the ‘economic committee of the bourgeoisie’; rather, the state should be seen as a ‘social relation’ (Poulantzas 2000[1978])—possessing ‘relative autonomy’ from different class interests as it advocates the interests of capitalism rather than capitalists. This ‘embedded autonomy versus relative autonomy’ debate is centred on ‘bringing class back in’, or asking the question who is doing what to whom? (Radice 2008: 1168), with the embedded autonomists seeing class more in terms of social groups that interact with the state, and relative autonomists focusing more on class relations and the complex manner in which these mutually (re)constitute the state, which can itself therefore be understood as a social relation. Such an understanding facilitates a firmer grip on the necessary ensemble of social relations of production and associated institutions that link society with the state that best facilitates latecomer industrialisation.

5

Conclusion: Beyond the Developmental State?

This chapter has explored the Developmental State as a theory that explains an empirical puzzle (rapid industrialisation in countries such as Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea), and the subsequent ways in which the literature has endeavoured to produce a general theory of state-led development out of that experience. In this context, the Developmental State can be seen as perhaps the most successful form of state-led industrialisation present in the historical record of the twentieth century. The scholarly exploration of the nature of the basis of this success has split into two separate, although fundamentally related, schools. The economics school has explored the nature of policies that have facilitated such successful industrialisation strategies as seen in the East Asian context, and have focused on industrial policy. The politics school has explored more the nature of the state itself and what characteristics it must possess in order to successfully realise such well-crafted and specific industrial policy. This chapter has rejected such a dichotomy, instead attempting

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to build an induced theoretical model that combines the thoughts of the two schools so as to generate a more holistic and integrated understanding of the Developmental State paradigm grounded in the fundamentally interrelated concepts of industrial policy and state–society relations. This approach has revealed that Developmental State theory has focused on capacity and autonomy as key concepts to explain successful state-led development, distilling into state–society relations characterised by embedded autonomy. This is by no means the only available option to a state. Instead, alternative Developmental Regimes grounded in different constellations of state–society relationships can oversee successful periods of development. A successful twenty-first-century Developmental State must therefore move beyond embedded autonomy and the narrow factors of bureaucratic competency and its links with business sectors within domestic society (Evans 2008). Furthermore, and drawing from the work of Amartya Sen especially, these new state–society mixes should be grounded in processes of democratisation; specifically moving away from early Developmental State thinking especially regarding the ‘elective affinity’ with authoritarianism as identified by Chalmers Johnson. This has important implications to the field of international development more broadly. The hegemony of neoliberalism in development thinking runs counter to many of the lessons that can be drawn from the late development experience of the NICs and their associated developmental states; something that is not lost on the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) or indeed MINT (Mexico, Indonesia, Nigeria, Turkey) countries, who, to varying degrees, engage in state-led industrialisation and development activities that could be characterised under the aegis of the theory of the Developmental State.

References Caldentey, E.P. 2008. The concept and evolution of the developmental state. International Journal of Political Economy 37(3): 27–53. Chalmers J. 1987. “Political institutions and economic performance,” in Fredric Deyo, ed. The Political Economy of the New Asian Industrialism, 136–164. Chang, H.-J. 1993. The political economy of industrial policy in Korea. Cambridge Journal of Economics 16(2): 131–157. Chang, H.-J. 1999. The economic theory of the developmental state. In The developmental state, ed. M. Woo-Cummings, 182–199. New York: Cornell University Press. Chang, D. 2013. Labour and the “developmental state”: A critique of the developmental state theory of labour. In Beyond the developmental state: Industrial policy into the twenty-first century, ed. B.  Fine, J.  Saraswati, and D.  Tavasci, 85–109. London: Pluto Press.

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Cumings, B. 1987. The origins and development of the North-East Asian economy: Industrial sectors, product cycles, and political consequences. In The political economy of New Asian Industrialism, ed. F.C. Deyo, 44–84. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Cumings, B. 1999. Webs with no spiders, spiders with no webs: The genealogy of the developmental state. In The developmental state, ed. Woo-Cumings, 61–92. New York: Cornell University Press. Deyo, F.C. (ed.). 1987. The political economy of New Asian industrialism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Doner, R., B.K. Ritchie, and D. Slater. 2005. Systemic vulnerability and the origins of developmental states: Northeast and Southeast Asia in comparative perspective. International Organization 59(2): 327–361. Evans, P.B. 1995. Embedded autonomy: States and industrial transformation. Chichester: Princeton University Press. Evans, P.B. 2008. In search of the 21st century developmental state. CGPE Working Paper Series, No. 4, December. Evans, P.B., D. Rueschemeyer, and T. Skocpol (eds.). 1985. Bringing the state back in. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fine, B. 1997. State, development and inequality: The curious incident of the developmental state in the night-time. Paper to Sanpad Conference, Durban, 26th–30th June. Fine, B. 2013. Beyond the developmental state: An introduction. In Beyond the developmental state: Industrial policy into the twenty-first century, ed. B. Fine, J. Saraswati, and D. Tavasci, 1–32. London: Pluto Press. Galbraith, J.K. 2007[1967]. The new industrial state. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Gerschenkron, A. 1962. Economic backwardness in historical perspective. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Heymann, D., S. Galiano, C. Dabus, and F. Tohré. 2006. Two essays on development economics. Estudios y Perspectivas 34. Buenos Aires: CEPAL Jessop, B. 2008. State power: A strategic-relational approach. Cambridge: Polity Press. Johnson, C. 1982. MITI and the Japanese miracle: The growth of industrial policy. Sanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Kohli, A. 1994. Where do high growth political economies come from? The Japanese lineage of Korea’s developmental state. World Development 22(9): 1269–1293. Kohli, A. 2004. State directed development: Political power and industrialisation in the global periphery. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Koo, H. 1987. The interplay of state, social class, and world system in East Asian development: The cases of South Korea and Taiwan. In The political economy of New Asian Industrialism, ed. F.C. Deyo, 165–181. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. List, F. 1983[1841]. The national system of political economy. London: Cass. Madjd-Sadjadi, Z., and N. Karagiannis. 2007. Modern state intervention in the era of globalisation. Cheltenham: Elgar.

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O’Donnell, G. 1973. Modernisation and bureaucratic authoritarianism. Berkeley: Institute of International Studies. Önis, Z. 1991. Review: The logic of the developmental state. Comparative Politics 24(1): 109–126. Page, J. 1994. The East Asian miracle: Four lessons for development policy. In NBER macroeconomics annual volume 9, ed. S.  Fischer and J.J.  Rotemberg, 199–281. Massachusetts: MIT Press. Palan, R., and J. Abbott. 1999. The state in the global political economy. In State strategies in the global political economy, ed. R. Palan and J. Abbott, 32–54. London: Pinter. Pempel, T.J. 1999. The developmental regime in a changing world economy. In The developmental state, ed. M. Woo-Cumings, 137–181. New York: Cornell Paperbacks. Pirie, I. 2013. Globalisation and the decline of the developmental state. In Beyond the developmental state: Industrial policy into the twenty-first century, ed. B.  Fine, J. Saraswati, and D. Tavasci, 146–168. London: Pluto Press. Poulantzas, N. 2000[1978]. State, power, socialism. London: Verso Radice, H.K. 2008. The developmental state under global neoliberalism. Third World Quarterly 29(6): 1153–1174. Rapley. 2008. Understanding development: Theory and practice in the 3rd world. London: Lynne Rienner Publishers. Robinson, M., and G. White (eds.). 2002. The democratic developmental state. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Shaikh, A. 2005. The economic mythology of neoliberalism. In Neoliberalism: A critical reader, ed. A. Saad-Filho and D. Johnston, 41–49. London: Pluto. Stubbs, R. 2005. Rethinking Asia’s economic miracle. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Vogel, S.K., and N.H. Barma. 2008. The political economy reader. New York: Routledge. Wade, R. 1990. Governing the market: Economic theory and the role of government in East Asian industrialisation. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Weiss, L. 1998. The myth of the powerless state: Governing the economy in a global era. Polity: Cambridge. White, G. 2002. Constructing a democratic developmental state. In The democratic developmental state, ed. M.  Robinson and G.  White, 17–51. Oxford: Oxford University Press. World Bank. 1993. The East Asian miracle: Economic growth and public policy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. World Bank. 1997. The state in a changing world, World development report. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wu, Y. 2008. The role of institutional quality in a currency crisis model. IMF Working Paper, WP/08/5. Wylde, C. 2012. Latin America after neoliberalism: Developmental regimes in post-crisis states. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Wylde, C. 2014. The developmental state is dead, long live the developmental regime! Interpreting Nestór Kirchner’s Argentina 2003–2007. Journal of International Relations and Development 17(2): 191–219.

8 Natural Resource Extraction and the Development Conundrum Håvard Haarstad

1

Introduction

It has become part of our common sense that natural resources, and particularly extractive resources such as minerals, oil and gas, are a double-edged sword for development. Media portrayals have demonstrated links between diamond extraction and violent conflict, between oil extraction and environmental destruction and the complicity of large oil companies in corruption and tax evasion. The idea of the ‘resource curse’ has become highly popularised, and has sparked new aid programmes, policy interventions and NGO campaigns. The idea of the resource curse became prominent in academia in the 1990s and 2000s as researchers started to put forward evidence that, contrary to what was often believed, natural resource endowments were associated with lower economic growth, more violent conflict and authoritarian regimes (Karl 1997; Ross 2001; Sachs and Warner 2001). The notion that economies based on resource extraction have detrimental effects predates the academic analyses. Journalist Eduardo Galeano’s popular book Open Veins of Latin America from 1973 vividly described the effects of resource exploitation in Latin America (Galeano 1973). And Juan Pablo Pérez Alfonzo, oil minister of Venezuela and one of the founders of OPEC, is famous for calling oil ‘the devil’s excrement’ in the early 1970s. It is of course paradoxical that natural resources extraction should be seen as a curse. Traditionally, natural resources

H. Haarstad ( ) University of Bergen, Norway © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 J. Grugel, D. Hammett (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of International Development, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-42724-3_8

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have been understood as endowments granted by nature, as what the wealth of nations and peoples were based on. In Rostow’s (1960) conception of the ‘stages’ of development, natural resource endowments were the essential ingredient that allowed underdeveloped countries to take off to industrialisation. Indeed, the development of today’s ‘industrialised’ countries is founded upon the endowments of natural resources of various types, including extractive resources in ‘developing’ countries. ‘Natural resources’ are in a sense a subsidy given to society by nature. They provide essential inputs into society’s systematic circulation of energy, goods and capital. Yet as Zimmermann’s (1951: 7) famous maxim has it, ‘resources are not, they become’: outcomes from natural resources extraction are not automatically determined but depend on particular social processes. Resources may essentially be natural artefacts, but they are only useful and meaningful to us as ‘resources’ once they have been given value by society. And the way we make use of and value resources is dependent on certain technical and scientific arrangements, which in turn are distributed highly unequally between people, group and countries. Simply put, some control the necessary technology and expertise, while others do not. Some control the channels for transporting extracted resources and energy. Some can shape the markets where resources and energy are distributed and sold. Natural resources are not ‘good’ or ‘bad’ for development per se, but the social processes that turn material artefacts into resources often produce highly unequal outcomes. Recognising this, the social sciences have gradually come to see the social system—or specific parts of it—as the determinant for development outcomes from natural resource extraction. Much of the resource curse literature points to weak national-level governance institutions in developing countries as the key problem (Mehlum et al. 2006a, b; Robinson et al. 2006; Stiglitz 2007; Collier and Goderis 2008). This literature has been highly influential, but has also been significantly criticised (Watts 2004; Rosser 2006; Stevens and Dietsche 2008; Logan and McNeish 2012; Haarstad 2014). It is not necessarily disputed that weak national-level institutions are detrimental to development. For example, weak institutions may be unable to hinder corruption and abuse of political power. But what the critics of the resource curse literature suggest is that weak national-level institutions cannot by themselves sufficiently explain negative development outcomes. Resource governance is shaped by both longer-term historical social power relations that are unique to specific contexts and transnational networks of oil companies, geopolitical interests, finance institutions and other actors. In this chapter, I will discuss the research behind the idea of the resource curse as well as the emerging literature of critique against it.

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I will argue that we may have taken Zimmermann’s old maxim a bit too literally. Resources do not ‘become’ out nothing: there is some material substance upon which social processes operate and this tends to be forgotten in the contemporary focus on governance institutions. Yet the material properties of resources are critical to understand development outcomes. For example, oil has certain characteristics that determine how it can be extracted, transported and consumed. My argument is that these material properties influence what kind of development outcomes that are likely or possible, and what kind of social, political and economic relationships are mobilised in development processes. Various authors have stressed the materiality of oil and other resources (Bridge 2009; Mitchell 2009; Smil 2010; Bridge and Le Billon 2013), but this has not had much influence on wider development and resource curse debates.

2

The ‘Resource Curse’ Literature and Its Discontents

The Mainstream ‘Resource Curse’ Perspective The traditional view of natural resources as ‘endowments’ and sources of wealth was challenged in the 1980s and 1990s. Around that time, the notion of ‘the Dutch Disease’ took hold, basically pointing to how commodity booms (e.g., windfall profits from natural gas extraction) led to the appreciation of the exchange rate, thereby hurting other exporting sectors. Commodity booms could also hurt investment in other sectors, lowering employment, or make rent-seeking activities more profitable than entrepreneurial activities. In fact, cross-country statistical analyses showed that countries with high portions of primary resources in their exports suffered lower economic growth (Gylfason et  al. 1999; Sachs and Warner 2001). This is what became known as the ‘resource curse’: resource exports might bring in cash, but potentially also negative economic effects that may cancel out any developmental effects. More lately, the analytical focus has shifted to the political mechanisms underlying the resource curse, and the dominant consensus is that ‘institutions matter’. The extent to which a country manages to deal with the challenges that resource-based revenues bring is determined by the ‘quality’ of their institutions. The added difficulty is, as Ross (2001: 328) puts it, that ‘oil and mineral wealth tends to make states less democratic’. Various contributions have made suggestions as to why that is the case, but most have focussed on how resource revenues introduce perverse and antidemocratic incentives for managerial and political elites at the national level

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(Ross 2001; Mehlum et al. 2006a, b; Stiglitz 2007; Collier and Goderis 2008; Bakwena et  al. 2009). Robinson et  al. (2006) showed that politicians tend to over-extract resources that resource revenues increase the value of being in power, and that resource revenues provide politicians with the resources they need to influence the outcome of elections both through patronage politics and outright distortion. Mehlum et  al. (2006b) showed how resource booms tend to make institutional frameworks more conducive to rent-seeking behaviour. Evidence of a link between natural resource extraction and violent conflict has been presented (Collier and Hoeffler 2002), although this link has been disputed (Brunnschweiler and Bulte 2008). This literature is primarily focussed on national-level elites and the types of incentives given to them through the institutional framework, with broad agreement that, in the absence of checks and balances on political leaders and elites, an influx of resource revenues sets countries on a downwards spiral. In the mainstream resource curse debate, the situation for resource-rich countries is a catch-22: you need good institutions to handle the influx of resource revenues, but this influx is a hindrance to the emergence of such institutions. As argued elsewhere (Grindle 2004; Bourgouin and Haarstad 2013), it is not clear how well-functioning institutions and ‘good governance’ are supposed to emerge. The idea of the resource curse and its explanation through malfunctioning institutions has resonated with another widespread idea in development debates, that of ‘good governance’. Good governance grew to prominence both in academic debate and aid policy circles during the 1990s as a replacement for the largely discredited notion of structural adjustment (Doornbos 2003; Mkandawire 2007). Good governance has in one sense signified sound administration and management, the institutionalisation of checks and balances against corruption, wasteful spending and patronage, and some degree of public welfare, effective taxation and long-term economic planning. In the extractive industry, the good governance debate has in particular centred on promoting transparency to allow civil society to scrutinise their governments, and how developing country governments should deal with international oil companies (Humphreys et al. 2007). The debate on good governance in the extractive industry has been significantly stimulated by NGOs and activists who have raised attention towards revenue flows and tax evasion. NGOs like Global Witness, Publish What You Pay and the Tax Justice Network have been at the vanguard of raising attention to illicit capital flight from weak mineral-producing states and the complicity of governments in the Global North in allowing tax havens to facilitate this capital flight (see van Oranje and Parham 2009). A host of initiatives have

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also been established by governments and multilateral organisations, such as the World Bank’s Extractive Industries Review, the Topical Trust Fund on Managing Natural Resource Wealth by the International Monetary Fund, and Norway’s Oil for Development programme. Most prominent is the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI), launched by Tony Blair in 2002 and currently supported by a range of governments in the Global North and South. Paul Collier, an economist whose research on the curse of resources has been influential in policy circles, has launched the Natural Resources Charter. Most of these initiatives explicitly point to the resource curse thesis in their information material and objectives statements. The existence of this cluster of initiatives and organisations, both governmental and non-governmental, speaks volumes about the massive influence the idea couplet of the resource curse and good governance has had in policy circles (Bourgouin and Haarstad 2013). It seems well justified to label the interlinked resource curse and good governance debates as ‘mainstream’ (even  though there are internal disagreements and conflicting tendencies within these debates). Few other theoretical debates on natural resources have had such an influence beyond the pages of academic journals and on policy programmes. Part of its purport likely comes from providing convincing explanations to concrete problems, and the fact that these explanations have been relatively easy to turn into policy prescriptions. Yet here also lies the problem with this perspective: it promotes straightforward explanations that may be attractive for some, but that seem unfounded, simplistic and possibly misleading to many scholars. For instance, Bolivia could by some standards be considered a ‘resource cursed’ country. For decades, natural resources have constituted the main export and source of state revenue. Even though it has among the highest reserves of natural gas in the region (second only to Venezuela), it is also among the region’s poorest in terms of gross national income (GNI) and has been through resource-related war (the Chaco War, 1932–1935), dictatorships (1964–1982) and internal violent conflict (the Gas War in 2003). On this basis, it does not seem as a stretch to label the country as ‘cursed’ by its resources. However, a closer look often reveals that the ‘resource curse’ label fails to do justice to the complex ways in which natural resources shape societies, cultures and politics. As I argue below, in Bolivia the question of how to govern natural gas and how to distribute the proceeds is one that has united and galvanised civil society and, contrary to the resource curse thesis, this has arguably enabled it to effectively press progressive and democratic demands.

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The Underlying Conditions of the Resource Curse Scholars are now questioning the mainstream resource curse thesis in different ways, examining the assumptions upon which it is based and providing alternative explanations for the complex linkages between resource extraction and development. A number of scholars have suggested that that the resource curse literature is too narrowly focussed on the rent-seeking behaviour of self-maximising elites and inefficient national state institutions in the Global South (Campbell 2003; Watts 2004; Rosser 2006; Stevens and Dietsche 2008; McNeish 2010). In other words, it is easy to blame corrupt dictators in poor countries, but this does not provide a sufficient explanation for why resource revenues do not accrue to ordinary people. While it is probably true that lawbased state governance and checks and balances on political leaders would be conducive to improved development outcomes, the ‘good governance’ focus may attract attention away from the role that international oil companies and the governments in their country of origin play. As several critics of the good governance agenda have pointed out (Grindle 2004; Hilson and Maconachie 2009), it is unclear how such an agenda is supposed to take hold; corrupt regimes are unlikely to accept any meaningful reforms and the ‘good governance’ agenda is in danger of simply producing token reforms and measures to appease the international donor community. At another level, the resource curse/good governance agenda has been critiqued for its relatively simplistic view of institutions. Weak governmental institutions are not simply the result of a choice or lack of public sector capacity-building programmes. They emerge through historical processes of sociopolitical conflict, and bear the imprints of how particular powerful groups have promoted their interests (Acemoglu 2003; Rajan and Zingales 2006; Rosser 2006; Bebbington et al., 2008). Both Rist et al. (2007) and Stevens and Dietsche (2008) argue that the econometric and quantitative work that show correlations between economic factors and institutional outcomes does not tell us much about the processes underlying these outcomes. This does not necessarily suggest that institutional design is unimportant, but that this design is to a significant extent a result of underlying social, political and economic processes that are unique to particular contexts. Therefore, it is pertinent to question to what extent ideals of good governance can be transferred from one country to another. Several authors (Rosser  2006; Stevens and Dietsche 2008; Thurber et al. 2011) have made this point and warned against using ‘success cases’ like Norway, Botswana or Malaysia as a guiding line for how to manage resources. While the governance models of those countries appear to have worked successfully, it is

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questionable to draw out particular aspects of those complex and historically derived governance systems and hold them up as examples to be mirrored without accounting for contextual differences. Part of this relates to the very different geopolitical positions countries occupy and the effects that has on resource politics. For instance, the basics of the petroleum governance system of Norway and Bolivia are very similar; tax rates on foreign oil companies are the same (82 %), there is (or has been) a focus on building a strong state-owned enterprise, and an official political intention to use the state enterprise as a tool for national industrial development. But the policies of the two countries are perceived very differently in international aid, finance and policymaking circles—one as socialist, one as a model to be replicated (Haarstad 2012). There are of course differences between these two countries’ governance systems as well, but the point remains that geopolitical positions shape how ‘models’ are implemented and understood in different countries. The critique against simplistic understandings of institutions can also be taken one step further: to ask where the ideals of institutional ‘quality’ or good governance come from in the first place. To use the word ‘good’, with its objectivist connotations, makes it seem as if there are some straightforward measures that can be applied without much democratic debate. But institutions are inherently cultural constructs (and fortunately we no longer label some cultures as ‘good’ or ‘high quality’). Objectivist concepts such as ‘good’ and ‘high-quality’ serve to hide that the reforms they are used to describe actually cover real political issues. In other words, they can be characteristic of a technocratic and instrumental reasoning that depoliticises natural resource governance. This means that it portrays natural resource governance simply as a set of measures that can be implemented by bureaucrats and elites, rather than political questions that should be subject to democratic debate (Doornbos 2003; Mkandawire 2007; Solli 2011). Another strand in the literature has argued that extractive resources can, under certain conditions, create circumstances for democratic and progressive change. This is what several scholars have suggested occurred during democratisation in Latin America. Dunning (2008) suggests that in several Latin American countries oil revenues made it easier for elites to accept democratic demands for redistribution. And Karl (1987) showed how the growth of the oil sector created a class of educated urban dwellers who made demands for democratic reform. Other authors have also argued that resource endowments have, rather than simply being negative or positive, had varied and contingent outcomes on democracies in Latin America (Dunning 2008; Hogenboom 2012; Grugel and Nem Singh 2013).

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Along a similar vein, through research in Bolivia I have argued that demands for public control of the petroleum sector created a common rallying point for several different types of social movements, thereby uniting civil society around a set of coherent political positions. This in turn provided a platform for pressing other types of demands and provided backing for the Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS) party, which upon gaining government power instituted radical reforms in the extractive sector (Haarstad 2010). How one evaluates such radical political shifts will, to a certain extent, depend on ideological position—Bolivia’s president from the MAS party, Evo Morales, has of course been seen by many as a classic socialist strongman who has returned to an old-school centralised economy and weakened democratic institutions. Nevertheless, the case illustrates that how petroleum extraction impacts on the quality of democratic institutions is dependent on a range of mediating factors, and cannot simply be reduced to simplistic prescriptions of the type ‘oil is bad for democracy’. As argued elsewhere (Haarstad 2014), rather than thinking that oil is bad for democracy it can be useful to understand large revenues from extractive industries as introducing a set of incentives and interests into the pre-existing political landscape. These revenues, and the whole corporate, bureaucratic and social machinery that extractive industries bring with them, can be a powerful force for social change. But how this change occurs, whether it creates poverty or distributed wealth, depends on contextual influences and the position of the country in geopolitical and global economic affairs. In brief, a number of critical perspectives have emerged to take issue with the mainstream resource curse/good governance perspective. They point out, among other things, that ‘the curse’ does not adequately cover the variety of outcomes that are observed in different contexts, and that what constitutes ‘good’ governance varies with context. Debating the mainstream resource curse/good governance perspective is important, since it has such a powerful grip on the donor community and the popular imagination.

3

The Materiality of Extractive Resources and Implications for Development

The mainstream perspective sketched out and critiqued above tends to see extractive resources as a capital asset or an input into the economy, and emphasises the role of governance institutions in resolving problems of resource extraction. In other words, social processes around resource extraction are seen to determine development outcomes. However, following some recent contributions in the political economy of extractive resources and

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energy, it can be argued that the material properties of natural resources are more important than current debates in international development take into account. The purpose of stressing that point is not to argue for a return to natural determinism, but to suggest that oil and other extractive resources are conducive to particular types of social organisation, and by extension, to particular development outcomes. I am not arguing for natural determinism, nor am I suggesting that things have agency. But in order to understand the prospects for natural resource-led development, we need to grapple with how the material properties of those resources shape development pathways. Modern society is, quite literally, fuelled by extractive resources. About 80 % of modern energy consumption comes from fossil fuels. As many social scientists have realised, understanding the way societies are ‘energised’ and ‘powered’ is crucial to understanding how they work (Bridge 2009; Mitchell 2009; Smil 2010; Kander et al. 2014). Extractive resources and energy sectors are at the core of the processes that drive or constrain social change, and that to properly understand the development of modern society we have to look to changes in the way we produce and consume energy (Kander et al. 2014). This can also be extended to an understanding of the material conditions for development. Development based on extraction of natural resources will necessarily be a particular type of development, where some distributive and organisational outcomes are more or less given. Several scholars have stressed how the material character of natural resources, particularly oil, must be taken into account in order to understand their social implications (Mitchell 2009; Smil 2010; Bridge and Le Billon 2013). In social theory, in general, there has been an increasing interest in the influence of material and non-human elements in shaping society, particularly from actor-network theory and the writings of Latour (1991). The writers on the materiality of oil rarely make this link explicit, but they nevertheless appear to share some affinities with the general turn to materiality in social theory. In particular, there is a reaction against the excesses of postmodern social constructivism. While ‘natural resources are not, they become’, as Zimmermann (1951) has it, it is also clear that there is some pre-existing material there, upon which society’s construction and value setting is done and that has some effect on possible outcomes. In the same way that coal was the energetic driver of the late industrial revolution, oil has been the energetic force behind the industrialisation, postindustrialisation and globalisation of the last half of the twentieth century (Smil 2010). Oil has a particular materiality that enabled it to play this role; it has high energy density and can be transported effectively if a certain infrastructure is in place. It comes out of a hole in the ground (or under the sea),

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which means that it can be territorially controlled but also that significant investments and competence are often needed to extract it (it is capital intensive). In other words, oil-based economic development is conditional upon control of territories, access to advanced technology and investments in infrastructure, all of which require effective organisation. According to Mitchell (2009), whose term ‘carbon democracy’ has recently been popularised, following the material properties of coal and oil enables us to investigate how resources are conducive to particular forms of social organisation. His work traces the specific conditions that made the contemporary form of democracy possible, and stresses, among other things, how differences in the material properties of coal and oil enabled modern forms of popular democratic politics. Since significant amounts of labour goes into extracting and transporting coal, coal-based industrialisation placed workers at critical points in the energy system. This meant that through the threat of strikes, workers could gain significant influence. At the same time, coal-based industrialisation concentrated people in cities, where popular movements and new political forces emerged. These forces were significant in pushing for more representative government and democracy. In contrast, oil needs far fewer workers, and it is more easily transported through a flexible network of pipelines and ocean tankers. Although the oil economy also opened for some political claims, the increasing importance of oil made energy systems less vulnerable to the political claims of organised labour. At the same time, the oil-based economy developing after the Second World War facilitated a consumerist lifestyle for the masses in the Global North (Mitchell 2009). This type of analysis must not be understood to imply that the material properties of oil, or any other resource, have the abilities to directly translate themselves into particular forms of state governance. Instead, the particular properties of natural resources have implications for how their extraction, distribution and consumption are organised. And since energy systems are so pervasive, these properties are conducive to some relationships rather than others. In other words, the development prospects of a resource-rich country is shaped not just by the ‘quality’ of its own institutions but also by the materiality of its resource base and the relationships with various actors and stakeholders that emerges around these material properties. There are several implications for understandings of international development. The most obvious development implication is of course that the modern ‘developed’ lifestyle is predicated on a particular employment of fossilised carbon, and that this lifestyle has material limitations. Fossil fuels are limited in two senses. They are limited in the sense that sooner or later the underground resources will be so depleted that the rest cannot be profitably

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extracted (peak oil). The other sense in which oil resources are limited is in the extent to which the globe’s atmosphere can act as a sink for CO2 without increasing the greenhouse effect (climate change). Evidence suggests that much of the CO2 the atmosphere can absorb without causing dangerous warming has already been emitted, in other words that we have spent much of our available ‘carbon budget’ we need to stay within before 2050 in order to avoid a 2°C temperature change (IEA 2012). Given that economic growth historically has been tied closely to energy consumption, the planetary carbon budget has in fact been spent on achieving development in the Global North. Although there is some evidence of a relative decoupling of economic growth and energy consumption at present, the limited amount of carbon that the atmosphere can absorb without causing climate change presents some clear limitations to development processes in the Global South. Another implication for international development is related to how the material properties of oil shape the possibilities for states to govern oil extraction to in ways that promote development. The materiality of oil is conducive to particular relationships between states, oil companies and other actors. Oil resources themselves are typically territorially controlled by states, while the exploration and extraction of oil is typically dependent on international companies and the capital, technology and engineering competence they possess (Bridge and Le Billon 2013). The oil that comes out of the ground (crude oil) is useless before it is transformed into various by-products in an oil refinery, an expensive and highly energy-demanding process. And transporting the crude oil to a refinery, and from there to the market, involves expensive infrastructure. Producing oil, then, necessitates the mobilisation of a complex set of relationships with international oil companies, governments in the countries where those companies are owned, actors in the financial industry, and more. Both companies and countries can use this material character of oil to their advantage. Oil reserves cannot simply be moved to another location, so for developing countries the possession of oil reserves can provide a significant strong bargaining card vis-à-vis international oil companies. Some countries, particularly Latin American ones, have increased tax rates after international investors have built infrastructure, taking advantage of the fact that since oil reserves and the built infrastructure cannot be relocated, the oil companies will accept the higher tax rates and continue operating (Haarstad and Campero 2012). It is likely that the gradual decline in available oil reserves will give resource-controlling countries a stronger hand in negotiations with companies. There is also a trend towards what has been called ‘resource nationalism’, which means that states and state-owned enterprises are increasingly taking control over natural resources. Since the oil crisis in 1973 national

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states have sought to regain control over fossil reserves, and three-quarters of the world’s carbon reserves are now government owned. This is particularly the case outside the OECD, where governments own almost all (88 %) of the fossil reserves (IEA 2012). Oil companies are also often able to use the particular material character of oil to their advantage. As Ferguson (2005) shows, oil companies have been able to take advantage of the offshore and peripheral location of oil reserves in Africa to make the extraction of oil almost completely detached from national governance, circumventing any possibilities to create local developmental effects. In cases such as these, national states are completely relinquishing their own rights to control they are granted by the international state system in favour of giving free reins to oil companies. In fact, such cases lend support to the argument of Emel et al. (2011) who argue that national-scale sovereignty of natural resources emerged historically out of colonial-era attempts to construct intelligible and controllable territories, and that it must be understood against this background. In other words, national resource sovereignty does not simply exist naturally, but is a product of relationships with states and non-state actors such as oil companies. Finally, natural resources also provide material grounding for a diversity of political claims around development. Emphasising this materiality arguably enables us to better grasp why actors are making particular claims and what their interests are in doing so. Rural communities in developing countries are often economically dependent upon the natural resources in their immediate surroundings, so the character of the resources often shapes their understandings of the meaning of development, as well as related notions such as ethnicity and citizenship (Perreault 2006; Haarstad 2009; Grugel and Nem Singh 2013). This does not mean that we should return to naïve conceptions of rural and indigenous as living simply ‘in touch with nature’, as ‘ecologically noble savages’ (McNeish 2012). The point is instead that the way people are embedded in particular resource materialities influences their political positions and claims. This point can equally be made for suburban middle-class populations in the Global North, for example, whose political affiliations—including their views on what ‘development’ means—are likely to be shaped by their dependence on cheap and abundant oil.

4

Conclusion

Natural resources are not simply things given to us by nature; they are products of the processes whereby material artefacts are put to work in society. This process involves reconfiguring the material artefact to make it useful

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for a particular purpose and imbuing it with societal value. Zimmermann’s (1951: 7) maxim, that ‘resources are not, they become’, still holds true. The mainstream form of explanation, centred on the idea of the resource curse, typically treats the resources simply as an input into the economy or as a factor that can be isolated and investigated for its effects on democracy. The resource curse literature and the related discussions on good governance have many virtues. This literature has shown how resource extraction can have negative effects, and undermined the naïve idea that as long as a developing country manages to get a foreign oil company to extract its resources, development will necessarily ensue. It has illustrated how important governance is for development outcomes of natural resource extraction, and how corruption, authoritarianism and conflicts undermine governance. It has communicated these insights in straightforward, catchy terms (‘resource curse’, ‘paradox of plenty’), which have granted them significant impact. But as elaborated above, a range of criticisms have been levelled at the resource curse literature, and the neat simplicity of its assertions is part of what has been deemed problematic. The resource curse and good governance literatures rest on a number of assumptions that are not fully accepted by other researchers. For instance, it assumes that certain quantifiable indicators are meaningful to explain how resource endowments influence democracy, and that looking at national-level governance of resource-rich countries in relative isolation is sufficient to understand the complex political linkages between resources and development. A number of researchers have questioned these and other assumptions, and instead argued for the need to look at the social and political processes that lie beyond the statistical indicators. The variety of critique against the resource curse may be summarised by underlining that what shapes the outcomes of extraction in particular places is to a greater degree determined by processes specific to those contexts, as well as by political–economic relations transcending the national state. While most would agree that ‘resources become’, in development debates we tend to overlook that they do not ‘become’ out nothing: there is some material substance there upon which social processes operate, and the character of this substance engenders particular development outcomes and not others. In my discussion, I have primarily focussed on oil, whose history shows that its material properties have been conducive to control by large companies, both private and state owned, as well as certain mechanisms of territorial and political control. Using oil as a means to achieve development therefore typically comes with certain conditions and forms of social organisation. It sets in motion an exclusive network of state actors, international oil companies, financial capital, in which it is difficult for civil society, local communities and small businesses to penetrate.

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This may seem like a pessimistic conclusion. But at the same time, nature sets certain limits on oil extraction, in the sense that it will eventually either be depleted or regulated to avoid climate change. Renewable energies are now rapidly increasing their share of the global energy mix, and they offer qualitatively different possibilities for distributed control. It is too early to say what power geometries and development possibilities will emerge out of that.

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9 Intellectual Property Rights and Development: A Contingent Political Relationship Valbona Muzaka

1

Introduction

Intellectual property rights (IPRs) are present and embodied in a multitude of goods and services that we use and have or not because they are not available for our use or we cannot afford them. This book, for instance, is protected by IPRs which you or your library are bound to respect, while the publisher, authors, and employers share an agreement about how this property is managed. The music we listen to is protected by intellectual rights and so are the films, artwork, and shows we go to see. Integrated circuit designs and computer software, fertilisers’ and other chemical substances’ formulae, new seed varieties, industrial designs, new technologies, drugs used to treat all sorts of medical conditions, clinical tests, brands, trade secrets, and Internet domain names are all protected by some form of IPR or other. IPRs are not simply legal entitlements filed away in legal texts; they empower and limit the way we live, learn, communicate, consume, create, innovate, and develop. There is an accepted, although deeply problematic, view that there would be no innovation and creativity but for the proper protection and enforcement of IPRs, often accompanied by more generous (and even more problematic) claims that IPRs promote technological innovation, new products, new markets, and economic growth and development overall.

V. Muzaka ( ) Kings College, London, UK © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 J. Grugel, D. Hammett (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of International Development, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-42724-3_9

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Those turning to this chapter with a view to demystifying the complex relationship between IPRs and development will not find the simple ‘truth’ about it here. This is because the way in which development and IPRs are said to relate to each other is entirely political, with seemingly convincing studies supporting different and often contradictory positions. Even so, the mainstream view remains that a robust domestic IPRs system in which the state actively protects and enforces them is necessary for a country’s economic development, because a robust IPRs system stimulates domestic research and development (R&D), increases inward foreign direct investment (FDI) flows, transfers of technology, and thus economic growth. Despite the confidence with which claims about the positive role of IPRs on development are made, the fact is that our use of rather sophisticated analytical tools has not managed to clarify even more basic relationships, such as, for instance, what the granting of IPRs accomplishes, or what the relationship between IPRs and innovation is, let alone the much more complicated relationship between IPRs and development. These are not merely methodological issues; on the contrary, specific groups find their material interests validated and legitimised by the taking of a specific position on the question of the relation between intellectual property (IP) and development rather than of another, with significant economic, social, political, and cultural consequences for society as a whole. Focussing on the political nature of the relationship between IPRs and development does not simplify the task at hand; there are many ways one can unpick this relationship. One needs only mention that IPRs are a shorthand for many, rather diverse bundles of rights ranging from patents to trademarks to geographical indicators, each bundle being subject to another layer of qualifications depending on the sector or territoriality of the right in question. Each one of them is political on its own right, as each one ultimately decides who can do what and, importantly, who accrues the economic and social benefits stemming from these rights and who is excluded from them. A patent on a new drug that treats a particular type of cancer, for instance, grants its holder (that may or may not be the inventor(s)) the right to exclude other companies from using the same process and producing the same drug; this (monopoly) right not only gives its holder the privilege of accruing often considerable economic benefits but it has consequences on the (pharmaceutical) sector and on patients’ access to affordable drugs for their condition. The way in which patents and other IPRs are framed and regulated has (intended and unintended) consequences not only on the development of a particular business or of specific sectors but also on the socio-economic development of a country and well-being of societies more generally.

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Intellectual Property Rights and Development: A Contingent …

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Development is also a thoroughly political category that underpins the narratives and practices of many state and non-state actors, again, with significant consequences for the material reality of people around the world. It is not an easy term to define, but in most debates about IPRs and development, development is often (and problematically) interchangeable with economic growth. Because IPRs as a category requires more attention—not only because of the complex nature of rights included into it but also because it is often and mistakenly seen as a technical category of interest to only a handful of lawyers, economists, and even fewer policymakers—the first section of this chapter deals with this category in more detail and opens the way for a more meaningful account of the contingent way in which development and IPRs have ‘travelled’ together historically. This long and complex historical account is summarised in the second section, focussing more specifically on how developing countries have fought to change international IPRs rules in order to enhance their access to technology and information so as to spur their own economic growth. Notably, the more knowledge has become important to economic growth, as evidenced in the shift towards ‘knowledge economy’ in the last four decades, the more contested has the relationship between IPRs and development become.

2

Intellectual Property Rights: A Brief Overview

That issues related to IPRs, in our case IPRs and development, have become more visible and contested recently has more to do with the rise of the socalled knowledge economy than with any fundamental change in the nature of IPRs. Indeed, IPRs have been contested since their rudimentary beginnings in the mid-fifteenth century (Drahos and Braithwaite 2002; May and Sell 2006) and this has not changed. IPRs determine who can own, control, and make use of what type of knowledge and who cannot; for this reason, they are political and contested. Knowledge and innovation have been a fundamental part of human history and the struggle for control over them has taken different forms through time. The current arrangement that governs IP is one particular materialisation of this historical struggle, one that determines the terms of control over and access to intellectual ‘goods’, that is, knowledge, innovation, creativity, and goods and services that embody them. While the current IP arrangement has to be understood in this historical context, it should also be pointed out that it is entirely possible to imagine

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a world with no IPRs. That they have now become the main way of governing access to and control over knowledge is proof neither of their indispensability nor of their social effectiveness and legitimacy. Indeed, compared to the institution of property, that of IP is perhaps more contested because what is to be owned, that is, ideas, knowledge, and other products of human intellect, are not scarce and appropriable in nature in the way tangible goods are. Knowledge is in fact a good example of a public good, being both non-appropriable and non-rivalrous in nature (Stiglitz 1999; May 2000).1 This conceptualisation of knowledge as a public good may appear strange today, but the point is that the more familiar conceptualisation of knowledge as something to be individually owned and traded is but one construction amongst many other potential ones. This more familiar conceptualisation of knowledge as property is constructed and upheld by the norms and rules embodied in IPRs laws that, essentially, determine which individuals or groups can control knowledge and expressions to the exclusion of the rest,2 thus deliberately creating scarcity when none existed before. It is through such exclusion that the scarcity and rivalrousness of intellectual goods is constructed, enabling a price to be taken and knowledge to be exchanged in the market as with any other commodity (Kinsella 2001; May 2000). That is, to say that scarcity of and exclusion from knowledge and other products of human intellect is not a regrettable side effect of IPRs: it is their very aim. Through IPRs, knowledge thus becomes the property of some and, importantly, it becomes capital, insofar as its owners can both claim rights to its economic value and separately trade their rights over such value (Drahos 1996). Who owns this capital and how it is used is of paramount importance not only for the familiar reasons capital ownership matters in a capitalist system, but, more specifically, because of the very peculiar nature of knowledge. It is indeed this persistent, profound, and unresolved contradiction between knowledge as private property/capital and knowledge as public good that has permeated contests over IPRs throughout their existence, providing a permanent normative and instrumental base for action for actors located in different time/space coordinates contesting specific aspects of IPRs. It is perhaps unsurprising that some of the main ideas at the core of the IP institution were developed over time by IP owners and private business 1

Unlike tangible goods and objects, which can be appropriated individually and thus visibly separated from the commons, knowledge and intellectual products are intangible and not appropriable in this way; once created, knowledge can be used by anybody. Such use is non-rivalrous because the ‘consumption’ of intangible goods would leave the same quantity and quality of such goods to be consumed and enjoyed by others. 2 It must be noted that certain intellectual goods are denied private ownership, such as, for instance, everyday ideas and discoveries of facts or laws found in nature. Note that both categories are susceptible to interpretation.

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actors who had the most to gain from it. Their success is impressive not only in sustaining the construction of knowledge as private property but, since the late eighteenth century, also that of property over knowledge as a right rather than what it is in practice: a monopoly for a limited period of time guaranteed by the state and subject to certain limitations, with a view to promoting innovation/creativity and, thus—at least in theory—public interest overall. The idea of ‘intellectual property as right’ developed from the late eighteenth century onwards, intellectually thanks to the cross-pollination of property theory with general rights theory (Drahos 1996; Drahos and Braithwaite 2002). While the intellectual construction of IP as right was in full swing during the nineteenth century in Europe, two interrelated and important trends were simultaneously taking place in practice: firstly, the lone inventorentrepreneur model that was at the core of justifications for IP was eclipsed by the emergence of the large corporation model with separate R&D departments and, secondly, corporations became recognised as a singular personality in law (Fisk 2003). Hence, the complex interplay of intellectual, legal, social, and economic changes occurring during this period in Europe and the USA made possible the conceptualisation of IP as the natural right of both individuals and companies for work created collectively by their employees. By the late nineteenth century, when the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works (on copyright) and the Paris Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property (on patents) signalled the emergence of an international IP regime, objections to ownership over intellectual goods were largely overshadowed and the language of rights had prevailed (May and Sell 2006). As the twentieth century began, ownership of patents, for instance, changed radically, with companies, as opposed to individuals, emerging as the largest group of patent holders. The importance of framing IP as a right cannot be overstated, insofar as it naturalises control/property over knowledge that such rights give their owners and marginalises the many objections to property over intellectual goods in the first place. This framing has had important consequences on how knowledge production, ownership, and diffusion have been governed and contested. The language of rights provides a particularly powerful and subtle kind of legitimacy to the institution of IP; it has the effect of making alternatives and challenges to it appear rather unthinkable. This idea of IP as rights has taken hold of the collective imagination to such a degree that even those who challenge the current IP arrangement in the name of development do not question it. Despite the fact that recent contests over IPRs and development are fought on a more or less clear developed–developing countries’ fault line, a rather more useful way of thinking about the main fault line in IPRs contests

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is that between IP owners and IP users: the former a rather small minority that may or may not include inventors/creators themselves and seeks the private appropriation of knowledge/creativity, and the latter, constituting the vast majority of people in the world, seeking the dissemination of knowledge into the ‘intangible commons’ and easier access to goods with IP claims (e.g., affordable drugs and education material). In this conceptualisation of IP contests, the state occupies an ambiguous but important position: in theory, as it legitimises and underwrites IPRs, its role is to ensure that these temporary monopolies are used to benefit the society overall, but, in practice, states have overseen—indeed, made possible—the strengthening of IPRs both in terms of deepening the rights granted to IP owners and extending IPRs to new areas of knowledge/creativity, thus facilitating the accumulation of social and economic power inherent in IPRs on the hands of private IP owners who are often large companies. This historical process has obviously varied over time and place, but the overall trend is clear and has been likened to ‘the second enclosure movement’ (Boyle 2003). This ‘second enclosure movement’ became more pronounced the stronger the view of knowledge as ‘the new capital’ became, especially with the rise of ‘the knowledge economy’ from the 1970s onwards. With knowledge- and information-based sectors constituting not only the most important share of the economic make-up of key advanced economies from that point onwards but also appearing to hold the key to continued growth in the future, how this ‘new capital’ was to be managed became an important issue to these countries, and to those aspiring towards their levels of economic development. This is the important point in time when contests over IPRs— determining how this ‘new capital’ is created, appropriated and protected— became more visible globally, culminating with the negotiation and coming into force of the TRIPs Agreement (Trade-related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights) at the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1994. This is not to say that TRIPS resolved these contests—on the contrary, it made them even more obvious and acute—but rather that it set in motion for the first time in history a global IPRs regime that, despite the language used to legitimise it, was driven by and is primarily concerned with protecting and enforcing globally the IP claims of a limited group of business actors, namely, large entertainment and high-tech business actors in the USA, Europe, and Japan (Drahos and Braithwaite 2002; Matthews 2002; Sell 2003). Given that the manner in which IPRs are governed impinges upon a large set of issues that include, but are not limited to, economic ones—for example, health, education, protection of biodiversity, and human rights—and that the new global IP regime governs IPRs largely as a commercial issue, it should

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not be surprising that contests post-TRIPS have become more pronounced. Indeed, what characterises most of the political conflicts unfolding in various global governance fora since the conclusion of the TRIPS agreement is a persistent concern that the current maximalist, ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach to IP undermines the achievement of a number of other public goals, most notably access to affordable medicines, education material, and the protection of biodiversity. The relation between IPRs and access to affordable medicines, for instance, was bitterly contested in the late 1990s and early 2000s; the 2001 WTO Doha Declaration on TRIPS and Public Health was one of the main outcomes of these contests, but many governments and patients continue to face the problematic aspects of this relationship (primarily that of high drug prices) which is why political conflicts in this area have not subsided. In this contested post-TRIPS’ terrain, a seemingly more comprehensive demand was made by a number of developing countries at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) nearly 10 years after TRIPS was concluded that aimed not to address a specific aspect of IPRs, but rather to make the entire IP regime subservient to development, broadly understood. This was the WIPO Development Agenda launched in 2004 and officially still ongoing at the time of writing. Having briefly laid out why IPRs are inherently political, the next section illustrates some aspects of the historically contested relationship between IP and development.

3

Contests Over IP and Development

Does the strengthening of IPRs help a country’s development? The answer one can hazard would depend not only on the industrial, economic, educational, social, cultural, and political make-up of the country in question and what its developmental goals are but also on the particular set of IPRs (e.g., patents, trademarks, copyrights, etc.) in question and what their strengthening would imply. If there must be an answer, at the very best, it can only be a very timid answer, subject to myriad qualifications. Historically, many of the economically advanced countries who are keen supporters of a ‘robust’ global IP regime today—most notably, the USA—do not appear to have relied on a strict IP system for their own economic development, although the most successful of them certainly sought to promote high value-added sectors that promised growth at certain points in time. In this regard, most of them sought to actively access (sometimes, ‘steal’) technology from their more developed peers as a means of promoting their own high-tech sectors and innovation systems at the time. Many had an IPRs system in place that

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was largely the outcome of contests amongst domestic groups, linked loosely to the international IP regime that had emerged in the late 1880s but which allowed relatively generous space for domestic ‘solutions’ in practice (Drahos and Braithwaite 2002). These options have been severely restricted for developing countries post-TRIPS.  Despite the inherent difficulty in providing a definitive answer to the question posed earlier, the orthodox view is that a robust domestic IP regime is necessary for a country’s economic development (e.g., Llal 1976; Beier 1980; Rapp and Rozek 1990; Gould and Gruben 1996; Ginarte and Park 1997). In light of arguments presented so far about the nature of IPRs, this represents a political view that serves the particularistic interests of a group of actors, especially IP holders, at the expense of others. When TRIPS was being negotiated at the WTO (1986–1993), for instance, key business actors with stakes in high IP standards and states who spoke on their behalf argued that ‘better’ IP protection and enforcement would stimulate domestic R&D, increase inward FDI flows, transfers of technology, and, ultimately, economic growth and development (Matthews 2002; Watal 2001). These orthodox assumptions about the positive and indispensable role IPRs play in development were particularly important in legitimising TRIPS and the global IP arrangement it set in place, but they were by no means new; indeed, these same justifications had been fundamental to legitimising the incorporation of Western IP laws into the laws of developing countries after decolonisation. Most newly independent states emerged equipped with a domestic IP regime of sorts, courtesy of former colonisers. IP laws were introduced to most of what is referred today as developing and less developed countries when colonial rule was becoming more consolidated during the nineteenth century, precisely the period during which an international IP regime of sorts was emerging among the developed countries of the time. This regime was based upon a number of bilateral commercial treaties with provisions for the reciprocal protection of IP between European powers (Ugolini 1999; Okediji 2003), reinforced and formalised later by the Berne and Paris Conventions of the 1880s (on copyright and industrial property, respectively). It was mainly during this period that IP laws, such as they existed, were extended to the colonies but, importantly, this extension had nothing to do with the societies in these parts and everything to do with securing the colonisers’ economic interest against other European countries in the colonial territories (Okediji 2003). In short, being part and parcel of empire-building strategies, the IP laws that found their way into colonial territories were completely alien to the socio-economic realities over which they exerted their power. Nonetheless, they were not revoked after decolonization; on the contrary, the incorporation

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and internalisation of European IP laws in the newly independent states was a central, rather than an incidental, part of their transformation into sovereign states. This is so because their reconfiguration into states (in the Western tradition) was mediated by the very international institutions and treaties that had facilitated their subjugation. Most newly independent states continued to adhere to IP obligations present in their inherited statutes as a ‘privilege’ and ‘duty’ of statehood, either by virtue of customary international law or through specially developed declarations stating in clear terms their intention to honour them (Okediji 2003). Nevertheless, the continued commitment to protecting (largely foreign) IP  by developing countries required more than an initial promise at the moment of their independence. It could only be fully secured by socialising them into the view that the ‘proper’ protection of IPRs was not only the duty of a sovereign state but in fact crucial to its continued development. This socialisation was achieved in great part through the dominant development discourse of the post–World War II (WWII) and postcolonisation period espoused by nearly all the major international organisations. This discourse continued to define development as the unilinear process of socio-economic realities being transformed in the image of the West, achieved inter alia via investment flows, technology transfer, and economic growth. The view that a ‘proper’ IP system was central to development was reinforced often without any evidence, with very few dissenting voices raising doubts about the adequacy of such a system for the particular needs of developing countries (for dissenting views, see Kronstein and Till 1947; Vaitsos 1972; Penrose 1973). It is important to mention, even if only in passing, the important role played in this process by the transformation of the private Secretariat established to oversee the Berne and Paris Conventions, United International Bureaux for the Protection of Intellectual Property (BIRPI), to the present-day WIPO as a member of the UN family in the late 1960s and 1970s. The point to be made is that this transformation was an entirely political move aimed at BIRPI/ WIPO becoming the authoritative organisation over international IP issues (rather than, e.g., UNESCO or Economic and Social Council [ECOSOC]). It was certainly not unavoidable, but it is understandable why, as a result of colonial heritage and the orthodox paradigm of development and IPRs place in it espoused by nearly all international organisations, and especially the newly established WIPO, developing countries’ representatives had more or less internalised the view that IPRs were important to economic growth, technology transfer, and domestic creativity. Indeed, it appears to be largely the case that this view continues to shape and underpin the participation of developing countries in IP governance even today.

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It will be said that this was not entirely the case, because some developing countries (e.g., Brazil and India) did in fact make some changes to their IP laws during the 1970s. This was indeed the case, but, even so, no radical changes to the structure of the inherited IP models took place through these reforms. The exclusion of patentability for pharmaceuticals, for instance, was one of the more substantial changes made to the Brazilian and Indian patent law in the late 1960s and early 1970s, both with a view to developing the indigenous pharmaceutical sector and addressing public health concerns; nonetheless, this substantial move was hardly radical, given that the international patent law allowed such exclusions and many countries, including some developed ones, also excluded pharmaceuticals (amongst others) from patentability. The assimilation of key orthodox assumptions about IP and development on the part of key developing countries was visible not only in their limited experimentation with domestic IP laws but also in their most comprehensive challenge to the IP regime of the day. The efforts on the part of some developing countries led by Brazil and India during the 1960s and 1970s constitute an earlier ‘development agenda’ that sought to reform the international copyright and patent rules so as to facilitate their development strategies (Drahos and Braithwaite 2002; Yu 2009), not unlike the recent WIPO Agenda. Despite its seemingly threatening nature, especially in the context of wider calls for a New International Economic Order during the 1970s, this earlier ‘development agenda’ reflected how comprehensively orthodox assumptions about IP and development had been internalised. For instance, the Brazilian delegation that proposed a draft resolution to the UN General Assembly in 1961 noted the ‘conditioned reflexes, biased…narrow, and sclerotic views’ held by dominant actors (the USA and key European states) in resisting calls to reform the patent system in order to respond to ‘the needs and requirements of under-developed countries’ (Menescal 2005: 769–70). It was not, however, as self-aware of the manner in which, by calling for there to be a balance between ‘the legitimate claims of patentees’ with the needs of developing countries, and of the need not to abolish the patent system but rather to ‘cure it of its imperfections’, it further secured the legitimacy of the existing international IP regime and the role that IPRs presumably played in meeting the needs of developing countries (Okediji 2008). These earlier efforts to reform the international IP rules ultimately failed. Contests over copyright reform precipitated an international crisis in the late 1960s when a rather watered-down version of developing countries’ demands (in the form of the 1967 Stockholm Protocol to the Berne Convention) was adopted, although it never came into force (Drahos and Braithwaite 2002). Those contests over patent reform and technology transfer continued well

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into the 1970s and early 1980s, when they were subsumed under the New International Economic Order agenda and plans to establish an International Code of Conduct on the Transfer of Technology at United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) (Yu 2009). Not only did they fail to achieve their aims, but were succeeded by the negotiation (1986–1993) of the WTO TRIPS Agreement which incorporated a stricter and ultra-binding version of the same IP rules developing countries had sought to reform. Unsurprisingly, it was difficult to successfully counter arguments about the positive relationship between IPRs and development during TRIPS negotiations in the late 1980s, given that developing countries’ attempts to reform the IP system during the 1960s and 1970s had not seriously challenged the assumed positive relation between IP protection and these other categories. The outcome of this earlier ‘development agenda’ was the result not only of its timid nature built wholly on orthodox assumptions about IP and development, but also of broader political events that turned the tide against developing countries as a group by the early 1980s, making any hopes they may have held for changes to the economic order appear remote for at least another 30 years. Likewise, the emergence of TRIPS, and of the global IP regime in its wake, has to be understood in the wider context in which the request of developing countries, weakened by the debt crisis of the 1980s, to further loosen some international IP rules so as to improve their access to technology and knowledge, was overshadowed by the rise in significance of high-tech sectors in the developed world for whom the global protection of IPRs became a matter of competitiveness, technological leadership, and continued economic growth. The bundling of TRIPS into a single package which included not only seemingly appealing trade concessions to developing countries but also the threat of being left outside the multilateral trading system altogether, goes some way to explain why the developing countries accepted the TRIPS agreement in 1994. Amongst other things, this acceptance radically closed off their own room for manoeuvre on issues related to IP and development, the same issues for which they had fought during the 1960s and 1970s. It is important to stress again how much more restrictive the TRIPS regime is and the rather substantive transformation of domestic IP laws it demanded of countries, regardless of the different socio-economic–socio-political exigencies prevailing in them. It is in this rather more restrictive global IP regime that a group of developing countries organised another political challenge at WIPO in 2004, but the WIPO Development Agenda is no more radical than earlier efforts for this reason. The 2004 Proposal for a Development Agenda in 2004 called, once again, for a balanced approach to IP that would ensure not only the protection of the rights of inventors/creators but also balance such protection

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with measures that would ensure the development of the society as a whole (WO/GA/31/11). Proposed by Brazilian and Argentinian representatives, it was widely supported by many developing countries, many of whom were to become known as the Group of Friends of Development, as well as by a large number of civil society actors,3 all of whom saw it not only as a call to reform WIPO as an organisation but also as an historical step towards restructuring the orthodox IP paradigm. It is too early to say anything definitive about the likelihood that this recent challenge will manage to achieve such aims. A cursory look of the 45 recommendations accepted by the WIPO General Assembly in 2007 reveals that this is unlikely to be the case. Some of the bolder demands made by developing countries, such as an amendment of the WIPO Convention, the signing of a multilateral agreement for open access to publicly funded knowledge, a continuous assessment of the social costs of existing and new treaty proposals through a new WIPO Evaluation and Research Office, and, perhaps most importantly of all, the construction of alternative systems of creativity/innovation not based on IP, had been completely sidelined by then. The 45 recommendations certainly retained the language of balance, but, because all actors appeared to hold similar beliefs about IPRs and their role in development during the contests, the 2007 recommendation merely encouraged WIPO to ‘promote’, ‘discuss’, ‘explore’, ‘consider’, ‘undertake’, ‘conduct studies’, ‘exchange experiences’, and so on (WIPO 2007). Since then, conflicts have ensued over issues linked to the implementation of these recommendations. Taking a longer perspective, and recalling our concern with the political nature of contests over IP and development, a number of points can be made. Like the earlier ‘development agenda’, the 2004 WIPO Development Agenda entered the stage at a time when developing countries—the bigger ones, at any rate—felt exuberant about their present and future growth prospects. Furthermore, like that earlier effort, the current Agenda is taking place completely within the current IP regime and thus indirectly legitimises it further. However, unlike the 1970s, the current global regime is much more restrictive and is binding, meaning that there is much less policy space left to domestic actors on IP-development issues. So far it has contributed to the considerable strengthening of IPRs standards; the question of whether the strengthening of IPRs helps a country’s development cannot be answered definitively, apart from saying that it certainly benefits the (largely private) owners of IP and that the effect of such strengthening on 3

A list of the civil society groups and their Future of WIPO Declaration can be accessed at http://www. futureofwipo.org/ (last accessed on 5 January 2015).

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technological innovation and the wider distributional effects of innovation on income, employment, and development overall remain difficult to generalise and entirely dependent on the kind of economic, social, political, cultural, and institutional arrangements in place. Although it recognises the different realities prevailing in the developing world, the current Development Agenda is based on the orthodox assumptions that IPRs are important for development; above all, it seeks not to radically change the current arrangement but to make it more balanced. Even the more modest and somewhat vague aims of the current Agenda may prove difficult to achieve in the near future. Recent developments in leading developing countries such as India, Brazil, and China appear to point to the fact that governments and certain business actors in these countries are much more willing to participate and compete in the global knowledge economy, which includes playing the ‘IPRs game’. Historically speaking, developing countries have not, individually or as a group, managed to shape international IP rules in their favour; these recent changes within key developing countries may change the nature of contests over IPRs and development in years to come, but we can be sure that such contests will remain political and any outcome will likely be challenged later on.

References Beier, F.-K. 1980. The significance of the patent system for technical, economic and social progress. International Review of Industrial Property 11: 563–584. Boyle, J. 2003. The second enclosure movement and the construction of the public domain. Law and Contemporary Problems 66: 33–74. Drahos, P. 1996. A philosophy of intellectual property. Aldershot: Ashgate. Drahos, P., and J. Braithwaite. 2002. Informational feudalism: Who owns the knowledge economy? London: Earthscan. Fisk, C. 2003. Authors at work: The origins of the work for hire doctrine. Yale Journal of Law and Humanities 15: 169–258. Ginarte, J., and W. Park. 1997. Determinants of patent rights: A cross-national study. Research Policy 26: 283–301. Gould, D., and W. Gruben. 1996. The role of intellectual property rights in economic growth. Journal of Development Economics 48: 323–350. Kinsella, N.S. 2001. Against intellectual property. Journal of Libertarian Studies 152: 1–53. Kronstein, H., and I. Till. 1947. A re-evaluation of the international patent convention. Law and Contemporary Problems 12(4): 765–781.

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Llal, S. 1976. The patent system and the transfer of technology to less-developed countries. Journal of World Trade Law 10: 1–16. Matthews, D. 2002. Globalising intellectual property rights: The TRIPs agreement. London and New York: Routledge. May, C. 2000. A global political economy of intellectual property rights: The new enclosures? London and New York: Routledge. May, C., and S.  Sell. 2006. Intellectual property rights: A critical history. London: Lynne Reinner Publishers. Menescal, A. 2005. Changing WIPOs ways? The 2004 development agenda in historical perspective. The Journal of World Intellectual Property 86: 761–79. Okediji, R. 2003. The international relations of intellectual property: Narratives of developing country participation in the global intellectual property system. Singapore Journal of International and Comparative Law 7: 315–385. Okediji, R. 2008. History lessons for the WIPO development agenda. In The development agenda, ed. N. Weinstock, 137–161. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Penrose, E. 1973. The economics of the international patent system. Economic Journal 83(331): 768–786. Rapp, R., and R. Rozek. 1990. Benefits and costs of intellectual property protection in developing countries. Journal of World Trade 24: 75–102. Sell, S. 2003. Private power, public law: The globalization of intellectual property rights. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stiglitz, J. 1999. Knowledge as a global public good. In Global public goods: International cooperation in the 21st century, ed. I. Kaul, I. Grunberg, and M. Stern, 308–325. New York: Oxford University Press. Ugolini, M.A. 1999. Grey market goods under the agreement on trade-related aspects of intellectual property rights. Transnational Law 12: 451–468. Vaitsos, C. 1972. Patents revisited: Their function in developing economies. Journal of Development Studies 9(1): 71–97. Watal, J. 2001. Intellectual property rights in the WTO and developing countries. The Hague: Kluwer Law International. WIPO. 2007. The 45 adopted recommendations under the WIPO development agenda, general assembly, Sept 2007. Available at http://www.wipo.int/ip-development/ en/agenda/recommendations.html. Accessed 25 July 2014. Yu, P. 2009. A tale of two development agendas. Ohio Northern University Law Review 35: 465–573.

10 Governing the Formal Economy: The Convergence of Theory and Divergence of Practice Tony Heron

1

Introduction

In 1996, Colin Leys wrote an article for the British journal New Political Economy, lamenting what he saw as the ‘crisis’ of development theory. Leys was, of course, not the first to offer this kind of diagnosis. David Booth (1985) penned a similar article a decade earlier, couched in terms of a theoretical ‘impasse’—a depiction that became something of a rallying cry for development theorists of varying persuasions during the 1990s, offering as they did different theoretical remedies for overcoming this supposed ‘impasse’ (Schuurman 1994; Hettne 1995; Payne 1998). But where Leys’ (1996) contribution differed was the greater emphasis he placed on the importance of ‘real world’ events, as opposed to the theoretical deficiencies of competing models, in determining the fate of the discipline. As Leys (1996: 45) put it at the time, ‘There is unease now about what ‘development’ means…so long as collective socioeconomic interests are supposed to be the products of the action of market forces rather than goals of strategic state action, the domain of ‘development theory’ is radically changed, if not abolished; that what is left is simply a world economy whose effects are overwhelmingly determined by very powerful states and market actors, with at most minor modifications or delays brought about by the actions of lesser states, social movements, communities, or whatever, that do not have significant military or market power.’ T. Heron ( ) University of York, UK © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 J. Grugel, D. Hammett (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of International Development, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-42724-3_10

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In other words, the impasse could not be easily overcome through the refinement of existing theories or the construction of new models, since the roots of the crisis were material rather than ideational in nature. More specifically, Leys suggested (1996: 41), the transformation of the world economy ushered in by the collapse of the Bretton Woods system of regulated capital movements and international trade, and the subsequent destabilisation and collapse of import substitution industrialisation (ISI) and other statist models of development, signified the ‘end of national development as it had hitherto been conceived’. At the time Leys was writing it was difficult to disagree with his analysis. This was the period in which neoliberal globalisation was arguably at its peak; it was a period marked by the acceptance by elites throughout the developing and post-socialist world (with greater or lesser degrees of enthusiasm) of the need to conform to the strictures of liberalisation, deregulation and privatisation, when the growth of transnational production, trade and financial integration appeared to render the economic role of the state (as previously understood) obsolete, and when the increasing embeddedness of the institutions of global governance—principally, the IMF, World Bank and newly established WTO—appeared to challenge not only the de facto but also the de jure economic sovereignty of the nation-state. In the light of more recent trends—and with the benefit of hindsight— it is now easy to see that Leys’ characterisation of development studies was overly pessimistic and his presumption of the inevitable triumph of neoliberal globalisation premature. Indeed, within a couple of years of the ‘crisis of development theory’ appearing in print, developing and newly industrialising countries were already beginning to lose faith in some of the central tenets of neoliberalism: most notably, capital account liberalisation following the East Asian financial crisis of 1997–8. This was soon followed by the so-called pink tide that swept through Latin America, with the election of leftist governments in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, Uruguay and Venezuela symbolising the increasingly tarnished reputation of the neoliberal development model in a region once synonymous with it. Finally, and most dramatically of all, the 2008 global financial crisis appeared to signal that, as UK prime minister Gordon Brown famously put it at the time, ‘the old Washington Consensus is over’ (Winnett et al. 2009). As it turned out, this declaration soon looked premature (Crouch 2011). Arguably, the fundamental lesson to draw from the experience of the financial crisis lies not in the resilience or otherwise of neoliberalism, but in the spectacular emergence of China and its willingness to underwrite US  profligacy, which provided the macroeconomic conditions that gave rise to the crisis in the first place. In other words, the global financial crisis was as

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much about China’s rise as it was about excessive risk taking, lax regulation or even the politics of sovereign debt and austerity. And while there is an ongoing debate about the nature of China’s model of political economy—and that of the other ‘BRICs’ and emerging powers—what is obvious is that it falls a long way short of the neoliberal vision of development (Ban and Blyth 2013). Framed in accordance with Leys’ thesis, then, the omnipotence of neoliberalism can no longer be taken for granted, nor can it be assumed that policy convergence is either an inevitable or necessary consequence of global economic integration. In this chapter, I expand on these observations by asking what, after over half a century of dedicated scholarship and policy experimentation, does development studies have to say about the relationship between the state and the market? Although the general tenor of much development commentary in recent years has been to emphasise the diminishing scope for state activism in the face of global economic integration and neoliberal policy convergence, I argue that this tendency is mistaken on two counts. First, the contradistinction between a supposedly ‘Golden Age’ (Payne and Phillips 2010) of development theory and the neoliberal era typically rests on a faulty caricature of just how central the analysis of the state was to the understanding of development in the former period. It is certainly true that the ‘Golden Age’ represented a period of great optimism for what could be achieved by postcolonial societies through utilising the transformative capacity and emancipatory potential of the state; yet this sentiment did not always rest on a systematic or reliable analysis of how the state actually functioned in the development process. Second, in contrast, the neoliberal era was actually marked by a growing recognition of the institutional determinants of growth, especially once it became clear that market-oriented reform was leading to a divergence rather than a convergence of development outcomes. The most obvious example of this is the developmental state literature that emerged in the 1980s and 1990s in the midst of neoliberal triumphalism, but this was also the period in which the institutionalist ‘turn’ in the social sciences as a whole began to make its mark on development studies (Remmer 1997). I go on to suggest that this institutionalist ‘turn’ is now providing the basis for a convergence of sorts between orthodox and heterodox theories, with respect to issues such as the historical origins of private property rights, norms of democratic transparency and accountability, the importance of bureaucratic autonomy, elite consensus and state capacity. I conclude by arguing that the state has never been considered more important to the understanding of development. Hence, the significance of the rise of China and the other BRIC economies is not that it shows the superiority of either state- or market-oriented development models, but rather, it is the

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distinct institutional pathways that nation-states follow which explains why the adoption of ostensibly similar (or even ostensibly different) development strategies often leads to vastly divergent development outcomes.

2

The ‘Golden Age’ of Development Theory

In a recent text, Payne and Phillips (2010) described the period from 1945 to the mid-1970s as the ‘Golden Age’ of development theory. Although the authors do not provide much further elaboration of the appropriateness of the term, they argue that two notable features defined the period. On the one hand, despite their different epistemologies, both structuralism and dependency (Payne and Phillips refer to the latter two as a single ‘underdevelopment’ paradigm), were conceived broadly within the parameters of Keynesian growth theory. On the other hand, each of these paradigms took for granted the assumption of ‘exceptionalism’ on the part of postcolonial societies, that is, a belief in the ‘apparently distinctive problems’ encountered by the ‘Third World’ (Payne and Phillips 2010: 84). A third feature of this ‘Golden Age’, implied but not stated explicitly, is that it was taken for granted that the promotion of development would require a primary role for the state. Yet, the paradox of the ‘Golden Age’ is that the advocacy of state-led development was not always informed by a thorough or systematic theoretical analysis of the state itself. This critique is most easily sustained in relation to modernisation theory. As is well known, the intellectual roots of modernisation theory lay with classical evolutionary sociology of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the structural functionalism of the early twentieth century, wherein social and behavioural change was deemed to be a linear process that took place through a series of discrete phases. An equally popular and important influence on early post-war modernisation literature was the adoption of the methods and techniques of the newly established school of behaviouralism, founded on the belief that the social world could and should be studied according to the scientific tenets of rational positivism and empiricism. The upshot of all of this was that modernisation theory became associated with the idea that social and political change was evolutionary and progressive in nature, and that the determinants of modernisation itself were largely observable and therefore amenable to the scientific techniques of behaviouralism. In practice, of course, these assumptions were soon revealed to be at odds with the postcolonial experience in Africa, Asia, Latin America and elsewhere. In a well-timed intervention, Samuel Huntington published an article in World Politics in 1965, entitled ‘Political Development and Political Decay’,

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which shone a spotlight on this discrepancy. Huntington (1965: 394) made an important distinction between economic modernisation from what he called ‘political development’, defined as the ‘process by which organisations and procedures acquire value and stability’. The relationship between these two processes, Huntington argued, was neither necessarily evolutionary nor progressive; indeed, the opposite was more likely to be the case, as social mobilisation and political participation associated with modernisation came to be seen as ‘directly responsible for the deterioration of political institutions’ (Huntington 1965: 405; Remmer 1997: 34–5). The notion that the process of modernisation in postcolonial societies might follow non-linear and idiosyncratic patterns, distinct from those supposedly taken by ‘first wave’ industrialisers, was something that had been anticipated earlier by development economists such as Gunner Myrdal (1957) and Dudley Seers (1963). The most influential variant of this position, however, was that associated with Hans Singer (1950) and Raul Prebisch (1950), who independently came to the conclusion that the drivers of economic change were historically and structurally determined, that the benefits of international trade fell disproportionately to the industrialised countries and that therefore, rather than propel modernisation, the dependence of postcolonial societies on primary exports would only serve to entrenched further their underdevelopment. The ‘Singer–Prebisch thesis’, as it became known, proved influential over the next two decades, and remains synonymous with the adoption—and subsequent abandonment—of ISI in Latin America and elsewhere. While it was arguably the practice of ISI that did the most lasting damage to the credibility of the Singer–Prebisch thesis, in hindsight it is easy to see that the model also suffered from a theoretical failing: namely, the failure to recognise the institutional—that is, domestic—correlates of external dependency. Put differently, because so much emphasis was placed on the historical and structural determinants of international trade, the theory provided few clues as to why some postcolonial societies managed to escape commodity dependence while others did not. Nor did the theory appear to have an answer to the question of why policymakers in postcolonial societies seemed incapable of using the macroeconomic policy tools at their disposal to mitigate the problems associated with commodity dependence, such that the enclave nature of the production process or the problems associated with what later became known as ‘Dutch disease’. At least initially, dependency theory came equipped with a plausible set of answers to these questions (see Hout, this collection). Paul Baran set the tone for this with the publication of The Political Economy of Growth in 1957, which argued that the economic exploitation of the postcolonial world was not only integral to worldwide capitalist accumulation but also

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aided and abetted by a local comprador class whose actions were driven by self-enrichment at the expense of the impoverishment of their populations. This theme later became the hallmark of the Latin American school of dependency, whose heritage lay in equal measure with the structuralist economics associated with Raul Prebisch and the Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA) and the neo-Marxism associated with Paul Baran and others. Like the structuralists, dependency writers started from the proposition that, as expressed famously by Dos Santos (1970: 231), ‘a relationship of interdependence between two or more economies or between such economies and the world trading system becomes a dependent relationship when some countries can expand only as a reflection of the dominant countries.’ But where these writers departed from the ECLA tradition was in the much greater emphasis that they placed on the domestic—the analysis of social class more specifically—correlates of external dependency. Dependency theory arguably reached its apogee with Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Enzo Faletto’s Dependency and Development in Latin America (first published in Spanish in 1971 but not translated into English until 1979), whose nuance and sophistication appeared to promise a non-determinist social science capable of escaping the theoretical cul-de-sac that structuralism had by this stage run into. In retrospect, however, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that even this classic work rested on a latent form of economic reductionism, and in the end could not avoid the accusation that it, too, was guilty of excessive ‘exogenism’ (Hettne 1995). The decade of the 1970s witnessed the growing ‘consumption’ (Cardoso 1977) of dependency outside of Latin America with the vibrancy and intensity of the intellectual debate continuing to reflect the movement’s mixed heritage. Yet, it can be scarcely claimed that this debate did much to elucidate a clear or workable set of policy prescriptions that might enable those developing countries afflicted by dependency to escape the condition. Indeed, as Lloyd Best (1996: 4) later caustically remarked about the impact of dependency theory on the Caribbean, the more faithfully the strategies deriving from radical theorists in the region were followed, ‘the more disastrous have been the consequences for the common people’.

3

Neoliberalism and ‘The End of Development’

On 13 August 1982, Mexico’s Finance Minister Jesus Silva Herzog is alleged to have turned up at the US Treasury and, as one official described it at the time, ‘turned his pockets inside out’ (quoted in Lissakers 1983). Whether or

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not this incident actually took place, what is undeniable is that the Mexican default, and the subsequent Latin American ‘debt crisis’, came to symbolise the exhaustion of the ISI-led model of development and, by implication, the theoretical ideas that had underpinned it. Instead, global development politics soon became synonymous with ‘policy-based lending’ and ‘structural adjustment’, in accordance with the neoliberal strictures of liberalisation, deregulation and privatisation. Critics labelled this new paradigm ‘anti-development’ (Pieterse 2010) for its unwillingness to acknowledge the idea that underdevelopment—or, more accurately, the absence of economic growth—was a unique ‘Third World’ problem, requiring a discrete set of policy interventions to ameliorate it. Instead, as Leys (1996: 42) scathingly put it, ‘by the end of the 1980s the only development policy that was officially approved was not having one—leaving it to the market to allocate resources, not the state.’ This depiction was almost certainly a deliberate caricature on Leys’ part; yet it did capture neatly the naivety and fanaticism that accompanied early neoliberal policy experimentation. Even so, the theoretical grounds for this market fundamentalism lay in a penetrating critique of earlier development thinking and policy prescriptions associated with it. While Friedrich von Hayek and Milton Friedman built the intellectual foundations of neoliberalism, these voices had a direct counterpoint in the disciplinary subfield of ‘development economics’. During the 1960s, a growing number of heretical voices associated, most notably, with the Journal of Political Economy questioned the very idea of a need for a specific branch of economics dedicated to the supposedly distinctive problems of the ‘Third World’ (Rapley 2007: 68). A particular important substrand to this neoliberal insurgency was the application of the rational choice assumptions of neoclassical economics to public institutions, otherwise known as public choice theory, to show the alleged folly of state-led development models and related forms of economic planning. In this vein, Krueger’s (1974) work on the political economy of rent-seeking in the allocation of import quotas was influential. The basic thrust of Krueger’s argument was that the allocation of import licences created a perverse incentive for unprofitable firms to exaggerate their need for these licences in order to capture the economic rent derived from the operation of the quota (i.e., the difference between world market prices and the artificially high price obtained in the quota-restricted market) by selling on to a third party. Robert Bates (1981), meanwhile, applied public choice assumptions to the problem of development failure in sub-Saharan Africa. Bates (1981: 3) began his analysis with an intriguing question: ‘why should reasonable men [sic] adopt public policies that have harmful consequences for the societies they govern?’ To answer this, Bates drew on Olsonian theories

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of interest group politics to reveal the extent to which urban bias is typically found in African development planning—for example, overvalued exchange rates, state-controlled marketing boards, price restrictions, support for ISI and so on—was rooted in urban-based class alliances that provided the political support for highly inefficient, urban-based industries at the expense of the more productive, rural-based agricultural sector. As with Krueger’s work, the key inference drawn was not just about the superiority of market- over statebased mechanisms of resources allocation; rather, by highlighting the rational calculations of individual human agents, this work was able to reveal the dangers and pitfalls of allocating discretion powers over economic policy to public officials exposed to the rent-seeking and lobbying activities of interest groups. In short, neoliberalism rested on a theoretical analysis and penetrating critique of the state. The neoliberals did not, however, have everything their own way. In 1982, Chalmers Johnson published his path-breaking book MITI and the Japanese Miracle. The central insight provided by Johnson was to draw attention to the importance to economic development (understood here in terms of growth, production and competitiveness rather than welfare) of a small but capable and politically insulated bureaucratic elite with the means and capacity to promote ‘market conforming’ methods of state intervention (see also Wylde, this collection). Although this insight initially went against the grain of the neoliberal orthodoxy of the 1980s—which initially proclaimed the spectacular economic successes of East Asia as testimony of the merits of laissez-faire and market-led industrialisation—subsequent work in the same vein served to substantiate and refine the development state concept (Hamilton 1986; White 1987; Wade 1990). The work of Robert Wade, for instance, sought to infuse what he saw as Johnson’s overly descriptive thesis with what he called a ‘comparative-analytic’ dimension, capable of identifying the causal link between specific policies and industrial performance. In particular, Wade (1990) argued that the key to the industrial transformation in East Asia lay not with the role of the state per se but with early and specific forms of intervention—especially heavy investment in human capital and infrastructure, which subsequently propelled export-oriented industrialisation. The logic underpinning Wade’s argument (and hence the development state concept more generally) was to turn the orthodox neoliberal interpretation on its head: the adoption of ‘market-friendly’ policies and the promotion of exports were, in short, a consequence rather than a cause of East Asia’s industrial transformation. But, arguably, the lasting significance of the ‘developmental state’ literature was not simply that it served to temper neoliberal triumphalism; it was that

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it drew attention to the institutional conditions that underlay the development success of East Asia (see Wylde, this collection). Crucially, this theoretical insight coincided with a renaissance of institutionalist analysis in political and social sciences more widely (March and Olsen 1984; Hall and Taylor 1996). In a way, neoliberalism—and public choice theory more specifically—contributed to this renaissance by providing a plausible set of microfoundations to the analysis of the political economy of development (Remmer 1997: 50). The application of rational choice assumptions to public institutions would find echoes in the pioneering work of Douglass North (1991a) on institutions and economic development. At the other end of the spectrum, political scientists and heterodox political economists drew increasingly on institutional analysis, not simply to account for the success or failure of particular development models but why they were adopted in the first place. In Pathways from the Periphery, for example, Stephan Haggard (1990) sought to account for why it was that South Korea, Taiwan, Brazil and Mexico all began with ostensibly similar development strategies build around ISI, but whereas the former two moved rapidly towards the promotion of export-oriented growth the latter two did not. Similarly, work in the 1990s on the politics of economic reform associated with structural adjustment and the adoption of neoliberal policies (Nelson 1989; Haggard and Kaufmann, 1992; Haggard and Webb 1994) saw scholars examine the institutional and behavioural determinants of the success or otherwise of market-oriented reform; in short, why was it that neoliberal policy experimentation was quickly abandoned or scaled back in some cases, and followed through more determinedly and (on occasion) successfully in others? The answer to both sets of questions, it was concluded, lay with the specific ways in which different institutional configurations and political alliances were able to manage the distributive conflict associated with economic change. By the mid-1990s, the political debate concerning market- versus state-based mechanisms of resources allocation appeared to have been settled decisively in favour of the former, yet the analytical debate concerning the determinants of growth and development increasingly coalesced around the importance of institutions, not least the state itself.

4

The Convergence of Theory and Divergence of Practice

During the 2000s, institutional analysis has arguably become the central focal point for both orthodox and heterodox theories of development. On the orthodox side, this has been seen in the influence of the so-called new institu-

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tional economics on mainstream development thinking, both inside and outside of the World Bank—especially under the guise of the post-Washington Consensus. Although the significance of the supposed pragmatic shift from the original Washington Consensus to the post-Washington Consensus has been the subject of widespread analytical scepticism (Standing 2000; Öniş and Şenses, 2005), one discernible difference lies in the emphasis placed on what Dani Rodik and Arvind Subramanian (2003) describe as the ‘primacy of institutions’. Institutions are understood here in accordance with Douglass North’s (1991b: 97) seminal definition, as ‘humanly devised constraints that structure political, economic and social interactions’. This definition has principally, but not exclusively, been used to refer to economic institutions, specifically those pertaining to property rights and contract law (Acemoglu et al. 2001). In his own work, Rodrik has been keen to stress the importance of what he calls ‘market stabilising’ and ‘market legitimising’ institutions, alongside ‘market regulating’ institutions. In a key paper, Rodrik (1999) attributed the failure of the majority of sub-Saharan African economies to bounce back quickly from the external economic shocks of the 1970s to the general absence of social and political institutions capable of managing distributive conflict and allowing for legitimate and appropriate policy responses. Rodrik’s emphasis on the stabilisation and legitimising functions of institutions finds echoes in some of the key heterodox political economy literature, perhaps most notably in the influential work of Adrian Leftwich (2000). Like Rodrik, Leftwich (2005) makes a distinction between ‘economic’ and ‘political’ institutions, but whereas the former sees the relationship between these two as, at least in theory, mutually supportive, the latter is less sanguine about the prospects for this. The reason for this, Leftwich suggests, is that the stability of economic institutions, far from being integral to successful development, might be an insurmountable barrier to it. Leftwich offers the example of land reform, which as he rightly points out is rarely brought about consensually (e.g., China in 1949, Cuba in 1959 or South Korea during the Japanese occupation or after the military coup in 1960). Thus, inclusive democratic institutions—which Rodrik sees as providing the stabilising and legitimising functions necessary for economic development—might not be the most conducive setting for a successful land reform programme. The principal reason for this is that democracy requires that the losers (in this case the landowners) are sufficiently persuaded that it is in their interests to abide by the rules of the democratic game and commit to what Adam Przeworski (1986) calls the ‘institutionalised uncertainty’ of electoral competition. Leftwich is careful to point out, however, that this did not mean that democracy is anathema to successful development or that authoritarian regimes have proven to be

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necessarily any better at promoting development. Rather, there is an inherent tension between the imperatives of economic institutions and political institutions that, while not irresolvable, necessitates a constant trade-off to be managed successfully. Ultimately for Leftwich (2010), the successful management of these trade-offs lies in the political realm; that is, the role of purposeful human agents—individuals, groups, organisations and coalitions—in the design, formation and maintenance of institutions holds the key to understanding why certain development experiments succeed while others fail. It is only by analysing the behavioural characteristics of leaders and elites in forming and sustaining development coalitions, Leftwich argues, that we can fully account for the economic success of small and externally vulnerable economies such as Botswana and Mauritius, as well as notable failures like Myanmar, Fiji and Yemen. Applying these theoretical insights to the case of the BRIC economies, it becomes easier to understand why the search for a generalizable ‘model’ to characterise these cases, as in the concept of the ‘Beijing Consensus’ (Ramo 2004; Williamson 2012), has proven misguided. As Ban and Blyth (2013): 241) put it, the BRICs have ‘neither pioneered a post-neoliberal transformation, nor have they proved to be forces for the continuation of Washington Consensus ideas and policies’. What the BRICs have shown is that size and systemic importance matter, not least because it has enabled these economies to resist the neoliberal strictures of the Washington Consensus to pursue more autonomous, state-led development strategies. But this is not the whole story. In each case, to the degree to which the BRICs have implemented neoliberal economic policies, they have done so in accordance with the distinct institutional pathways each has followed. This is based on different forms of hybridisation wherein the pursuit of neoliberal economic policies has been filtered through historically and institutionally embedded ideas and practices (Ban and Blyth 2013: 245). In Brazil’s case, the commitment to orthodox macroeconomic discipline and the adoption of privatisation and deregulatory reforms has gone hand in hand with heterodox measures and interventions, including the use of public development banks and an expansionary minimum wage policy to provide fiscal stimulus during the crisis, alongside targeted industrial policy and use of state-owned firms to provide welfare and employment programmes (Ban 2013). By contrast, India’s embrace of the Washington Consensus following the 1991 balance-of-payments crisis appears to have involved a more radical paradigm shift from the country’s previous commitment to import substitution. But, as Mukherji (2013) suggests, this was not the first occasion in which neoliberal reforms had been put forward in India. The key difference is that by 1991 the encroachment of neoclassical ideas—which had been gain-

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ing ground in elite policymaking circles since the late 1970s—was buttressed by the emergence of a powerful coalition of industrialists, professionals and farmers that provided the necessary political support to ensure that the reform process was able to take root. The key summative point, then, is not that the experience of the BRIC economies shows the superiority of either state- or market-oriented development models; rather, it is the distinct institutional pathways—and political coalitions that underpin them—which accounts for the economic models that different economies follow and, to a degree, the successes and failures associated with them.

5

Conclusion

In this chapter, I have offered a stylised (and necessarily brief ) historical account of the political economy of development by asking what, after over half a century of dedicated scholarship and policy experimentation, does the discipline have to say about the relationship between the state and the market. The answer I have provided has centred on the identification of what amounts to a paradox, namely, in the time in which the role of the state in the practice of development has been substantially reduced, the role of the state in the analysis of development has been substantially increased. This trend can be detected in orthodox and heterodox scholarship, both of which are now arguably dominated by the study of institutions. The key insight offered by institutionalism is the insistence on what is known in the jargon as ‘endogeneity’, by which is meant that the political economy of individual nation-states is defined by the discrete historical pathways that they take. Once adopted, institutions have a tendency to endure and take on a path-dependent character, wherein past practices and policies shape and constrain, but do not determine, future trajectories. This insight helps us to understand why neither the ubiquity of neoliberalism nor the imperatives of global economic integration has led to the degree of policy convergence that might have otherwise been expected. By the same token, the endogeneity of institutions also provides important clues to why the search within the development success of the BRICS economies for a ‘model’ of development to rival the Washington Consensus has proven misguided. Emphasising the endogeneity of institutions—and therefore the domestic sources of growth and development—does not mean, of course, that the external, historical and structural obstacles highlighted by earlier theories of development are now deemed to be of less causal significance. But what it does mean is that once these factors have been taken into account it is the idiosyn-

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cratic institutional characteristics of individual nation-states—and the extent to which these institutions are capable of providing mechanisms for resolving the distributive conflict associated with economic change and appropriate incentive structures for effective coalition building—that accounts for those that achieve development success and those that do not.

References Acemoglu, D., S. Johnson, and J. Robinson. 2001. The colonial origins of comparative development: An empirical investigation. American Economic Review 91(5): 1369–1401. Ban, C. 2013. Brazil’s liberal neo-developmentalism: New paradigm and edited orthodoxy. Review of International Political Economy 20(2): 298–331. Ban, C., and M. Blyth. 2013. The BRICs and the Washington consensus: An introduction. Review of International Political Economy 20(2): 241–255. Bates, R.H. 1981. Markets and states in Tropical Africa. Berkeley: University of California Press. Best, L. 1996. Independence and responsibility: Self-knowledge as an Imperative. In The critical tradition of caribbean political economy: The legacy of George Beckford, ed. K. Levitt and M. Witter. Kingston: Ian Randell. Booth, D. 1985. Marxism and development sociology: Interpreting the impasse. World Development 13(7): 761–787. Cardoso, F. 1977. The consumption of dependency theory in the United States. Latin American Research Review 12(3): 7–24. Crouch, C. 2011. The strange non-death of neoliberalism. Cambridge: Polity. Dos Santos T. 1970. The Structure of Dependence. The American Economic Review, Vol. 60, 231–236. Haggard, S. 1990. Pathways from the periphery: The politics of growth in the newly industrializing countries. New York: Cornell University Press. Haggard, S., and S.B. Webb (eds.). 1994. Voting for reform: Democracy, political liberalization, and economic adjustment. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hall P and R Taylor (1996) Political Science and the Three New Institutionalisms Political Studies 44 (5) 936–957 Hamilton, C. 1986. Capitalist industrialisation in Korea. Boulder, CO: Westview. Hettne, B. 1995. Development theory and the three worlds: Towards an international political economy of development. London: Longman. Huntington, S. 1965. Political development and political decay. World Politics 17(3): 386–430. Krueger, A. 1974. The political economy of the rent seeking society. American Economic Review 64: 291–303.

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Leftwich, A. 2000. States of development: On the primacy of politics in development. Cambridge: Polity Press. Leftwich, A. 2005. Democracy and development: Is there institutional incompatibility? Democratization 12(5): 686–703. Leftwich, A. 2010. Beyond institutions: Rethinking the role of leaders, elites and coalitions in the institutional formation of developmental states and strategies. Forum for Development Studies 37(1): 93–111. Leys, C. 1996. The “crisis” of development theory. New Political Economy 1(1): 41–58. Lissakers, K. 1983. Dateline Wall Street: Faustian finance. Foreign Policy, 16 Mar 1983. http://foreignpolicy.com/1983/03/16/dateline-wall-street-faustian-finance/. Retrieved 14 Sept 2014. March, J., and J. Olsen. 1984. The new institutionalism: Organizational factors in political life. The American Political Science Review 78(3): 734–749. Mukherji, R. 2013. Ideas, interests and the tipping point: Economic change in India. Review of International Political Economy 20(2): 363–89. Myrdal, G. 1957. Economic theory and underdeveloped regions. London: Duckworth. Nelson, J.N. (ed.). 1989. Fragile coalitions: The politics of economic adjustment. New Brunswick and Oxford: Transaction Books. North, D. 1991a. Institutions, institutional change and economic performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. North, D. 1991b. Institutions. Journal of Economic Perspectives 5(1): 97–112. Payne, T. 1998. The new political economy of area studies. Millennium: Journal of International Studies 27(2): 253–73. Payne, A., and N. Phillips. 2010. Development. Cambridge: Polity Press. Pieterse, J. 2010. Development theory, 2nd ed. London: Sage. Prebisch, R. 1950. The economic development of Latin America and its principal problems. New York: United Nations. Przeworski, A. 1986. Some problems in the study of the transition to democracy. In Transitions from authoritarian rule: Comparative perspectives, ed. G.  O’Donnell et al. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Ramo, J. 2004. The Beijing consensus. London: Foreign Policy Centre. http://fpc.org. uk/fsblob/244.pdf. Date accessed 12 Jan 2013. Rapley, J. 2007. Understanding development: Theory and practice in the third world, 3rd ed. London: Lynne Rienner. Remmer, K. 1997. Theoretical decay and theoretical development: The resurgence of institutional analysis. World Politics 50(1): 34–61. Rodrik, D. 1999. Where did all the growth go? External shocks, social conflict, and growth collapses. Journal of Economic Growth 4(4): 385–412. Schuurman, F. 1994. Beyond the impasse: New directions in development theory. London: Zed. Seers, D. 1963. The limitations of the special case. Bulletin of the Oxford Institute of Economics and Statistics 25(2): 77–98.

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11 Outside the State: The Shadow Economy and Shadow Economy Labour Force Friedrich Schneider

1

Introduction

Why do people work in the shadow economy all over the world? In the official labour market, the costs firms (and individuals) have to pay when ‘officially’ hiring someone have been tremendously increased by the burden of tax and social contributions on wages, as well as by the legal administrative regulation to control economic activities. In various Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries, these costs are much greater than the wage effectively earned by the worker—providing a strong incentive to work in the shadow economy. Illicit work takes many forms, especially in developing countries. These forms include undertaking a second job after (or even during) regular working hours, working entirely outside the official labour market and the employment of people, for example, clandestine or illegal immigrants who are not allowed to work in the official economy. Empirical research on the shadow economy labour market is even more difficult than the shadow economy in terms of value added, since there is very little knowledge about how many hours an average ‘shadow economy worker’ works; hence, it is not easy to provide empirical facts (but see Chickering and Salahdine 1991; Dallago 1990; Loayza 1996; OECD 2009a; Pozo 1996).

F. Schneider (*) Johannes Kepler University, Austria © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 J. Grugel, D. Hammett (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of International Development, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-42724-3_11

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Kucera and Roncolato (2008: 321) identify two crucial issues for labour market policy in dealing with informal employment: the intensive labour market regulations as one (major) cause of informal employment and so-­ called ‘voluntary’ informal employment. In their paper, Kucera and Roncolato (2008) provide a theoretical overview and, through survey empirical studies which mainly analyse the effect of official labour market regulations on informal employment, find a significant and quantitatively important influence. Fighting the shadow economy and informal (illegal or shadow) employment have been important policy goals in developing and highly developed OECD countries during recent decades. In order to do this, one needs knowledge about the size and development of the shadow economy and labour force as well as the reasons why people are engaged in shadow economy activities: this paper provides this understanding. Although important topics, tax evasion and tax morale and compliance are beyond the remit of the discussion here (but see Andreoni et  al. 1998; Blackwell 2010; Feld and Frey 2007; Kastlunger et  al. 2009; Kirchler 2007; Kirchler et  al. 2003, 2007; Torgler 2002, 2007). This chapter begins with theoretical considerations about the definition and measurement of the shadow economy and discusses also the main factors determining its size. The subsequent section discusses the empirical results of the size and development of the shadow economy (in value-added figures). The next section presents a discussion of the size and development of the shadow economy labour force, before the final conclusions.

2

 ome Theoretical Considerations About S the Shadow Economy

Defining the Shadow Economy Authors trying to measure the shadow economy face the difficulty of the lack of a precise definition.1 According to one commonly used definition it ­comprises all currently unregistered economic activities that contribute to the  This paper focusses on the size and development of the shadow economy for uniform countries and not for specific regions. Recently, first studies have been undertaken to measure the size of the shadow economy as well as the ‘grey’ or ‘shadow’ labour force for urban regions or states (e.g. California). See, for example, Marcelli et al. (1999), Marcelli (2004), Chen (2004), Williams and Windebank (1998, 2001a, b), Flaming et al. (2005), Alderslade et al. (2006), Brück et al. (2006). Herwartz et al. (2009) and Tafenau et al. (2010) estimate the size of the shadow economy of 234 EU-NUTS regions for the year 2004 demonstrating a considerable regional variation in the size of the shadow economy. 1

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o­ fficially calculated gross national product (for instance, Feige 1989, 1994; Frey and Pommerehne 1984; Schneider 1994a, 2003, 2005). Smith (1994: 18) defines it as ‘market-based production of goods and services, whether legal or illegal, that escapes detection in the official estimates of GDP’. Put differently, one of the broadest definitions is: ‘those economic activities and the income derived from them that circumvent or otherwise avoid government regulation, taxation or observation’.2 (For a broader discussion, see Buehn et al. 2009; Kazemier 2005a, b; Schneider and Enste 2002, 2006; Schneider et al. 2002; Thomas 1992.) In this chapter, the shadow economy is deemed as including all market-­ based legal production of goods and services that are deliberately concealed from public authorities in order to avoid payment of income, value-added or other taxes, to avoid payment of social security contributions, to avoid having to meet certain legal labour market standards or to avoid complying with certain administrative obligations (see Kazemier 2005a; Pedersen 2003: 13–19). Thus, typically illegal underground economic activities including classical crimes (e.g. burglary, robbery, drug dealing) are excluded, as is the informal household economy which consists of all household services and production.

Measuring the Shadow Economy The definition of the shadow economy plays an important role in assessing its size. In general, there are two types of shadow economic activities: illicit employment and the in-the-household-produced goods and services mostly consumed within the household. The following analysis focusses on productive economic activities that would normally be included in the national accounts but which remain underground due to tax or regulatory burdens. Although such legal activities contribute to the country’s value added, they are not captured in the national accounts because they are produced in illicit ways. From the economic and social perspective, soft forms of illicit employment, such as moonlighting (e.g. construction work in private homes) and its contribution to aggregate value added, can be assessed rather positively. Although the issue of the shadow economy has been investigated for a long time, the discussion regarding the ‘appropriate’ methodology to assess its scope continues (see Bhattacharyya 1999; Breusch 2005a, b; Dell’Anno and Schneider 2009; Dixon 1999; Feige 1989; Feld and Larsen 2005; Feld and Schneider 2010; Giles 1999a, b, c; Schneider 1986, 2001, 2003, 2005, 2006,  This definition is taken from Dell’Anno (2003), Dell’Anno and Schneider (2004) and Feige (1989); see also Thomas (1999), Fleming et al. (2000) or Feld and Larsen (2005: 25). 2

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2011, 2014; Schneider and Enste 2000a, b, 2002, 2006; Tanzi 1999; Thomas 1992, 1999). However, three main methods of assessment can be identified: direct procedures at a micro level to determine the size of the shadow economy at one particular point in time (e.g. surveys), indirect procedures using macroeconomic indicators to proxy the development of the shadow economy over time and statistical models that estimate the shadow economy as an ‘unobserved’ variable. The estimation of the shadow economy is often based on either the currency demand method3 or a combination of the Multiple Indicators Multiple Causes (MIMIC) procedure and the currency demand method (see Feld and Schneider 2010; Schneider 1994a, b, c, 2005, 2011; Schneider and Enste 2000b, 2002, 2006; Schneider and Williams 2013). The MIMIC procedure assumes that the shadow economy remains an unobserved phenomenon which can be estimated using quantitatively measurable causes of illicit employment, for example, tax burden and regulation intensity, and indicators reflecting illicit activities, for example, currency demand, official GDP and official working time. However, the MIMIC procedure produces only relative estimates of the size and the development of the shadow economy. Thus, the currency demand method is used to calibrate the relative into absolute estimates (e.g. in per cent of GDP) by using two or three absolute values (in per cent of GDP) of the size of the shadow economy. Alternatively, the size of the shadow economy can be estimated through surveys (Feld and Larsen 2005, 2008, 2009), although there are limitations to this approach due to respondents dishonestly replying or declining answers to the sensitive questions (hence, a similar ways approach to the contingent valuation method (CVM) in environmental economics (Kopp et al. 1997) is adopted). In addition to studies by Merz and Wolff (1993), Feld and Larsen (2005, 2008, 2009), Haigner et al. (2013) and Enste and Schneider (2006) for Germany, the survey method has been applied in the Nordic countries and Great Britain (Isachsen and Strøm 1985; Pedersen 2003) as well as in the Netherlands (van Eck and Kazemier 1988; Kazemir 2006). While the questionnaires underlying these studies are broadly comparable in design, recent attempts by the European Union (EU) to provide survey results for all EU  This indirect approach is based on the assumption that cash is used to make transactions within the shadow economy. By using this method, one econometrically estimates a currency demand function including independent variables like tax burden, regulation and so on, which ‘drive’ the shadow economy. This equation is used to make simulations of the amount of money that would be necessary to generate the official GDP. This amount is then compared with the actual money demand and the difference is treated as an indicator for the development of the shadow economy. On this basis, the calculated difference is multiplied by the velocity of money of the official economy and one gets a value-added figure for the shadow economy. See footnote 11 for references discussing critically this method. 3

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member states runs into difficulties regarding comparability (Renooy et  al. 2004; European Commission 2007). Thus, although each method has strengths and weaknesses, and biases in the estimates of the shadow economy almost certainly prevail, no better data are currently available. Clearly, there can be no exact measure of the size of the shadow economy: macro estimates derived from the MIMIC model or currency demand method are seen as upper-bound estimates, while micro (survey) estimates are seen as lower-bound estimates. There are other ways of investigating the shadow economy. In tax compliance research, the most interesting data stem from tax audits by the US Internal Revenue Service (IRS). In the Taxpayer Compliance Measurement Program (TCMP), actual compliance behaviour of taxpayers is observed and is used for empirical analysis (see Andreoni et al. 1998). The approach of the IRS is broader in a certain sense as tax evasion from all sources of income is considered while the other methods of estimating the shadow economy mainly measure tax evasion from labour income. Even the data obtained from the TCMP is biased, however, because the tax non-compliance actually detected may well only be the tip of the iceberg. Nevertheless, the imperfect data in this area can still provide insights into the size, the development and the determinants of the shadow economy and of the shadow economy labour force.

Theorising About the Shadow Economy A useful starting point for a theoretical discussion of the shadow economy is the paper by Allingham and Sandmo on income tax evasion. While the shadow economy and tax evasion are not congruent, activities in the shadow economy in most cases imply the evasion of direct or indirect taxes. It is generally recognised that tax compliance depends on its expected costs and benefits. The benefits of tax non-compliance result from the individual marginal tax rate and the true individual income. In the case of the shadow economy, the individual marginal tax rate is often roughly calculated using the overall tax burden from indirect and direct taxes including social security contributions. The expected costs of non-compliance derive from deterrence enacted by the state, that is, the state’s auditing activities raising the probability of detection and the fines individuals face when they are caught. Individual morality also plays a role for compliance and additional costs could pertain beyond the tax administration’s pure punishment in the form of psychic costs like shame or regret, but also additional pecuniary costs from a reputation loss.

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Individuals are rational calculators who weight the costs and benefits a legal status entails. Their decision to partially or completely participate in the shadow economy is a choice under uncertainty facing a trade-off between the gains if their activities are not discovered and a loss if discovered and penalised. Shadow economic activities (SE) thus negatively depend on the probability of detection p and potential fines f, and positively on the opportunity costs of remaining formal denoted as B. The opportunity costs are positively determined by the burden of taxation T and high labour costs W due to labour market regulations. Hence, the higher the tax burden and labour costs, the more incentives individuals have to avoid those costs by working in the shadow economy. The probability of detection p itself depends on enforcement actions A taken by the tax authority and on facilitating activities F accomplished by individuals to reduce detection of shadow economic activities. This discussion suggests the following structural equation:



+   +   + +  SE = SE  p  A, F  ; f ; B  T ,W   .     

(11.1)

Hence, shadow economic activities may be defined as those economic activities and income earned that circumvent government regulation, taxation or observation. More narrowly, the shadow economy includes monetary and non-monetary transaction of a legal nature: that is, all productive economic activities that would be taxable. Kannianen et  al. (2004) incorporate many of these insights in their model of the shadow economy. They hypothesise that tax hikes unambiguously increase the shadow economy, while the availability of public goods financed by taxes moderates participation in the shadow economy. The latter effect however depends on the ability to access those public goods. A shortcoming of this analysis is the neglected endogeneity of tax morale and good governance, which is addressed by Feld and Frey (2007) who argue that tax compliance is the result of a complicated interaction between tax morale and deterrence measures. It must be clear to taxpayers what the rules of the game are and as deterrence measures serve as signals for the level of tax morale a society wants to elicit, deterrence may also crowd out the intrinsic motivation to pay taxes. While tax morale may increase if taxpayers perceive the public goods received in exchange for their tax payments, it may decrease if individuals perceive political decisions or the treatment of taxpayers is unfair.

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Fig. 11.1  Average size of the shadow economy of 162 countries, 1999–2007: originally published in International Economic Journal (Source: Schneider et al. 2010: 457—reproduction by permission of Taylor and Francis: www.tandfonline.com)

3

 ize of the Shadow Economies All Over S the World4

The average size of the shadow economy varies tremendously between countries (Fig. 11.1 and Table 11.1). Utilising the World Bank’s distinguishing of eight world regions (East Asia and Pacific, Europe and Central Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, Middle East and North Africa, High-Income OECD, Other High Income, South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa), we can identify differing levels of informality around the globe (Tables 11.2 (unweighted) and 11.3 (weighted)). It is clear that unweighted average informality is highest in Latin America and the Caribbean (41.1 % informality/shadow economy), followed by sub-Saharan Africa (40.2 %) and Europe and Central Asia (38.9 %). However, weighting the average informality/shadow economies by total GDP in 2005 puts sub-Saharan Africa as the highest (37.6 %), followed by Europe and Central Asia (36.4 %) and Latin America and the Caribbean (34.7 %). Overall, the unweighted world mean for the shadow economy (1999–2007) is 33 %, but when this is weighted by respective GDP, we can see this as accounting for ‘only’ 17.1 % of the economy. Over the period 1999–2007, we can also observe a reduction in the size of the shadow economy (as weighted by official GDP for 2005) across all ­country  Some figures are taken from Schneider et al. (2010). The econometric MIMIC estimation results are not shown here due to space reasons; see, for example, Schneider et al. (2010). 4

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Table 11.1  The main causes determining the shadow economy Region

Mean Median

Min

Max

sd

East Asia and Pacific Europe and Central Asia Latin America and the Caribbean Middle East and North Africa High-Income OECD Other High Income South Asia Sub-Saharan Africa WORLD

32.3 38.9 41.1 28.0 17.1 23.0 33.2 40.2 33.0

12.7 18.1 19.3 18.3  8.5 12.4 22.2 18.4  8.5

50.6 65.8 66.1 37.2 28.0 33.4 43.9 61.8 66.1

13.3 10.9 12.3  7.8  6.1  7.0  7.0  8.3 12.8

32.4 39.0 38.8 32.5 15.8 25.0 35.3 40.6 33.5

Source: Prepared by author

Table 11.2  Average informality (unweighted) by World Bank’s regions: originally published in International Economic Journal Region

Mean Median

Min

Max

sd

East Asia and Pacific Europe and Central Asia Latin America and the Caribbean Middle East and North Africa High-Income OECD Other High Income South Asia Sub-Saharan Africa WORLD

17.5 36.4 34.7 27.3 13.4 20.8 25.1 37.6 17.1

12.7 18.1 19.3 18.3  8.5 12.4 22.2 18.4  8.5

50.6 65.8 66.1 37.2 28.0 33.4 43.9 61.8 66.1

10.6  8.4  7.9  7.7  5.7  4.9  5.9 11.7  9.9

12.7 32.6 33.8 32.5 11.0 19.4 22.2 33.2 13.2

Source: Schneider et al. 2010: 457—reproduction by permission of Taylor and Francis: www.tandfonline.com

Fig. 11.2  Size and development of the shadow economy of various country groups (weighted averages), in % of official total GDP of the respective group (Source: Schneider et al. 2010)

groupings (Fig. 11.2). The average size of the shadow economies across the 162 countries was 34.0 % of official GDP in 1999, decreasing to 31.2 % of official GDP in 2007. This decrease in the shadow economy of almost 3 % over nine years seems most likely to be accounted for by the growth of the official economy with reduced unemployment/increased formal employment.

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4

193

Shadow Economy Labour Force

Worldwide Aspects The following data on the shadow economy labour force are partly based on the OECD and World Bank database on informal employment in major cities and rural areas, as well as sources mentioned in this chapter. The values of the shadow economy labour force are calculated in absolute terms, and as a percentage of the official labour force, under the assumption that the shadow economy in rural areas is at least as high as in the cities. This is a conservative assumption, since in reality it is likely to be even larger (see Lubell 1991; Pozo 1996; Chickering and Salahdine 1991). The OECD’s (2009a, b) Is informal normal? study provides worldwide ­figures for the shadow economy and concludes that in many parts of the world for the period 1990–2007 informal employment was the norm, not the exception. More than half of all jobs in the non-agricultural sectors of developing countries—over 900 million workers—can be considered informal: in subSaharan Africa and South Asia, over 80 % of non-agricultural jobs are identified as informal. If agricultural workers in developing countries are included, the estimate number of informal labourers rises to roughly 2000 million. Most of these informal workers are self-employed and work independently, or own and manage micro- or small enterprises. According to the OECD study (2009a, b), informal employment is a result of both people being excluded from official jobs and people voluntarily opting out of formal structures. This OECD (2009a, b) study concludes that informality is the norm: 1.8 billion people working in informal jobs outnumber the 1.2 billion employed in and benefiting from formal contracts and social security protection. Informal economic activity, excluding the agricultural sector, accounts for three quarters of the jobs in sub-Saharan Africa, for more than two-thirds in South and South East Asia, half in Latin America, the Middle East and North Africa, and nearly for one quarter in transition countries. If agriculture is included, the informal share of the economy in the above-mentioned regions is even higher (e.g. more than 90 % in South Asia). The precariousness and paucity of income for many from informal employment is underlined by data showing that more than 700 million informal workers ‘survive’ on less than $1.25 a day and some 1.2 billion on less than $2 a day (OECD 2009a, b). The study also concludes that the share of informal employment tends to increase during economic turmoil. For example, during the Argentine economic crisis (1999–2002), the countries’ ‘official’ economy shrank as by almost one-fifth while the share of informal employment expanded from 48 % to 52 %. One can clearly see that even

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Table 11.3  Average informality (weighted) by total GDP, 2005: originally published in International Economic Journal 22 South and Middle American countries 34 Asian countries 42 African countries 21 Transition countries

1985–1989

1990–1994

1995–1999

2000–2007

32.4

35.4

40.3

50.1

55.9 40.3 30.9

60.4 47.1 32.3

65.4 52.4 35.4

70.2 60.5 40.2

Source: Schneider et al. 2010: 457—reproduction by permission of Taylor and Francis: www.tandfonline.com

under conditions of strong economic growth, the share of non-agricultural employment and, the share of informal employment is strongly rising. Overall informal employment in non-agricultural sectors has grown remarkably across all regions of the world since 1985 (Table 11.3). The share of informal employment in South and Middle American countries in the period of 1985–1989 was 32.4 % and increased by the period of 2000–2007 to 50.1 %. In the 34 Asian countries, informal employment rose in the period of 1985–1989 from 55.9 % to 70.2 % in 2000–2007. In the 42 African countries, the share of informal employment rose from 40.3 % in 1985–1989 to 60.5 % in 2000–2007. These data clearly demonstrate a very strong positive trend in the share of informal employment (in per cent of total non-­ agricultural employment) over time.

OECD Countries In Table 11.4, the estimates for the shadow economy labour force in highly developed OECD countries (Austria, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Sweden) are shown. In Austria, the shadow economy labour force is estimated at 500,000–750,000 workers, 16 % of the official labour force, in the years 1997–1998. In Denmark, the proportion of the Danish population engaged in the shadow economy ranged from 8.3 % of the total labour force in 1980 to 15.4 % in 1994, a remarkable increase of the shadow economy labour force. In France, the shadow economy labour force reached a size of between 6 % and 12 % of the official labour force (between 1.6 and 3.2 million workers) in 1997/1998. In Germany, the shadow economy labour force increased from 8 % to 12 % in 1974–1982 to 19–23 % in 1997–1998. Both France and Germany demonstrate a very strong increase in the shadow economy labour force. Elsewhere, the shadow economy labour force also accounts for a large proportion of the workforce: in Italy, 30–48 % (1997–1998),

5640 13,791 15,107 25,685 9930 22,179 9576 22,880

8040 20,361

20,636 25,874 13,233 18,496 25,946 34,441 12,539 24,363 11,940 26,080

7868 19,927 21,981 37,331 14,458 32,226 14,162 33,176

11,736 29,425

25,382 29,630 18,658 26,356 36,558 48,562 17,542 34,379 17,911 39,634

19.0 23.1 13.0 19.8 14.5 19.6 15.0 20.2

16.7 27.3

5.47 8.93  8.6  9.8 11.2 17.6  6.9 14.9 10.6 14.7

1250–3500 1500–4200 750 1150 15,000 30,000 26,000 48,000

4000–7000 6600–11,400

300–380 500–750 250 390 410 420 800–1500 1400–3200 3000–4000 7000–9000

Size of the shadow economy (in % of official Shadow GDP) currency economy demand labour force in approachb 1000 peoplec

a

Source: OECD 2009a, b: 34–35; Charmes 2002, 2007, 2008; Heintz and Chang 2007 Source: OECD, Paris, various years b Source: Own calculations and Schneider and Williams (2013) c Estimated full-time jobs, including unregistered workers, illegal immigrants and second jobs d In per cent of the population aged 20–69, survey method

1979–1980 1997–1998 Sweden 1978 1997–1998 European Union 1978 1997–1998 OECD (Europe) 1978 1997–1998

Spain

Italy

Germany

France

1979 1997–1998

1990–1991 1997–1998 1980 1986 1991 1994 1975–1982 1997–1998 1974–1982 1997–1998

Austria

Denmark

Year

Countries

Total economy (shadow Official GDP economy plus per capita in official GDP per capita in US $) US-$a

–

9.6–26.5 11.5–32.3 13.0–14.0 19.8 –

20.0–35.0 30.0–48.0

9.6 16.0 8.3 13.0 14.3 15.4 3.0–6.0 6.0–12.0 8.0–12.0 19.0–23.0

De Grazia (1983) and own calculations De Grazia (1983), Schneider (1998a, b) and own calculations Gaetani-d’Aragona (1979) and own calculations Ruesga (1984) and own calculations De Grazia (1983) and own calculations De Grazia (1983) and own calculations De Grazia (1983) and own calculations

Schneider (1998a, b) and own calculations Mogensen et al. (1995) and own calculations

Shadow economy participants in Sources of shadow % of official economy and shadow labour forced economy labour force

Table 11.4  Percentage share of informal employment in total non-agricultural employment by five-year period 11  Outside the State: The Shadow Economy and Shadow Economy … 

195

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Table 11.5  Estimates of the size of the ‘shadow economy labour force’ in some OECD countries, 1974–1998 Region North Africa Algeria Morocco Tunisia Egypt Sub-Saharan Africa Benin Chad Guinea Kenya Mali South Africa Latin America Bolivia Brazil Chile Colombia Costa Rica Dominican Republic Ecuador El Salvador Guatemala Honduras Mexico Panama Peru Venezuela South and Southeast Asia India Indonesia Philippines Thailand West Asia Lebanon West Bank and Gaza Strip Syria Turkey Yemen Transition countries Kyrgyzstan Moldova Russia

1990–1999

2000–2007

Women

Men

Women

Men

43.3 40.6 46.8 39.2 46.5 84.1 97.3 95.2 86.7 83.1

49.3 43.1 44.0 53.2 56.9 63.0 87.0 59.5 65.6 59.1

38.6 77.1

47.2 62.6

58.4 56.2 74.4 67.3 43.9 44.0 48.0 49.7

43.6 47.1 55.0 54.7 30.9 34.1 42.1 46.5

89.2 64.9 59.5

74.2 51.0 55.4

52.3

50.2

76.9

73.2

68.6 69.4 65.5 55.0 40.8

45.7 46.5 73.6 54.3 35.5

47.3 72.7 85.7 77.2 73.4 54.3 31.1

46.7 70.2 82.9 78.0 70.8 49.1 43.4

53.5 50.4 72.0 52.1 73.4

47.8 48.7 65.1 47.5 71.2

35.4 60.0 20.2

44.4 44.4 46.8

34.6 19.1 39.7

42.8 29.1 58.2

32.2 29.3 22.3 40.9 18.4 17.6

33.4 52.8 27.2 47.1 28.0 19.6

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Spain 11.5–32 % (1997–1998) and Sweden 19.8 % (1997–1998). In the EU, about 30 million people are engaged in shadow economy activities in the years 1997–1998 and in all European OECD countries 48 million work illicitly.

Developing and Transition Countries Table 11.5 provides the share of informal employment in total non-­ agricultural employment by country (mostly developing countries), region and gender. Separating the share of informal employment (in per cent of total non-agricultural employment) by gender, one generally observes that the share of women is in some regions higher but in other lower than the one of men. In North Africa (countries Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt), the share of informal employment of women is 43.3 % and the one of men 49.3 % over the period 1990–1999. In sub-Saharan Africa, the share of women is 84.1 %, the one of men 63.0 %. In Latin America, the share of women is 56.2 % and the share of men 47.1 %. In the region of West Asia and in the transition countries, the share of men of informal employment is higher than the one of women. In West Asia (countries Lebanon, West Bank and Gaza Strip, Syria, Turkey, Yemen), the share of women is 31.1 %, the share of men 43.4 %. In the transition countries (Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Russia), the share of women is 22.3 % and the share of men 27.2 %. One realises some remarkable differences over the regions and over time. In general, the share of informal employment is rather large in these developing countries and certainly has severe policy implications.

5

Conclusions

In this chapter, the significance of research on the shadow economy and undeclared work in highly developed OECD, developing and transition countries is explained. The discussion of the recent literature shows that economic opportunities for employees, the overall situation on the labour market, not least unemployment, are crucial for an understanding of the dynamics of the shadow economy. Individuals look for ways to improve their economic situation and thus contribute productively to aggregate income of a country. This holds regardless of their being active in the official or the unofficial economy.

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A further question is: What types of policy conclusions can one draw? One conclusion is that besides the indirect tax and personal income tax ­burden, which the government can directly influence by policy actions, self-­ employment and unemployment are two very important driving forces of the shadow economy. Unemployment may be controllable by the government through economic policy in a traditional Keynesian sense; alternatively, the government can try to improve the country’s competitiveness to increase foreign demand. The impact of self-employment on the shadow economy is only partly controllable by the government and may be ambiguous from a welfare perspective. A government can deregulate the economy or provide incentives ‘to be your own entrepreneur’, which would make self-employment easier, potentially reducing unemployment and positively contributing to efforts in controlling the size of the shadow economy. Such actions however need to be accompanied with a strengthening of institutions and tax morale to reduce the probability that self-employed shift reasonable proportions of their economic activities into the shadow economy, which, if it happened, made government policies incentivising self-employment less effective. The main challenge still is to bring shadow economic activities into the official economy in a way that goods and services previously produced in the shadow economy are still produced and provided but in the official economy. Only then, the government gets additional taxes and social security contributions. Finally, if one asks what we know about the shadow economy and work in the shadow, one can clearly realise that we have some knowledge about the size and development of the shadow economy and the size and development of the shadow economy labour force. For developing countries, the shadow economy labour force has reached a remarkable size according to OECD (2009a, b) estimates, which is, that in most developing countries the shadow economy labour force is higher than the official labour force. What one does not know are the exact motives, why people work in the shadow economy and what is their relation and feeling if a government undertakes reforms in order to bring them back into the official economy. Hence, much more micro studies are needed to obtain a more detailed knowledge about people’s motivation to work either in the shadow economy and/or in the official one. There is very high level of shadow work in less developed countries. The nature of what is better described as ‘informal’ work in this context, however, is very different from that in OECD countries. In general, the problems lie with the legal systems that make it difficult for businesses and individuals to register their activity. Indeed, in some sectors, informality in business and employment relationships can effectively become the norm. As this paper has presented an analysis of the extent of the informal economy in less developed

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countries, one can draw one policy conclusion: good governance, low corruption and a market economy are the best way to reduce the shadow economy and increase official growth.

References Alderslade J., J. Talmage, and Y. Freeman. 2006. Measuring the informal economy: One neighborhood at a time. Discussion Paper, The brooking institution metropolitan policy program, Washington D.C., Sept 2006. Andreoni, J., B. Erard, and J. Feinstein. 1998. Tax compliance. Journal of Economic Literature 36(4): 818–860. Bhattacharyya, D.K. 1999. On the economic rationale of estimating the hidden economy. Economic Journal 109(3): 348–359. Blackwell, C. 2010. A meta analysis of incentive effects in tax compliance experiments. In Developing alternative frameworks explaining tax compliance, ed. J. Alm, J. Martinez-Vazquez, and Benno Torgler, 97–112. London: Routledge Publishing Company. Breusch, T. 2005a. The Canadian underground economy: An examination of giles and tedds. Canadian Tax Journal 53(4): 367–391. Breusch, T. 2005b. Estimating the underground economy using MIMIC models. Working Paper, Canberra, Australia. http://econwpa.wustl.edu/eps/em/papers/ 0507/0507003.pdf Brueck, T., J.B. Haisten-DeNew, and K.F. Zimmermann. 2006. Creating low-skilled jobs by subsidizing market contracted household work. Applied Economics 38(4): 899–911. Buehn, A., A. Karmann, and F. Schneider. 2009. Shadow economy and do-it-­yourself activities: The German case. Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics 165(4): 701–722. Charmes, J. 2002. Informal sector, poverty and gender: A review of the empirical evidence. Paper prepared on behalf of Wiego (Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing). Washington and Paris: OECD and World Bank. Charmes, J. 2007. Informal sector poverty and gender, a review of empirical evidence. Paper prepared on behalf of Wiego (Women in Formal Employment Globalizing and Organizing). Washington and Paris: OECD and World Bank. Charmes, J. 2008. Informal sector poverty and gender, a review of empirical evidence. Paper prepared on behalf of Wiego (Women in Formal Employment Globalizing and Organizing). Washington and Paris: OECD and World Bank Chen, M. 2004. Rethinking the informal economy: Linkages with the formal economy and the formal regulatory environment. Paper presented a the EGDI-WIDR Conference Unleashing Human Potential: Linking the Informal and Formal Sectors, Helsinki, Finland.

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Chickering, L.A., and M. Salahdine (eds.). 1991. The silent revolution – The informal sector in five Asian and near Eastern Countries. San Francisco: An International Center for Economic Growth Publication (ICS Press). Dallago, B. 1990. The irregular economy: The ‘underground economy’ and the “black labor market”. UK: Dartmouth. De Grazia, R. 1983. Le travail clandistin: Situation dans les pays industrialisés à économie de marché. Genève: Bit. Dell’Anno, R. 2003. Estimating the shadow economy in Italy: A structural equation approach. Working Paper 2003–7, Department of Economics, University of Aarhus. Dell’Anno, R., and F.  Schneider. 2004. The shadow economy of Italy and other OECD countries: What do we know? Journal of Public Finance and Public Choice 21: 223–245. Dell’Anno, R., and F.  Schneider. 2009. A complex approach to estimate shadow economy: The structural equation modelling. In Coping with the complexity of economics, ed. M. Faggnini and T. Looks, 110–130. Berlin: Springer. Dixon, H. 1999. Controversy, on the hidden economy, editorial introduction. Economic Journal 456(3): 335–337. Enste, D., and F. Schneider. 2006. Umfang und Entwicklung der Schattenwirtschaft in 145 Ländern. In Jahrbuch Schattenwirtschaft 2006/07. Zum Spannungsfeld von Poltik und Ökonomie, ed. F. Schneider and D. Enste, 55–80. Berlin: LIT Verlag. European Commission. 2007. Stepping up the fight against undeclared work. COM 628 final. Brussels: European Commission. Feige, E.L. (ed.). 1989. The underground economies. Tax evasion and information distortion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Feige, E.L. 1994. The underground economy and the currency enigma. Supplement to Public Finance/ Finances Publiques 49: 119–136. Feld, L.P., and B.S. Frey. 2007. Tax compliance as the result of a psychological tax contract: The role of incentives and responsive regulation. Law and Policy 29(1): 102–120. Feld, L.P., and C. Larsen. 2005. Black activities in Germany in 2001 and 2004: A comparison based on survey data, study No. 12. Copenhagen: The Rockwool Foundation Research Unit. Feld, L.P., and C. Larsen. 2008. “Black” activities low in Germany in 2006. News from the Rockwool Foundation Research Unit, Mar 2008, 1–12. Feld, L.P., and C. Larsen. 2009. Undeclared work in Germany 2001–2007 – Impact of deterrence, tax policy, and social norms: An analysis based on survey data. Berlin: Springer. Feld, L.P., and F. Schneider. 2010. Survey on the shadow economy and undeclared earnings in OECD countries. German Economic Review 11(2): 109–149. Flaming, D., B. Hayolamak, and P. Jossart. 2005. Hopeful workers, Marginal jobs: LA’s off-the-books labor force, economic roundtable. Los Angeles, CA. Fleming, M.H., J.  Roman, and G.  Farrel. 2000. The shadow economy. Journal of International Affairs 53/2(Spring ): 64–89.

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Frey, B.S., and W. Pommerehne. 1984. The hidden economy: State and prospect for measurement. Review of Income and Wealth 30(1): 1–23. van Eck, R., and B.  Kazemier. 1988. Features of the hidden economy in the Netherlands. Review of Income and Wealth 34(3): 251–273. Gaetani-d’Aragona, G. 1979. I sommersi. Nord e Sued 7(1): 26–46. Giles, D.E.A. 1999a. Measuring the hidden economy: Implications for econometric modelling. Economic Journal 109(3): 370–380. Giles, D.E.A. 1999b. Modelling the hidden economy in the tax-gap in New Zealand. Empirical Economics 24(4): 621–640. Giles, D.E.A. 1999c. The rise and fall of the New Zealand underground economy: Are the reasons symmetric? Applied Economic Letters 6: 185–189. Haigner, S., S. Jenewein, F. Schneider, and F. Wakolbinger. 2013. Driving forces of informal labour supply and demand supply in Germany. International Labour Review 152(3–4): 507–524. Heintz, E., and G.B.  Chang. 2007. Report of informal employment for the ILO. Geneva: ILO. Herwartz, H., F. Schneider, and E. Tafenau. 2009. One share fits it all? Regional variation in the shadow economy in the EU regions. Discussion paper, Universities of Linz and Kiel. Isachsen, A.J., and S. Strøm. 1985. The size and growth of the hidden economy in Norway. Review of Income and Wealth 31(1): 21–38. Kannianen V., Pääkkönen J. and Schneider Johannes Kepler F. 2004. Fiscal and Ethical Determinants of Shadow Economy: Theory and Evidence Discussion Paper No. 30 HECER – Helsinki Center of Economic Research Kastlunger, B., E. Kirchler, L. Mittore, and J. Pitters. 2009. Sequences of audits, tax compliance, and taxpaying strategies. Journal of Economic Psychology 30(4): 405–418. Kazemier, B. 2005a. The underground economy: A survey of methods and estimates. Discussion Paper, Statistics Netherlands, Voorburg, Netherlands. Kazemier, B. 2005b. Monitoring the underground labor market: What surveys can do. Discussion Paper, Statistics Netherlands, Voorburg, Netherlands. Kazemir, B. 2006. Monitoring the underground economy: A survey of methods and estimates. In Jahrbuch Schattenwirtschaft 2006/07. Zum Spannungsfeld von Politik und Ökonomie, ed. F. Schneider and D. Enste, 11–53. Berlin: LIT Verlag. Kirchler, E. 2007. The economic psychology of tax behaviour. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Kirchler, E., B. Maciejovsky, and F. Schneider. 2003. Everyday representations of tax avoidance, tax evasion and tax flight: do legal differences matter? Journal of Economic Psychology 24(4): 535–553. Kirchler, E., E. Hoelzl, and I. Wahl. 2007. Enforces versus voluntary tax compliance: The “slippery slope“ framework. Journal of Economic Psychology 29(2): 210–225. Kopp, R.J., W.W. Pommerehne, and N. Schwarz. 1997. Determining the value of non-­ marketed goods: Economic, psychological, and policy relevant aspects of contingent valuation methods. Boston, MA: Kluwer Academic.

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Kucera, D., and L. Roncolato. 2008. Informal employment: Two contested policy issues. International Labor Review 147(3): 321–348. Loayza, N.V. 1996. The economics of the informal sector: A simple model and some empirical evidence from Latin America. Carnegie-Rochester Conference Series on Public Policy 45: 129–162. Lubell, H. 1991. The informal sector in the 1980’s and 1990’s. Paris: OECD. Marcelli, E.A. 2004. Unauthorized Mexican immigration, the labour and other lower-wage informal employment in California. Regional Studies 38(1): 1–13. Marcelli, E.A., Mjr Pastor, and P.M. Joassart. 1999. Estimating the effects of informal economic activity: Evidence from Los Angeles county. Journal of Economic Issues 33: 579–607. Merz, J., and K.G. Wolff. 1993. The shadow economy: Illicit work and household production  – A microanalysis of West Germany. Review of Income and Wealth 39(2): 177–194. Mogensen, G.V., H.K. Kvist, E. Körmendi, and S. Pedersen. 1995. The shadow economy in Demark 1994: Measurement and results, study no. 3. Copenhagen: The Rockwool Foundation Research Unit. OECD. 2009a. Is informal normal? Towards more and better jobs. Paris: OECD. OECD. 2009b. Policy round tables, competition policy and the informal economy. Paris: OECD. Pedersen, S. 2003. The shadow economy in Germany, Great Britain and Scandinavia: A  measurement based on questionnaire service, study no. 10. Copenhagen: The Rockwool Foundation Research Unit. Pozo, S. (ed.). 1996. Exploring the underground economy: Studies of illegal and ­unreported activity, W.E.  Upjohn. Michigan: Institute for Employment Research. Renooy, P., S. Ivarsson, O. van der Wusten-Gritsai, and E. Meijer. 2004. Undeclared work in an enlarged Union – An analysis of undeclared work: An in-depth study of specific items. Brussels: European Commission. Ruesga, B.S.M. 1984. Economia oculta y mercado de trabajo: Aproximación al caso espaniol. Información commercial espaniola 55–61. Schneider, F. 1986. Estimating the size of the danish shadow economy using the currency demand approach: An attempt. Scandinavian Journal of Economics 88(4): 643–668. Schneider, F. 1994a. Measuring the size and development of the shadow economy. Can the causes be found and the obstacles be overcome? In Essays on economic psychology, ed. H. Brandstaetter and W. Güth, 193–212. Berlin: Springer. Schneider, F. 1994b. Determinanten der Steuerhinterziehung der Schwarzarbeit im internationalen Vergleich. In Stand und Entwicklung der Finanzpsychologie, ed. C. Smekal and E. Theurl, 247–288. Nomos: Baden-Baden. Schneider, F. 1994c. Can the shadow economy be reduced through major tax reforms? An empirical investigation for Austria. Supplement to Public Finance/ Finances Publiques 49: 137–152.

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Schneider, F. 1998a. Stellt das Anwachsen der Schwarzarbeit eine wirtschaftspolitische Herausforderung dar? Einige Gedanken aus volkswirtschaftlicher Sicht. Mitteilungen des Instituts für angewandte Wirtschaftsforschung (IAW) I/98: 4–13. Schneider, F. 1998b. Further empirical results of the size of the shadow economy of 17 OECD-countries over time. Paper to be presented at the 54. Congress of the IIPF Cordoba, Argentina and Discussion Paper, Department of Economics, University of Linz, Linz, Austria. Schneider, F. 2001. Die Schattenwirtschaft – Tatbestand, Ursachen, Auswirkungen. In Die Arbeitswelt im Wandel, ed. A. Rauscher, 127–143. Köln: J.P. Bachem. Schneider, F. 2003. Shadow economy. In Encyclopedia of public choice Vol. II, ed. C.K. Rowley and F. Schneider, 286–296. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Schneider, F. 2005. Shadow economies around the world: What do we really know? European Journal of Political Economy 21(4): 598–642. Schneider, F. 2006. Shadow economies and corruption all over the world: What do we really know? Universität Linz: Institut für Volkswirtschaftslehre, Diskussionspapier, Aug 2006. Schneider, F. (ed.). 2011. Handbook on the shadow economy. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing Company. Schneider, F. 2014. The shadow economy and shadow labor force: Results, problems and open questions, discussion paper, Department of Economics, University of Linz, Linz, June 2014. Schneider, F., and D. Enste. 2000a. Schattenwirtschaft und Schwarzarbeit – Umfang, Ursachen, Wirkungen und wirtschaftspolitische Empfehlungen. München: Oldenbourg. Schneider, F., and D.  Enste. 2000b. Shadow economies: Size, causes and consequences. Journal of Economic Literature 38(1): 73–110. Schneider, F., and D. Enste. 2002. The shadow economy: Theoretical approaches, empirical studies, and political implications. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schneider, F., and D. Enste (eds.). 2006. Jahrbuch Schattenwirtschaft 2006/07. Zum Spannungsfeld von Poltik und Ökonomie. Berlin: LIT Verlag. Schneider, F., and C.C. Williams. 2013. The shadow economy. London: Institute of Economic Affairs. Schneider, F., J. Volkert, and S. Caspar. 2002. Schattenwirtschaft und Schwarzarbeit: Beliebt bei vielen – Ein Problem für alle?: Eine Analyse der schattenwirtschaftlichen Aktivitäten in Deutschland (am Beispiel Baden-Württemberg) und mögliche politische Konsequenzen. Baden-Baden: Nomos. Schneider, F., A. Buehn, and C.E. Montenegro. 2010. New estimates for the shadow economies all over the world. International Economic Journal 24(4): 443–461. Smith, P. 1994. Assessing the size of the underground economy: The Canadian statistical perspectives. Canadian Economic Observer, Catalogue No. 11–010, 16–33. Tafenau, Egle, Helmut Herwartz, and Friedrich Schneider. 2010. Regional estimates for the shadow economy in Europe. International Economic Journal 24(4): 629–636. Tanzi, V. 1999. Uses and abuses of estimates of the underground economy. Economic Journal 109(3): 338–347.

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Thomas, J.J. 1992. Informal economic activity. New York: Harvester/Weatsheaf. Thomas, J.J. 1999. Quantifying the black economy: “Measurement without theory” yet again? Economic Journal 109: 381–389. Torgler, B. 2002. Speaking to theorists and searching for facts: Tax morale and tax compliance in experiments. Journal of Economic Survey 16(4): 657–683. Torgler, B. 2007. Tax compliance and tax morale: A theoretical and empirical analysis. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.

Part III The Changing Role of Citizens, Civil Society and Privatisation in Development

12 Urban Informality and the State: A Relationship of Perpetual Negotiation Tom Goodfellow

1

Introduction

In the four and a half decades since it was coined by Keith Hart (1973), the concept of the urban ‘informal sector’ or ‘informal economy’ has been subject to restless debate. To the extent that it can even be defined, the prevalence of informality has been lamented and celebrated in equal measure by scholars and development practitioners with differing political persuasions, research orientations and ideas about what constitutes ‘development’. One thing that is clear, however, is that informality as a concept is not going to exit the Development Studies stage in a hurry. While its analytical merits and normative attributes will remain disputed, the term’s use has proliferated to the extent that the study of developing economies—and especially developing cities—is now inconceivable without it. Today, people interested in urban development in the Global South are concerned with not only informal economies but also informal settlements, informal housing, informal institutions and informal politics. A pervasive concept of ‘urban informality’ has thus come to characterise debates on cities and development. This chapter will explore these debates with particular attention to the critical question of how informality relates to, and some would argue is created by, the state. This is a central issue because informality can only be seen to exist by grace of its opposite, formality, which is generally understood as that T. Goodfellow ( ) University of Sheffield, UK © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 J. Grugel, D. Hammett (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of International Development, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-42724-3_12

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which is legitimated by the state—for example, through legislation, taxation and regulation. The degree to which states are (or should be) responsible for measures to address informality, whether this means supporting it or attempting to eradicate it, is a central question in the study of informal activity. Quite what ‘supporting’ the informal economy means is open to wide interpretation: in general, government authorities and city dwellers living and working ‘informally’ are engaged in a complex dance of ongoing negotiations and bargaining. These processes usually keep informality alive or even fuel its growth; but whether or not this ultimately benefits people and societies is a highly contested question. The informal economy is not only relevant to developing countries, or indeed to cities: the wider phenomenon of informal economic activity and its prevalence across the world is covered elsewhere (see Schneider, this collection). When considered in these global, general terms, the informal or ‘shadow’ economy is often associated with ‘illicit’ activities and economic transactions that are ‘deliberately concealed’ from authorities (see Schneider, this volume). In urban areas of the developing world, however, the informal economy is something much broader, subsuming not only activities that are ‘deliberately concealed’ but also ordinary petty economic activities that have not been fully or effectively legislated for. Often these activities are legal, or at least tolerated and being carried out in plain sight; yet the regulatory framework and taxation policies relating to them remain largely unimplemented, so they fall de facto even if not de jure outside the formal purview of the state. In order to explore how such activities and the state interrelate, this chapter begins by exploring the origin of the concept of the informal sector or informal economy, and how it has evolved in debates within the field of Development Studies. Following this, I turn to the issues of informal settlements and informal housing, which have been the subject of a rather different set of debates than the informal economy but are no less central to discourses on urban informality. This is followed by a discussion that brings together the various strands of literature on urban informality to review common themes regarding the role of the state in creating, reproducing and managing informality. Taking on board the range of different relationships between state and non-state actors that shape informal lives and practices, this analysis leads to a discussion of ‘formalisation’ and the emerging interest in ‘hybrid’ governance with respect to developing countries. Finally, the chapter offers some concluding thoughts on the relationship between the state and informality in theory and practice.

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The Informal Economy and Development Studies

While ideas of a ‘dual’ economy date back to the first half of the twentieth century (Boeke 1942), Keith Hart first introduced the concept of the urban ‘informal sector’ in a 1971 conference paper on Ghana, published two years later (Hart 1973). Here, he argued against the then prevalent Marxist notion that most urban dwellers in developing country cities were an ‘unemployed’ labour reserve, and instead presented the activities of the urban poor as economically dynamic—‘a means of salvation’ where wage labour was scarce (Hart 1973: 67). Far from being marginal, he argued, these workers provide ‘many of the essential services on which life in the city is dependent’ (Hart  1973: 68). Thus, urban petty economic activity was recast from being a space of failure to one of opportunity and potential success. Hart basically defined the informal sector as work outside public or private sector waged employment, comprising a range of activities (both legal and illegal) from urban farming and beer manufacturing to street hawking. The International Labour Organisation embraced the concept in a 1972 report but modified it, presenting it as a more rigid and universal structural feature of developing economies, characterised among other things by ease of entry, small scale of operation, family ownership and unregulated markets (ILO 1972). From early on, the concept was widely criticised in the academic community. Bromley (1978) argued that it reflected a crude, logically inconsistent dichotomy, providing no clear guidelines about how to classify most urban economic activities. Harriss (1978) attacked the rigid dualism of the informal/formal distinction. The concept’s popularity soared nevertheless, enjoying a ‘meteoric career in the world of policy’ (Peattie 1987). In the late 1980s, Hernando De Soto published The Other  Path, an ebullient celebration of informal activities in relation to housing, trade and transport in Peru (De Soto 1989). De Soto’s argument about what the ‘informals’ could achieve if laws and regulations were relaxed chimed with the ideological spirit of the times. His ideas were enthusiastically adopted by the World Bank, and Peattie’s (1987: 851) criticism of the distinction as an ‘utterly fuzzy’ impediment to analysis fell largely on deaf ears. In the 1990s, the concept remained in constant currency, but the terminology began to change. References to the informal ‘economy’ were increasingly preferred to the more homogenising term ‘sector’ (Feige 1990; Makaria 1997). This was partly a reflection of increased interest in not only whether enterprises were formally regulated but also the broader employment relationships and how these were structured in

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the absence of legal frameworks (Chen 2006). MacGaffey (1991), meanwhile, adopted the term ‘second’ economy in preference to both ‘informal’ and terms such as ‘parallel’ economy, considering the latter to ignore the degree to which the two economies intersect. Even among those who agreed that the concept was analytically valuable, strongly opposing normative approaches were apparent by the 1990s. While De Soto (1989) and Chazan (1988) presented informality as assertiveness and dynamism on the part of civil society in the face of over-regulation, the ‘informalisation’ perspective developed by writers such as Castells and Portes (1989) and Meagher (1995) constituted a very different approach, bringing back elements of Marxian analysis. Far from being a form of ‘entrepreneurial triumph’, they posited growing informality as ‘a strategy on the part of dominant formal sector interest groups to defend their conditions of accumulation in the face of crisis’ by ensuring a flexible (and vulnerable) pool of informal labour (Meagher 1995: 260). These perspectives reasserted the role of the state and elite interests in actively creating informal economies. Despite constant criticism, the concept has repeatedly been reinvented. In one of the many efforts to rescue it, Guha-Khasnobis et al. (2006) emphasise the ‘reach of official governance’ and the ‘degree of structuring’ of economic activities as being two interlinked dimensions that are central to defining the informal economy. Increasing attention has also been focussed on the relationship between formal and informal firms (Chen 2006; also Meagher 2013). In some global regions, unregulated enterprise is so dominant that some scholars now argue it is analytically unhelpful to lump it all into a residual category of ‘informal’. Instead, such authors attempt to analyse such activities in new ways, rather than depending on a concept that essentially defines them negatively. Meagher (2010), for example, argues that rather than seeing informal economic activity in terms of under-regulation, we should seek to understand how such activities are actually structured. In pursuit of this aim, she turns to social network theory, exploring how culturally embedded social networks facilitate or constrain the activities of vulnerable small-scale enterprises. Whether or not the idea of ‘social capital’ can help inform the study of informal urban activities has also been explored and debated (Lyons and Snoxell 2005; Meagher 2005). The gendered aspects of informal work have also received increasing attention, with authors such as Chen (2001) and Chant and Pedwell (2008) highlighting that women are not only more likely to work informally but also disproportionately represented in the riskiest and least well-paid informal jobs.

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The debate on the informal economy has thus fragmented into a range of discourses on economic structure, institutional form, networks and vulnerability. This chapter concurs with Lindell (2010: 5), that the idea of informality has ‘modest analytical value’, and works with a broad definition based on a number of key characteristics. It classes as informal those activities that in some respects ‘lie beyond or circumvent state regulation’ (Lindell 2010: 5) and posits a continuum of formality–informality rather than a clear dichotomy. While rejecting over-simplistic definitions that view informal economic activity as virtually synonymous with tax evasion (Spiro 1997), the degree of taxation by the state does have an important bearing on an activity’s position on that continuum. Equally important, however, is the extent to which workers’ roles and working conditions are governed by policies and regulations that are actually implemented. The sheer diversity of untaxed, unregulated or partially regulated economic activity makes it counterproductive to specify the concept further. It is, in any case, hard to reject the idea of informality entirely when the use of the term in reports and policy discourses has grown to the extent that it is difficult to make sense of data on economic activity and employment without using the concept. It has become central to describing economies in the developing world, even though—in some respects like GDP itself—the foundations for its measurement are disputed. Indeed, the ‘rebasing’ of the GDP of various African economies in recent years, through which Nigerian GDP was revised upwards by 89 %, turning it overnight into Africa’s largest economy in 2014, has largely been predicated on the inclusion of informal economic activity (Jerven 2012). When considering the nature of the workforce, there is also value in a concept that speaks to the question of whether or not workers go about their business with legal protections or a regulatory framework. It tells us something that between 2004 and 2010, 82 % of people in South Asia involved in non-agricultural employment (a rough proxy for urban employment) were working informally, with figures of 66 % for subSaharan Africa and 51 % for Latin America (WIEGO 2014). The scale of ‘informality’ in some ways necessitates the concept, even if it is a problematic concept with fuzzy edges.

3

Informal Settlements and ‘Informal Life’

Alongside the debate over the informal economy, a parallel literature has evolved on the nature of urban informal settlement, housing and land use. This has sometimes intersected but in general followed a different intellectual

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trajectory from that discussed above. Rapid urban growth across the developing world in recent decades has been accompanied by a continuing increase in the number of people living in settlements variously termed ‘slums’, ‘shantytowns’ or ‘informal settlements’, along with a proliferation of policy responses to try and deal with this perceived problem. There is now a considerable literature on slums and what causes them (see UN-HABITAT 2003; Gilbert 2007; Fox 2013). They are generally characterised in relation to factors such as poor living standards, insufficient space, lack of basic services and nondurable materials. What concerns us here, however, is a further key characteristic: the lack of clear legal status. It is this, and the associated absence of tenure security, that essentially renders slum housing ‘informal’. As with informal work, such housing occupies an ambiguous position in relation to the law: either it is actively illegal, being constructed without permission on land not designated for housing, or of unclear legal status because occupants possess no title deed conferring property rights. De Soto himself had plenty to say on the issue of informal housing, which was central to his analysis in The Other Path but also in his later, even more influential work, The Mystery of Capital (2000). In the former text, he describes how people he terms ‘the informals’ in Lima, Peru, develop their houses in a way that is ‘exactly the reverse’ of what happens in the formal world: they first occupy the land (through gradual or violent invasion), then build on it, then install infrastructure, and only at the end acquire legal ownership if they are lucky (De Soto 1989: 17). Far from being anarchic and disorganised, however, De Soto argued that such housing settlements are governed by a set of ‘extralegal norms’, involving informal real estate brokers and often recognition from politicians even when they are denied official legislative recognition. People who do manage to acquire formal titles to their land and house do so at enormous financial cost, De Soto argues, because the legal barriers to formality are so high and considerable expense is needed to meet legal requirements. Hence, many people opt to remain in the realm of the informal. This too has its costs, however, in terms of both the bribes needed to avoid state persecution and the absence of the security that legality confers. Above all, De Soto believes that the informals’ lack of clear legal title to their property strips them of the incentive to add value to it and thereby generate more resources. It is this point that he expands upon in The Mystery of Capital, in which he argues that the lack of clear property titles renders people’s houses ‘dead capital’. This, and the consequent inability of people to use their property as collateral, is in his view the overriding reason for economic failure in developing countries.

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De Soto’s views have been heavily criticised, not least because giving informal urban dwellers the security they need is about much more than issuing property titles; his solution amounts to a minimalist agenda with little actual redistribution of wealth or power towards the poor (Payne 2001; Gilbert 2002). Moreover, the introduction of tenure regularisation can lead to speculation and price increases that impact negatively on the poor (Payne 1997; Briggs 2011). Even in his own home territory of Peru, researchers found that the issuing of land titles did little to help poor people gain either jobs or access to credit (Kagawa and Tukstra 2002). De Soto also fails to explain convincingly why the situation of unclear legal status for ‘informals’ emerges and persists in the first place, blaming it on the ‘redistributive tradition’ in Peru in a way that holds little water for the problem of informality on a global scale. He pays inadequate attention to the power dynamics that underpin the perpetuation of informality; dynamics that are not likely to be much altered by the creation of legal titles. Despite these criticisms, his point about the high costs of formality, and the struggles that ‘informals’ endure to gain some kind of recognition by the state, is an important one. People live informally because it is more affordable for them, but this certainly does not mean it is free of major everyday costs and stresses. Many of those who live in informal housing are the same people as those working in informal jobs. For such people, both home and work life exist in tension with the state’s legal and regulatory framework: they live essentially ‘informal lives’ (Bayat 2007). It is this sense of an all-pervading sphere of urban informality that has occupied the attention of many scholars in recent decades. Informality has become more than the sum of its parts; it is not just about whether an enterprise is regulated or whether someone has a title to their house, but a more essential, defining characteristic of people’s lives and status. Informality has thus become a symbolic state of being, that is, instrumentalised in different ways by governments and other actors. Used in this way, the idea of informality is a euphemism for the way the urban poor live their lives, and is often demonised by state authorities who construe it is a counter-developmental force. Yet it is also presented by scholars as a space of popular agency and a set of systems through which ordinary people ‘get by’. For Asef Bayat, for example, slum dwellers are ‘informal people’ living lives that characterised daily by flexibility, pragmatism and negotiation (Bayat 2007: 579). These processes amount to ‘“the quiet encroachment of the ordinary”— a silent, patient, protracted, and pervasive advancement of ordinary people on the propertied and powerful in order to survive hardships and better their lives’ (Bayat 1997: 57). Other scholars have similarly sought to understand slum dwellers’ lives through concepts such as ‘occupancy urbanism’, analysing

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the role of the urban poor as agents capable of asserting claims and subverting formal political and bureaucratic processes (Benjamin 2008). Through such discourses, informality is constructed as a space of ‘subaltern urbanism’, building on the work of Chatterjee (2004) to develop a new epistemology of urban studies in which the urban poor are given voice as critical agents of change (Roy 2011). Despite the increasing range and sophistication of approaches to the urban informal as a subaltern sphere, it is important to remember that informality does not just involve the poor. As with informal economic activity, which often draws in wealthy elites and middle classes as well as the urban poor trading on the streets or manufacturing in their homes, informality in the sphere of housing is not confined to those with low incomes. Indeed, there are elite neighbourhoods in cities across the developing world that evolved with little or no planning. For example, the Muyenga neighbourhood in Uganda’s capital Kampala is known as the ‘rich man’s slum’, due to the way houses were built over existing roads and drainage, without adequate foundations and without planning permission. Despite the fact that many of the houses are luxurious, one international businessman who had travelled to over 200 cities worldwide claimed it was ‘the worst-planned place he has ever seen’ (Goodfellow 2013c). This ‘informality of the rich’ is in many ways as much of a challenge of urban planners as that of the poor (Goodfellow 2013a). Thus, for authors such as Roy (2005: 148), the informal is not a separate sector but ‘a series of transactions that connect different economies and spaces to one another’; indeed, it is an ‘organizing logic’ that governs the very process of urbanisation in many parts of the world (Roy and AlSayyad 2004). In this view, it is no longer adequate to think of the informal as a characteristic of poverty, or to associate it with dispossession; rather, it is a ‘mode of the production of space that connects the seemingly separated geographies of slum and suburb’ (Roy 2011: 233). These theoretical contributions have served to broaden the conceptual and epistemological field on which debates on informality are playing out. This has also helped move the debate decisively beyond De Soto’s technocratic approach, deepening appreciation of the politics behind the formal/informal divide and the ways in which this is contested and constantly shifting. Thus, while Roy associates informality with deregulation like many scholars before her, she emphasises that deregulated does not mean unregulated: in fact, there is considerable planning and effort that goes into maintaining fluid and ambiguous urban land and property relations (Roy 2009). In an echo of the work of Castells and Portes (1989) and Meagher (1995) on the informal economy, informality itself is thus seen a strategy, part of the way cities are actively managed, rather than representing the absence of something.

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Meanwhile, the very terminology of formal and informal comes to be laden with normative content; just as ‘informality’ becomes a euphemism for something negative, ‘formality’ is a hazily defined euphemism for whatever the user’s preferred vision of urban development is (Schindler 2013). The boundary is ‘perpetually contested’ across multiple sites of government, and thus never represents any objective, fixed categories (Ibid: 2608).

4

The State and the Informal: Negotiating ‘Grey Spaces’ and ‘Untouchability’

Underpinning these dynamics is the question of the role of the state, explored here with periodic references to the case of Uganda. It is the state above all else that confers or denies the status of informality on jobs, enterprises, houses and settlements—and by extension, people themselves. It would be misleading, however, to conceive of the activities we associate with informality as always being deliberately created by the state, even if it is the state that ultimately designates them as ‘informal’. Such activities often consist of practices that flourish in spaces that the state has vacated, with state actors only entering the scene subsequently to control, manipulate and (paradoxically) entrench that informality. In Uganda, a period of rapid and dramatic informalisation took place under Idi Amin when virtual state collapse led to the emergence of a black market economy known as magendo, as the formal sector contracted and power and resources flowed into Amin’s informal networks (Kasfir 1983: 86). By 1980, two-thirds of Uganda’s GDP consisted of magendo, a  remarkable increase from the 3 % estimated a decade earlier (Green 1981). Significantly, in the period since, Uganda’s informal economy has remained enormous even as the state reconsolidated itself in the 1990s. Amin and his cronies clearly benefitted royally from the decaying of state structures and formal economic systems. Yet in the years that followed, even while reassembling the state his successors have found ways to protect and nurture the space of informality as a means to secure their own economic and political benefits. Under President Yoweri Museveni, the informal economy has flourished in the context of continual engagement with, and manipulation by, state actors. Government actors frequently ‘allow’ certain groups to continue to operate informally, effectively suspending laws and regulations and in so doing reconstituting their own power. Several authors draw on Agamben’s (1998) idea of the ‘state of exception’ to characterise this dimension of informality, making the point that informality is not the chaos that precedes order (like some kind of Hobbesian state of

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nature), but the situation that results from the deliberate suspension of order (Roy 2005; Lindell 2010). This suspension is itself a technique of power, which can be applied to both particular spaces and particular livelihoods and activities. In relation to the space, authors have discussed the strategic significance of ‘zones of exception’ (Ong 2006; Goldman 2010; Roy 2011), and the creation of urban ‘grey spaces’, whose precarious existence between ‘legality/ approval/safety’ and ‘eviction/destruction/death’ serves to benefit state actors (Yiftachel 2009). The ability to exercise the constant (implicit or explicit) threat of tipping informal actors into spaces of eviction and destruction, and concomitantly imply the promise of greater recognition and safety, is a very effective way of maintaining power inequalities. This leaves informal actors perpetually ‘walking the tightrope’, to use Lourenço-Lindell’s (2002) evocative phrase. This applies to livelihoods as much as homes. Those engaged in activities that obviously contravene laws and regulations are dependent on governments allowing them to operate in a ‘grey space’ in order to survive. Thus, the hundreds of thousands of street vendors and transport workers on the streets of Kampala are for the most part not working illegally, but neither are they comfortably within the space of formality. Instead, they are periodically harassed by the city government for contravening particular rules, but then left for periods to operate ‘untouched’ because other government figures step in their defence (Goodfellow 2012; Goodfellow and Titeca 2012). Indeed, a whole class of urban dwellers has come to be referred to as ‘untouchables’ because of the protection given to them by certain actors within government. Among the most prominent examples of this are the boda-boda (motorcycle taxi) drivers, who numbered around 65,000 in Kampala alone according to a registration exercise in 2013. Although the city government has tried to regulate and tax the boda-bodas for over a decade, these efforts have failed largely due to interventions from the president, who uses such means to bolster urban support for the ruling party (Goodfellow 2015). These state–society dynamics raise a number of important issues about why the state behaves in such contradictory ways towards ‘informals’, and whether the latter themselves have any say—or indeed any power—in this relationship. The fact that states issue such inconsistent messages with regard to informality can be seen as deliberate, strategic ‘grey spacing’, but also serves as a reminder that states are far from being monolithic actors with clear and consistent agendas (Migdal 1994). Indeed, in urban areas especially, one tends to find multiple layers of the state overlapping; local, district, municipal and sometimes also national governments are often located in the same

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place in urban contexts, all vying for both rents and political support. Thus in Kampala, where the majority of city councillors were from an opposition party, central government figures found it politically beneficial to intervene and grant ‘favours’ to urban dwellers that the city government was trying to regulate and control (Goodfellow and Titeca 2012). Conflict between different layers and arms of government can therefore play an important part in determining how much room for manoeuvre urban informal actors possess in their engagement with governing authorities. With this in mind, what can be said about whether informal workers and settlement dwellers themselves exert any power vis-à-vis the state? Many interpretations highlight the weakness and dependency of informal actors in these situations. It is clear that government actors use ‘grey spacing’ and sporadic conferral of ‘untouchability’ to benefit themselves, both through the collection of bribes and maintenance of clientelistic support, and in so doing keep those working and living informally in a state of vulnerability. Tendler (2002) characterises what urban authorities offer to informals as ‘the Devil’s Deal’: in other words, they are unofficially exempted from taxation and regulatory compliance in exchange for votes. In countries where democratic politics is especially constrained, it may be politically easier for governments to squeeze the informal sector (in terms of both economic activity and housing) without fear of the electoral consequences. This has evidently been the case in Rwanda, for example, where regulatory compliance is more strictly enforced (Goodfellow 2012). Nevertheless, whether through regulatory enforcement or the negotiation of a ‘devil’s deal’, it is the politicians that tend to call the shots and these processes inevitably reflect and reify existing power imbalances (Meagher et al. 2014; Brown and Lyons 2010). It is not always helpful to think of informal actors as entirely powerless, however, particularly if we take on board Foucault’s view that power is not something simply ‘held’ or ‘exercised’ by particular individuals but located in relationships that are subject to evolution and change (Foucault 1980). Informal actors can be more or less effective in their attempts to negotiate their position relative to government; while they often find themselves powerless and marginalised in ‘invited’ spaces of participation, they may seek other ways to exert influence. Their capacity to manoeuvre themselves into positions where they can leverage an intervention in their favour by some government figure should caution us against seeing them as mere pawns in a government game (Goodfellow and Titeca 2012; Goodfellow 2013b). Rather, they are themselves players in the game when it comes establishing the utility of informality for different actors on the urban scene, even if they are playing

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on highly unequal terms. Informal actors are thus engaged in ongoing processes of negotiation that shape their position vis-à-vis the state. These negotiations themselves are often informal and can involve acts or threatened acts of violence (Goodfellow 2013b). In Kampala, the growth of a class of informal transport workers portrayed by the state as a ‘rogue sector’, breaking virtually every law and regulation targeted towards it, has to be seen in terms of both how government figures pursue gains in the sector and from how the transport workers themselves act to maintain their status as ‘untouchables’ (Goodfellow 2015). Informal actors can attempt to strengthen their hand through generating conflicts between themselves and the state and between different state agencies, and in so doing they shape aspects of the political process. Thus, while state power helps to constitute informality, as writers such as Roy have argued, informality too shapes the state and its internal dynamics. For all these reasons, arguing that there is an ‘essential antithesis between state power and informality’ (Centeno and Portes 2006) oversimplifies reality. These processes through which informality is constituted serve as a reminder that the state–society divide is itself fluid, subjective and constantly manipulated. State actors benefit not only from the bribes or votes they may get from meddling in the informal economy but also from their direct stake in informal activities. One often hears, for example, about politicians and government officials owning large numbers of the very minibuses, plots of land or houses that the state is condemning as ‘informal’ (Goodfellow 2012; Syagga et al. 2002). The idea that those dwelling in the houses or driving the minibuses are ‘informals’, somehow belonging to a separate sphere from those higher up the chain in the same activity, is clearly problematic. When considering how the state relates to actors in the informal economy, we must therefore take heed of Mitchell’s point about the line between state and society being ‘internally drawn’ by those with an interest in maintaining the idea of a clear state–society divide. Studying informality reveals that one of the ways in which the line is drawn and redrawn is through the juridical and regulatory contestations over what is or is not ‘formal’ or ‘informal’ (Schindler 2013).

5

Formalisation and Hybridity

As noted at the start of this article, the ideas of formality and informality are now thoroughly embedded in public and policy discourse. Yet the normative question of how these two putative spheres should work together, and what the ultimate end goal of formal–informal interaction should be, is a vexed one.

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The simplest solution, suggested both by De Soto in his emphasis on issuing property titles and through the discourses embraced by many governments and policymakers keen to issue licenses and collect taxes, is formalisation. This idea is misleading in its apparent simplicity, however. Formalisation means very different things to different people and it is far from clear that the cost and bureaucratic effort needed to issue the relevant licenses, titles and documents to the ‘informals’ could be met, or would be worthwhile in terms of its potential to actually reduce vulnerability and insecurity (Chen 2006). What discourses of formalisation often ignore is that the point of achieving formality, as far as ordinary people are concerned, is to gain access to particular benefits (such as legal rights and access to credit) and these benefits cost money to provide. If the state is not willing or able to cover the cost of providing these benefits— in addition to the bureaucratic cost of issuing licenses and so on—then the ‘objects’ of formalisation are likely to reject it and the whole project will fail. It therefore comes as little surprise that recent research has shown that firms that formalise in the sense of getting licenses and paying taxes ‘don’t appear to get the more touted benefits of formalising such as increased access to credit, obtaining government contracts, or participating in government programs’ (De Mel et al. 2012: 20). Consequently, there is ‘little in the way of pent-up demand to become formal among existing firms’, which instead seem to be ‘rationally refraining from formalizing’ (Ibid: 20, 21). Moreover, as Porter (2011) argues, formalisation with regard to housing is based on principles of exchange rights that ignore the use rights people already enjoy over their properties. Indeed, such use rights may be actively undermined and devalued as formalisation places people’s assets squarely in the sphere of market transaction. While formalisation may have noble intentions, she argues, de facto it also tends to become about ‘restructuring property relations for accumulation and control’ (Porter 2011: 118). If formalisation is an over-simplistic approach, questionable on both theoretical and empirical grounds, what then is the answer to the conundrum posed by informality? One response in recent years has been to explore how formal and informal regulatory systems can come together to create forms of ‘hybrid governance’. In some cases, for example, organisations of informal workers have taken on regulatory and taxation roles in close collaboration with the state, filling gaps in state provision and conferring legitimacy on regulatory systems that the state lacks when acting alone (Meagher et al. 2014). In others, however, burgeoning systems of informal taxation vie with formal systems, leading to conflict and predatory practices by state and nonstate actors alike (Meagher et al. 2014; Meagher 2012). Often, the problem is that there is no actual ‘hybridity’ in the literal sense; state institutions and

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non-state or ‘informal’ ones simply coexist side by side, creating friction and providing people with opportunities to play one off against the other in a situation better characterised as ‘institutional multiplicity’ than ‘hybridity’ (Goodfellow and Lindemann 2013). Nevertheless, it is clear that states need to take seriously the organisations through which informal workers and informal settlement dwellers articulate their interests, and find ways to work productively with them rather than assuming they are best subsumed into an idealised world of formality. If Kampala represents one extreme, in which the state sporadically and selectively engages with informal actors in ways that perpetuate informality while weakening informal organisational capacity, neighbouring Kigali represents the other end of the spectrum. Here, the concerted drive to eradicate informality has left little space for the urban poor. While organisations within what remains of an urban informal economy are less fragmented in Kigali, this is because they have been brought under the aegis of the state and thus stripped of organisational independence (Goodfellow 2012). What is lacking in both these extremes is concerted support for autonomous organisational capacity within the informal economy. This kind of outcome is quite rare, but not unheard of—particularly in middle-income contexts (Lund and Skinner 2004; Dias and Gama Alvas 2008).

6

Conclusions

The activities that springs to mind when we think of informality—from selfbuild housing to street trade, home brewing to sex work—may be old as urban civilisation itself; but the idea of informality is decidedly modern. Without modern systems of regulation, taxation and planning—in other words, without the development of modern bureaucratic states—the need for the concept would not have arisen. As informality discourses have evolved, the sphere of the informal has been conceptualised as a space of innovation against over-regulating states, a space of neoliberalisation and state retreat, a phenomenon representing state weakness or ‘fragility’, and a sphere of ‘hybrid’ governance. Debates and discourses about informality in recent decades can therefore be seen as a proxy for debates on the role of the state in development more generally. One of the more recent occurrences with regard to debates on informality is how the concept has come to percolate from the Global South into the Global North, as the developed/developing dichotomy is increasingly challenged and the analyst’s gaze is drawn to thriving informal economies and settlements in Europe and the USA (Lombard and Huxley 2011; Schindler

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2014), reflecting a broader process through which informality is shifting from being a concept in Development Studies to a central subject of Urban Studies at a global scale (Schindler 2014; Wagenaar and Allegra 2014). Urban informality remains a challenge for planning and governance both epistemologically and practically. In terms of the former, it will be important to continue interrogating what constitutes informality, who creates and contests the category and how it intersects with theories of planning and development. In terms of practice, if eradication of informal housing and activity is morally indefensible and economically self-defeating, while formalisation is bureaucratically unfeasible fails to engage with root problems, the quest for policy solutions has only just begun. A first step, which many governments still have yet to take, has to involve acceptance of informality as a long-term feature of contemporary urbanisation that is not, in and of itself, malign. Alongside this, however, must be a commitment to improving the conditions of those working informally and guard against celebrating the ‘vibrancy’ of those in self-employed, unregulated and often high-risk jobs without due attention minimising these risks and vulnerabilities. Even this, however, is not enough to build viable urban economies capable of reducing inequality and promoting social, political and economic inclusion over the longer term. Progress on this level will involve action at scales beyond the urban, including efforts to create industrial and service sector jobs driven by national governments and supported by equitable global trade environment. Yet it will also need to involve concerted efforts at the urban and local scale to provide platforms for collective organisation on the part of those living and working in the urban informal economy in order to bolster their collective voice. Without such organisation, informal activists are likely to continue with practices of seeking favours that may ensure their survival but ultimately reconstitute their fragile and vulnerable position. The government’s organisational impetus to formalise, alongside many state actors’ individual urges to benefit from (and thereby perpetuate) informality, all too often proves a toxic mix without the mediating influence of collectively organised ‘informals’ themselves.

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13 Civil Society: Management, Mismanagement and Informal Governance Sarah A. Radcliffe

1

Introduction

In the daily business of development, a number of non-state and non-market actors and groups play crucial roles in ensuring that services are delivered, that people know about upcoming meetings to decide upon community resources and that public is informed about government programmes that might affect them. These social actors are identified as civil society, a collective noun that includes grassroots associations, social movements, human rights organisations, community-based groups and many other networks that operate at scales running from the neighbourhood or village up through to worldwide activism (Edwards 2009; Desai 2014). Grassroots organisations (GROs), often smaller, membership-based organisations, operate without paid staff, although may be reliant on professional and third-sector allies. Excluding political actors, such as political parties, civil society is nevertheless constituted in the three-way dynamics between state (and formal politics), the market and ‘private’ relations, making it a sphere in which mutual power and influence shape the content and outcomes of civil society organising. In Western thinking, civil society has a privileged status as a sphere that can balance out central nation-state power while fostering social relations of trust and mutual aid that underpins economic growth (see below on this history). It is in this context that civil society rose to prominence in development S.A. Radcliffe ( ) University of Cambridge, UK © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 J. Grugel, D. Hammett (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of International Development, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-42724-3_13

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thinking and policy through the 1990s, as neoliberal economic restructuring and the disarticulation of sociopolitical institutions threatened to undermine the Washington Consensus. Within the diverse panorama of civil society, NGOs were identified as a particularly significant vector for civil society involvement, representing politically autonomous, non-membership and relatively structured institutions, intermediaries between private and public life, yet staffed by professionals and often committed to working with grassroots actors and organisations (Desai 2014; Van Rooy 2014). By contrast, tracking development in relation to security reveals a different trio of actors, namely the civilian as opposed to the army or the government (Duffield 2007: 35). In this scenario, ‘ordinary people’—civilians—are to be firmly shut out of geopolitical conflicts between sovereign states, a form of protection that unravelled during the twentieth and into the twenty-first centuries. Conceptually, civil society is associated with a complex and diverse set of meanings and expectations. Civil society hence contains associations with a sphere of civility, public order and norms of social interaction that have been highly normalised in Western history, in an emergent—if geographically and historically variable—consensus about the relations between a public sphere, subjectivity, intimacy and legitimacy. Civil society hence was expected to play a variety of roles vis-à-vis the state, providing an institutional counterweight to state power, and reproducing the social values, norms and social interactions that permeate state and society. Yet recent analysis traces how dominant notions about civil society, and differences between the liberal democratic ideal and the uncontainable difference of developing countries are rooted in long-standing binary distinctions and colonial-era representations about other societies (Escobar 1995; Duffield 2007; Li 2007; McEwan 2009; Radcliffe 2015). For example, Samuel Huntingdon reiterated many of development’s implicit assumptions when writing about civil society as a distinctively Western phenomenon, rooted in historically strong social pluralism arising through social relations across non-kin groups. In this view of Western exceptionalism, Western civil societies have continued to demonstrate flexible yet robust institutionalised civil society compared with its lack in Russia, China and the Ottoman Empire (Schech and Haggis 2002: 23–24). (Political thinker Antonio Gramsci viewed civil society as the repository of hegemonic ideas and social practices such that ‘in the West… when the state trembled… a sturdy structure of civil society was revealed’ [1971, cited in Hetherington 2011: 242].) Throughout modernisation, the cultural and social structures in place in former colonies were frequently perceived as barriers to successful adoption of Western features including a vibrant civil society, providing

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development with a rationale for destroying traditional forms (Schech and Haggis 2002; McEwan 2009). Intellectual debates about civil society have identified how nuanced understandings of civil society’s ambivalent and multifaceted relationships with socio-economic and political transformation were swept away as more instrumental, narrow and clearly policy-focussed definitions became dominant. Drawing on Nikolas Rose, Tania Li (2007) discusses how civil society comprises institutions of community, the latter being a highly loaded term that carries with it associations of harmony, collaboration and the lack of problematic politics. Development policy’s tendency to naturalise and historically disembed social difference reflects colonial relations of power (Pigg 1992; Radcliffe 2015) which feed into more recent neoliberal readings of civil society and community. Policy thereby came to view itself as playing a key role in reshaping ‘community’. Neoliberalism imagined beneficiary populations as ‘so many natural communities—ethnic, religious, linguistic, territorial, professional, ideological, gendered, aged, and lifestyle based’ that regulate social behaviours, whereas development’s role is to free them from such constraints (Li 2007: 324; Povinelli 2005). Institutionally, the identification and rectification of civil society’s deficits called into being certain types of professionals and forms of knowledge production. As notions of civil society and community were brought into development, a central paradox emerged: that community was presumed to already exist, yet it required government (not only by the state but also by other agents such as multilaterals, NGOs) to ensure it became improved, especially through the application of expert knowledge. This central paradox explains why and how civil society came to the fore in development from the 1950s and especially after the 1980s and then why its contradictions and limitations led to its displacement in recent years. The rise and fall of ‘civil society’ as a panacea, and recent transformations of policy understandings of non-state, non-market social life, form the basis of this chapter, which proceeds in the following way. The rise of civil society policy and, within this, NGOs’ prominence is introduced, before moving on to examine the concomitant use of participatory mechanisms in development at community and national levels. The chapter then explores what has happened in the past decade, with the backlash against civil society-dominated models of development. Comparing policy agendas and recent scholarly work demonstrates how the emphasis on formally organised civil life has been displaced by models of distributed social networks and self-actualising individuals and households. A final analysis of current developmental ontologies leads to the conclusions around what place civil society holds today in development thinking and practice.

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Rise of Civil Society and NGOs

Civil society organisations (CSOs) in liberal political theory are assumed to act as a check on state power by acting to challenge its unquestioned sovereignty at various scales, and by acting as the incubators of alternative policy models (Mercer 2002). Yet under modernisation, active civil society was associated with uncontainable disorder from below, threatening the stability of top-down agendas of industrialisation and planning. Among the more politicised spectrum, civil society in parts of Latin America and Asia was involved with nonviolent and empowerment challenges to exclusionary regimes, associated with figureheads such as Gandhi and Paolo Freire (see Mohan 2014). Following these antecedents, anti-development writers emphasise the creativity and nondominant values found in grassroots communities, moving away from elites’ negative stereotypes to highlight practices of wealth sharing and the moral basis of socioeconomies. In their respect for communities’ local knowledge of natural resources and agro-ecological systems, anti-development writers are aligned with advocates of decolonisation that emphasise non-Western forms of knowledge and epistemologies as the basis for alternatives to development. Despite the mid-twentieth-century emergence of radical efforts to empower and raise the consciousness of the poor, by the 1990s participatory methods and the encouragement of civil society experienced what Evelina Dagnino terms a ‘perverse confluence’ between neoliberals and radicals (Dagnino 2008). In other words, forms of alternative development entered the mainstream were ‘rendered technical’ (Li 2007) and divested of political objectives in order to be scaled up into diverse programmes that remained firmly embedded within neoliberal goals and institutions. CSOs and especially NGOs became recipients of aid funding, as part of a recalibration of market–state–civil society relations and as states outsourced services or multilateral development agencies worked via NGOs instead of nation-states (Edwards 2009). NGOs are defined as officially established organisations, employing often professional staff; they are usually relatively large, and operate at international or national–regional levels. NGOs came to be perceived as a key part of civil society with important roles to play in strengthening civil society thereby widening and deepening democracy especially through work with grassroots and marginalised groups (Mercer 2002; Alvarez 2009; Choudry and Kapoor 2013). NGOs were also perceived as central in good governance concerns with making state activities transparent and open to civil oversight. As nation-states were decentralising to subnational levels, NGOs saw their spheres of influence scale up as they began to deliver health and education provision, and oversee participatory decision-making activities. As intermediaries between govern-

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ments, international donors and wider civil society, NGOs became freighted with considerable responsibility through the 1990s and into the twenty-first century, as they combined service delivery, advocacy for poor and empowerment objectives (Mercer 2002; Desai 2014). Flexible and knowledgeable about beneficiary populations, NGOs were lauded for their problem-solving capacity, closeness to the poor, cost- and administrative effectiveness (Banks and Hulme 2012). Yet as became quickly apparent, NGOs’ and associated CSOs’ role was understandable only within a wider context of state retrenchment (reduction in direct provision of social welfare) and market ascendance (continued privatisation, extension of markets into collective services, etc.). NGOs were the sticking plasters to deal with problems generated by structural adjustment and rising impoverishment, offering small-scale credit programmes and promoting women’s labour market participation, and boosting social capital. Social capital in these formulations was equated with trust networks, understood to enhance economic performance and establish politically stable communities. As critical studies have shown, social capital models were based on deeply engrained assumptions about community, gender and the capacity of trust to compensate for declining public investment. In this context, the NGO-ised engagement with civil society occurred through an array of practices designed to ensure that civil society’s ‘goods’—voice, legitimacy, democratisation—could be assembled alongside policy’s other, financial and political-stabilising, goals. Participatory techniques included various methods from participatory rural appraisal, communal workshops, community mapping to women-only forums among others, often drawing on non-literate and oral communication. Ignoring the existence in civil societies across the world of internecine jealousies, political battles and postcolonial intersectional hierarchies, participatory methods functioned as boundary objects permitting groups with divergent perspectives and interests to enter temporarily into collaborations around minimal shared objectives (Green 2010).

3

Participation and Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers: Service Delivery and Elusive Community

Although participatory objectives are not necessarily instrumental (Hickey and Mohan 2005), during the high point of development’s interest in civil society participation has often been configured in particular ways. In this context, PD combines ‘an ethical (democratic) principle with efficiency arguments’,

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and positions stakeholders in decentralised, privatised services with responsibilities as well as interests in policy outcomes (Molyneux 2008: 782). As noted above, civil society development has been strongly premised upon Western assumptions about community homogeneity, mutual regard and continuity. Rendered as a technical solution to intractable political problems (Li 2007), PD was converted into a space to which participants were invited by more powerful stakeholders, such as NGOs, technical professionals and the state (Cornwall 2002). Through to the twenty-first century, PD has been strongly associated with the format of community workshops in which local stakeholders participate in making decisions about resource distribution and investment. For example, the World Bank-funded Indonesian Kecamatan Project introduced village workshops—with additional workshops for women—in which local stakeholders devised and then ranked various locally generated project proposals before establishing priorities (Carroll 2009). Likewise, in the World Bank-funded Indigenous and Afro-Ecuadorian Development Project in Ecuador, local communities were allowed to devise appropriate small-scale projects with the assistance of professional project staff to make resources more culturally appropriate (Andolina et al. 2009). Civil society participation did not remain however at the local level. From the late 1990s, the World Bank began to consider mechanisms by which to combine civil oversight and participation with longer-term goals of national planning and stabilising investment patterns (in its Comprehensive Development Framework) (Lazarus 2008). In Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs), countries would think about long-term development and poverty alleviation in a nationwide strategic frame. The PRSPs’ design and content were to be consultative with the participation of civil society and private sector, and building partnerships with bilateral and multilateral agencies and NGOs (Ramalingam 2013: 61). PRSPs soon became a condition for overseas aid and debt relief in the heavily indebted poor countries (HIPC) initiative, while being linked to World Bank social funds. Major donors including the UK and EU make grants conditional on effective PRSP processes. At the national level, PRSPs often lock countries to ministry-specific spending priorities and caps, and new accountability procedures, encouraging transparency and good governance agendas. In practice, however, civil PRSPs demonstrated limited scope for civil society impact. In some countries, such as Thailand, participatory research remained superficial, and did not mould the Bank’s macroeconomic design (Williams et al. 2009). In Nicaragua, the period after Hurricane Mitch generated active civil society efforts to contribute to policy design although the scope for influence was constrained. It saw the country adopt a narrow poverty alleviation PSRP, to which mobilised civil society responded with an agenda

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entitled ‘The Nicaragua We Want’, focussed on sustainable human development (Bradshaw and Linneker 2003). Just as local PD had been criticised for maintaining unbalanced power relations that replicate authoritarianism and colonialism, so too PRSPs came under harsh attacks from a number of angles (see Lazarus 2008). PRSPs are frequently designed and implemented by the World Bank and IMF, leaving no leeway for adaptation to country-specific conditions (despite a willingness to consider geographic variability and pathdependent processes in other parts of International Financial Institution [IFI] activity). By 2004, an evaluation demonstrated limited proven impact and many countries quietly dropped the plans, as powerful groups were already coopting the planning process (Lazarus 2008). Local community participation and the PRSPs hence left unanswered the urgent questions about how best to ensure the ways of knowing about and transforming countries creatively could occur. As a result, civil society participation frequently remains tokenistic, systematically eliding critical engagement with the consequences of social heterogeneity and power, whether that power is formal or expressed through unquestioned common sense. The quality and substantive benefits of citizenship remain tenuous or irregular at best even in countries where community participation and national-level plans have been implemented and routinised (Lazar 2012).

4

Re-conceptualising State and Civil Society: Backlash and New Developments

Backlash Academic research increasingly made clear that utilising NGOs in the vanguard of development objectives regarding civil society change has mixed outcomes, strengthening beneficial change in some places while undermining it in others (Mercer 2002; Edwards 2009). A backlash against civil society as a development panacea arose from practical frustrations in the field, and among academics and policymakers. The sheer ambition of civil society change became increasingly apparent, as societies were found to be fragmented and uncooperative, a finding that came as no surprise to observers attentive to power and social heterogeneity (Li 2007). NGOs were increasingly questioned over the evidence for their effectiveness (Desai 2014), a scepticism becoming more vociferous after 11 September 2001 with the fear that civil organisations might be fronts for terrorism, and with a backlash among developing country governments. NGOs were increasingly queried about their accountability,

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whether it was downwards towards beneficiary groups or upwards towards states and donors who held the purse strings. In this context, it is important to note how the sources of funding (local vs. international) can frame both, how an NGO/CSO operates and the ways in which it is related to or presented by the state (e.g., as a puppet of an ex-colonial power) and how this may limit their abilities or effectiveness. Efforts to regulate, accredit and evaluate NGO effectivity threw up mixed results, and were strongly resisted by NGOs themselves, leading to assurance mechanisms being applied gradually and unevenly among partner countries. However, NGOs maintained their role in delivering services resulting in an increasing share of aid budgets. Events in North Africa through 2011, known as the Arab Spring, also threw doubt on policy formulations for democratisation and civil society action, as the region had no NGOs, few official development assistance (ODA) projects and few development experts to hand, yet saw the widespread mobilisation of citizens to push for political and economic reforms (Van Rooy 2014). Accordingly, the Arab Spring has been variously attributed to food insecurity, unemployment and rising youth education and disenchantment (e.g., Breisinger et al. 2010; Kuhn 2012: 649). The Arab Spring demonstrated that development institutions did not encompass all avenues for change among impoverished sectors of civil society, while highlighting the ongoing difficulty of providing civil organisations with constructive mechanisms for balancing out states and markets. ‘Within mainstream development, doubts began to be raised concerning the rationales for relying upon NGO organisations where “narrow, self-interested morality”’ (Ramalingam 2013: 89) was seen to prevail despite their best intentions and effectiveness in some situations. Disillusioned with CSOs, policymakers began to consider the advantages of giving money directly to the poor (Hanlon et al. 2010). Such attitudes inflect and explain the expanding use of conditional—and unconditional—cash transfers throughout the developing world, first in Latin America and later in Asia and, from around 2005, in Africa (Merrien 2013).

Risk and Vulnerability: Rescaling and Reframing Civil Society The role and nature of civil society in development has also been reconfigured as policy thinking and development analytics begin to couch global poverty in terms of certain populations’ risks and vulnerability. Global public concern with existential risks—global climate change and environmental disasters, economic uncertainty and political unrest—is echoed by development thinking which

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has shifted its framing of the status of civil society. In this context, civil society’s centrality in understandings of democratisation and institutionalisation is partially eroded by new poverty models that rescaled human relations down to households and individuals. Although civil society in practice continued to exist in myriad and double-edged forms, it no longer comprises the alpha and omega of policy and planning. Rather than imagined as associations, GROs and NGOs, the non-state/non-state sphere becomes envisioned as a granular, individualised and naturalised institutional landscape comprising households, communities and individual people, connected through flows of knowledge. Social neoliberalism—or development with a human face—has come to no longer view CSOs as sufficient to prevent low-income individuals and groups falling into poverty, and accordingly policy refocusses on increasing the poor’s risk-avoidance and disaster-management capacity (Molyneux 2008; Best 2013; Merrien 2013). Poverty management thereby generates policy that boosts proactive networking among public and private institutions and actors, while the theme of social capital is downplayed. The defining terms of this new social configuration become networks, linkages, assemblages, in which the capacity to anticipate and respond to risks are distributed across multiple stakeholders. Nevertheless, and paradoxically, NGOs and private consultancy firms remain key institutions in the delivery of social welfare, technical assistance and professional advice upon which risk-led development relies (Carroll 2009; Choudry and Kapoor 2013; Grove 2014).

Challenge of the Unexpected The recalibration of poverty in terms of limited capacities of households and individuals to build assets and reduce vulnerability has also become framed within wider understandings of the instability of political-economic systems, and the need for development policy to be more nimble in adapting to rapidly changing circumstances on the ground. PRSPs hence were criticised for limited flexibility in the face of unanticipated events (Ramalingam 2013: 63). Policy and critical analytical responses to apparent global unpredictability have diverged with consequences for how civil society is positioned. In mainstream development, world instability appears to cascade down in a mathematically traceable set of interlocking factors (e.g., the Arab Spring is explained in terms of ever-tighter coupling between finance, energy and food systems: compare Breisinger et al. 2010; Kuhn 2012). In response, policy turns to social complexity science to explore how changes in one element can spread rapidly and unpredictably, leading to social collapse (compare  Diamond 2005).

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Social complexity science models how society gains from increasing complexity but then reaches tipping point, when gains are outweighed by cost, and hence places less emphasis on governance and institutions than on social networks and their durability beyond the lifetime of a project or programme (e.g., Ghana, Uganda and Bolivia’s differing experiences). Focussing on the relations within groups, the emphasis is on how interpersonal behaviour shapes behaviour, and how it can be moulded to better cope with unpredictable dynamics (for distinctive perspectives on origins of antisocial behaviour, see Ramalingam 2013; Duffield 2007). Instead of NGOs and civil associations providing a ‘magic bullet’, the stress is on local adaptation occurring in incremental, iterative and non-linear ways, and relying on experimentation, flexibility and innovation.

Resilience In light of increasing policy concern to understand the drivers and social relations beyond institutions, policy debates turned to notions of resilience and (social and natural) systems’ ability to bounce back after catastrophic events. Originating in ecological science, the notion of resilience refers to the ability of a system to remain cohesive even under extreme perturbations (Walker and Cooper 2011). As socio-natural disasters and unpredictable political-economic fluctuations seemed to assail the developing world from the early twenty-first century, so too resilience came to acquire society-related meanings and policy instrumentality, ‘colonizing multiple arenas of governance … due to its intuitive ideological fit with the neoliberal philosophy of complex adaptive systems’ (Walker and Cooper 2011: 144). As with previous policy models, the notion of resilience comes to work with—and upon—implicit understandings of the relative roles of the state, the market and ‘civil society’ actors. According to the expansive policy field of resilience, civil society refers to grassroots populations’ willingness and openness to learn how to accept change as inevitable and how to improve the capacity to remain cohesive under pressure despite poverty (Ramalingam 2013: 346). As illustrated in the case of Jamaica’s disaster management programme, building resilience in this policy framework involves working closely with civil communities in order to instil an awareness of the magnitude of risks involved, encourage information sharing about community-based resources, and to manage the poor’s expectations about the extent of state support (Grove 2013). Given the synergy of resilience frameworks with disaster management, the securitisation of humanitarian aid and neoliberal precepts, it appears likely that this approach will overtake—if it

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has not already done so—concepts of social capital and civil associationalism as the policy lens through which to apprehend and intervene in civil society.

Eruptions of Politics Despite policy attempts to defuse development’s inherently contested and power-laden processes, the societies subject to intervention continue to exceed and reflect critically upon socio-economic transformations and visions of the future (Li 2007). Active interrogations of development’s form, function and consequences continue to animate teahouse discussions, subaltern theorising and mobilisation across diverse groups in civil society. In other words, citizens and groups in developing countries claim spaces for participation, rather than waiting to be invited into policy-driven procedures. In this context, social movements—organised efforts of groups to leverage change in relation to a single dimension of material-representational exclusion—emerge in some places to pursue claims in legal, social and developmental fields (see Bebbington et al. 2010). Political articulations of interests occurs in myriad ways, responding to layered-in influences of political economy, political cultures and the contingencies of mobilising events and processes, meaning neither class nor identity analyses completely capture the motivations, forms and outcomes of political protest (Choudry and Kapoor 2013; compare Chibber  2013). In contrast to PD’s containment of civil involvement, social movements can scale up and leverage change by mobilising networks beyond the nation-state. They may also gain sympathy from unexpected quarters, as when Time magazine hailed ordinary citizens acting as ‘the protestor’ in December 2011 (Van Rooy 2014). Ecuadorian and Bolivian indigenous social movements for instance created transnational linkages to human rights organisations, multilateral and bilateral development agencies in ways that permitted a contingent space in which to design and then implement ethno-development (Andolina et  al. 2009). Elsewhere, slum dwellers’ organisations have jumped scale to network on the global stage (Williams et al. 2009). Mobilisations that emerge from the combined effects of neoliberal development agendas and politicised networking can also have large-scale implications through changing the electoral, and then regime, contexts in which development occurs. The emergence in Latin America over recent years of governments that, in their diverse ways, challenge the neoliberal model (although not capitalism per se), recentre the state and raise social spending illustrate this (Grugel and Riggirozzi 2012; Goodale and Postero 2013). Reasserting the state’s role in macroeconomic and welfare sectors, these governments balance attempts to maintain foreign exchange

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earnings with high expectations from populations severely affected by (post) colonial dispossession, neoliberal restructuring and the global economic downturn from 2008. Additionally, Ecuador and Bolivia have given prominence to endogenous formulations of development, known as sumak kawsay and suma qamaña respectively, which draw on indigenous social movement agendas for communitarian and sustainable development (Radcliffe 2012).

Does Civil Society Really Matter? Over recent years, academic debate has zeroed in on fundamental concerns about the nature of civil society, politics and justice within postcolonial and low-income states and raise profound questions about what ‘civil society’ is and its position in the political field of decision-making, resource distribution and political authority. In large part, these analyses are raising questions about whether our understandings of civil society need to be more contextually sensitive in contexts ‘beyond’ the West. Several writers posit a clear distinction between those groups who can achieve substantive citizenship (and  thereby membership of civil society as defined in multilateral policy’s liberal democratic model), and on the other hand, a mass of marginalised subjects who, it is argued, are never able to achieve or take for granted full citizenship (Chatterjee 2004). In part, these distinctions rest upon politicaleconomic structures, whereby some—the developed world, and the rich in developing countries—have insurance against sudden declines in well-being and an income, provided through a complex web of insurance, infrastructures, welfare and protections through work (Duffield 2007). By contrast, the life of the ‘non-insured’ groups comprises a constant state of exception, in which bare life—a term borrowed from Giorgio Agamben—is the daily reality for millions of people, whose social reproduction relies upon a mix of self-exploitation, kin and pushed-to-the-limit social networks. Adding to these analyses is the insight that postcolonial statecraft and development governmentality define and maintain the social and policy distinctions that work to arbitrate between one group and another, those subjects that require intervention to subsist within the parameters of bare life, and those subjects who become bearers of full substantive citizenship, whereby individuals and groups have the capacity to make formal membership rights into material and intersubjective gains (Chatterjee 2004). In these analyses, development’s remit and goal is essentially minimal in that the goal is not to insure uninsured populations but to make strategic, non-transformatory and instrumental interventions. The  non-insured in this analysis become surplus to national

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politics and capitalism, the target of—frequently racialised—exclusions and barriers to mobility (Ferguson 2005). Such distinctions are constantly rematerialised and inscribed on to bodies, as shifting policy frameworks transform the desirable (and undesirable) qualities that development seeks to ameliorate (Li 2007). Examining Paraguay’s transparency agendas introduced after the return to formal democracy, anthropologist Kregg Hetherington (2011) found good governance policy entailed unintended and unexpected consequences. On the one hand, it created two classes of citizen, the first comprising ‘new democrats’ who consider themselves rational actors who practice transparency, and hence deserve full participation in decision-making, and a second class of rural small farmers, whose class, language, education and dispositions made them appear ‘inappropriate’ and incapable of reaching the global standards of the information age. The context by which such fine yet devastating distinctions are made and then naturalised owes much to shifting ontologies of the bios in the twentyfirst century. One of the most lauded contributions to recent mainstream development thinking, Ben Ramalingam’s Aid on the Edge of Chaos (2013) neatly illustrates this shift. In his book, evolutionary dynamics frame how society and human life are to be understood in development policy. Building on the resilience and complex systems science discussed above, people are pictured less as social beings and more as components of self-organising biological systems whose goals are oriented towards improvement. Evolutionary dynamics, path dependency and sudden changes in the ‘ecosystem’ that comprise human interactions are all terms that signal this growing influence of an ontology of the human as ‘more than human’ (i.e., a way of thinking that breaks down the binary divide between society and nature, and highlights the agency and power of ‘natural’ phenomenon), less cultural and more embedded in natural environments, less historical and more subject to cyclical adjustments and crises. Ramalingam (2013: 187–188) cites Robert Axelrod’s work on social cooperation in extreme situations. Referring to soldiers’ capacity to coordinate across enemy trenches in the Second World War, Axelrod identified a ‘live-and-let-live system’, which Ramalingam extends to envision self-organised spontaneous systems, new forms of cooperation in deal with change, and permit the continuation of life. As Ramalingam notes, the economy has also been understood as a ‘self-organising system’ in the work of Ostrom and Krugman, among others (compare Mitchell 2005). Validated in turn by statistical modelling, ‘live and let live’ social relations are understood to have ‘evolved on a fitness landscape of pay-offs for cooperation … [building up from] local exploratory actions, emerging spontaneously through a variety of opportunities and evolving into patterns of “mutually understood behav-

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iour”’ (Ramalingam 2013: 187). Couched in harsh evolutionary terms, development’s emergent ontology—understanding human life as survival-oriented locally adaptive calculations of biosocial beings—arguably repositions the global have-nots as naturally conditioned to harsh struggles, while Western observers stand back. Such insights raise questions about the need for more contextually specific and disaggregated analyses of social institutionalisation beyond the West, and in the variegated spaces of societies that exist to varying degrees beyond the sphere of development interventions.

5

Conclusions

Civil society’s high point as the buzzword of international development has arguably passed, after a quarter of a century in which it was variously seen as the panacea for problems in ordering low-income societies through to its appropriation as a low cost, yet often colonising avenue for the delivery of slimmed-down services and humanitarian relief. While the penumbra of community, participation and non-state, non-market meanings continue to swirl around the notion of civil society among hard-nosed policymakers and grassroots movements alike, it is arguable that the predominant lens through which the problems of impoverished populations are viewed has become one that owes more to nineteenth- and twentieth-century bioecological sciences than to Enlightenment visions of a liberal society. Such transformations occur against the backdrop of a critical examination of (neo)colonialism’s multilayered legacies on fields as diverse as NGO operation, development agendas and social protest. Society, power and difference across multiple scales thus remain central to development, even as a long-standing concern to bracket off the social now appears to be crumbling.

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14 Security Privatisation, the State, and Development in the Global South Rita Abrahamsen

1

Introduction

Security occupies a prominent place in contemporary development theory, policy, and practice. Not only has aid been increasingly redirected to fragile and conflict-affected states or states seen to be of particular strategic importance, but security sector reform has also become a major item on most donor budgets. Security and development, we are told, are the two sides of the same coin; there can be no development without security and no security without development. In addition, security in the Global South is not only good for poor people, but also for the national security of donor countries. As the UK’s Department for International Development puts it, ‘development and security goals can be pursued in a mutually reinforcing way’ (DFID 2005:13): in line with this reasoning development has become an intrinsic part of many donors’ national security strategies. There have also been strong appeals from NGOs and international organisations to incorporate security into the post2015 development agenda, as part of recognition that insecurity is a key obstacle to development (e.g. UNOCD 2013; Denney 2012). What is strikingly absent from these security/development debates is a recognition of the extent to which the security sectors of most countries in the Global South have been transformed in the last two to three decades. Across the globe, security is no longer the exclusive domain of the state but has been R. Abrahamsen ( ) University of Ottawa, Canada © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 J. Grugel, D. Hammett (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of International Development, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-42724-3_14

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extensively privatised: estimates suggest that the ratio of private security guards to public police in developed countries is approximately 3:1 and as high as 10:1 in some developing countries (Mancini 2005:41). From urban centres to tourist attractions and remote mining sites, the uniformed guards of PSCs have become ubiquitous, and individuals, neighbourhoods, businesses, and even the aid industry itself now rely increasingly on private companies rather than the public police for their security. This has numerous and significant implications for development; if there can be no development without security, we need not only a careful mapping of the main security actors, but also an understanding of their motivations, their roles and dynamics, as well as their relationship to each other. Who and what gets secured, how, and by whom? What is the effect on the state, its ability to provide security, and its sovereignty and legitimacy in the wake of extensive security privatisation? Attempting a comprehensive answer to all of these questions in one chapter would be foolhardy, not only because of the vastly different experiences across the Global South but also because of the breadth of security privatisation (Abrahamsen and Williams 2011; Ungar 2007). This chapter provides a more modest mapping of some of the implications of security privatisation for our understanding of the state and its role in development, with a specific focus on commercial PSCs engaged in the everyday protection of ‘life and assets’.1 Such security provision takes innumerable forms; from guarding urban shopping malls, private residences, NGOs and banks to remote oil fields, gold mines and refugee camps; from the installation of alarm systems and razor wire to risk planning and risk management; from the patrolling of public city streets to close protection of wealthy individuals; from the monitoring of closed-circuit television (CCTV) to demining in post-conflict zones—the list is almost endless. The chapter argues that while it is tempting to regard the growth of private security as a reflection of state failure or weakness, this offers only a partial explanation and cannot adequately capture the implications of security privatisation. Rather than simply eroding the power of the state, or threatening its authority and legitimacy, the proliferation of private security actors is linked to transformations inside the state and their influence stems not primarily from the barrel of the gun but from their embeddedness in 1

I thus exclude direct references to two important forms of private security activities: direct involvement in war and conflict as well as more informal, non-state policing by groups often referred to as vigilantes or militias. Many of the observations and arguments are nevertheless relevant to these types of private security, and no clear-cut distinction can be drawn between the more mundane guarding of ‘life and assets’ and security provision in conflict situations.

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contemporary structures of governance and its links to public forms of power and authority. In many countries and settings, private security actors are by law unarmed and receive their armed capacity through close collaboration with the public police or military. The result has been the emergence of global security assemblages: new security structures and practices that are simultaneously public and private, global and local (Abrahamsen and Williams 2011). Within these assemblages, state power is certainly reconfigured, but not necessarily weakened. Instead, the very distinctions between the public and the private, the global and the local are rearticulated and reworked, giving rise to new practices and forms of power that cannot be neatly contained within the geographical boundaries of the nation state. The state, then, is best understood not as challenged, residual, or resurgent, but as transformed. To make this case, the chapter first documents the rebirth of private security in the south, before reviewing the dominant narrative of security privatisation as an indication and/or cause of state weakness or failure. It then suggests an alternative analytical framework focussed on transformations in governance and the emergence of global security assemblages, and concludes with some implications for how we think about the state and its role in development.

2

The Private Security Expansion

The rebirth of private security is an uneven but worldwide phenomenon of striking rapidity and proportion. In many parts of the world, private security agents now outnumber the public police, often by a considerable margin. In the UK, private security officers outnumber the police by a ratio of almost two to one, and in the USA by almost three to one (Mancini 2006). While North America and Europe account for the largest share of the global private security market, the fastest expanding markets are to be found in the developing word. Growth in so-called ‘emerging markets’ is frequently twice the rate of more established or ‘mature markets’. These ‘emerging markets’ are now estimated to account for about 40 % of a global market for guard services expected to be worth US$110 by 2016 (Securitas 2013). Given such spectacular predictions, the main PSCs are increasingly targeting these areas for lucrative new market opportunities. The rapidly expanding economies of Asia are a case in point. In India, the private security sector has an estimated value of US$2 billion, and is expected to grow at approximately 25 % a year. It employs about 5 million people—1.3  million more than the country’s combined police and armed forces. As the New York Times commented in the wake of the deadly attacks on three Mumbai hotels in November 2008, ‘In much of India, the first line of

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defence against crime stands just over five and half feet tall, earns less than $100 a month and is armed with little more than a shiny belt buckle’ (Timmons 2009). In Asia’s other economic giant, China, the security market has exploded alongside its new-found wealth, and current estimates indicate that there are 4000 registered companies, employing over four million guards in a sector worth some $6.5 billion (Petrie 2008; China Times 2013). Asia, excluding Japan, represents almost 20 % of the total global market in private guard services, with an annual long-term growth of 11–13 % (Securitas 2013:9). In most Latin American countries too, private security officers outnumber public police, especially in the continent’s megacities. Overall, there are approximately 1.6 million registered private security employees on the continent, with probably another two million working informally or illegally (Ungar 2007). In Mexico, there are as many as 7000 PSCs employing 200,000 guards, with about half of these working the streets of the capital, Mexico City (Ibid.). In Brazil, the Federal Police estimated the sector to be worth US$4.5 billion in 1998, including approximately 1200 companies employing 400,000 registered agents. By the end of 2001, a study concluded that in the state of Sao Paulo alone there were 1300 legal companies, employing 330,000 guards with 255,000 firearms. In addition, there were an estimated 5000 unregistered, illegal PSCs, employing approximately 600,000 guards (Wood and Cardia 2006). The Latin American market continues to expand at an annual rate of 8–10 % (Securitas 2013:9). On the African continent, South Africa is home to the largest private security market in the world measured as a percentage of GDP, with nearly 5000 companies employing 446,000 guards compared to the country’s approximately 27,000 police and soldiers (Mnisi 2014). Outside South Africa, statistics are hard to come by, but according to one account, private security is the fastest growing industry on the continent, and the world’s largest PSC, Group4Securicor, the continent’s largest single private employer, with a total payroll of over 100,000 people across 29 African countries. In Nigeria, the continent’s most populous country, the best estimates indicate that over 1200 companies employ over 100,000 people, possibly making it the country’s second largest industry, after the oil sector (Abrahamsen and Williams 2011). In Kenya, some 2000 companies employ 48,000 people, indirectly supporting a total of 195,000 when the country’s high dependency rations are accounted for (Wairagu et al. 2004). In conflict and post-conflict countries like Sierra Leone, the DRC, and Somalia, persistent insecurity and lingering fear have contributed to an expanding role for the private security sector, with the international aid community and resource companies making up a large proportion of the client base (Abrahamsen and Williams 2006). In conflict-affected countries,

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private security provision also involves security sector reform and the training of police and military personnel, and the more conflictual the setting, the more difficult it often becomes to draw a distinction between the protection of ‘life and assets’ and more militarised security provision. Overall, Africa and the Middle East make up 14 % of the global market, and long-term growth is estimated at 8–10 %per year (Securitas 2013:9). Security privatisation is by no means a domestic phenomenon. While the majority of security companies in most countries are small to mediumsized national, regional, or local businesses, the rapidly expanding market in security services has become increasingly global and has given rise to PSCs with a transnational presence. Suffice here to mention two: Securitas, the world’s second largest PSC, is a Swedish company listed on the Stockholm stock exchange. From small beginnings in 1901  in Copenhagen, Securitas now has 310,000 employees in 52 countries. It has pursued an aggressive acquisitions and mergers strategy, expanding first into Europe and North America, then to Latin America, Asia, and more recently Africa and the Middle East. Securitas is, however, dwarfed by its one-time sister company, Group4Securicor. A  security giant, G4S is now present in 120 countries worldwide. With 618,000 employees, it is the largest private employer on the London stock exchange, and the third largest private sector employer in the world. Put differently, G4S commands a force three times the size of the British military! Much of this force is armed by little more than a whistle and perhaps a truncheon, but nevertheless this illustrates the massive expansion of private security and the relative shift from public to private force.

3

Private Security and the Decline of the State

These numbers go a long way towards explaining the dominant way of analysing security privatisation; its sheer size and the rapidity of its expansion seem intuitively to signal a decline of the state and its role in the provision of security, if not to confirm or even accelerate the processes of state failure and collapse. Even as direct military actions by mercenary groups, such as those of Executive Outcomes and Sandline International in Sierra Leone and Papa New Guinea in the 1990s, appear to have subsided and the vast majority of today’s guards are unarmed, anxiety and unease continue to follow in the footsteps of private security actors. As PSCs proliferate across the Global South, the power and authority of the state are perceived to decrease in almost equal measure, as if the rise of the private is necessarily at the expense of the public. In the most despairing visions, social and political fragmentation appears as

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the inevitable endpoint of a downward spiral in which the wealthy retreat to their privately fortified enclaves, the poor rely on vigilante justice, and the state abandons any notion of security as a public good equally available to all. Such interpretations are not without insights, and they are certainly valuable as a cautionary note, but they are simultaneously of limited explanatory and analytical value. To be sure, the phenomenal growth of private security across the developing world is linked to the decline of the state in numerous ways: for one, the rise of the private is a frequent corollary of ineffective, untrustworthy, and sometimes outright brutal public security institutions. As police and military personnel not only have failed to offer adequate protection but have also themselves become major sources of insecurity, people, neighbourhoods, business, and international organisations have turned to various private initiatives in order to ensure their daily safety and security (see Simelane 2008). In many authoritarian and less than fully democratic countries, police and militaries have been engaged primarily in regime security; that is, they have been protecting those in power rather than the citizenry. The notion of public security—a public good provided equally to all—has thus been severely compromised, as an ostensibly public security apparatus has been used to secure a state that has been effectively privatised. The resurgence of private security is also linked to the fiscal crisis of the Keynesian state that began in the late 1970s and reached most developing countries in the form of structural adjustment programmes. According to this argument, as the state’s capacity to fund public services decreased (whether through economic necessity, political design, or both), the private sector expanded to fill the various ‘gaps’ that ensued—including in the area of security. It is certainly the case that decades of neoliberal economic policies and structural adjustment severely undermined the administrative capacity of the state, and thereby also its ability to govern and regulate the security sector. In many countries, neoliberal restructuring also triggered, reinforced, and exacerbated many of the tendencies described above; economic austerity brought a decline in policing resources, wages and status, and police and soldiers alike often turned their possession of public authority to private advantage. Corruption, bribes and collusion with criminals thus escalated, with a parallel erosion of public trust in public security institutions. For political leaders, the economic hardships of the adjustment era often spelt declining popular support and legitimacy, and with it came the temptation to politicise the use of security forces to curtail opposition and ensure their own survival. The rise of the private cannot, however, be read simply as the replacement of a retreating, declining, or failing state. While it is certainly the case

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that under neoliberal policies many areas of public spending have decreased, this is far from uniformly the case in the security sector. Indeed in many countries in both the North and the South, spending on public security has increased or remained constant at the same time as the private security sector has expanded. The idea of a ‘gap’ filled by private security cannot therefore be understood as an automatic result of the retrenchment of public capacities. Secondly, policies of privatisation and outsourcing do not represent a simple retreat of the state from security provision, but rather are part of a crucial relocation of its place within such provision. The growth of private security is better captured as part of broader transformations in global governance and a general intensification of security discourses and activities across societies— a process abetted by the state and, in many countries, drawing power from an increasing demand for security from individuals, communities, corporations, and organisations who have come to accept responsibility for a greater involvement in provision of their own security (Garland 2001).

4

Global Security Assemblages

Saskia Sassen’s (2006) interpretation of globalisation provides a useful starting point for an alternative account that is more attuned to the transformations of state power and its role within global security assemblages. For Sassen, globalisation is associated with a process of realignment inside the state, rather than simply a process of ‘outside’ forces eroding a territorially distinct ‘inside’. As she observes in her analysis of the shifting relationship between territory, authority, and rights, it is the national state that has made today’s global era possible. Many of the activities, institutions, and structures now identified with globalisation came into existence at the direct instigation of national governments, and continue to operate through transformed national institutions that enable and facilitate their operation. More specifically, Sassen suggests that the development of contemporary global structures involves three key elements. First, a process of ‘disassembly’ in which previously public functions are transferred to private actors, the subsequent development of ‘capacities’ by private actors that allow them to act at a global level, and a process of ‘reassembly’ whereby these new actors and capabilities become part of global assemblages that are embedded in national settings but operate at a global scale. In this way, the disassembly of the national becomes constitutive of the global, in that ‘the territorial sovereign state, with its territorial fixity and exclusivity, represents a set of capabilities that eventually enable the formation or evolution of particular global systems’ (Sassen 2006:21).

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Applied to private security, the partial disassembly of the state is associated with the fiscal crisis, structural adjustment, and the turn to neoliberal modes of governance. The normativity of the competitive state and its attendant emphasis on fiscal discipline, value for money, efficiency, and a reduced role for the state in the provision of services have meant that the police are increasingly required to work in partnership with other agencies in tackling crime and disorder. States have accepted and facilitated the parcelling out of previously state-run security functions to private actors, and have tolerated and often encouraged the expansion of private security. At the same time, neoliberal forms of governance ensure that private actors are linked to the public through a host of New Public Management (NPM) strategies, including various forms of audits, procedures, and reporting mechanisms designed to ensure particular forms of behaviour and ‘best practice’. The state, then, is not absent from these security arrangements, but linked to them and lending them authority and legitimacy through numerous networks of governance. PSCs have acquired extensive material capacities from the processes of partial state disassembly, through outsourcing, privatisation, and various forms of public–private partnerships. Tellingly, the main clients of PSCs are often states themselves, as they rely on the private for tasks like prisoner transport, CCTV surveillance and the guarding of public buildings. The process and policies of partial state disassembly also provide private security actors with ideational ‘capacities’; socially recognised forms of legitimation and recognised expertise that allow them to move effectively in the security field. Having acquired the technologies, skills, and legitimation to perform security tasks at home, some PSCs have in turn expanded their markets across borders. It is important to emphasise, however, that the growth of private security is not a purely functional response to state restructuring and the outsourcing of previously public services. It is also linked in multiple important ways to social and cultural transformations associated with late modernity, including changing attitudes towards crime and punishment and the pervasiveness of various mentalities of risk (see Abrahamsen and Williams 2011; Johnston 2000; Shearing and Stenning 1987). Risk society, as Ulrick Beck (1992) reminds us, entails an ever-increasing awareness of vulnerability and the potentiality of risk. Private security companies, of course, play a role in reinforcing this sensibility as their own survival and profit depend to a significant extent on society’s sense of insecurity. Intently aware of their insecurity, the late modern public has become responsibilised (Garland 2001) in the sense that individuals, firms, and communities are not only increasingly held responsible for their own security, but also come to accept that responsibility as a right to engage actively in its provision, be it through hiring a PSC, installing an alarm system, or joining in a neighbourhood watch scheme.

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Risk-based thinking also entails a shift in the social technologies of security, which become increasingly centred on prevention and prediction rather than on justice and the punishment of past offences. Again, this boosts the role of private providers, who are constituted as experts on prevention strategies, surveillance, risk profiling, spatial demarcation, and so on. As such, security becomes increasingly a question of the right technical solutions, delinked from broader issues of justice, social strategies, and political reform. Risk society thus entails a particular kind of depoliticisation of security, in that it becomes primarily a technique that is in principle applicable everywhere. This is in turn underpinned by a pervasive commodification of security, whereby security has become a commodity or a service like any other. It is, in other words, no longer an exclusive public good associated with particular political and social agendas, but a commodity, a service, and a neutral set of global techniques and technologies that can be bought and sold in a marketplace where the state is only one of many potential providers, and not necessarily the most efficient and reliable. This commodification of security is a precondition for its globalisation, and today free trade in security services falls within the WTO purview. As a result of these diverse but interconnected processes of transformation, security has become not only increasingly privatised but also globalised. Today, it would be difficult for any state to prohibit private security or close its borders entirely to competition from foreign PSCs, as such actions would not only be contrary to the normativity of the competitive state but also cause significant uproar about the sanctity of free trade and foreign investment. But this does not mean that the state has been eclipsed, that its functions have been simply transferred to the private, and that it has no influence over security provision and governance. Instead, the transformations described above have led to the rearticulation and reassembly of the public and the private, the global and the local into complex, multi-sited orders—global security assemblages—where a range of different security agents interact, cooperate, and compete to produce new practices and structures of security governance. As a descriptive term, ‘assemblage’2 captures the new geographies of power that are simultaneously global and national, public and private: diverse hybrid structures that inhabit national settings but are stretched across national boundaries in terms of actors, knowledge, technologies, norms, and values. Worldwide, from isolated resources enclaves to densely populated urban centres, the production and governance of security (and insecurity) involve such global assemblages, with important implications for the politics of security and the distribution of political power. The impact, however, is far from 2

The term ‘assemblage’ has a series of complex provenances in social theory; for an exploration, see Acuto and Curtis (2014).

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straightforward. Global security assemblages do not represent a mechanistic process of disassembly and reassembly, and entail more than the arrival of a new set of security actors. Global security assemblages are better understood as boundary fields, in that they are neither private, nor public, neither local, nor global, but mark analytical spaces that lie between these common distinctions and require their own specific empirical investigation.

5

Implications for the State and Development

Approaching security privatisation from the perspective of global security assemblages has numerous implications for how we think about the state and its role in development. For one, it shows that conceptually and analytically the ramifications of security privatisation cannot be captured simply in terms of a state that is getting progressively weaker or hollowed out by the simultaneous expansion of the private in some kind of zero-sum game. Nor can it be adequately grasped in a vocabulary of networked governance, where the state has outsourced some of its power but still rules and regulates at a distance, in some multilevel form of governance, or in collaboration with the private and non-state actors. In such perspectives, the state remains the same, unaltered— it shares power, or is perhaps weaker, or stronger, but as a basic unit or category it remains unchanged and ontologically intact. The transformations associated with the emergence of global security assemblages are more profound, and involves changes within the state as well as to the very categories of public and private. Thinking in terms of global security assemblages thus involves both the abandonment of the public/private and the inside/outside distinctions in favour of a perspective on development and governance as one analytical field connected by a multitude of mutually constitutive relationships. It also requires recognition that the state as well as the categories of public/private are historically contingent, reflecting particular social interests and power relations at particular points in time (Cutler 1997). Capturing the new geographies of power demand attention to the global and to the point where the global is inserted and translated into the local, resulting in the production of new modalities of power through which the very categories of public/private and global/local are reconstituted. Only by approaching security privatisation in this manner and studying its specific impacts in particular global security assemblages can we begin to answer the important empirical and political questions of its implications for development, security, equality, and the extent to which private security strengthens or weakens the structures of the formal legal-rational state.

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The latter question is of utmost importance for debates about development. The idea of the state’s monopoly of legitimate force, and of security as a quintessentially public good, is deeply ingrained in the modern political imagination and its eventual achievement has become part of almost teleological visions of development, state formation, and state-building efforts (see Slansky 2006). Against this backdrop, the contemporary resurgence of private security seems inescapably fragmenting, an intrinsic erosion of the social and political order leading to increased polarisation between rich and poor. This is a powerful narrative in current debates, where the power of concepts and categories tightly tied to the symbolic power of the modern state supports the seemingly obvious view that since security is a—if not the—core function of the state, its privatisation is both a symbol and a cause of decreased social cohesion and governmental legitimacy. From this perspective, security privatisation is part of a ‘downward spiral’, and even an indicator or cause of incipient state failure.3 It is certainly the case that private actors have been empowered in numerous ways within global security assemblages; they are able to influence security practices along a continuum from risk and threat perception to strategic planning, to the choice and implementation of material, and coercive technologies and capacities. In this way, private companies can influence the subjectivities of both the general public and state security actors in terms of what kinds of security practices are necessary and desirable, and play a powerful role in providing coercive capabilities. It is not necessarily the case, however, that this undermines the state or is at the expense of its authority and legitimacy. As argued above, many private security initiatives operate with the active endorsement and encouragement of state authorities and within contemporary neoliberal strategies of governance. The private delivery and governance of security is thus, more often than not, part of state policy, and rather than existing in opposition to the state today’s PSCs (as well as many private military companies, vigilantes, and other private actors) are often part of complex security networks that knit together the public and the private, the global and the local (see Abrahamsen and Williams 2011: Chaps. 4 and 5). The manner in which the private is linked to the public through legitimated structures and forms of coercion and power means that there can be no automatic assumption that commercial private security undermines or weakens formal state institutions. If, as suggested by many recent analyses, the state is perceived not merely as a formal institution, but as the effect of a wider range of dispersed 3

For an instructive example, see Human Security for an Urban Century, p.  26, co-sponsored by the Canadian Consortium on Human Security and the Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade.

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forms of power, then private security companies can in certain settings be seen to help produce and enact the state in the eyes of its inhabitants, making the state more real and tangible in everyday practices (Mitchell 1999; Blom Hansen and Stepputat 2001). In this sense, global private security is a key illustration of James Ferguson’s (2006: 112) observation that an important effect of the new forms of transnational power is not so much to make states ‘weak’ or ‘strong’ as to reconfigure the way that they are able to spatialise their authority and stake their claims to superior generality and universality. The state, in other words, can spatialise its authority through or in cooperation with other actors, and in this sense private security can act to strengthen the state. While this suggests the inadequacy of any linear narrative of inevitable collapse and fragmentation, the implications are not necessarily any less disturbing from the point of view of development. Instead of fragmenting, global security assemblages can be stabilising and conservative, preserving the existing social and political order. Private security might strengthen the coercive aspects of the state, and while it may provide security to some otherwise vulnerable parts of the population, it can also contribute directly and indirectly to continuing inequality and exploitation, strengthening the coercive apparatus of the state and allowing elites to continue to disregard the provision of public security in part because their own security and economic reproduction is bolstered by private force, and because the lack of effective public security does not yield rampant insecurity in society as a whole, its inadequacies being to some degree compensated for by private provision. Private security does undeniably follow the lines of wealth, providing for the rich and powerful and leaving the poor and vulnerable to the mercy of a frequently inadequate public police. This has transformed many urban landscapes, where the wealthy have barricaded themselves behind security walls and advanced alarm systems and exit only in narrow safety corridors to fortified suburban enclaves of work and pleasure (see Caldeira 2001). Private security also touches down primarily where global capital is present, such as sites of resource extraction, and it plays a crucial role in maintaining the distinction between what French colonial authorities in Africa referred to as ‘l’Afrique utile’ and ‘inutile’ (Reno 2004)—or more broadly, useful and disposable territories in the Global South. This interpretation of an overwhelmingly conservative and stabilising impact of private security is, however, complicated by the need to take account of the wide range of actors and normativities within a global security assemblage. Importantly, the key actors extend beyond traditional security actors to include international aid donors, NGOs, transnational corporations, as well as various ministries of trade, finance, and mineral resources, to mention but

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a few. It also includes an expanding set of global norms seeking to regulate the use of force such, for example, as the Voluntary Principles on Business and Human Rights. The relative power of these competing actors and norms, their relationship to each other and to the state is of vital importance for an analysis of whether and how security practices change within assemblages. In countries where the public police is known for its trigger-happy brutality, for example, transnational businesses may turn to global PSCs that are more observant of human rights, not because they are better humanitarians but because they are subject to different pressures (e.g. from shareholders) and answerable to different clients (e.g. companies that are acutely aware of the power of consumers and potential damage to their global brand recognition). In such cases, the effects of global security assemblages for development might be contradictory and multifaceted; they might strengthen the ability of the state to spatialise its authority, while simultaneously making its coercive capacities less directly violent. They might maintain existing divisions and exclusions, while simultaneously open up space and influence for norms and values that argue for great equality, inclusion, and development. Taken together, these observations point towards the dangers of theorising a priori about the relationship between security privatisation, the state, and its role in development. What is clear is that the private sector matters—for the maintenance of law and order, for the question of who has access to security, and for social and political legitimacy. But because ‘private’ security is not simply private, but integrated into complex global security assemblages, this calls for close empirical investigation of how the security field is assembled in different settings as well as of the relative power and influence of actors within it. Analytically it also points towards the merits of a less state-centric perspective, wherein the question of how authority and order emerge and are maintained is open to investigation. The relationship of the private to the public thus becomes an empirical question to be investigated through careful analysis of how public and private, global and local actors interact, negotiate, and compete to produce and govern security. Practically, this should be the point of departure for a development theory and practice concerned with policy prescriptions to enhance security and development for all.

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Ungar, M. 2007. The privatization of citizen security in Latin America: From elite guards to neighbourhood vigilantes. Social Justice 34(3/4): 20–39. UNOCD. 2013. Accounting for security and justice in the post-2015 development Agenda. UN Office of Drugs and Crime. http://www.unodc.org/documents/aboutunodc/Post-2015-Development-Agenda/UNODC_-_Accounting_for_Security_ and_Justice_in_the_Post-2015_Development_Agenda.pdf Wairagu, F., J.  Kamenju, and M.  Singo. 2004. Private security in Kenya. Nairobi: Security Research and Information Centre. Wood, J., and N. Cardia. 2006. Brazi. In Plural policing: A comparative perspective, ed. T. Jones and T. Newburn, 139–68. London: Routledge.

15 Alternatives to the Privatisation of Water and Sanitation Services: Lessons from Latin America Susan Spronk

1

Introduction

After more than three decades of privatisation (1980s to present), the reasons why communities struggle against the privatisation of public services are well understood now. The privatisation of essential services such as health and education creates two-tiered systems: one for the rich and one for the poor. These systems are rarely of equal quality: couched in the language of expanding ‘choice’, the expansion of marketised services increases choice only to those who can afford to pay. In the case of networked services such as transportation, electricity, water and sanitation, privatisation has meant higher prices for citizens and greater inequality, as profit-motivated companies have ‘cherry picked’ contracts in densely populated, relatively wealthy areas—those areas in which services are the least likely to need improvement but are most lucrative (Graham and Marvin 1994; Swyngedouw 2005). In some cases where private contracts have failed due to economic crisis or social unrest, governments have been hit with expensive lawsuits under international treaties in pursuit of lost investments and been left holding the bag (Spronk and Crespo 2008; Castro 2007). Multiple studies have demonstrated that privatisation is often a riskier and more expensive way to expand and improve services (Bakker 2010; McDonald and Ruiters 2005; Bel and Warner 2008). While international financial S. Spronk ( ) University of Ottawa, Canada © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 J. Grugel, D. Hammett (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of International Development, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-42724-3_15

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institutions (IFIs) continue to push the privatisation agenda as a way to finance services, they are far less bullish than they were (McDonald 2014: 3). In the face of broken promises for increased investment, environmental problems, unequal access and scandalous profit margins, many governments have decided to take back public services (Pigeon et al. 2012). Since the wave of privatisation started to ebb over a decade ago, this chapter will focus on the question of alternatives to privatisation, focusing on lessons drawn from fieldwork over the past ten years on water and sanitation in Latin America.1 Given the diversity of organisations engaged in the struggles to defend essential services from privatisation, social movement activists present many different answers to the question of alternatives. While there may be a common conviction amongst water justice activists that involving privatesector providers is not the solution to the problems of service delivery, there are many proposals about what alternatives might look like. The chapter is organised as follows. The first section outlines the reasons that resistance to water privatisation has been fiercer in Latin America than other regions. The second section describes the main currents within the water justice movement in Latin America regarding ‘alternatives’ to privatisation: (1)  social democratic, (2) socialist and (3) communitarian. How these ideological currents translate into practice—and the tensions and debates that emerge regarding each alternative—are illustrated by reference to concrete case studies of water delivery systems in Uruguay, Venezuela and Bolivia.

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Resistance to Privatisation in Latin America

Until the 1980s, water delivery was dominated by state ownership and management. In the previous era of state-led development, delivery by the state was justified on the grounds of ‘market failure’. The private sector was viewed as incapable of providing accessible services to all citizens at an affordable price because of the high amount of investment required and the long-time horizons needed to turn a profit (Bakker 2007). Following the economic shocks of the 1970s, state budgets came under scrutiny and the high costs of state delivery attracted increasing attention. With the shift to neo-liberalism as the reigning economic paradigm for policymaking, notions of ‘market failure’ 1

I have conducted fieldwork in Bolivia, Venezuela and Uruguay and throughout Latin America as a research associate with the Municipal Services Project (2008 to present, see www.municipalservicesproject.com). The latter work has included attending international meetings of the Red Vida, Latin America’s largest antiprivatisation network, in Cochabamba, Bolivia (August 2008), Cali, Colombia (May 2010) and Mexico City (October 2012), as well as the Alternative Water Forum in Marseilles, France (March 2013).

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were replaced by ‘state failure’. Perceptions of water also changed: previously viewed as a strategic and abundant resource to be delivered as a public service, it came to be treated as a private commodity with an economic value. While there are many forms of privatisation, the most popular in the water and sanitation sector has been the concession contract. Also termed a ‘public–private partnership’, under the concession contract a private company leases state assets but acquires the management rights for a set period of time and assumes the commercial risk. According to the World Bank database on private participation in infrastructure, between 1990 and 2001 over 200 privatisation contracts were signed to run water and sanitation services in developing countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America, half of them in Latin America (Budds and McGranahan 2003b: 36). Privatisation has been more fiercely contested in Latin America than in other regions for at least three reasons (Spronk et al. 2012). First, the region was a guinea pig for the World Bank and IMF policies of privatisation of the 1990s. The authoritarian, nonconstitutional regimes that governed the region from the 1960s to the 1990s incurred heavy foreign debts to fund their modernisation projects (and dirty wars against their own populations), which made them vulnerable to the demands of international financial institutions. As these countries returned to civilian rule in the 1980s and 1990s, the newly democratic governments accepted loans from IFIs, which were made conditional upon structural adjustment that included privatisation (Grusky and Fiil-Flynn 2004; Goldman 2007). Second, the Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) region not only is relatively highly urbanised and relatively wealthy but also has the highest rates of income inequality in the world. This concentration of massive wealth in the hands of a few citizens in urban areas means that from the perspective of multinational water corporations, there are some attractive markets (Hall and Lobina 2006: 41; Budds and McGranahan 2003b). In the late 1990s, some of the largest concession contracts were awarded in cities such as Buenos Aires and La Paz-El Alto. By the end of the decade, the region had attracted more foreign direct investment (FDI) in water and sanitation than any other region. Although the rate of FDI into water and sanitation in the LAC region has slowed down, it remains the region with the largest foreign (private) investment share in the world.2 Third, the LAC region has a long history of revolution and social struggle (Wickham-Crowley 1992), including in Mexico (1919), Bolivia (1952), Cuba (1959) and Nicaragua (1979). Popular struggle was also crucial in the 2

See World Bank database: http://ppi.worldbank.org/explore/ppi_exploreSector.aspx?sectorID=4, date accessed 12 August 2014.

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transitions from authoritarian rule in the 1980s, entrenching a commitment to the principles of democracy and citizen control (Stahler-Sholk and Vanden 2011). The organisations that have emerged to contest water privatisation such as the Coalition for Water and Life in Bolivia and the Coalition for Water and Life in Uruguay have built on these diverse social movement traditions to defend public water resources as part of the ‘commons’. Multinational water companies from North America and Europe have faced fierce resistance from local populations in places such as Argentina and Bolivia. In 1998, in Tucuman, Argentina, the company withdrew from the contract when 86 % of citizens refused to pay their water bills after the private, multinational company increased water tariffs for existing customers and imposed an ‘infrastructure charge’ under which unconnected users were made responsible for expanding the network (Castro 2008). In the ‘Water War’ of 2000 in Cochabamba, Bolivia, the government was forced to cancel the contract after only six months after large-scale protests brought thousands of people to the streets in a stand-off with the military police that left one protestor dead. While urban citizens were upset about the hikes to their water bills (estimated to be up to 600 %), peri-urban residents who did not have any connections with the local water company were upset about the monopoly provisions that granted exclusive water rights to the multinational company, preventing them from accessing water from their own wells (Olivera and Lewis 2004). Transnational advocacy networks to defend public water have also emerged from global ‘convergence spaces’ (Routledge 2003) such as the Alternative Water Forum, which takes place every year parallel to the corporate-dominated World Water Forum, as well as the World Social Forums that began as part of the global social movement to challenge neo-liberal globalisation in 2001. These convergence spaces have served as networking opportunities for social movement organisations to coordinate campaigns and share strategies. In the past decade, there have been at least five different popular initiatives to hold referenda that have attempted to enshrine water as a human right in  local legislation: Uruguay (2004), Colombia (2009), Italy (2011), Berlin, Germany (2011) (Dugard and Drage 2012) and more recently, Greece (2014).3 Key social movement organisations such as the Blue Planet Project (Canada), Food and Water Watch (USA) and the Reclaiming Public Water network (Europe) have played key roles providing financial, logistical and moral support. In Latin America, the Red Vida, a network of 54 environmental and social 3

In Colombia, the Friends of the Earth/CENSAT collected the number of signatures required by law but Congress refused to hold the referendum.

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justice organisations from 16 countries fighting for water justice, grew out of the Cochabamba Water War and has played a crucial role helping to coordinate campaigns and support public–public partnerships between different water operators in the region to fight the IFI-mandated privatisation agenda. Within these transnational social movement networks, there is widespread agreement that the involvement of private-sector providers is not the answer to poorly performing public services. But a further question must be asked: if privatisation is not the answer, then what is?

3

Alternative Forms of Service Delivery in Latin America

With the risk of oversimplifying a complex debate, three dominant left traditions emerge in discussions regarding alternatives to water privatisation, at least in South America: (1) social democratic, (2) socialist and (3) communitarian. Each of these alternatives is discussed within the context of a concrete experience in the context of Uruguay, Venezuela and Bolivia, respectively. It should be noted that each of these political traditions exists within each of the countries examined here but particular alternatives have been institutionalised in some contexts and not others due to specific particular political– economic conditions and social forces.

Statist Traditions of Social Democracy: Uruguay Uruguay is one of the few countries in Latin America where citizens, both rich and poor, can feel confident drinking tap water. The publicly owned and operated company Obras Sanitarias del Estado (Sanitation Works of the State, OSE) has been providing high-quality, affordable, nearly universal water services to the population of Uruguay since 1952. Due to high levels of public investment over six decades, OSE has achieved the highest coverage rates for water and sanitation in the region amongst the companies. In 2012, 99 % of Uruguayans had access to improved drinking water and 96 % had access to improved sanitation facilities (WHO and UN-Water 2014). The public health benefits are obvious. Uruguayans consider it a point of national pride that it was the only country on the continent not to be affected by the cholera epidemic in the late 1990s. Uruguay has a long tradition of social democracy. Trade unions, particularly in the public sector, are highly supportive of public ownership and see

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their public utilities as a source of national pride. Uruguay has often been considered the Switzerland of South America due to its economic stability and high levels of social equality. It instituted free public education before England, women’s suffrage before France, the eight-hour workday before the USA and divorce seventy years before Spain. Uruguay is also renowned for its highly developed welfare state that dates back to the early twentieth century (Panizza 2005). Healthcare, which is provided by both public and private providers, is nearly universal. Electricity, telecommunications and railway services, and even gas stations and rum are produced by state-owned enterprises. Approximately 16 % of workers are employed by the state, and government social spending, including a sweeping pension system, has historically been amongst the highest in Latin America, representing about a fifth of GDP (Spronk et al. 2014: 108). Despite this strong commitment to ‘publicness,’ water and sanitation services were privatised in the 1990s when the World Bank recommended that the Uruguayan government privatise part of its water services as a means of ‘modernising’ the sector by introducing competition. Following this advice, in 1992 the Uruguayan state granted the first concession for water and sanitation services in the wealthy, eastern zone of Maldonado to the company Aguas de la Costa (Santos 2006). In 1998, the union that represents the water workers, Federacion de Funcionarios de Obras Sanitarias del Estado (FFOSE), began to organise opposition to privatisation. Despite growing public opposition, in 2000 OSE granted a concession for the entire department of Maldonado to URAGUA, a subsidiary of Spanish water company Aguas de Bilbao. FFOSE, the trade union that represents public water workers, is widely considered the ‘backbone’ of the social movement alliance that made water a human right (Wainwright 2012), providing ideological direction, human and financial resources. In 2000, FFOSE published a series of pamphlets that laid out the/an ideological basis for a campaign to push for a national referendum to promote the right to public participation and the return of water services to public control based upon the notion that water as a ‘fundamental human right’ and to modify the constitution to declare that ‘all superficial and subterranean water resources in all of its forms and uses are not alienable to multinational capital’. On 31 October 2004, the same date as the electoral victory that brought the new left-of-centre government under the Frente Amplio to office, 64.7 % of the population voted to make water a human right. The largest concession contract was cancelled, but the company was not returned fully to the public. A public–private partnership continues to operate in the eastern zone of Maldonado, and the utility has created several other entities that operate under private rather than public law, to build infrastructure and market innovations. In addition, the company continues

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to rely on subcontracting, a form of ‘privatisation by stealth’ (CUPE 1998). Much of the work previously done by public servants with decent salaries and benefits is farmed out to contract workers on precarious contracts. FFOSE is also concerned that space for worker participation in the decision-making of the utility has been narrowing in recent years, after a brief period of expansion when the Frente Amplio government was first elected. In short, the new frontier in the water justice movement in Uruguay concerns the threat of ‘corporatisation’—or the tendency of public companies to increasingly act like private companies (McDonald 2014; Therhorst et al. 2013). These criticisms are part of a wider debate about corporatisation. In 2014, five of the top ten publicly traded companies in the world were state-owned: Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, China Construction Bank, Agricultural Bank of China, Bank of China and PetroChina.4 Similar to privately owned companies like ExxonMobil and Wells Fargo, the commitment of such companies to ‘publicness’ is dubious. They may be owned by the state but they implement many private-sector management techniques that are primarily motivated by profit. The expansion of state-owned companies since 2002 led the neo-classical economic magazine, The Economist (2012), to warn of a ‘rise of state capitalism’. Debates on the creeping corporatisation of public companies reflect the fact that under capitalist social relations, the state and market are not truly opposites. As critical Marxist political economist Juan Grigera (2014) argues, however, most of today’s social democrats share a common view of the state with neo-liberals: both affirm that the state should defend property rights, maintain macroeconomic stability, intervene in the economy when necessary to rectify ‘market-failures’ and provide basic infrastructure. As Grigera (2014: 204) observes, ‘the strength or weakness of a state is not a function of the extent of intervention in the economy, nor its regulatory power; rather from the viewpoint of class, the strength or weakness of a state is measured against its capacity to reproduce accumulation’: that is, measured by its ability to produce in narrow economic terms (GDP) not in social indicators (e.g. the Human Development Index (HDI)). The social democratic government in Uruguay under the Frente Amplio (2009–) is pursuing the formation of public–private partnerships to build prisons, schools and healthcare. Due to the referendum in 2004, however, it is not pursuing privatisation in the water and sanitation sector. But within this general climate of neo-liberalism, as with all public companies in Uruguay 4 http://www.forbes.com/sites/liyanchen/2014/05/07/the-worlds-largest-companies-china-takes-over-thetop-three-spots/

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the public water utility, OSE, is under increasing pressure to act like a private company by introducing narrowly conceived ‘efficiency’ indicators and subcontracting many of its operations to private companies. In these contexts, it is difficult to know what remains ‘public’ about public utilities.

Socialism of the Twenty-First Century: Venezuela Similar to Uruguay, Venezuela is one of the more developed countries in Latin America that enjoyed a high degree of political stability and, until recently, was considered to be an ‘exceptional democracy’. Unlike the majority of Latin American countries, which experienced military governments between the 1960s and 1990s, Venezuela has been under constitutional rule since 1958. The veneer of this ‘democracy’ was shattered in 1989, however, when the government violently suppressed social protests that erupted as the result of an IMF-mandated neo-liberal austerity package, killing between 300 and 3000 innocent protesters. This traumatic event known as the ‘Caracazo’ was seared into the memory of many poor Venezuelans and paved the way for the election of Hugo Chávez, a progressive military commander who put himself forward for election in 1998 promising to reverse the legacy of neo-liberalism. In Venezuela, the Bolivarian Revolution (1998 to present) is advancing the most radical alternative to neo-liberalism in Latin America. Under former President Hugo Chávez, the government enacted many reforms that reduced social inequality and improved living standards by providing public (state) support for programmes to meet basic needs, such as food, housing, health, education, and water and sanitation. Reforms in the urban water and sanitation sector serve as a powerful illustration of the transformative nature of the Bolivarian Revolution that aims to create a ‘different kind of state’ (Wainwright 2012) which forges a new form of ‘21st century socialism’ that does not repeat the mistakes of history. Venezuela has also had its share of water troubles. In contrast to OSE in Uruguay, the local public water company in the capital city of Caracas, Hidrocapital, is an example of a public utility that was never that ‘public’ (McMillan et al. 2014). Although it has never been privatised, until recent reforms it primarily served the upper and middle classes in the formal, planned parts of the city, while barrio residents resorted to constructing their own ‘illegal’ connections to the city system or accessed resources for infrastructure through clientelist networks, depending on the party in power. This piecemeal development of services in the barrios created incomplete, fractured water and sanitation networks, and highly uneven service access. In some

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barrios water would only reach some households for an unpredictable few hours every three weeks. In the 1980s and early 1990s, poor residents would take to the streets in daily protests to try to pressure government authorities to fix the situation. Since household activities such as laundry, bathing children and cooking are considered (locally) as women’s work, it is unsurprising that most protesters were women (Miraglia and Spronk 2014). The problems with the public water and sanitation company in Venezuela demonstrate that public companies face the same challenges as private ones: the debate should not focus solely on ‘public versus private’ but rather must address how to meet the needs of the poorest, disenfranchised citizens (Budds and McGranahan 2003a). Under the management of a progressive mayor in the early 1990s, the municipal government of Caracas established local forums to hear citizens’ concerns about their problems with water and sanitation, which became the forerunners of something more substantial. When President Hugo Chávez was elected in 1998, a citywide communal water council was created in Caracas comprised of representatives of the water company, municipal government and barrio residents. The entities, known as the technical water tables (MTAs), have improved services and relationships between barrio residents and the local water company. Established at the national level in 2000, there are now over 9000 MTAs. As of 2011, they had initiated 1500 community-managed infrastructure projects. In Caracas, the coverage of drinking water service rose from 82 % in 1998 to 89 % in 2003, and sewerage from 64 % to 72 % (McMillan et al. 2014). Through participation in the MTAs, barrio residents now have more control over the distribution practices and the design and location of water and sanitation infrastructure. While the problem of water and sanitation delivery has not been solved in Caracas, the MTAs have made service more predictable by improving the lines of communication between the barrio residents and the local water company. Now residents are given a schedule as to when water will arrive at their household and provided with tanks to store water between cycles. The successful experience of the MTAs has been scaled up to a broader range of services in institutions known as communal councils. In January 2007, Chávez proposed that such councils be created in all realms of society in order to create a new form of communal state, which would deal with questions of reproduction, such as the provision of food, water, education and healthcare services, as well as the production of these goods and services. According to the National Plan for Economic and Social Development 2007–2013, ‘since sovereignty resides absolutely in the people, the people can itself direct the state, without needing to delegate its sovereignty as it

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does in indirect or representative democracy’. The MTAs have thus prefigured Venezuela’s radical experiment in participatory democracy, which aims to create a new form of self-administered state based upon community councils. It would be a mistake to argue that Venezuela is ‘socialist’. The country’s new constitution guarantees rights to private property (and therefore capital accumulation). Although the more ‘social’ forms of production have proliferated, including worker-controlled factories and cooperatives, the private sector has actually grown vis-à-vis the public sector since the election of Chavez. While presidents Chávez and Maduro claim that they aim to build socialism, it is unclear at this point how the government will overcome this situation of ‘dual power’, one in which the old dominant class is still vying for hegemony against a new class that has gained power under the Bolivarian Revolution. As  Levitsky and Roberts (2011: 11) note, due to the enormous wealth accrued as rents during the commodities boom of the early 2000s, ‘left-ofcentre governments [have been] able to offer material benefits to popular constituencies—and to do so, moreover, without challenging property rights or adopting highly polarising redistributive measures’. As Laura Enriquez (2013) observes, it remains unclear whether a peaceful transition to socialism is possible without more radical, non-parliamentary methods. One of the positive lessons to be learned from the Venezuelan experience, however, is that ‘top down’ and ‘bottom up’ models of social transformation are too simplistic. Experiences such as the MTAs suggest that the Bolivarian process is the product of a ‘two-track approach’ that produces a creative tension between the forms of power rooted in community spaces and the state (Azzellini 2014). Questions about production, reproduction and the form of state have been the subject of intense political struggle, a contest between the opposition and the pro-government forces, as well as struggles amongst different factions within the Bolivarian process. As Steve Ellner (2014: 9) observed in the wake of the opposition protests that rocked the country in February of 2014, ‘the final outcome of the process of transformation in Venezuela will be determined not so much by those on top, but rather by the rank and file of the PSUV and allied parties and social movements in a variety of venues including, to a great extent, the streets’.

Communitarian Tradition: Bolivia In contrast to Uruguay and Venezuela, Bolivia is a majority indigenous country in which most citizens have traditionally had a very negative view of the state. Up until the election of indigenous President Evo Morales in 2004, the

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country’s first president of indigenous descent, a white or mixed race elite ruled the country even though the country is majority indigenous. The deep race/class divide in Bolivia has been described as forming a kind of ‘informal apartheid’ (Webber 2011: 4). This deep race/class divide is also reflected in the urban water and sanitation infrastructure. Similar to Venezuela, the state has historically responded to the needs and desires of the white and mixed race elite and neglected the poor, indigenous citizens. In Bolivia’s third largest urban area, Cochabamba, for example, the public water utility serves only about half of the total residents who live in the wealthier districts of the city and identify as ‘white’ or ‘mixed race’. The rest of the urban residents—particularly those in the poor, southern zone of the city where most recent arrivals from the countryside live— have taken matters into their own hands, building wells and installing their own networked infrastructure. There are believed to be about 120 of these committees, cooperatives and water associations in the area of Cochabamba (West 2014: 8). These urban residents, along with the small farmers who work in the lands surrounding the city, have fiercely defended their ‘rights’ to water based upon claims to traditional ‘uses and customs’ (Perreault 2008). These rights were tested when the government of Bolivia granted a concession to Aguas del Tunari, a subsidiary of the American construction firm, Bechtel, to run the city’s water and sanitation system in 1999. Facing pressure from the World Bank which made privatisation of Cochabamba’s water supply a condition of the terms of a structure adjustment loan, the government also hoped that private investment would help address the service deficit in the city. The contract included two very controversial measures. First, water rates skyrocketed as the private provider pushed the costs of massive new investments onto existing users. Second, the contract granted the concessionaire monopoly rights over all water resources within the concession area, prompting the phrase that the ‘even the rain’ had been privatised. Poor barrio residents and small farmers who had dug their own wells and citizens angry about their water bills joined together in a rural–urban alliance to protect their ‘uses and customs’, successfully ousting Aguas del Tunari from the country only six months after the contract was signed in a series of conflicts known as the ‘Water War’ of 2000 (Olivera and Lewis 2004). In the retellings of the Water War, commentators have observed how indigenous traditions as well as a mix of Marxism and anarchism have inspired many of the organic intellectuals who form the water justice movement in Latin America. Oscar Olivera, a former union leader and spokesperson, has found inspiration in both Andean philosophy and the ‘autonomist’ traditions practised by the Zapatistas in the Chiapas, Mexico (Albro 2005), which

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itself is inspired by Marxism.5 Understanding claims to indigenous traditions such as ‘uses and customs’, the fierce defence of the ‘commons’ and the history of Marxism in Bolivia requires a critical understanding of the history of development as a process of enclosure and dispossession (Perreault 2013; Webber 2011). On this view, ‘development’—particularly capitalist development, which has been the dominant form of development for the past two centuries—entails a violent process of social change. As Gilbert Rist (2008: 13) argues, ‘[d]evelopment consists of a set of practices, sometimes appearing to conflict with one another, which require—for the reproduction of society— the general transformation and destruction of the natural environment and of social relations. Its aim is to increase the production of commodities (goods and services) geared, by the way of exchange, to effective demand’. This critical view of development inspired by Marx’s observations regarding the process of ‘primitive accumulation’ by capitalism was originally created. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in England and Scotland, the lands that were previously held in common were cleared of the ‘commoners’ as the government passed edicts to restrict access to the ‘commons’ in order to create pasture for sheep farmers, providing inputs to the blossoming textile industry. These former ‘commoners’ became the landless workers who found employment in the nascent textile mills, creating the first forms of capitalist industry (see Robbins 2011, for an accessible primer). According to this view, markets are not ‘natural’ institutions (a la Adam Smith) but rather historical creations that entail exploitative social relationships that change over time depending on the ‘mode of production’: put simply, the way that people produce, distribute and consume. Under capitalism, the direct producers are divorced from the means of production, and instead become dependent on the market for their reproduction and subsistence. For example, if you live in industrialised Britain, USA or Canada, you probably buy water from a public or private water company, using money that you earned by selling your labour power in the market, rather than procuring water from a stream or well. In this sense, you are dependent on the market and the water that you buy is commodified, along with your labour. Today, many of the struggles to protect the ‘water commons’, particularly those by small farmers in rural areas and poor urban residents organised in water cooperatives or committees, are efforts to protect traditional forms of production, distribution and exchange that have been determined locally rather than created by states or large, profit-seeking corporations. Within these community organisations, there is mistrust of the state, ‘which sold 5

http://zapagringo.blogspot.ca/2010/12/does-evo-morales-lead-by-obeying.html

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their water rights to a private company in the not-so-distant past’ (Marston 2014: 81). As Oscar Olivera (2004: 156–157) observes, ‘the true opposite of privatisation is the social re-appropriation of wealth by working-class society, itself organised in communal structures of management, in neighbourhood associations, and in the rank and file’. Amongst water justice activists in Bolivia, this mistrust has also fostered strong feelings that it is important to maintain community autonomy from state and party structures (Dwinell and Olivera 2014). The emphasis on autonomy poses a problem, however. These small committees do not have the capital necessary to improve the quality and quantity of services that they provide to their current users. Since there is so much competition over water use, there is water scarcity in the Cochabamba Valley. Plans to build a large multipurpose dam that would also provide water to the city have been in the works for about half a century. Currently, many of these committees purchase water from private, profit-seeking water vendors called aguateros who sell water in bulk to fill their cisterns. The water is of dubious quality since these water vendors are not regulated by the state. While the small committees hope that once the dam is completed, these committees can enter into a ‘co-management’ agreement with the local water utility under which the committees would buy water in bulk from the utility but the committees would retain ownership and control over their infrastructure (Marston 2014). The difficulties that the small committees face point to a problem within this communitarian current that defends non-state alternatives to romanticise the notion of the ‘community’ as a space that is inherently more democratic and equitable than the state. As Karen Bakker (2008: 246) observes, ‘the desire for autonomy from the state is predicated upon the assumption of the innate capacity of communities; however, the state remains, in many instances, the best vehicle through which consumers’ [sic] interests can be balanced against one another, and against other interests. The need to balance equity and sustainability suggests the need for the continued, active role of the state in setting and enforcing water management criteria in communitymanaged initiatives.’ As West (2014) argues in her study of small water committees in the southern zone of Cochabamba, the Bolivian government has been reluctant to even impose regulation on the aguateros for fear that any increased costs will be passed on to the users. She finds that these committees might have some ‘autonomy’ from the state, but they do not have autonomy from small, private companies that are providing very expensive water services. That is, these community organisations cannot escape the imperatives of the market.

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Conclusion

Alternatives do not come from nowhere; solutions to local problems must be grounded in concrete realities and be appropriate to local context, considering the local social forces and histories of development. In the global North, the question regarding alternatives is more settled. Most water justice activists in the advanced capitalist countries are committed to defending public (state) models of delivery since utilities in these countries have a strong history of providing quality, universal and accessible services. For this reason, the new trend in public service delivery in the global North is the return to the state, most often the municipal government (Pigeon et al. 2012). By contrast, the main challenge facing activists defending public services in most zones of the global South, particularly in poor countries like Bolivia or even in wealthier countries such as Venezuela, is that public services have never really been that public. Although governments have invested substantial public money in infrastructure, it has not been enough. With few exceptions (such as in countries like Uruguay), formal water and sanitation networks have only served the wealthy elites living in the urban core. Although privatisation via the participation of large multinational water companies was sold to local governments and populations as a means to bring new financing and expertise to expand services, these promises turned out to be no more than ‘pipe dreams’ (Hall and Lobina 2006). After a wave of privatisation in the 1990s, by the early 2000s private water companies began to complain that the project of water privatisation was just too risky due to largescale social mobilisations in places like Bolivia and Argentina in the wake of a series of failed and cancelled contracts. The multinational water companies argued that they could not do it without more financial support from international financial institutions, thus begging the question why the private-sector participation was necessary in the first place if they could not even mobilise the promised investment, continuing to rely on public sources of financing (Hall and Lobina 2006). As a result, the pendulum has swung back in favour of state rather than market forms of provision. Given the historic problems with state-led provision, however, activists must ask themselves many questions: is it better to work within the state, lobbying for public (state) investment in order to expand access to and improve quality of existing services? Or is it necessary to build autonomous, selffinanced services outside of the state? Are these strategies mutually exclusive? As with most questions relating to strategy and struggles over ‘development’, the answer to these questions depends on the context, as well as different views on the relationships between labour, capital and the state.

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In a country like Uruguay, with a strong tradition of social democracy and progressive public-sector trade unions, the alternative to water problems has been the status quo: returning to the public, state-owned company. In Venezuela, a country with much higher levels of social inequality where the public water utility’s performance has been found wanting, the alternative to privatisation has been to introduce mechanisms of popular participation at the community level to make the public utility more accountable to the public. In Bolivia, the solution to the water problems has focused on strengthening the community water committees, but more regulation by the state is necessary in order to overcome the abuses of the local water vendors whose interests are making a profit rather than providing a public service. These concrete realities inform and are informed by different ideological perspectives within the water justice movement in Latin America.

References Albro, R. 2005. The water is ours, Carajo!: Deep citizenship in Bolivia’s water war. In Social movements: An anthropological reader, ed. J. Nash. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Azzellini, D. 2014. Venezuela’s social transformation and growing class struggle. In Crisis and contradiction: Marxist perspectives on Latin America in the global political economy, ed. S. Spronk and J.R. Webber, 138–162. Leiden: Brill Press. Bakker, K. 2007. Uncooperative commodity: Privatizing water in England and Wales. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bakker, K. 2008. The ambiguity of community: Debating alternatives to water supply privatization. Water Alternatives 1(2): 236–252. Bakker, K. 2010. Privatizing water: Governance failure and the world’s water crisis. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Bel, G., and M. Warner. 2008. Challenging issues in local privatization. Environment and Planning C: Government and Policy 26: 104–109. Budds, J., and G. McGranahan. 2003a. Are the debates on water privatization missing the point? Experiences from Africa, Asia and Latin America. Environment and Urbanization 15(2): 87–114. Budds, J., and G. McGranahan. 2003b. Privatization and the provision of urban water and sanitation in Africa, Asia and Latin America. London: International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED). http://www.iied.org/urban/documents/water_dp1.pdf Castro, J.E. 2007. Poverty and citizenship: Sociological perspectives on water services and public-private participation. Geoforum 38(5): 756–771. Castro, J.E. 2008. Neoliberal water and sanitation policies as a failed development strategy: Lessons from developing countries. Progress in Development Studies 8(1): 63–83.

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CUPE (Canadian Union of Public Employees). 1998. False savings, hidden costs: Calculating the costs of contracting out and privatization. Ottawa, ON: CUPE. Dugard, J., and K.  Drage. 2012. Shields and swords: Legal Tools for Public Water, Municipal Services Project. Occassional Paper No. 17. http://www.municipalservicesproject.org/publication/shields-and-swords-legal-tools-public-water Dwinell, A., and M. Olivera. 2014. The water is ours damn it! Water commoning in Bolivia. Community Development Journal 49(1): 44–52. Ellner, S. 2014. Chavistas debate the pace of change. North American Congress on Latin America 47(1): 4–9. Enriquez, L. 2013. The paradoxes of Latin America’s “Pink Tide”: Venezuela and the project of agrarian reform. Journal of Peasant Studies 40(4): 611–638. Goldman, M. 2007. How “water for all!” became hegemonic: The power of the world bank and its transnational policy networks. Geoforum 38(5): 786–800. Graham, S., and S. Marvin. 1994. Cherry picking and social dumping: Utilities in the 1990s. Utilities Policy 4(2): 113–119. Grigera, J. 2014. Conspicuous silences: State and class in structuralist and neostructuralist thought. In Crisis and contradiction: Marxist perspectives on Latin America in the global political economy, ed. S. Spronk and J.R. Webber, 138–162. Leiden: Brill Press. Grusky, S., and M. Fiil-Flynn. 2004. Will the world bank back down? Water privatization in a climate of global protest. Washington, DC: Public Citizen. Hall, D., and E. Lobina. 2006. Pipe dreams: The failure of the private sector to invest in water services in developing countries. London: PSIRU. Levitsky, S., and K.M. Roberts. 2011. Latin America’s “left turn”: A framework for analysis. In The resurgence of the Latin American left, ed. S.  Levitsky and K.M. Roberts, 1–30. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Marston, A.J. 2014. The scale of informality: Community-run water systems in periurban Cochabamba, Bolivia. Water Alternatives 7(1): 72–88. McDonald, D.A. 2014. Public ambiguity and the multiple meanings of corporatization. In Rethinking corporatization and public services in the global south, ed. D.A. McDonald, 1–30. London: Zed Press. McDonald, D.A., and G. Ruiters (eds.). 2005. Age of commodity: Water privatization in Southern Africa. London and Sterling, VA: Earthscan Press. McMillan, R., S. Spronk, and C. Caswell. 2014. Popular participation, equity, and co-production of water and sanitation services in Caracas, Venezuela. Water International 39(2): 201–215. Miraglia, S., and S. Spronk. 2014. Neoliberalism, social reproduction and women’s resistance: Lessons from Cambodia and Venezuela. In Polarising development: Alternatives to neoliberalism and the crisis, ed. L. Pradella and T. Marois, 98–107. London: Pluto Press. Olivera, O., 2004. Cochabamba! Water War in Bolivia SouthEnd Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts. Olivera, O., and T.  Lewis. 2004. Cochabamba: Water war in Bolivia. Cambridge, MA: South End Press.

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Panizza, F.E. 2005. The social democratisation of the Latin American left. European Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies / Revista Europea de Estudios Latinoamericanos y del Caribe 79: 95–103. Perreault, T. 2008. Custom and contradiction: Rural water governance and the politics of “usos y costumbres” in Bolivia’s irrigators’ movement. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 98(4): 834–854. Perreault, T. 2013. Dispossession by accumulation? Mining, water and the nature of enclosure on the Bolivian Altiplano. Antipode 45: 1050–1069. Pigeon, M., D.A.  McDonald, O.  Hoedeman, and S.  Kishimoto (eds.). 2012. Remunicipalization: Putting water back into public hands. Amsterdam: Transnational Institute. Rist, G. 2008. The history of development: From western origins to global faith. London: Zed Books. Robbins, R.H. 2011. Global problems and the culture of capitalism, 5th Edition. Pearson Publishers. Routledge, P. 2003. Convergence space: Process geographies of grassroots globalization networks. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 28: 333–349. Santos, C. 2006. La privatización del servicio público de agua en Uruguay. In Aguas en movimiento: La resistencia a la privatización del agua en Uruguay, ed. C. Santos, S.  Valdomir, V.  Iglesias, and D.  Renfrew, 85–100. Montevideo, Uruguay: Ediciones de la Canilla. Spronk, S., and C. Crespo. 2008. Water, sovereignty and social: Investment treaties and the struggles against multinational water companies in Cochabamba and El Alto, Bolivia. Law, Social Justice & Global Development Journal (LGD) (1). http:// www.go.warwick.ac.uk/elj/lgd/2008_1/spronk_crespo Spronk, S., C. Crespo, and M. Olivera. 2012. Struggles for water justice in Latin America: Public and “social-public” Alternatives to Commercial Models of Water Delivery. In Alternatives to Privatization in the Global South, ed. D. McDonald and G. Ruiters, 421–452. London: Earthscan. Spronk, S., C. Crespo, and M. Olivera. 2014. Modernization and the boundaries of public water in Uruguay. In Corporatization and public services in the global south, ed. D. McDonald, 107–135. London, UK: Zed Press. Stahler-Sholk, R., and H. Vanden. 2011. A Second look at Latin American social movements. Latin American Perspectives 8(1): 5–13. Swyngedouw, E. 2005. Dispossessing H2O: The contested terrain of water privatization. Capitalism, Nature, Socialism 16(1): 81–98. The Economist. 2012. The rise of state capitalism. (special issue) 21 Jan. Therhorst, P., M.  Olivera, and A.  Dwinell. 2013. Social movements, left governments, and the limits of water sector reform in the left turn. Latin American Perspectives 40(4): 55–69. Wainwright, H. 2012. Transformative resistance: The role of labour and trade unions in alternatives to privatization. In Alternatives to privatization: Public options for essential services in the global south, ed. D.A. McDonald and G. Ruiters. New York: Routledge.

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Webber, J.R. 2011. From rebellion to reform in Bolivia: Class struggle, indigenous liberation, and the political of evo morales. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books. West, M. 2014. Community water alternatives in Cochabamba, MA Thesis. Ottawa, ON: University of Ottawa. WHO and UN-Water. 2014. UN-water global analysis and assessment of sanitation and drinking-water (GLAAS) 2014 – report. Investing in water and sanitation: Increasing access, reducing inequalities. Geneva, Switzerland: World Health Organization. Wickham-Crowley, T. 1992. Guerrillas and revolutions in Latin America: A comparative study of insurgents and regimes since 1956. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Part IV New Flows of Development Finance

16 Emerging Powers in International Development: Questioning South–South Cooperation Giles Mohan

1

Introduction

For much of the post-war period, international development theories and practices, coalesced around a belief in economic growth and increasing political ‘rationality’, centred on the experiences of selected ‘Northern’ countries. While the confidence with which this development agenda was pursued has varied, it has remained hegemonic. In terms of development cooperation, the mode of engagement continued the colonial assumption of trusteeship in which ‘the North’ was deemed to have responsibility for ‘the South’ (Cowen and Shenton 1996). Despite various attempts to challenge these geographies of development cooperation, for much of this period ‘the South’ remained hemmed in by the structures of the world system. In the past two decades, this situation has changed. Within ‘the South’ a number of countries have emerged as major players in the world economy, and with this has come greater political power, and arguably cultural influence (UNDP 2013). Various titles have been given to these countries—emerging powers, rising powers, BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa). With this supposed ‘rise’ of the South have come deepening interrelations between Southern actors through trade, investment, diplomacy, aid, and migration. As such, ‘South–South’ development cooperation (hereafter

G. Mohan ( ) The Open University, UK © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 J. Grugel, D. Hammett (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of International Development, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-42724-3_16

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SSC) is a growing discourse that on the face of it challenges long-standing and uneven North–South relationships. These burgeoning ‘South–South’ relationships have been greeted in polarised ways. Some are zero-sum in seeing countries like China and India as a direct challenge to Western hegemony. Other speculations are more win– win and rather idealistic in seeing only good things emerging from SSC (Altinbas  2013; Ikenberry 2008). While raising some useful questions, this oppositional good/bad discourse is unhelpful in understanding the ideological underpinnings of various framings of ‘the South’, ‘development’, and ‘cooperation’. This polarisation also makes it hard to determine the fine-grained outcomes for development of enhanced SSC, although Hammett’s (2007) study of Cuban doctors in South Africa shows genuine benefits in terms of bringing much-needed skilled personnel to rural areas even though there were concerns about displacing domestic labour and the overall sustainability of such a bilateral agreement. To address this, we need to not only think geopolitically and geo-economically in terms of structures and interests but also understand the mediating roles of Southern states and non-state actors. As such, this chapter has two broad aims: first, to situate and critique the ideology of various versions of SSC by addressing whether SSC offers new ‘life’ for development cooperation, and, second, to provide selective evidence of what it means in practice, by asking who is benefitting from SSC.

2

Emerging from What, When, and to Where

SSC relies on a twin movement: the ‘emergence’ of the South and deepening relations between Southern actors (Golub 2013). The first set of ideological questions I want to interrogate are around historical and geographical classifications that bring with them concerns over power relations and development.

Situating the Emerging South The discourse of emergence implies a teleological model of development in which countries move from a state of underdevelopment and progress to one of modernity. Sometimes this can be seen as zero-sum in the sense that the emergence of ‘new’ powers means the decline of ‘old’ ones, as if there is only so much room for powerful states in a single system. When considering the more recent emergence of the Southern states, it is important to consider the longer histories of development and international relations (IR). In many cases, those

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states we consider as ‘Southern’ today were once the global economic, political, and intellectual leaders (Majid 2013)—the Islamic Mediterranean empire, Indian Ocean trade networks, and so on. Even if we focus on formal development cooperation, these so-called ‘emerging’ donors have longer histories of support for other parts of the Global South (Manning 2006; Quadir 2013). As a result of these deeper histories, it might be more appropriate to discuss the rise of these countries as re-emergence and to be aware of the role of imperialism in rendering once prosperous regions underdeveloped. Ideologically and theoretically, it is also vital not to view this re-emergence in teleological terms, which can feed into reactionary nationalist politics in the countries concerned in which their ‘rise’ is viewed as rightful, inevitable, and as a way of demonising ‘the North’ while at the same time benefitting from a global economy still centred on it. Rather development is always a relational process involving more than one country (Watts 2003) such that these autocentric accounts of development belie complex interdependencies. The development geography of ‘the South’ is variegated and formed from interconnections as opposed to bounded and absolutist categories (e.g., Chinese capitalism, African patrimonialism). The discourse of ‘emergence’ also begs the question of what constitutes this process. Most accounts place central emphasis on sustained economic growth. China had more or less double-digit growth rates from the early 1990s up to 2008, while India’s averaged around 7 % for the same period. As the emerging powers account for a higher percentage of total global output, their political influence has grown (McEwan and Mawdsley 2012). Here China is seen as the pre-eminent political player, but by acting through existing multilateral networks—such as the G20, World Trade Organisation (WTO), UN Security Council—these emerging powers are having more influence on world affairs (Shaw et  al. 2009). Others point to a growing cultural influence through global media and events such as the Olympics and World Cups, which have been, or will be soon, held in South Africa, China, Brazil, Russia, and Qatar. The growth discourse also feeds into classifications such as BRICS, MINT (Mexico, Indonesia, Nigeria, and Turkey), or N(ext) (N11) (Bangladesh, Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines, Turkey, South Korea, and Vietnam). These groupings are used to signal a shared location in the teleology of development: the BRICS countries have arrived and the Next 11 will do so soon. But these are boosterist labels designed to lure investors and traders, and were coined by global economic consultancy firms. While I return to questions of commonality, the key is that such groupings conceal great variation in terms of levels of development, social infrastructure, political systems, and connectedness to virtuous economic processes. So in

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discussing SSC, we have to be very wary about who is ‘Southern’ and what being ‘of the South’ is used for in geopolitical and geoeconomic negotiations.

The South as Counterhegemonic Resistance In terms of historicising these newer groupings and alignments, there have been previous attempts at developing South–South alliances. The term ‘The South’ emerged in the 1970s as both part of and reaction to a broad ‘dependency’ critique. Similar phrases like ‘Third World’ and ‘underdeveloped’ were felt to carry negative connotations of lack whereas ‘North’ and ‘South’ spoke to a symbolic geography of shared experience and aspiration. Despite its globality and polite radicalism, much actual South–South interaction was cross-border (e.g., circular migration, refugees, wars). By comparison the notion of SSC is a more purposive political project of (potential) counterhegemony. During the Cold War, a series of relatively amorphous movements took shape to challenge Western dominance and/or the East/West geopolitical divide. The Bandung Conference of 1955, the concepts of Third Worldism and non-alignment, and efforts like the New International Economic Order (NIEO) were attempts by the South to carve out a space in a global economy that was seen to create dependency (see Golub 2013). Contemporary SSC carries traces of these previous discourses, although it is freed from some of the Cold War trade-offs in which being ‘non-aligned’ carried important implications for aid or military interventions. But the question remains as to why SSC has become such a ‘buzzword’. The Bandung era was one of optimism at the point of mass decolonisation with solidarity, an important claim in the polarised geopolitics of the Cold War. The oil crises of the 1970s, the debt crisis, and subsequent Structural Adjustment era of the 1980s saw Southern countries focusing inwards on reforms. It was only from the 1990s that the possibilities for the nascent SSC initiatives could take hold. First, the rise of the East Asian Newly Industrialized Countries (NICs) in the 1980s and, then, of China, India, and Brazil in the 1990s showed that Southern development was possible and with it came a growing voice within global politics (Stuenkel 2013). Their power was greater than at Bandung and so has been able to push the agenda harder and further, notably the move to the G20. Second, partly as a backlash against the intrusiveness of Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs) and their relative lack of success, the call came for more Southern initiatives to challenge these failed Northern ones. This built on the long-standing dependency critiques and was given credence by the seemingly more autocentric experience of China and India in achieving

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growth. Aware of this critique and the shifting locus of global power, established multilateral organisations started to redefine their role away from that of ‘trustee’ to one where the catchwords were Southern ‘ownership’ of development processes as well as more ‘harmonisation’ of efforts. Such shifts saw the move to Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs) (Hickey and Mohan 2008), the launching of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), and coalesced in the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness (PDAE) in 2005, which has rolled out through a series of High Level Forums (HLFs) since.

3

Positioning South–South Cooperation

One of the problems when analysing SSC is that it is a highly normative discourse about what ‘should be’ rather than what is, so that when we try to assess current practices they are generally found wanting. On top of this, SSC can be part of quite formal multilateral and bilateral initiatives, but is also found in emergent and informal networks. Also most statements about SSC do not clarify the underpinning vision(s) of development. As noted, the initial impetus for SSC was the Cold War period of decolonisation and it carried quite political connotations concerning an assertion of sovereignty in the context of Western neocolonialism. Gradually SSC evolved into a more formal, but equally amorphous, set of prescriptions. At the broadest level SSC has been defined as, ‘a broad framework for collaboration among countries of the South in the political, economic, social, cultural, environmental and technical domains. Involving two or more developing countries, it can take place on a bilateral, regional, subregional or interregional basis. Developing countries share knowledge, skills, expertise and resources to meet their development goals through concerted efforts’ (UNOSSC: http://ssc. undp.org/content/ssc/about/faq.html). The emphasis of this definition is around sharing and transfer to meet common development goals. They are carefully worded so as not to be prescriptive about what development means, so long as it is consensual. It also covers a range of development actors and operates at multiple scales, from grandiose projects like the Tazara Railway in East Africa funded by Chinese aid in the 1970s to relatively small and lowkey agreements in health and agriculture (Hammett 2007; Amanor 2013). In keeping with neo-liberal developmentalism, much contemporary SSC is around ‘partnerships’, which imply equal power. While the list of possible activity areas is broad, the onus is on skills and knowledge (Jules and de Sa e Silva 2008). Hence for much of the period since SSC was formally recognised in the early-mid 1970s, it has meant

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technical cooperation. This covers things like agricultural expertise, medical training and personnel, or basic manufacturing know-how (Hammett 2007). However, with the rise of economic powerhouses in China and India, in particular, we see greater flows of trade from Southern producers to these Asian consumers, as well as manufactured goods in the other direction. As such, South–South trade is very much part of SSC. Underpinning SSC is an implicit notion of solidarity based on some shared notion of (under)development. While the Bandung Conference had a political agenda around decolonisation, such that having being colonised was a unifying experience, more recent SSC is based on being ‘Southern’. For example, ‘South-South Cooperation ensures greater empathy between southern countries and a better understanding of realistic strategies for problem resolution’ (van Reisen 2011: 3). The implication is that ‘empathy’ and ‘understanding’ will help ensure success, which is a moral and intellectual resource that ‘Northern’ countries cannot muster in their trustee-based approaches to development cooperation. Given that being ‘of the South’ is a fluid and ideological positioning, the rest of the chapter assesses how far these ideals are realised. A problem with these open-ended definitions is that the underlying ideology is never made explicit, which makes it hard to evaluate the processes critically. What underpins different versions of SSC and how, as analysts, we can make sense of this? Here I examine Marxist, realist, liberal, and functionalist interpretations of SSC. In practice, the ideological justification for SSC combines elements of these depending on the speaker and their audience. The original push came on the back of a Marxist critique of the global economy. Here SSC was a radical alternative about autonomous development outside of dominant processes of the global economy. Whether this was ever viable is a different matter but the point is that SSC was about ‘delinking’ from what were seen as damaging relations. A realist reading of SSC argues that it is about pursuing state-based interests vis-à-vis other states. In particular, regional alliances involving a regional hegemon might be evidence of one state using ‘South-South’ linkages to advance its interests. A more liberal reading of SSC is that cooperation is a rational strategy to advance the total welfare of the global system, but that the institutions set up to deliver equitable development are not fit for purpose. They may be unrepresentative of the diversity of the Global South or inefficient, such that SSC is about altering the constitution and operation of these institutions. Finally, a functionalist reading is not unconnected to liberalism in arguing for improving development practice through knowledge transfer. The unquestioned assumption is that cooperation and development are impeded by imperfect knowledge such that enhancing knowledge exchange will overcome the blockages.

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A second move is to think about the wider political economy in which ‘development’ takes place. Here I follow Hart’s (2001: 650) distinction between D-development and d-development whereby ‘“big D” Development (is) defined as a post-second world war project of intervention in the “third world” that emerged in the context of decolonisation and the cold war, and “little d” development or the development of capitalism as a geographically uneven, profoundly contradictory set of historical processes’. Hart urges us to consider how global capitalism must be both actively created and constantly reworked, and also resisted. In this framing, the liberal and functionalist views of SSC are more around the project of D-development, whereas South–South trade is part of d-development. And Marxian approaches to SSC are about ultimately seeking to over-turn the hegemonic order. This framing allows us to take at face value the well-meaning attempts at South–South knowledge transfer, for example, but with awareness that this might effectively endorse global inequality by not challenging its systemic roots. As we have discussed, SSC is normative, ideologically opaque, and involves a complex array of actors. If we are to move beyond the normative, we have to address the operation of power and the fundamental question of who benefits. This requires analysis of practices rather than the generalisations of policy statements. We also need to bind what is an amorphous field, so I will focus on two broad areas: the UN SSC initiatives which are more D-development in orientation, and those of the BRICS which can be seen as d-development, though clearly there is overlap and arguably some convergence.

4

The UN World of South–South Cooperation: D-development Business as Usual

In terms of more formal SSC, it is through the UN system that most work has been orchestrated. At Bandung in 1955, there was an informal agreement by independent African and Asian states to work as a bloc in the UN, and in 1964 United Nations Conference on Technology and Development (UNCTAD) hosted a conference at which the G77 was formed (since expanded to over 130 countries). Shortly after, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) was formed which has become a major champion of SSC and over the next 10 years a series of moves around technical cooperation among developing countries (TCDC) culminated in the Buenos Aires Plan of Action (BAPA) in 1978. As the name suggests, TCDC concerns technical issues and is defined as: ‘two or more developing countries pursue their individual or collective development through cooperative exchanges of knowledge, skills, resources and

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technical know-how’ (UNOSSC: http://ssc.undp.org/content/ssc/about/faq. html). The BAPA laid the foundations for much of what has happened since and its 38 recommendations cover the strengthening of national systems of innovation and their ability to link up with institutions from other nations in the developing world. Such capacity building also needed to be achieved at regional and global levels so as to facilitate the inter-country exchanges. Much of the 1980s was spent servicing SAPs, meaning relatively little progress was made on SSC. The promulgation of the MDGs in 2000 gave a platform for common goals across countries and in 2003 the UN instituted 19 December as The UN Day for SSC which was the date the BAPA was signed, and the year after the Special Unit of TCDC that had been set up in 1974 was renamed the Special Unit for SSC. This renaming reflected a broadening of the definition of SSC away from technical matters to encompass broader economic and political collaboration. TCDC and SSC were, and still are, envisaged as a complement to North– South cooperation rather than a replacement for it. As such, under the UN system SSC has not been a development alternative but something to be accommodated into the dominant development paradigm and the postwar architecture of Northern-led IR.  Arguably with shrinking aid budgets in the North, the need to encourage Southern states to provide support to backfill funding shortfalls was pragmatic rather than ethically motivated. That said demands for a NIEO in the mid-1970s was a more transformatory d-development agenda, but was quashed by powerful countries. In this sense, and following Hart (2001), the UN’s D-development agenda of SSC is welcomed because it does not challenge the hegemony of a liberal system centred on a small coterie of developed nations. Rather than simply dismiss SSC, we need to assess its efficacy and impact. Given the diversity of programmes for SSC, it is difficult to know where to cut into these complex institutional arrangements. We will take as our starting point the UN Office for South–South Cooperation (UNOSSC), which is mandated to enable SSC and to ‘mainstream’ it throughout the UN system and wider development community (Simplicio 2010). In terms of mainstreaming SSC, most UN agencies, including the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), International Labour Organisation (ILO), UNCTAD, and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) have SSC initiatives and units, while bilaterals such as Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) are also active. UNDP (2009) notes that funding for SSC has increased against generally flat levels of development funding suggesting its importance is on the rise, but it is also viewed as more cost effective than some other modalities. As such, SSC may be preferred because it reduces

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some transaction costs for policy delivery rather than through any desire to radically rethink development cooperation. In a blog Dan Bradley (2012), a Department for International Development (DFID) adviser, asked rhetorically ‘So why was DFID supporting a workshop on the role of South-South cooperation? Isn’t South-South supposed to be about southern voices, without “traditional donors” getting in the way?’ It does seem oxymoronic that Northern development agencies are leading in SSC but the circle is squared by the notion of ‘triangular cooperation’. This refers to ‘a form of collaboration in which traditional donor countries and/ or multilateral organisations facilitate South-South initiatives of two or more developing countries through the provision of funding, training and management and technological systems as well as other forms of support’ (UNOSSC: http://ssc.undp.org/content/ssc/about/faq.html). Triangulation is part of the aid effectiveness agenda in which ‘ownership’ of SSC (or other development policies) resides with the Southern actors concerned, and the European Union has been pushing this agenda hard for the past few years. Triangulation also reveals that while SSC has elements of multilateralism, in practice, most projects are primarily bilateral between two developing countries (UN 2009, 2013a; Hammett 2007). One of the reasons for the shift from TCDC to SSC was recognition of the role of the private sector and Civil Society Organisations (CSOs). TCDC has been a state-centric affair whereas SSC recognises the plurality of actors. Indeed the UN conceded in a series of recent reports (UN 2013a, b) that it is corporations, through trade and investment, which have done most to promote South–South links. Such recognition also played gradually into the thinking of Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the post–Paris Declaration HIgh Level Fora on Aid Effectiveness (HLFs). The OECD set up the Task Team on South–South Cooperation (TT-SSC) following the Accra HLF in 2008 and contributed to the Bogota Statement (2010) on Effective and Inclusive Development Partnerships (EIDPs). In this we gradually saw a recognition of the need to include the larger middle-income countries (MICs), notably China, India, and Brazil. The discourse is still somewhat vague but based on the comparative advantages of respective actors (UNDP 2009) and now includes a wider set of issues beyond technical cooperation. There are too many SSC projects to engage with in any detail, though various collections of case studies exist (UNDP 2009; Modi 2011; UNOSSCJICA 2013). The lessons emerging show a familiar set of issues: information available to share with other projects is generally lacking, successful projects need champions in the countries concerned, better coordination is needed

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within and between countries, key states driving SSC often lack long-term strategies, project beneficiaries are not always optimally involved, the alignment with triangular cooperation is limited, and monitoring and evaluation is weak. Within the UN-orchestrated SSC initiatives, the UN system remains quite fragmented so commitment to and impacts of SSC are ad hoc and uneven (UN 2013a). In short, many of the issues relating to SSC are no different from North–South cooperation. In terms of the ethos of SSC, there is nothing about ‘empathy’ producing more appropriately designed projects or leading to more effective implementation. Rather it is bureaucratic rigidities and the complexity of projects that hamper their effectiveness. While triangular cooperation appears an advance on crude conditionality, it remains problematic in terms of power relations. First, Jules and de Sa e Silva (2008) observe that the Southern partners in triangular cooperation may simply mimic the best practices in order to secure funding. As such, these funding models do little to promote Southern innovation and so break the hegemonic power of the North over the South. Second, there is something of an unwritten ‘hub and spoke’ model with some Southern countries acting as ‘pivots’ and others as ‘beneficiaries’. Much SSC activity is between MICs and the very poorest countries contribute little, which speaks to a South–South hierarchy not dissimilar to more marked North–South hierarchies. On the other side, SSC signals something about a country’s ‘Southerness’. With aid agencies like DFID rethinking their support for China and India on the basis of their middle-income status, we are seeing a differentiated ‘South’. Part of being able to offer SSC (or to reject western aid) is a marker of one’s success as a MIC; ‘we’ have the resources and experience to assist others.

5

The World of BRICS Cooperation: d-development Business as Usual

The wider context for the rise of the BRICS is the restructuring of the global economy from the mid-1970s and liberalisation of the 1980s onwards. The relocation of production to the East Asian NICs and Japanese firms’ pivotal role in these value chains, combined with China’s strategies of inward investment-led growth, saw the wider East Asia region growing economically and integrating. The SAPs that dominated the late 1980s onwards also liberalised Southern economies and in the case of African countries opened them to international capital, the BRICS included. The upshots are increasing South–South trade, a degree of economic muscle that was lacking in the 1950s to 1970s, and a broadening of SSC from technical to economic cooperation.

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As we noted, groupings like BRICS or emerging powers conceal great diversity, but there are some commonalities which impact on how they perceive and ‘do’ SSC (Shaw et al. 2009; Hurrell 2006). These countries share an experience of being colonised by European powers; their recent growth has been based on internationalisation rather than ‘de-linking’, and during the Cold War they were not key to the US-centred alliances of Western Europe and Japan/South Korea. In terms of international engagement, these countries broadly practise a state-determined foreign policy, and use soft power in their diplomacy (Davies 2010). Arguably they face some similar challenges, notably containing highly uneven growth and balancing rapid growth with environmental sustainability. While the BRICS and their progeny—MINT and N11—steal the limelight, regional groupings in the South have existed for some time (Giacalone 2013). These include the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) (1967), Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) (1975), Southern African Development Community (SADC) (1980), South Asian Associated for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) (1985), and MERCOSUR (1991). Their origins differed but they share an emphasis on preferential trade between member states, a collective commitment to developing regional infrastructure, and a desire to act more coherently as a political grouping in international affairs. Importantly for a critical analysis of SSC in all cases one member state is more powerful than the rest—China in ASEAN, Nigeria in ECOWAS, South Africa in SADC, India in SAARC, and Brazil in MERCOSUR.  As such, these regional groupings can not only enhance cooperation and ‘voice’ but also serve to strengthen the hegemony of one regional power. BRICS are an attempt to articulate an agenda that lies between the global and regional levels, but in doing so the strength of these regional hegemons are enhanced. Like SSC, in general, the initiatives the BRICS pursue are quite ad hoc and overlapping (Quadir 2013). More formal structures began to emerge around the turn of the millennium with the G20 formed in 1999, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation formed in 2001, the IBSA (India, Brazil, and South Africa) Dialogue Forum in 2003, and the first formal BRICS summit in Russia in 2009 (Vanaik 2013; Taylor 2009). While most BRICS-based alliances are informal, the most significant are those where these countries sit alongside Northern states. The G20 was formally recognised in 2009 as the ‘club’ of the richest nations that accounted for around 85 % of world output, while the UN Security Council and WTO are the key multilateral forums for emerging powers to engage the North. While most of these initiatives have been talking shops, recent developments signal more purposive South–South interventions. In March 2013, the BRICS Development Bank was launched in South Africa with contributions from

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respective national development or export–import banks (Stuenkel 2013). While its initial funding is small, the focus is largely on infrastructure financing with a commitment to pursuing the norms of the BRICS states regarding development cooperation not being conditional. It will also open the door for tying of aid, which the Development Assistance Committee (DAC) has sought to banish, albeit with limited success. Some have criticised the infrastructure focus as outdated because development policy acknowledges the interplay of multiple factors rather than supply-side injections (Rodrik 2013). Others see the BRICS Bank as brinksmanship, because the promised reforms of the Bretton Woods Institutions have been slow, so by proposing an alternative it is hoped the process will speed up. Whatever the outcomes of these unfolding institutions, it remains the case that meaningful SSC is economic rather than diplomatic, and in this lie the possibilities and threats of deeper cooperation. The value of South–South trade was US$4 trillion in 2013, about 25–30 % of all global trade. Crucially, from 2008 Southern countries exported more to other Southern countries than Northern ones, currently standing at 56 %. And given the relative buoyancy of the emerging powers, South–South trade was less affected by the global recession from 2008 and bounced back quicker. However, if we disaggregate these broad flows we see a differentiated geography of trade. Most South–South trade is within and to Asia (c.80 %), which is about the subcontracting chains within South East and East Asia. By contrast most exports from Africa are unprocessed commodities, whereas those exports from Asia are manufactured products, and for Latin America the picture is more mixed. For African countries their reliance on other Southern countries as destinations for exports has grown from 31 % in 1995 to 62 % in 2013, and much of this is to China. A corollary is that there is much less intra-Africa trade than there used to be, which means greater dependence on one or two importing countries. And if the economic fortunes of these major importers, notably China, slows then demand is affected quickly. As the saying goes, ‘When China sneezes Africa catches a cold’. So, South–South trade signals greater economic integration but is not a panacea for less developed countries (Tull 2006) These trade relations between China and Africa begin to reveal the limitations of broad-brush statements around SSC.  While we have seen coordinated efforts around China–Africa relations, notably the successive Forum on China–Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) meetings, much remains bilateral. And while the rhetoric of equals (‘Socialist brothers’ or experiencing colonisation) infuses public rhetoric around China and Africa, the relationships are deeply uneven. Even South Africa, the ‘S’ of BRICS, is nowhere near the same levels as China and India and its inclusion can be seen as an attempt to give credibility to the BRICS as genuinely ‘Southern’ by including an African part-

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ner, particularly the one with whom China does most of its African business. As Hurrell (2006) terms it, the ‘developing country identity’ of BRICS is in tension with their ‘aspiring great power identity’. The other arm of SSC that China brings to Africa is ‘aid’ which feed into wider debates around ‘emerging donors’ (Woods 2008). Some aid between China and Africa exists, particularly in the area of technical cooperation, and after years of pointedly not referring to aid as a vehicle for SSC, the Chinese government issued Aid White Papers in 2011 and 2014, which signals a tentative recognition of its role in this arena. But more usual in China–Africa relations is a mercantilist model that sees the bundling of trade, investment, and some form of concessional financing (Brautigam 2009). While these deals are framed in terms of not interfering in domestic sovereignty, the nature of these loans means that there are stringent commercial conditions as distinct from those of governance reform bound up in the Washington and post– Washington consensus approaches. While it is beyond the scope of this chapter (see Power et  al. 2012) to tease out the variegated impacts of Chinese aid and investment in Africa, the assumption that it is distinctly ‘South–South’ aid is misplaced. A series of studies (Dreher et al. 2011; Reisen and Ndoye 2008) suggest that Chinese concessional lending is not qualitatively different from OECD lending, and there is little evidence to support the claim that the Chinese disproportionately invest in politically repressive states. As (Quadir 2013: 332) observes ‘non-DAC donors have not yet shown any clear promise of building alternative aid structures to promote their vision of development through mutual cooperation and collaboration’. The renewed focus the Chinese have brought on infrastructure is important, but to only focus on the ‘hardware’ of d-development without attending to institutional and distributive issues is short sighted. Moreover, just like Western donors before them, Chinese technical cooperation can be seen as part of soft power diplomacy designed to generate goodwill between nations that will smooth accompanying or future economic relations. Most SSC is state centric but globalisation largely concerns non-state actors, both elite and subaltern. And on the ground we find a major disjuncture between the official discourses of solidarity and entrenched racially differentiated attitudes among non-official actors (Mohan 2013). The BRICS appear to present a united front from the aspirant leaders of the emerging powers, but in reality huge differences exist within them, and between the BRICS and the rest. Paradoxically it was China’s liberalisation from the early 1980s which ushered in rapid growth that really ended the facade of Third Worldism based on shared underdevelopment (Golub 2013) even as China champions itself as the voice of the South. Moves towards

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the G20 and institutionalising BRICS are in Golub’s (2013) words about ‘remaking capitalism from within’. In this context of an emergent, but highly unequal, multipolar world order the BRICS have never been about SSC but rather establishing a counterweight to US hegemony, while at the same time recognising the centrality of the USA and the necessity of the capitalist system on which this order is founded. As such, the BRICS are about ‘balancing’ rather than ‘challenging’ Northern dominance (Hurrell 2006).

6

Conclusion: A Variegated South

Returning to my original questions, does SSC breathe new life into development cooperation, and who benefits? In terms of D-development, there have been some positives in terms of technical cooperation, but these remain relatively localised and fragmented. They are important in and of themselves but do not coalesce into anything approaching a new development paradigm. Indeed their fragmentation might be encouraged precisely because it does not aggregate into something more systemic, like the earlier NIEO that could challenge dominant political relations. And the very complexity of multiple, bilateral projects means that those institutions charged with aggregation and ‘mainstreaming’ face a very tough challenge. The notion of triangular cooperation does signal a shift away from more brutal displays of conditionality in development policy, but does not usurp the power of Northern agencies. In this context, SSC has a radical and feel-good cache without challenging anything, and functions as a malleable ‘boundary concept’ (Green 2010) which multiple actors of different ideological persuasions can buy into without conceding their deeper interests. As Hart (2001) notes such D-development initiatives function as a form of governmentality to contain the social disembedding released by d-development. As such, formal SSC can obfuscate, and so legitimise, the deeper structural processes of d-development. SSC plays into an existing and hierarchical international order, where neoliberalism dominates (Amanor 2013). The emerging powers complicate this hierarchy, blurring the lines between ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ countries as difference within the South grows. Re-emergent Southern actors have managed to ruffle feathers at a time when the DAC donors were engaged in a process of introspection, but do not really challenge established practices, and actually give credence to them by endorsing greater Southern ‘voice’ in processes that have hitherto excluded them. On the other side, DAC donors, who represent states that are keen to do business with the emerging powers, have to ‘honour’ the success of these countries while not condoning things such as

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the lack of ‘true’ democracy. Here we see D-development and d-development in conflict. As a result, DAC states tread a careful path of engaging with the emerging powers as fellow capitalists and seeking access to their markets while chastising them at the margins in an attempt to stay true to their liberal roots of good governance and the ‘softer’ aspects of D-development. In this context, while technical D-development exchanges are welcomed, other forms of SSC are demonised, notably where ‘rogue lenders’ (Naim 2007) are seen to engage in unscrupulous South–South activities (the Iran–Venezuela alliance being a case in point). Much of this is about established Western powers fighting to retain influence and market share and so engage in hawkish demonising of ‘new’ donors and investors. As such, triangular cooperation can be used selectively to promote activities that do not challenge the status quo. For the BRICS, SSC is not a radical alternative vision of development but more about realist, d-development self-interest, such as accessing African resources or cementing the position of key powers as regional hegemons, which further erodes the normative ideals of SSC. The rise of South–South trade and ‘aid’, either bilaterally or through the BRICS bank, can stimulate growth in supplier countries but the key is to avoid a resource curse and spread the benefits of growth to other sectors and sections of the population. Likewise, the infrastructure provided through resource-backed loans is much needed but evidence suggests that the benefits tend to be skewed towards elites, not to mention the new avenues for elite-based corruption that these sources of finance bring. Diplomatic efforts in the WTO, G20, and other multilateral organisations are really about using these fluid international alliances to get a seat at the ‘big boys table’ (Vanaik 2013) while at the same time pulling the ladder up behind.

References Altinbas, D. 2013. South-south cooperation: A counter-hegemonic movement? In The rise of the global south: Philosophical, geopolitical and economic trends of the 21st century, ed. J. Dargin, 29–66. Singapore: World Scientific. Amanor, K. 2013. South–south cooperation in Africa: Historical, geopolitical and political economy dimensions of international development. IDS Bulletin 44(4): 20–30. Bradley, D. 2012. Should traditional donors be interfering in South-South cooperation? Future Agricultures Blog. http://www.future-agricultures.org/blog/entry/shouldtraditional-donors-be-interfering-in-south-south-cooperation#.U6FqICgyCxI. Last accessed 23 June 14. Brautigam, D. 2009. The dragon’s gift: The real story of China in Africa. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Cowen, M., and R. Shenton. 1996. Doctrines of development. London: Routledge. Davies, P. 2010. South-south cooperation: Moving towards a new aid dynamic. In  Southsouth cooperation: The same old game or a new paradigm? Poverty in Focus No. 20, ed. R. Roy, 11–13. Brasilia: International Policy Centre for Inclusive Growth, UNDP. Dreher, A., P.  Nunnenkamp, and R.  Thiele. 2011. Are “new” donors different? Comparing the allocation of bilateral aid between Non-DAC and DAC donor countries. World Development 39(11): 1950–1968. Giacalone, R. 2013. South-south cooperation: A bridge between regionalism and globalization? In The rise of the global south: Philosophical, geopolitical and economic trends of the 21st century, ed. J. Dargin, 67–92. Singapore: World Scientific. Golub, P. 2013. From the new international economic order to the G20: How the ‘global South’ is restructuring world capitalism from within. Third World Quarterly 34(6): 1000–1015. Green, M. 2010. Making development agents: Participation as boundary object in international development. Journal of Development Studies 46(7): 1240–1263. Hammett, D. 2007. Cuban intervention in South African health care service provision. Journal of Southern African Studies 33(1): 63–81. Hart, G. 2001. Development critiques in the 1990s: Cul de sac and promising paths. Progress in Human Geography 25(4): 649–658. Hickey, S., and G. Mohan. 2008. Poverty reduction strategies, participation and the politics of accountability. Review of International Political Economy 15(2): 234–258. Hurrell, A. 2006. Hegemony, liberalism and global order: What space for would-be great powers? International Affairs 82(1): 1–19. Ikenberry, J. 2008. The rise of China and the future of the west. Foreign Affairs 87(1): 23–37. Jules, T., and M. sá e Silva. 2008. How different disciplines have approached south-south cooperation and transfer. Society for International Education Journal 5(1): 45–64. Majid, A. 2013. How the south was born: Reflections on the geography and culture of inequality. In The rise of the global south: Philosophical, geopolitical and economic trends of the 21st century, ed. J. Dargin, 3–28. Singapore: World Scientific. Manning, R. 2006. Will “emerging donors” change the face of international cooperation. Development Policy Review 24(4): 371–85. McEwan, C., and E. Mawdsley. 2012. Trilateral development cooperation: Power and politics in emerging aid relations. Development and Change 43(6): 1185–1209. Modi, R. (ed.). 2011. South-south cooperation: Africa on the centre stage. London: Palgrave McMillan. Mohan, G. 2013. Chinese migrants as agents of south-south cooperation. In The rise of the global south: Philosophical, geopolitical and economic trends of the 21st century, ed. J. Dargin, 283–322. Singapore: World Scientific. Naim, M. 2007. Rogue aid. Foreign Policy 159: 95–96 (March/April). Power, M., G.  Mohan, and M.  Tan-Mullins. 2012. Powering development: China’s energy diplomacy and Africa’s future. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

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17 The New Philanthropy: Private Power in International Development Policy? Michael Moran and Diane Stone

1

Introduction

Philanthropy has long been a source of finance for international development, and private philanthropic foundations have been significant actors across key development sectors. The Rockefeller Foundation, for instance, was critical in the expansion of the international health architecture which contributed to the establishment of the League of Nations Health Organisation (LNHO), and its successor, the World Health Organisation (Youde 2013: 144–145). With the Ford Foundation, it was also integral to the ‘Green Revolution’ in agriculture and the establishment of the umbrella Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (Herdt 2012). The Grameen Bank was in part catalysed by the Ford Foundation when it secured a loan for Muhammad Yunus for its formative microfinance demonstration project (Ford Foundation 1991). The Ford Foundation, and others including the MacArthur Foundation, also aided the construction of global civil society by financing non-governmental activity from the 1970s. Philanthropy has deep roots in international development and in many respects its present influence in building transnational policy partnerships are far from novel. However, changes in the political economy of development finance have altered the landscape of development. At the macro level, private aid flows have grown M. Moran ( ) Swinburne University of Technology, Australia D. Stone University of Warwick, UK © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 J. Grugel, D. Hammett (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of International Development, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-42724-3_17

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significantly since 2000 (Desai and Kharas 2014). Continuing strains have been placed on the bilateral and multilateral aid systems, while the efficacy of official approaches to aid financing has been questioned (Easterly 2006). In this context philanthropy’s relative importance and influence has increased (Desai and Kharas 2014). On the one hand, the so-called ‘new development philanthropy’ has performed a function of providing required finance in critical areas where official donor support has been inadequate or state or market failure has occurred. On the other, philanthropy has played an active role in shaping and structuring international development policy, with implications for the politics of aid. New institutional mechanisms for aid delivery and product development in global health, notably public–private partnerships (PPPs), partly have their genesis in private foundations, in particular the Rockefeller and The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundations (BMGF) (Moran 2014). Other transnational policy partnerships, focussed on the diffusion of expertise to developing and transition countries, have been established by the George Soros funded Open Society Foundations (OSF) network (Stone 2013). These distinctive partnerships show that philanthropy, especially private foundations, can be seen as a (re-)emerging power in international development policy. This chapter examines how foundations and private philanthropy influence development policy. We begin by placing international development philanthropy in context, outlining the scale of flows and traditional and emerging foundation-driven approaches to development interventions. We then briefly outline the activities of two distinctive foundations—the BMGF and OSF—which differ in legal form, sectoral focus and to some extent in organisational culture to illustrate how foundations, as distinctive actors, can shape development policy. In the final section, we outline the challenges of foundation interventions and the implications for development philanthropy.

2

Philanthropy and International Development: Continuity and Change

Changes in overseas development assistance are taking place at the intersection between the public and the private spheres. A range of factors—the proliferation of global programmes, such as PPPs, the increasing involvement of the private sector in development (Di Bella et al. 2013) and dramatically increased involvement by non-state actors—have moved development assistance from its position as largely the preserve of bilateral and multilateral donors (Desai and Kharas 2014). These structural and institutional changes have provided a space for the return of philanthropy and foundations as active players in development aid.

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Scale of Philanthropic Flows Following a period from the 1970s, when the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations were the only major players (responsible for over 50 % of all international grants from the USA from 1975 to 1995 (Herdt 2012: 185)), a small, but significant, reorientation of American philanthropy towards development was discernible from the 1990s. Foundations from the technology sector, including the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, began scaling up international grant-making in global development and population and reproductive health. This trend gathered pace throughout the 2000s with the emergence of other entities from technology sector such as the Skoll Foundation, the Omidyar Network and the BMGF. According to the Foundation Centre (2012: 1), in 2010, US foundations distributed US$4.3 billion to international grants, comprising 21 % of all giving (or 14.1 %, if the BMGF is excluded from the data set). In relative terms, international grants are larger than domestic grants but must be counterbalanced with data, which indicates that less than 10 % of US foundation grants, by volume of individual grants, goes to international causes (Foundation Centre 2012: 1). One reason is that the majority of US international grants pass through official intermediaries, such as the World Bank, North American or European-headquartered NGOs and multisectoral global funds such as the GAVI Alliance. Data collection on private giving to international development causes remains poor. A limited number of countries amass reliable data, such as the USA, and only through non-profit initiatives that rely on publicly mandated tax data. Furthermore, incommensurate national accounting and taxation systems, which use different definitions of philanthropy, confound effective comparison of financial flows (Johnson 2010: 5). Important political–cultural differences have also been noted: ‘Americans give 60 % of their charitable donations to religious organisations and only 2 % to international aid, whereas the British give 14 % of their donations to international aid and only 8 % to religious organizations … (and) surveys show that Europeans are more likely to believe their moral duties are better fulfilled through paying taxes to the government than through the “arbitrary” channels of private donations’ (Illingworth et al. 2011: 3–4). The World Bank has attempted to quantify the scale of international giving since the idea of ‘philanthrocapitalism’ (Bishop and Green 2008) became fashionable. The results were sobering: In 2005, roughly US$4.5 billion was devoted to international development (Sulla 2007), compared to the

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US$100 billion that the OECD Development Assistance Committee (DAC) estimated as the total of official development assistance (ODA) provided by country members (Riddell 2007). Once the modest contributions of philanthropy became evident—barely 1 % of all the world’s foundations conduct activities that touch on developing countries—the World Bank focussed analysis on more promising avenues of development finance such as levels of remittances to developing countries. The Hudson Institute—through its Centre for Global Prosperity—produces an annual Index of Global Philanthropy and Remittances, detailing the sources and magnitude of private giving to the developing world. The Centre has faced similar challenges in its efforts to capture philanthropic flows, which it asserts are significantly under-reported by DAC members in their submissions to the OECD (Centre for Global Prosperity 2013: 11–12). In partnership with 14 countries it has worked to redress this discrepancy to provide a more accurate picture of philanthropic flows. As a snapshot, in 2013 it found that in the 2008–2011 period the USA dispersed US$39 billion in private donations to developing countries (against $23.28 billion as reported to the OECD DAC), the UK dispersed US$4.2 billion (against $0.63 billion) and the Netherlands US$0.82 billion (against US$0.23 billion)—with the largest discrepancy evident in Japan which in its estimates had donated US$5.51 billion against a reported US$0.50 billion. Total private giving over the period was US$58.87 billion. Today, OECD DAC is tracking what it refers to as ‘statistics beyond ODA’, that is, ‘external financing for development’ (OECD DAC 2014). Total nonODA flows have grown substantially as a proportion of total flows and in 2012 accounted for more than 80 % of all ‘external resources received by developing countries’ from the private sector (a trend reversed to 20 % when isolated among low-income countries which received over 80 % as ODA) (OECD DAC 2014). ‘Non-ODA’, however, is a broad category that includes foreign direct investment, private export credits and loans as well as philanthropic and other private grants. OECD analysts estimate that concessional philanthropic and other private grants remain small, approximately 1 % of total flows (OECD DAC 2014).

Traditional Funding Approaches: Philanthropic Foundations and Development Cooperation While data remains patchy, private foundations are nonetheless an important— and arguably unique—type of actor in international development. As an organisational form they come in three dominant types: independent or family

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foundations (endowed by individuals or families with the objective of public purposes, for example, the MacArthur Foundation), corporate foundations (funded by assets for endowment and/or regular distributions from a corporation, for example, the Citi Foundation (Citi Group)) and, operating foundations (which undertake programmatic and/or service provision for charitable purposes but without raising funds from the public, for example, the German Bertelsmann Stiftung (Foundation)). The vast majority of US foundations with activities in international development are independent and family foundations, typified by the BMGF. In some European countries, the proportion of operating foundations is higher, comprising up to one-third in Germany (Anheier and Toepler 1999: 13). Nonetheless all types, regardless of jurisdiction, have shared features including: an endowment, a focus on charitable purposes and are structured as nongovernmental organisations. Historically, this has meant that they tend to exhibit some shared behaviours. In the case of US foundations, this has manifested in shared approaches to development, with a notable focus on technical development interventions, and selection of development sectors, specifically public health and agricultural development (Moran 2011). For grant-making entities this has involved using their primary defining feature, an endowment that accords them a degree of financial agency, to provide philanthropic risk capital to develop partnerships with state and non-state actors (Moran 2014). This has played a part in the diffusion of particular development ideas in the international aid architecture. The Rockefeller Foundation was a major actor in the nascent field of international health, funding activities spanning communicable diseases such as hookworm, vaccine development (yellow fever) and malaria. It also played a role in the dissemination of Western approaches to public health by funding schools of public health and medicine. To institutionalise this approach, it financed national programmes with health bureaucracies throughout the world. National-level strategies were buttressed at the international level by the provision of support for the development of the LNHO and WHO. In the 1990s, Rockefeller brokered product development partnerships, for example, the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative, that brought together actors from the pharmaceutical industry, the public sector and international organisations to research and development for health technologies focussed on developing country needs. These institutional mechanisms, by virtue of their cross-sectoral structure and focus on market-based solutions, introduced a market logic into global health governance (Moran 2014). The BMGF has played a similar role, focussing resources on large-scale global funds that emerged as major institutional players that complemented—and challenged—

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the established health architecture. Free of the constraints imposed on grantmaking foundations—which must act as institutional intermediaries that distribute capital to obtain organisational goals—operating foundations have similarly focussed on partnerships as a means of exerting policy influence. As a consequence the principle of partnership has become a defining feature of many traditional foundations involved in international development, with foundations playing a key part in the drive towards collaborative modes of governance in international development policy. This has brought foundations to the attention and agenda of development policymakers, most clearly exemplified by the establishment in 2012 of NetFWD—the Global Network for Foundations Working for Development, hosted by the OECD.

Beyond Grant Making: New Approaches and Philanthropic Mechanisms The term ‘philanthrocapitalism’ is not only used to signify the greater market orientation of the ‘new philanthropy’ but also is often shorthand for the increasing diversity of tools and mechanisms deployed by philanthropists. Also known as ‘venture philanthropy’, the main features include using new financing tools (such as social impact bonds, equity, debt, loans), non-financial support (including access to networks, mentoring), multi-year support and performance measurement requirements. Whereas established foundations have tended to focus on large-scale global programmes, in partnership with official actors, some new foundations (e.g., the Skoll Foundation) target areas ostensibly designed to break with established practice in development by channelling resources towards areas like social enterprise to inject a ‘business-like’ logic into international development. For example, the Omidyar Network, which was established by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar in 2004, is structured as both a non-profit organisation (a 501c(3) under the US Internal Revenue Code) that makes grants much like a traditional foundation and a for-profit venture that invests in entities with a broad social mission. This enables Omidyar to partner with a broad sweep of organisational types and straddle sectors and industries. Its initiative areas Consumer Internet, Financial Inclusion, Education, Government Transparency and Property Rights broadly accord with a traditional foundation. Yet its ‘investees’ include diverse organisations from traditional recipients like Teach for India, investment firms such as LeapFrog Investments that invest in high-growth companies serving emerging market companies that struggle accessing capital, and start-ups such as Change.org that act as for-profit advocacy platforms.

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For over 40 years, foundations such as the Ford Foundation have deployed programme-related investments—aligning investment strategy with philanthropic mission to accord debt and equity to non-profit organisations. Yet there is evidence that social finance is transitioning from the margins to the mainstream. These changes have implications for international development policy. First, social finance brings new actors into development policy debates, such as investment banks and wealth managers, looking at moving beyond their traditional role in capital markets. Second, it acts as a continuation and extension of a long-running market turn in the political economy of development, towards a financialisation of the social dimensions of development. This logic was evident when United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Department for International Development (DFID) in the UK launched in 2013 a global investment platform with Omidyar Network as a founding member: The Global Development Innovation Ventures, whose mission is to focus resources in international development towards innovative approaches and unlock investment capital from both private and public sectors, and to scale solutions commercially or through public sector adoption. Other countries subsequently aligned with the approach as the ‘new aid paradigm’.

3

Contemporary Philanthropic Powers in International Development?

While the field of philanthropy is diverse and constantly changing, the imagination of the public has been captured by a few big players due to the media attention they (or their founders) attract. We focus on only two foundations in this section: BMGF and OSF. Both foundations are relatively new organisations, operated internationally from the outset, have a living founder(s) and have experimented with innovative organisational formats and tools. While both entities are involved in providing funding to education, research and science, the BMGF is closely associated with global health. OSF has been aligned with civil liberties. A more important difference is that the OSF has been overtly normative, some would say ideological, on human rights issues whereas the BMGF has sought (if not successfully) a more normatively neutral disposition. OSF is unique in two respects: First, it was established as a network of separate and relatively autonomous national foundations loosely linked by European and American coordinating offices and, second, it is one of few operating foundations of significant scale in international development. Yet it is the BMGF that has worldwide significance due to its size and reach.

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The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundations The BMGF is the world’s largest, and arguably most high-profile, foundation operating in the field of international development. It was established in 2000 to manage the rapidly growing philanthropic activity of Microsoft founder William (Bill) Gates Jr and his wife Melinda and was a merger of the family’s two foundations, the William H Gates Foundation (named for Bill’s father and philanthropic confidant) and the Gates Learning Foundation. Its early focus was on consolidating the family’s interests in education, particularly through ensuring internet connectivity to US public libraries, and its expanding and influential interest in global health, particularly through vaccines, which followed the Gates’ US$750 million donation to kick-start the GAVI Alliance (then known as the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisations) shortly before the establishment of the Foundation. The Foundation’s interest in public health, which occurred at a time of major expansion in development assistance for health (Ravishankar et  al. 2009) in part precipitated by the Foundation which assisted in ‘crowding in’ funding, saw the BMGF rapidly become an active policy player in global health policy (The Lancet 2009). In 2006, it was announced that the world’s most successful investor, Warren Buffett, would be pledging some US$30 billion to the BMGF in yearly tranches that have averaged between US$1.5 and US$2 billion. With such rapid growth, the Foundation restructured around three broad programmatic areas—Global Health, Global Development and US Programs, with a recent addition of Global Policy and Advocacy. As of September 2014 its assets in trust sat at US$42.3 billion, with US$3.6 billion granted in 2013 and a total of US$31.6 billion since inception. BMGF retains several regional offices and has over 1000 staff. It has become a global institution and despite retaining the flexibility characteristic of foundations it increasingly resembles large official development agencies: a large globally dispersed staff, huge campus headquarters, complex bureaucracy and organisational culture and governance and organisational structure. It was in effect recognised by its official and quasi-official peers when it was selected for inclusion in the policy grouping, the Health 8, which brought together the major players in development assistance for health to coordinate activities around the Millennium Development Goals. Although the breadth of its activities in development is beyond the scope of this chapter, some aspects are worth mentioning. First, the foundation is widely accepted to be the most important singular private actor in global health (McCoy et al. 2009). While it is also widely agreed that the Foundation’s activities are characterised by a focus on technical interventions (Moran 2011),

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which have in part been diffused by the Foundation in the health architecture, the BMGF’s activities also illustrate that grant-making foundations are fundamentally constrained by their structure, they must partner with other agencies in order to attain goals (Moran  2014). Second, it is increasingly achieving a similar centrality in the area of agricultural development an area prioritised through its Global Development Program. Yet while this has also been identified as focussed on technical interventions (Moran 2014), and roundly criticised by some (Holt-Gimenez 2008), it is also a diverse institution engaged in innovative work that plays on foundations’ comparative advantages: an ability to take risks and finance innovation (Moran and Stevenson 2013). Finally, these webs of influence are not unparalleled, but rather reflect the historic influence exerted by foundations at earlier epochs, notably the Rockefeller Foundation, which performed a similar function in structuring the health and agricultural architecture in the early to mid-twentieth century (Youde 2013).

The Open Society Foundations Network The Open Society Foundations, which began in 1979, seek to build vibrant and tolerant societies whose governments are accountable and open to public participation. Financed by the billionaire George Soros, a hedge fund entrepreneur, OSF promotes the values and principles of a free and open society around the world. As a donor, Soros initially provided scholarships for black students in South Africa and for Eastern European dissidents to study abroad and later, through OSF, he jump-started the International Crisis Group and gave $100 million to Human Rights Watch in 2010. In the past 30 years, OSF has had expenditures of more than $10 billion. The national foundations of OSF, operating their own programmes, were established from the mid-1980s. From the outset, it has been an unusual organisation: it is several different and autonomous organisations—an international network that sprawls across more than 40 offices and independent foundations worldwide. OSF grew with a flat structure where the national bodies and the cross-national initiatives are free standing and often operated independently with their own sub-boards. Most support in the early days centred around the dissident movements in Eastern and Central Europe’s Communist countries to help promote tolerance, democratic governance, human rights and the rule of law. The fall of the Berlin Wall prompted a scaling up of support to grass-roots groups, civil society organisations and new political groupings in the transitioning economies and societies of the former Soviet Union. Later, the European Union (EU) accession process for candidate countries brought a new wave of funding support to universities,

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advocacy groups and government watchdog groups in the region. But the EU accession process was also an important factor prompting a global reorientation in foundation activities. From 2005, there was a mushrooming of OSF international initiatives to support inter alia the democracy movement in Burma, humanitarian aid in response to the global economic crisis and natural disasters, global advocacy for the passage and implementation of freedom of information laws as well as extensive promotion for revenue and budget transparency in resource-rich countries including establishing the Revenue Watch Institute in 2006. The professional maturing of the OSF brought a gradual policy turn away from grass-roots activism. While still seeking to improve the civil rights of individuals and the well-being of communities like the Roma, for the past decade there has also been a desire for policy impact. This has propelled a growing professionalisation among OSF staff and grantees, but also signalled some shifts in funding priorities towards expert-based policy advocacy and sometimes partnering with governments and international organisations as was the case with the Decade on Roma Inclusion. For an organisation that was once ‘low on bureaucracy’, its growing size, geographical spread and mounting financial disbursements brought new pressures for improved reporting, accountability measures and institutionalisation of procedures (Stone 2013). And it needed to do so in order to effectively partner with a range of governments as well as the EU, UNDP and the World Bank on different initiatives.

Academic Inattention There has been limited social and political inquiry, in both empirical and comparative terms, as well as under-theorisation of the agenda-setting capacities of philanthropic actors within development policy and their structural influences in international affairs. Notwithstanding some recent analysis (inter alia, McGoey 2014), the attention given by social scientists focussed on development questions is sketchy. Analysis of philanthropy has been addressed at the nation-state level, particularly American society and politics. On the one hand, analyses are based on an assumption of the foundations’ benign character (Karl and Katz 1987; Anheier and Daly 2005): some suggest foundations were or are above party politics, the state and big business, representing a ‘third sector’ (Prewitt 1999). On the other hand, there are others who argue, from a neo-Gramscian perspective (Parmar 2002; Roelofs 2003) or critical sensibility (Berman 1983;

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Arnove 1980), that foundations are key elements of an historic bloc of international banks and corporations, organised labour elites and powerful states pursuing global economic, financial and commercial interests. This binary debate has been scaled upwards to the international level and is recognised as being counterproductive: ‘philanthropic “exceptionalism”, the belief that what private donors do is necessarily good and that what official donors do is necessarily inefficient and bureaucratic, is all too prevalent. The fight against poverty will not be won with such evidence-free assertion and simplistic dichotomies’ (Green 2014: 2). Recent approaches addressing international development have addressed the ‘uncritical ideological acceptance of a logic of neutrality, and the efficiency and effectiveness of partnerships and philanthropy’ (Srivastava and Oh 2010: 460). Others have been critical of the methodological individualism of focus on the agency of individual donors (e.g., see The Economist on ‘Robber Barons and Silicon Sultans’ 2015) rather than organisational powers and capacities (Stone 2013) or the manner in which private foundation funding shapes the character of global civil society (Vogel 2006). But the proponents of international philanthropy, point beyond the financial disbursements to numerous other benefits. Even so, the power and influence of foundations is on the one hand overlooked, and on the other hand, exaggerated. For instance, the OSF is regarded as an influential organisation at the vanguard of the so-called ‘colour revolutions’ of Georgia and the Ukraine. An indicator of its success in ‘advocating’ rule of law and freedom of speech may lie in the political opposition it has attracted, such as being expelled at different points of time from Uzbekistan and Belarus. However, rather than looking for time-bound instances of immediate political impact (or irritation), a longer-term perspective on their relationships with other development actors provides more insight into their structural position (Guilhot 2007). It is already evident that the massive resources of the BMGF, and its funding priorities in health, are having a long-term impact shaping—or structuring—the agenda for health in forthcoming decades.

4

Conclusion: Implications, Challenges and Trajectories of New Philanthropic Power

The rise of philanthropy is reflective of a profound shift in the relationship between the state, marketplace and civil society over the last quarter century, as well as increasing levels of the concentration of private wealth, with some

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implications for international development policy processes. Consequences such as reconfigurations in modalities of ODA, emergent policy challenges such as aid fragmentation and questions of legitimacy and the growing numbers of ‘high net worth individuals’ worldwide alongside the development of new tools of philanthropic finance that may have policy implications.

Networks and Coalitions Grant-making foundations, almost by definition, must foster and catalyse partnerships such as PPPs. Partnership entails transaction costs. Nonetheless, partnering can prove effective ‘on the ground’ in terms of service delivery and mitigate against some tendency towards duplication. Additionally, networking can be beneficial in the manner in which it becomes a generator of pluralism of participation and securing aspects of civil society and/or stakeholder engagement. Foundations can be effective in advocacy around development issues. Indeed the BMGF, criticised early on for avoiding advocacy (and at the same, perversely chastised for wielding too much policy influence), has become an important player in aid diplomacy, lobbying states and international organisations to maintain ODA in the face of austerity. It does so publicly (for instance through a high-profile social media campaign in Australia to pressure the government to reverse dramatic cuts to ODA) and diplomatically (the BMGF is accorded state-like status in many international policy domains, while its eponymous co-chairs Bill and Melinda Gates regularly front international fora on development issues). Ergo Soros, and the OSF network, has built its model around fostering policy coalitions, networks and policy entrepreneurship, while Soros is a substantive policy actor in his own right. These twin functions—establishing institutional mechanisms for aid delivery and influencing broader aid policy through coalition building—are not unique to foundations. Nonetheless, in relative terms foundations are flexible actors. They are not subject to accountability constraints when compared to states and other official development actors or even relatively alike actors such as development NGOs, which have to respond to varying stakeholder demands from donors to official actors. Their relative material agency, associated with an endowment, also heightens their relative agency in the aid architecture. Both the BMGF and OSF can be seen as exemplars of these characteristics of foundations.

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Legitimacy and Accountability Foundations naturally bring additional resources to development and can, at least in part, address shortfalls in development finance by official actors. Yet interventions into development—at the level of agenda setting, financing and development practice—raise legitimacy and accountability concerns. Foundations lack the accountability derived from popular sovereignty accorded to most states and indirectly international organisations as well as indirect legitimacy that NGOs derive from linkage to social movements and members. While financial allocations of institutional philanthropy to ODA are in relative terms low, nevertheless this small and elite sector of interests has been able to ‘leverage’ their position in a number of ways and arguably have outsized influence on aid policy relative to contribution. For instance, prominent philanthropic leaders have influenced others to become more philanthropically involved through the Giving Pledge in which select members commit to donating over 50 % of wealth to philanthropic causes. Other initiatives, such as the Global Philanthropists Circle, founded in 2001, support families and individual philanthropists from more than 25 countries. Some of its member services include Learning Visits to developing countries, regional and issue working groups and philanthropy workshops. Importantly it also provides elite level access to foundations and funders, business and multilateral organisations; and helps secure individual meetings with key leaders in civil society, government and the private sector. Such initiatives are expressions of humanitarian intent and are designed to counter the regressive effects of wealth transmission on intergenerational familial behaviours. However unlike other actors in civil society, these individuals and their families are in a privileged position to inform aspects of development policy by virtue of their wealth, as witnessed in the privileged reception that philanthropic leaders, particularly donors, receive in international fora from Davos to New York. Other private bodies providing support services—such as the Worldwide Initiatives for Grantmaker Support—also undertake advocacy in support of philanthropic contributions to policy development, while NetFWD takes ‘full advantage of being part and hosted by an international organisation such as the OECD, which allows it to convey and disseminate foundations’ key messages to policy makers and provides the network with access to the vast internal knowledge base of the OECD’. These institutional networks are a necessary facet of aid coordination yet, they can be seen to solidify a privileged

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position in policy debates for actors that lack ‘input’ legitimacy—that is, legitimacy that is associated with public action (Rushton and Williams 2011: 19). While it has been pointed out that foundations exert ‘output legitimacy’ by virtue of the efficacy of interventions—and many public and in particular other private actors lack commensurate legitimacy (Rushton and Williams 2011: 19)—there is a perception that foundation influence can be disproportionate relative to contribution.

Fragmentation and Coordination The ‘old’ philanthropic institutions such as the Ford Foundation as well as the new bodies like OSF and BMGF have an enviable reputation in promoting knowledge advancement and building quality educational capacity. They can also illuminate state and market failures and offer solutions to collective action problems (Moran and Stevenson 2013). Yet while foundations bring fresh ideas to development debates, and have played a critical role at key points in history both fostering and disseminating new approaches that have altered the course of development policy, there are often unintended perverse implications for aid effectiveness that create strain on the crowded and fragmented aid architecture. Many of the new foundation-financed development interventions are vertical in orientation and do not always focus sufficiently on strengthening domestic capacity, for example, by establishing horizontal approaches that focus on primary care in health. Many foundation interventions are also disease specific and focussed on communicable diseases at the expense of non-communicable diseases which are the fastest growing burden in developing states (Moran and Stevenson 2014: 520). While the new resources and new mechanisms associated with PPPs, like the GAVI Alliance, has been ‘one of the triumphs of global health efforts’ (Buse and Tanaka 2011: 8), the effect has sometimes been to add complexity to aid policy at the international level and undermine effectiveness at delivery level as global programmes compete with existing actors. While the GAVI Alliance has come to symbolise PPPs, other types of partnership with substantial philanthropic involvement have also generated the need for new financial instruments and modalities of governance. Established in 1998, the United Nations Fund for International Partnerships (UNFIP) serves as the interface in the partnership between the UN system and the UN Foundation which is the public charity responsible for administering Ted Turner’s $1 billion contribution in support of UN causes. The total number of UNFIPs global programmes stands at 544, implemented by 43 UN entities in 124 countries (UNFIP 2014).

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Likewise, at the World Bank the growth of multi-donor partnerships— in which many foundations are involved—propelled the creation of the Development Grant Facility within the Bank to host, co-fund and manage, provide governance advice and some secretariat support. The Bank provides financial management services to multilateral initiatives including the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria (GFATM), the Global Environment Facility (GEF), the International Finance Facility for Immunization (IFFIm) and the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) Debt Initiative (DFI 2014). These examples of international organisation partnership programmes show that philanthropic partnering is incrementally structuring elements of the architecture of international development. Yet there are other trends signalling how philanthropic foundations can leverage their position in international development policy to a greater extent than the value of their resource commitments suggest. Paralleling the growth of institutional and individual philanthropy at both national and international levels has been the emergence of a cottage industry of associations and professional consultancy firms at international and regional levels. For decades, the US Foundations Centre was the epicentre of data collection, analysis and training on matters concerning philanthropy. In 1989, the European Foundation Centre was established and grown from an initial group of 7 founding members to 231. Since 2008, with the establishment of its Global Agenda Council on Philanthropy and Social Investing, the World Economic Forum has entered this policy domain, and partners with Synergos, a US-based development NGO. At the annual meeting in Davos, the Philanthropic Roundtable is organised each year as a private event by the Victor Pinchuk Foundation. These interrelated trends call for a more systematic scholarly treatment of these phenomena than has been the case to date.

References Anheier, H. and Toepler S. 1999 ‘Philanthropic Foundations: and International Perspective’ in Private Funds Public Purpose: Philanthropic Foundations in International Perspective Kluwer Academic Publishers, New York. Arnove, R.F. (ed.). 1980. Philanthropy and cultural imperialism: The foundations at home and abroad. Boston: G.K. Hall. Berman, E.H. 1983. The influence of the Carnegie, Ford, and Rockefeller foundations on American foreign policy. Albany: State University of New York Press. Bishop, M.L., and M. Green. 2008. Philanthrocapitalism: How the rich can save the world. New York: Bloomsbury Press.

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Buse, K., and S. Tanaka. 2011. Global public-private health partnerships: Lessons learned from ten years of experience and evaluation. International Dental Journal 61: 2–10. Center for Global Prosperity. 2013. The 2013 index of global philanthropy and remittances. Washington, DC: Center for Global Prosperity, The Hudson Institute. Desai, R., and H. Kharas. 2014. The new global landscape of poverty alleviation and development: Foundations, NGOs, social media, and other private sector institutions. In Human dignity and the future of global institutions, ed. M.P. Lagon and A. Clark. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. DFI. 2014. About DFI. http://web.worldbank.org/WEBSITE/EXTERNAL/ ETABOUTUS/ORGANIZATION/CFPEXT/0,,contentMDK:21421377~menu PK:64060199~pagePK:64060249~piPK:64060294~theSitePK:299948,00.html Di Bella, J., A.  Grant, S.  Kindornay, and S.  Tissot. 2013. Mapping private sector engagements in development cooperation. Ottawa: The North–south Institute. Easterly, W. 2006. The white man’s burden: Why the west’s efforts to aid the rest have done so much ill and so little good. New York: Penguin. Foundation, Ford. 1991. Investing for social gain: Reflections on two decades of programrelated investments. New York: Ford Foundation. Foundation Center. 2012. International grantmaking update: A snapshot of US foundation trends. New York: Foundation Center. Green, M. 2014. Philanthropy and official development assistance: A clash of civilisations? netFWD articles, series. http://www.oecd.org/site/netfwd/Philanthropy%20 and%20Official%20Development%20Assistance%20A%20Clash%20of%20 Civilisations.pdf Guilhot, N. 2007. Reforming the world: George Soros, global capitalism and the philanthropic management of the social sciences. Critical Sociology 33: 447–477. Herdt, R.W. 2012. People, institutions, and technology: A personal view of the role of foundations in international agricultural research and development 1960-2010. Food Policy 37: 179–190. Holt-Gimenez, E. 2008. Out of AGRA: The green revolution returns to Africa. Development 51: 464–471. Illingworth, P., T. Pogge, and L. Wenar. 2011. Introduction. In Giving well: The ethics of philanthropy, ed. P.  Illingworth, T.  Pogge, and L.  Wenar. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Johnson, P. 2010. Global institutional philanthropy: A preliminary status report. Boston: World-wide Initiatives for Grantmaker Support and The Philanthropic Initiative. Karl, B., and S. Katz. 1987. Foundations and ruling class elites. Daedalus 116: 1–40. McCoy, D., G. Kembhavi, J. Patel, and A. Luintel. 2009. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s grant-making programme for global health. The Lancet 373: 1645–1653. McGoey, L. 2014. The philanthropic state: Market–state hybrids in the philanthrocapitalist turn. Third World Quarterly 35: 109–125. Moran, M. 2011. Private foundations and global health partnerships: Philanthropists and 'partnership brokerage. In Partnerships and foundations in global health gover-

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nance, ed. S.  Rushton and O.  Williams. Basingstoke and New  York: Palgrave Macmillan. Moran, M. 2014. Private foundations and development partnerships: American philanthropy and global development agendas. London and New York: Routledge. Moran, M., and M.  Stevenson. 2013. Illumination and innovation: What philanthropic foundations bring to global health governance. Global Society 27: 117–137. Moran, M., and M. Stevenson. 2014. Partnerships and the MDGs: The challenge of reforming global health governance. In The handbook of global health policy, ed. G. Brown, G. Yamey, and S. Wamala. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell. OECD-DAC. 2014. http://www.oecd.org/dac/stats/beyond-oda.htm Parmar, I. 2002. American foundations and the development of international knowledge networks. Global Networks 2: 13–30. Prewitt, K. 1999. The importance of foundations in an open society. In The Future of Foundations in an Open Society, ed. Bertelsmann Foundation. Guetersloh. Ravishankar, N., P.  Gubbins, R.J.  Cooley, K.  Leach-Kemon, C.M.  Michaud, and D.T. Jamison. 2009. Financing of global health: Tracking development assistance for health from 1990 to 2007. The Lancet 373: 2113–2124. Riddell, R.C. 2007. Does foreign aid really work? Oxford: Oxford University Press. Roelofs, J. 2003. Foundations and public policy. New York: SUNY Press. Rushton, S., and O. Williams. 2011. Introduction. In Partnerships and foundations in global health governance, ed. S.  Rushton and O.  Williams. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Srivastava, P., and S. Oh. 2010. Private foundations, philanthropy, and partnership in education and development: Mapping the terrain. International Journal of Educational Development 30: 460–71. Stone, D. 2013. Knowledge actors and transnational governance: The Public-Private Policy Nexus in the Global Agora. Palgrave MacMillan. Sulla, O. 2007. Philanthropic foundations and their role in international development assistance. International Finance Briefing Note 3: 1–5. The Economist. 2015. Robber Barons and Silicon Sultans, 3 Jan 2015. http://www. economist.com/news/briefing/21637338-todays-tech-billionaires-have-lotcommon-previous-generation-capitalist The Lancet. 2009. Who runs global health? The Lancet 373: 2083. UNFIP. 2014. United Nations Foundation by the numbers. http://www.un.org/partnerships/unfip_byNumbers.html Vogel, A. 2006. Who’s making global civil society: Philanthropy and US empire in world society. British Journal of Sociology 7: 635–655. Youde, J. 2013. The Rockefeller and Gates foundations in global health governance. Global Society 27: 139–158.

18 Recipients and Contributors: The Dual Role of Middle-Income Countries Jose Antonio Alonso, Jonathan Glennie, and Andy Sumner

1

Introduction

The role of MICs in development cooperation is the subject of heated debate. Following a decade of global growth, many developing countries have moved into the World Bank’s definition of MICs (approximately $1000–$13,000 GNI per capita1). Although we might imagine that international development cooperation has a limited role in MICs, given the increased domestic resources and international private capital at their disposal, in fact most MICs still face considerable structural deficits and vulnerabilities that affect their process of development and, secondly, future international progress and collective human well-being will be strongly influenced by MIC development. MICs, therefore, not only need the support of the international community but the international community needs MICs to succeed in order to help achieve global development goals. The question is how the international 1

For the 2015 fiscal year, the World Bank defines as middle-income economies those with a GNI per capita (Atlas method) of more than $1045 but less than $12,746. Lower middle-income and upper middle-income economies are separated at a GNI per capita of $4125.

J. A. Alonso ( ) University of London, Spain J. Glennie Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain A. Sumner Save the Children, and Kings College, London © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 J. Grugel, D. Hammett (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of International Development, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-42724-3_18

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Table 18.1 Distribution of located ODA among income groups (%)

GNI per capita, Atlas method (current US$) GDP per capita (constant 2005 US$) Poverty headcount ratio at $1.25 a day (PPP) (% of population) Poverty headcount ratio at $2 a day (PPP) (% of population) Net ODA received (% of GNI) Net ODA received (% of gross capital formation)

Lower Low middle income income

Upper middle income

Middle income

High income

OECD

588

1913

6977

4383

38,182

37,612

423

1221

4315

2731

31,373

31,356

48.3

27.1

8.4

18.0

–

–

74.3

56.3

19.5

38.3

–

–

9.1

0.8

0.1

0.3

–

–

37.6

2.6

0.3

0.8

–

–

Source: Data processed from World Development Indicators (WDI), 2013

community can further the contribution of MICs to overcoming collective global challenges? Given its wide GNI per capita boundaries the MIC category groups together 105 countries (in 2015) with considerable diversity. Some MICs are G20 members, such as India and Indonesia, others have little weight in the global economy; some are large such as China or Brazil, while others have very small population such as Tuvalu and Vanuatu. An obvious way to differentiate current MICs is the lower/upper middle-income country (LMIC/UMIC) split at approximately $4000 per capita, which divides the category into 50 LMICs and 55 UMICs.2 Average GNI per capita (Atlas method) among LMICs is still around $5/day (about 5 % of the GNI per capita of Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) members). Further, the poverty headcount ratio at $1.25/day is a quarter of LMIC population, rising to half the population at $2/day poverty. The indicators are better for UMICs, but are still considerably below OECD levels. Official development assistance (ODA) is drastically lower in the LMIC and UMIC group compared to the low-income country (LIC) group. Whilst the LIC group average is almost 10 % for ODA/ GNI and almost 40 % for ODA/gross capital formation, the corresponding data for LMICs is 1 % and 3 % and for UMICs close to zero (see Table 18.1). Despite the continuing development problems facing MICs, international donors are reducing, or planning to reduce, financial support and either closing in-country delegations or beginning to exclude them from aid. 2

See http://data.worldbank.org/about/country-and-lending-groups

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Fig. 18.1 Distribution of located ODA among income groups (%) (Source: Based on DAC (OECD))

Consequently, the share of ODA directed at MIC countries fell from about 62 % in 2000/2001 to under 47 % in 2012/2013 (Fig. 18.1). This is concerning: nothing automatically happens when a country crosses a line in per capita income. Although policy coherence (policy changes undertaken by wealthy countries to encourage development elsewhere in the world) is likely to be much more important than financial transfers for MICs, it does not follow that such financial transfers are unimportant. In the following section, we set out a framework for understanding the problems faced by countries moving up the income ladder, divided into development ‘traps’ and financing ‘gaps’. We then look at MICs as recipients of development cooperation, what donor priorities should be, and why. The next section then addresses the increasingly important role of MICs as contributors to global development and questions how other countries can support MICs in this. The chapter finalises with a brief section of conclusions.

2

‘Traps’ and ‘Gaps’: A Need Analysis

Attempts to generalise about MICs encounter two main problems. First, the MIC category is diverse making it hard to generalise across it. Second, few of the challenges faced by countries with MIC levels of income per capita are exclusive to them. However, some useful observations can be made about the challenges faced at higher levels of per capita income—areas of particular difficulty for those countries in the (sometimes lengthy and rocky) transition from very poor to somewhat better off. Their need for international support also evolves, in terms of both quantity and type.

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In the diagnostic of issues and challenges faced by MICs, two words with long tradition in development studies can be particularly useful: traps and gaps. It is worth clarifying the meaning in which these terms will be used in this chapter. When we use the term ‘Traps’, we mean those constraints to progress that result from a set of mutually reinforcing blocking factors. Technically, a trap remits to a problem of ‘coordination’, requiring policy or political responses in different areas, in a context of several restrictions. In some cases, financial support is needed to overcome the traps, but not necessarily. When we use the concept of ‘Gaps’, on the other hand, we mean those constraints which require large financial investments to overcome, which is in relation to the ambition of the goals assumed.

MIC Traps As countries rise up the income ladder, they tend to be affected less by absolute shortages and more by asymmetries and bottlenecks in the development process. These bottlenecks have a similar effect to the well-known ‘poverty traps’, insofar as they drive countries to fall into a low-level equilibrium that ends up blocking or delaying growth (Alonso 2007). Many MICs have undergone—in some cases repeatedly—episodes of accelerated growth which have not led them to paths of sustainable growth over time (Spence 2011). According to one study, only one in ten countries defined as middle income (using a different, author defined definition to the common World Bank definition we note earlier) in 1960 had reached high-income status by 2010 (Agenor et al. 2012). We identify four areas in which, more frequently, these blocking forces tend to operate. The more studied area relates to difficulties sustaining a process of technical and productive change. The productive specialisation of emerging countries tends to be based on sectors which are intensive in resources and unskilled labour. As countries progress, they lose part of their competitive advantages, being difficult for them to compete either in low-wage manufacture markets due to rising wages or in high value-added markets due to limited skill and innovation investments. To move towards more dynamic sectors, they need to promote structural change, investing in infrastructure, nurturing their human capital, and generating technological capacities, which is not easy in a context of financial and institutional restrictions (Agenor and Canuto 2012; Aiyar et al. 2013). In addition to promoting these changes, MICs have to deal with dramatic environmental and energy challenges. MICs need to take advantage of the drivers of their growth and develop new industrial sectors and productive capacities. However, as much of their existing patterns of growth are linked

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to non-green technologies, further development could lead to drastic, and unsustainable, increases in energy demand, waste, and pollution. With MICs showing the highest ratios of increase in greenhouse emissions in the last decade, there is a pressing need for these countries to pursue green technology and energy transformation projects within development processes. A third set of vulnerabilities relates to difficulties achieving macroeconomic stability and integration into international financial markets, while at the same time maintaining enough space for counter-cyclical macroeconomic policies. Given their high exposure to international financial markets, some MICs face difficulties in preserving macroeconomic stability due to indebtedness in foreign currencies, limited fiscal space, and narrow national capital markets. Debt traps and recurrent financial crisis are symptoms of these problems, which are aggravated by financial and capital account liberalisation, and deregulated financial flows that can lead to macroeconomic disruption (Ocampo 2003; Ocampo and Griffith-Jones 2007). A fourth set of traps is related to MIC difficulties for adjusting economic and social changes with the required path of institutional change. As countries progress, they require more complex institutions of economic and social management and governance. However, economic and institutional processes frequently do not evolve at the same pace, with institutions more subject to inertia. The evolution of these governance structures and mechanisms are limited by various factors including technical capacity issues, structural constraints, or shortages of skills and experience. But, frequently, the problem lies not only in low efficiency of institutions but also in their reduced credibility. Problems of governance are often driven by the extraordinary levels of inequality that characterise many MICs and which corrode institutional legitimacy and hinder the possibility of building an institutional framework able to provide the required global goods to society and manage distributive conflicts and shocks (Alonso and Garcimartin 2013).

MIC Gaps Financing gap analyses are common in international development, dating back to the 1950s development economics. The definition of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) was accompanied by various estimates about the financial gap to be fulfilled in order to make those goals a reality (e.g. UN Millennium Project 2005); and the new post-2015 development agenda has also motivated some estimates about the resources required for supporting the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). All such estimates depend upon

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both assumptions about future trends in global economy and ambitions of the international community setting objectives (less ambitious objectives will result in smaller financing gaps). While the MDGs have focussed attention on halving (and perhaps eventually eradicating) extreme poverty, this has led to a reduced emphasis on other aspects of the development process such as non-extreme poverty (poor people living on over $1.25/day) and sustainable infrastructure supporting national economic development. Both aspects are underlined by the post-2015 development agenda and will crucially affect the dimension of the MIC financial gaps. The majority of global poverty between $1.25 and $2 is located in MICs (Sumner 2012): by 2030, it is estimated that MICs could continue to account for up to two-thirds of poverty in this bracket if current inequality trends continue (Edward and Sumner 2014) (see Fig.  18.2). Other studies suggest similar levels of persistent inequality and poverty when modelled as multidimensional poverty (Alkire et al. 2011, 2013) as well as in relation to indicators of ill health (Glassman et al. 2011) and nutrition and primary education (Kanbur and Sumner 2012). Projections for the next 20 years show a burgeoning mass of insecure people in the $2–$10 range; 3–4 billion people could find themselves in this bracket by 2030 and most will live in MICs.

Fig. 18.2 Proportion (%) of global poverty (at $1.25, $2, and $10/day) in MICs, 2010 and projections for 2030 (Source: Edward and Sumner 2014). Notes: MICs = countries currently classified as MICs; optimistic growth forecast = IMF projections; pessimistic growth forecast = half of IMF projections; estimates here assume historical inequality trends continue. For a range of further scenarios, see Edward and Sumner (2014)

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The objective of development should be to move the whole world to a reasonable and secure standard of living, such as $13/day PPP, the US poverty line (Ravallion 2009). Whilst estimates of ending $1.25 and $2 poverty are small as a proportion of global GDP, ending $10/day (let alone $13/day) poverty would take 20 % of global GDP (Edward and Sumner 2014) suggesting a much longer-term project of development cooperation. The emphasis on tackling absolute poverty can be argued as having promoted an excessively narrow vision of the development agenda. Other objectives need consideration if a fairer distribution of global development opportunities is to be achieved, and infrastructure for building sustainable strategies is likely to be the most expensive of these concerns. Investment in infrastructure not only promotes economic growth and competitiveness but also expands capital markets and broadens the portfolio of projects for domestic and foreign investors. Its impacts can be felt in increases of productivity and energy efficiency, in the reduction of transportation and communication costs, in strengthening regional integration, and in a more adequate supply of social services (World Bank 1994). In the short term, however, it can be very cash intensive. Recent analyses have identified the significant financial burden to be met in order to deliver the infrastructure required to meet various development goals. Greenhill and Ali’s (2013) analysis of five sectors likely to be included in the post-2015 framework (education, health, water and sanitation, sustainable energy, and food security/nutrition/agriculture) found that the additional funding required ‘over and above all existing spending’ would amount to between $150 and 250 billion per year, plus a further $400–900 billion annually to achieve renewable energy goals. Another recent report estimates that, with populations growing, annual spending on infrastructure in the developing world will need to increase to between US$1.8 and 2.3 trillion each year by 2020 (Bhattacharya et al. 2012). These figures dwarf current spending on infrastructure in developing countries of US$0.8–0.9 trillion per year. Things get even more costly when we consider that this infrastructure has to be ‘green’. A drastic improvement in energy efficiency and an accelerated shift to sustainable energy will be needed in MICs to respond to climate change. Climate finance for mitigation and adaptation is an area of finance that has developed in negotiation processes distinct from the usual aid discussions but it will inevitably become ever more indistinguishable from development cooperation per se as the post-2015 framework comes into effect, and as the donor– recipient paradigm continues to evolve towards a more horizontal relationship.

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MICs as Recipients: The Role of Development Cooperation in MICs

In the previous section, we presented the scale of need in MICs in terms of both a variety of development blockages, the traps, and holes in the budget, the gaps. The weight of responsibility for dealing with these problems will always fall squarely on the shoulders of the countries themselves, but what can development cooperation do to support MICs? As countries climb the income ladder and (in most cases) more funds become available domestically or from international private sources, countries will rely less on external public finance in the form of aid. But the fact that countries may not need aid as much as before does not mean that it may not still be a very important contribution to development, in terms of both the pace with which development objectives are achieved and the depth of success. This is especially true with public resources that are deliberately focussed on achieving mutually agreed objectives and utilise policy experience, knowledge sharing, technical capacities, and institutional support. There is no universal panacea: country context matters. Some MICs still require large-scale financial transfers to reduce poverty or to build green infrastructure and contribute to sustainable global development. Other MICs require less financial aid, but demand technical support and exchange. The debate about development cooperation with MICs is not solely about need, but effectiveness: one aid dollar is likely to be more effective in slightly betteroff developing countries (such as MICs) where state capabilities are stronger. In fact, the negative consequences of aid on governance, which are well documented (Moss et al. 2008), are far less likely to occur in Low Aid contexts. Understanding how the role of aid might change in countries moving from higher to lower aid reliance, or continue to evolve in countries that have long been non-reliant on aid can further understandings of effective aid interventions (Glennie and Prizzon 2012).

Development Cooperation and MIC Traps: An Incentives-Based Approach International support can help overcome MIC traps more by accompaniment than large-scale funding. However, money is usually needed to facilitate such a process, and catalytic injections of funding can generate substantial change. We identify six key roles for incentivising financial cooperation.

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First, aid can encourage improvements in policies. Whether the level of cooperation is large or small, the incentivising effect has always been a crucial part of its effectiveness, and will continue to be so. Sometimes incentives have been perverse, especially when large amounts of support have disincentivised progressive policies, or when aid conditionalities have promoted the wrong policies (Svenson 2000; Killick 1997). But equally the role of the international community has sometimes been to incentivise progressive policies, whether in human rights, domestic resource mobilisation, better accounting, or supporting policies against social inequities. Small-scale funding can produce very significant changes through such cooperative ventures. For example, while ODA makes up a tiny proportion of Colombia’s economy, it has often worked to promote positive outcomes in strategic areas (Wood et al. 2011). Often, the importance of cooperation as incentive is not linearly linked with the scale of the investment. A second role for aid is supporting non-governmental actors. As countries grow economically and development challenges shift from an absolute lack of resources to the poor distribution of resources, the advocacy and accountability roles of civil society, and the work of parliaments, become even more important in ensuring ‘value for money’ outcomes. However, there are often only limited national sources of funds for national civil society, meaning international funds can be crucial to the survival and development of a healthy civil society capable of shifting the balance of power towards the poor and marginalised. A third role for aid is leveraging and adding value to private finance. Given its limited weight on the GDP of recipients further up the income scale, the effectiveness of development cooperation will often depend on its leverage that is, its ability to mobilise additional capacities and resources. Just as it can at the national level, international public money can play a crucial role in bringing private funds forward to invest in public-interest projects, either by leading the way and proving profitability, or sharing some of the risk. That is the purpose of the Development Finance Institutions, those institutions in charge of managing instruments related to equity and quasi-equity investment, loans and guarantees, seek to maximise this leverage. The involvement of public actors often means that social and environmental standards will be somewhat higher than when only private actors are to be involved. Other key role for the development cooperation in MICs is promoting both individual and institutional capacity development. The need for capacity development will evolve; as technical cooperation helps overcome some typical limitations, increased emphasis is often placed on the development of local

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capacities and knowledge applicability under local conditions rather than the transplanting of donor capacity and expatriate technical staff. A fifth role for aid should be providing risk coverage against external shocks. Such a role is especially important among MICs most exposed to natural disasters and other shocks—including financial. Development cooperation should take into account this problem, supporting national and international mechanisms of prevention and strengthening resilience of communities at risk. One example is donor support to the Caribbean Catastrophe Risk Insurance Facility, an initiative promoted by the governments of the region with the support of the World Bank in order to provide short-term liquidity to facilitate recovery efforts after hurricanes or earthquakes. Meanwhile, MICs are more likely to be at risk of financial shocks than LICs, as they are generally more integrated into global financial markets. Again, resources need to be available to act as an insurance mechanism through financial crises, which have the capacity to hit their development prospects severely and suddenly (e.g. Indonesia regressed to LIC status in the late 1990s following the East Asian crisis). Finally, a sixth role of development cooperation is supporting innovative initiatives in economic and social policies which governments may be reluctant to fund on account of risk. Because foreign money is accountable to entities outside the immediate political arena of the recipient state, governments are sometimes able to use this more flexibly than their own money. While accountability issues are among the most complex area of development cooperation, this additional flexibility can potentially allow countries to take risks that they would otherwise have avoided, leading to higher returns or important lessons learned.

Development Cooperation and MIC Gaps: Critical Support for Development Budgets In the above examples, in which development cooperation is called upon to help respond to MIC traps, the quality (characteristics) of the money is more important than its quantity. But, as we have seen, many MICs have significant gaps in public budgets to reduce/end poverty and achieve a more sustainable path to development. In some countries towards the poorer end of the spectrum, this is still linked to an absolute lack of resources; in others, it is related to poor revenue mobilisation or other governance problems. Some MICs have enough room to improve their taxation system, but others face serious problems. Many of the ‘new middle classes’ are still in the

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$2–$13 range, meaning that MICs have a relatively small taxable population. For example, just 5 % of Indonesia’s population lives above $10/day PPP according to the national socio-economic survey (Sumner and Edward 2014). Other factors also hinder the creation of a sound taxation system, including the strength of the informal economy, the large number of very small companies, the weaknesses of institutions and tax administrations, a shortage of tax statistics, and the limited development of the financial system, not to mention illicit and untaxed capital flows which are substantial for MICs (Cottarelly 2011; Keen 2012). In such contexts, domestic taxation is not necessarily sufficient to deal even with the cost of ending $1.25 or $2 poverty, let alone $10 poverty. There may also be significant limitations in terms of access to private capital markets. Even when countries do have a credit rating (and not all MICs do), it is still the case that even UMICs may find themselves borrowing at 10 % rates of interest or more on 10-year treasury bonds Most anti-poverty and infrastructure spending in the developing world is, and will continue to be, financed by domestic budgets supported by a mix of private sector finance, ODA, multilateral development bank loans, and, more recently, loans from emerging economies. Private finance will be crucial in filling the renewable energy financing (Greenhill and Ali (2013) suggest it will provide 75 % of what is required). It is clear that international public finance will also need to play an active role. The climate finance negotiations have already recognised the principle that developed countries should contribute considerable funds to ‘green’ developing country infrastructure, very much including MICs, to encourage a shift towards low-carbon and climate-resilient technologies.3 In a bidding war for scarce resources, the very poorest countries will likely emerge as priorities for funding. It will be up to the international community, particularly the wealthiest countries, how much of the financing gaps in MICs it chooses to help fill with additional international public finance. Such funding need not necessarily be grant aid; it could be concessionary finance. While there is downward pressure on aid funds in many OECD countries, the progress of many countries up the income ladder should be seen as an excuse for aid reductions when the real reasons are domestic political perceptions in OECD countries. In short, MICs can make good use of international public funds, whether to respond to traps (quality of funding) or gaps (quantity) to complement 3

A leading scholar has recently called for the $100 billion pledged in Copenhagen to come exclusively from public funds, because the profit opportunities from investment in adaptation are extremely limited. http://www.developmentprogress.org/blog/2014/02/04/can-private-sector-finance-support-adaptation

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domestic finance (public and private) and international private finance. Whether such funds are provided is one of the major choices facing the international community in this era of development.

4

MICs as Contributors: Supporting the Contributions of MICs to International Development

Development cooperation should not only support MICs to overcome the constraints that affect their own development processes: it should also back their efforts to participate more intensely in the development agenda regionally and globally. Traditional donors should back MIC efforts to participate in cooperative action against common problems in four particular dimensions: south–south cooperation (SSC), contribution to international public goods, regional cooperation and integration, and policy coherence and global rules and governance.

Supporting South–South Cooperation Support for SSC is one way of overcoming the dualistic ‘donors and recipients’ conception of the cooperation system, replacing it with a more inclusive vision in which those developing countries (particularly MICs) with enough capacity and resources also take part in international cooperation activities (see Mohan, this volume). The exact volume of SSC is not well known, partly due to deficient registration systems, but according to the OECD–DAC 25 non-DAC countries provided US$10.6 billion in 2010, more than 8 % of total ODA, with Saudi Arabia (US$3.4 billion), China (US$2 billion), and Turkey (US$968 million) being the most important contributors (DAC ). These estimates do not include all SSC contributors, suggesting that total figures would be somewhat higher. Unlike ODA, then, which has decreased from historically high levels in recent years, SSC appears to be increasing year on year. Although the SSC label hides very different models and cooperation practices, it brings significant, and sometimes new, elements into the cooperation system including: • Greater recipient ownership, based on a philosophy of ‘horizontality’. SSC may also generate a ‘double dividend’, supporting the development of technical and institutional capabilities in both recipient and contributor country;

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• Learning from other countries that have faced the same problems in similar contexts. In these cases, technical assistance provided by MICs may be more appropriate and cheaper than that offered by ‘traditional’ donors; • SSC widens recipients’ room for manoeuvre and increases their bargaining power in the international arena (Kragelund 2008; Zimmermannn and Smith 2011); • Helping spread a sense of shared responsibility for addressing international inequalities. This should lead to a less hierarchical system, in which different actors coming from all types of country will operate together in mutual networks. In view of the above, the progressive participation of all countries, especially the more wealthy MICs, in international cooperation should be promoted by high-income country (HIC) donors through various forms of triangular and regional cooperation. Specifically, HIC donors could support SSC through helping official agencies and their technical bodies in emerging donors to strengthen their cooperation systems (with technical and financial resources, and sharing experiences), taking part in triangular cooperation, facilitating SSC initiatives by providing additional funds and technical expertise, scaling up successful innovations from SSC, and backing SSC platforms for technical support and the exchange of experiences and supporting regional cooperation initiatives (see below). Meanwhile, SSC contributors could enhance their development cooperation by improving their information systems for better transparency and accountability, encouraging the involvement of non-governmental actors, especially civil society organisations and private sector, diversifying modalities of cooperation, for example, beyond bilateral programmes of technical cooperation, contributions to multilateral or multi-country programmes, particularly those related to international public goods and others global issues, and decentralised programmes, and establishing learning mechanisms through more intense practices of evaluation and peer reviews.

Providing Regional and Global Public Goods The appropriate provision of regional and global public goods is crucial for promoting material progress and reducing instability and international risks. It requires a certain level of coordinated action at the international level and some MICs are being called upon to play a crucial role in this cooperative effort given their increasing significance in the world order. For example,

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MICs are responsible for 54 % of the CO2 emissions in the world, and rising, and 65 % of rainforests, the ‘lungs’ of the planet and stores of biodiversity, are located in MICs. At the same time, some MICs are among the countries most affected by under-provision of public goods. For example, a large group of MICs (among them islands and coastal countries in the Pacific and Caribbean) could be seriously affected by the effects of climate change—13 of the 15 countries most exposed to natural risks are MICs (World Risk Report 2012; also Barnett and Waters, this volume). The provision of public goods is not free and some countries will adopt ‘free-rider’ behaviour. To encourage developing countries (particularly MICs) to assume a committed role in the provision of international public goods, the international community has to define the right incentives and supporting measures to compensate the costs. International cooperation can play a role in various ways. First, the active involvement of HICs and MICs is required to challenge international public bads (environmental threats being the most challenging). HICs and MICs should actively share their experiences, and provide technical assistance and financial and in-kind support to those countries of equal or lesser development in areas such as clean technologies, natural resource management, sustainable livelihoods, prevention and resilience against environmental risks, and adaptation programmes. Second, all contributors (but particularly HICs) should integrate vulnerability to environmental and global risks into their allocation criteria of development cooperation flows. Third, all contributors should work together in promoting progressive change in patterns of energy production and consumption in favour of renewable energies. A possible option would be a joint international fund for clean technology generation and dissemination.

A Regional Perspective A regional scope is often most appropriate for MICs as they increase their role in the international arena, for three main reasons. First, their contribution to global governance could be more significant at a regional level. Second, several public goods are regional in scope, such as river basin management, mechanisms for regional macroeconomic coordination, or infrastructure to promote inter-country connectivity. Third, some MICs are very large. In much of the world, a small number of MICs account up to a half of a region’s population and aggregate output. The stability and economic growth of such economies is therefore a regional factor. International cooperation should take these externalities into account in order to guarantee maximum impact in supporting

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development in surrounding countries. Thus, all contributors should work to promote an ambitious plan of infrastructure investment encouraging regional connectivity, and should support technological cooperation programmes promoting the diffusion of new technologies and the strengthening of national innovation systems.4 Furthermore, HICs should support regional integration processes, encouraging MICs to take a leading role in the process. Such cooperation could include technical support to regional institutions to improve their capacities for driving the integration process, and backing regional programmes, thus strengthening a culture of collaboration. An interesting example of inter-MIC cooperation can be found in the strengthening of regional (and sub-regional) development banks and bond markets. Although such institutions are to be found in all regions of the developing world, the two most complete networks serve the Arab and Islamic countries (Islamic Development Bank, Arab Fund for Economic and Social Development, Arab Monetary Fund, Arab Bank for Economic Development in Africa, among others) and the Latin America and the Caribbean region (Andean Development Corporation,5 Central American Bank for Economic Integration, or Caribbean Development Bank). More recently, the Asia-Pacific region has seen initiatives to create mechanisms in support of national bond markets, and the issuance of regional bonds. These institutions are limited by the financial restrictions of their membership, which suggests the need for external support (finance, guarantees, and risk management) from the international community, including regional financial institutions as well as HICs.

Policy Coherence, Global Rules, and Governance MICs occupy a difficult position in the development range: they are more deeply integrated in international markets than LICs, but they lack the economic soundness and institutional capacity of HICs. Thus, they are highly vulnerable to the faults in the developed country policy coherence, as well as to the asymmetries and gaps of existing global rules. An important part of international support for development in MICs should therefore lay in 4

Some existing experiences in this field show that significant results can be achieved with limited resources. For example, CYTED, a scientific and technological cooperation programme based on creating international research groups and deployed in the Iberoamerican area (Spain, Portugal, and the Latin American countries), has supported the exchange of researchers and the creation of technological networks. 5 The Andean Development Corporation has become the most important development finance institution in Latin America and has achieved an investment-grade rating higher than its individual member countries.

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improving policy coherence (such as in terms of trade and intellectual property rights (see Muzaka, this volume)). In the new international landscape, some MICs are negatively affected by externalities caused not only by developed country policies but also by other MICs, particularly the biggest and richest countries in the same region. Therefore, improvements in policy coherence should also be promoted in some MICs. Monitoring policy coherence could be carried out at regional level, as a part of SSC, in order to maintain ownership of the surveillance process. Without an enabling international environment that better distributes development opportunities among countries and encourages cooperative responses to collective problems, many national development efforts will be fruitless. An effective enabling environment should guarantee the desired balance between preserving enough policy space for national development strategies and providing effective global rules for governing shared problems. Voice and representation should be adapted in some global governance structures to reflect countries’ current weight in the international arena, to enable them to engage more fully in modification of global rules and governance structures. There are many global rules and institutions requiring reform, but one is particularly important for MICs: international tax cooperation. MICs are being encouraged to improve their tax systems in order to better mobilise domestic financial resources. But while many MICs have policy space for designing fairer and more efficient tax systems, as well as improving their tax administrations and public finance management systems, such reforms should be accompanied by advances in tax governance at a global level to reduce tax evasion and fraud, the ‘race to the bottom’ on tax policies, and the debilitating effects of tax havens (see Heron, this volume).

5

Conclusion

MICs still face considerable structural deficits and vulnerabilities that affect their development process. MICs need the support of the international community and the international community needs MICs to succeed if global development goals are to be met. Despite the diversity of the MICs category there are a number of ‘MIC traps’ (mutually reinforcing blocking factors) and ‘MIC gaps’ (constraints requiring significant financial investment to overcome) facing these countries as their per capita income increases. As income increases, and these countries climb the income ladder, more funding will become available from domestic or international private sources, reducing

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MICs’ reliance on financial aid. While this reliance on aid may be declining, and international donors are reducing financial aid flows to MICs, development challenges within MICs remain. Continued aid flows as well as support for policy coherence and implementation remain key part to global efforts to reach sustainable and equitable growth. Development cooperation should not only support MICs to overcome their own developmental constraints but also support the intensification of regional and global development cooperation. The potential for such cooperation is vast and requires greater support for these more horizontal forms of cooperation than is currently provided.

References Agenor, P.-R., and O. Canuto. 2012. ‘Middle-income growth traps’, World bank policy research working paper 6210. Washington: The World Bank. Agenor P.-R., O.  Canuto, and M.  Jelenic. 2012. Avoiding middle-income growth traps. Economic Premise, 98. (The World Bank, November). Aiyar, S., R. Duval, D. Puy, Y. Wu, and L. Zhang. 2013. Growth slowdowns and the middle-income trap, IMF working paper 13/71. Washington: IMF. Alkire, S., J.M.  Roche, M.E.  Santos, and S.  Seth. 2011. Multidimensional poverty 2011. Oxford: OPHI. Alkire, S., J.M. Roche, and A. Sumner. 2013. Where do the multi-dimensionally poor live? OPHI working paper. Oxford: OPHI. Alonso, J.A. (dir.). 2007. Cooperation with middle-income countries. Madrid: Editorial Complutense. Bhattacharya, A., M. Romani, and N. Stern. 2012. Infrastructure for development: Meeting the challenge. Centre for climate change economic and policy, Policy Paper, June. Cottarelly, C. 2011. Revenue mobilization in developing countries. Washington: International Monetary Fund. https://www.imf.org/external/np/pp/eng/2011/ 030811.pdf Edward, P., and A. Sumner. 2014. Estimating the scale and geography of global poverty now and in the future: How much difference do method and assumptions make? World Development (forthcoming). Glassman, A., D. Duran, and A. Sumner. 2011. Global health and the new bottom billion: What do shifts in global poverty and the global disease burden mean for GAVI and the global fund?. CGD Working Paper 270. Washington, DC: Centre for Global Development. Glennie, J., and A.  Prizzon. 2012. High, middle, low and very low aid countries: A  new proposal for classifying countries by aid receipt. ODI Background Note, March. London: Overseas Development Institute.

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Greenhill, R., and A. Ali. 2013. Paying for progress: How will emerging post-2015 goals be financed in the new aid landscape? ODI Working Paper 366. London: Overseas Development Institute. Kanbur, R., and Sumner A. 2012. Poor Countries or Poor People? Development Assistance and the New Geography of Global Poverty Journal of International Development 24(6): 686–695. Keen, M. 2012. Taxation and development: Again. IMF Working Paper, WP/12/220, Washington, DC. Killick, T. 1997. principal, agents and the failings of condionality. Journal of International Development 9(4): 48–495. Kragelund, P. 2008. The return of non-DAC donors to Africa: New prospects for African development? Development Policy Review 26(5): 555–584. Moss, T., G. Petterson, and N. de Walle. 2008. An aid-institutions paradox? A review essay on aid dependence and state building in Sub-Sahara Africa. In Reinventing foreign aid, ed. W. Easterly. Mass: MIT press. Ocampo, J.A. 2003. Capital-account and countercyclical prudential regulation in developing countries. Santiago de Chile: CEPAL. Ravallion, M. 2009. Do poorer countries have less capacity for redistribution? Policy Research Working Paper 5046. Washington: The World Bank Spence, M. 2011. The next convergence: The future of economic growth in a multispeed world. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Sumner, A. 2012. Where do the poor live? World Development 40(5): 865–877. Sumner, A., and P. Edward. 2014. What does analysis of poverty by international poverty lines tell us about the long-run evolution of poverty in Indonesia?. Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies (forthcoming). Svenson, J. 2000. Foreign aid and rent-seeking. Journal of International Economics 51(2): 461–473. UN Millennium Project. 2005. Investing in development: A practical plan to achieve the millennium development goals. New  York: United Nations Development Programme. Wood, B., J.  Betts, F.  Etta, J.  Gayfer, D.  Kabells, N.  Ngwira, F.  Sagasti, and M. Samaranayake. 2011. Evaluation of the Paris declaration, phase 2: Final report. Copenhagen: Danish Institute for International Studies. World Bank. 1994. World development report: Infrastructure for development. Washington: The World Bank.

19 Migrants, Remittances and Hometown Associations in Promoting Development Ninna Nyberg Sørensen

1

Introduction

Migration is linked to development in several complex and mutually interdependent ways. Persistent global inequality in access to decent employment, resources, education, healthcare, human rights and other fundamental livelihood conditions are among the factors that explain why individuals, families and communities embark on migratory projects. Natural and man-made disasters, often followed by humanitarian crises, are other important factors. In many ways, migrants can be understood as people who have given up on waiting for development locally and venture out to find it elsewhere. Asylum seekers and refugees would then be those unable to wait in order to survive. In reality, such distinctions may be difficult to uphold as today’s mixed migration flows seem to indicate (Stepputat and Sørensen 2014). When successful in reaching their destination, both migrants and refugees may engage in activities directed towards their home communities. These activities often involve the sending of remittances—transfers in cash or in kind between migrants and family members left behind—and can be of both an individual and collective character. Linking migration to development is not a new phenomenon, in social science research or in policy debates. Whether this link has been viewed positively or negatively has changed historically, and, in the words of Hein de Haas, has

N.N. Sørensen ( ) Danish Institute for International Affairs, Denmark © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 J. Grugel, D. Hammett (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of International Development, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-42724-3_19

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swung back and forth like a pendulum since the post–World War II period: from modernist development optimism to brain drain pessimism, towards neo-optimistic brain gain and remittance euphoria since the dawn of the new millennium (de Haas 2012). The steady growth in reported remittances sent by migrants to developing countries has played an important role in establishing migrants as important development agents in current international policy discourse. Paradoxically, the celebration of migrants’ positive impact on development has coincided with the introduction of stricter migration control in migrant-receiving countries in the Global North. From a purely financial point of view, officially reported remittances to developing countries indeed constitute a considerable source of external resource flows. Over the last 15 years, we find a rise from an estimated US$72 billion in 2000 to an estimated US$336 billion in 2008. Even if a slight decline in remittances was observed with the onset of the global financial crisis, the crisis did not affect remittances to the same extent as other capital flows. In 2013, the steady growth in remittances was back on track, reaching an estimated US$435 billion in 2014 (an increase of 5 %  over  2013), driven largely by remittances to Asia and Latin America (World Bank 2014). Remittances not only represent a large proportion of financial flows but in many developing countries also constitute substantially more than global official development assistance, capital market flows and foreign direct investments in many countries. The growth in remittances and their resistance, or even counter-cyclical capacity in times of economic recession, surely explains why they stand at the centre of current migration–development discussions in international institutions such as the World Bank, the regional development banks, various United Nations Agencies like the Development Programme (UNDP), the Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the intergovernmental International Organisation of Migration (IOM) (Faist  2008). The proposed mechanisms to strengthen the link between migration and development nevertheless also entail regulatory objectives to better facilitate orderly, safe, regular and responsible migration and mobility of people through implementation and well-managed migration policies. From the mid-2000 onwards, international efforts to make migration work for development through remittances have increasingly realised the private and family-based nature of individual transfers. Therefore, organisational efforts have begun to focus on collective remittances transferred by HTAs, diasporas or other organised migrant groups. Unlike individual remittances, it is assumed that collective remittances more easily can be directed towards community-development projects in infrastructure, healthcare and education

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or be invested in ‘productive’ areas that generate local employment. Despite the fact that HTAs generate only a smaller share of the overall remittance flow, they are assumed to have a larger impact on local development, with potential large multiplier effects on the local economy (Sørensen et al. 2002). This chapter reviews the main debates on the role of migrant remittances and HTAs in promoting development. It considers the money migrants send back to developing countries, the forms migrant transfers take and the factors that may influence the developmental impact of the transfers. It is argued that no matter whether remittances are sent by individuals or through HTAs and diaspora groups, the developmental outcomes of these transfers cannot be assumed. In most instances, the effects of migration on development are far from straightforward, leaving the link unsettled, as formulated by Papademetriou and Martin (1991), ambivalent as pinpointed by Bakewell (2008) or contentious or contested, as argued by several contemporary critics (Castles and Delgado Wise 2008; Glick Schiller and Faist 2009; Geiger and Pécoud 2013; Sørensen 2015).

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Remittances as Development Link

Migrants and migrant organisations linking people living abroad to their communities and/or countries of origin have emerged as important development agents. In this process, migrant remittances have emerged as a major source of external development finance. Exact data on remittance flows are hard to come by. The main source of official data on migrant remittances stems from the annual balance of payment records of individual countries, compiled in the Balance of Payment Yearbook published annually by the International Monetary Fund (IMF). While ‘migrant remittances’ generally refer to transfers in cash or kind from a migrant to his or her dependent family members in the country of origin, the IMF Yearbook also includes compensation to employees and other migrant transfers. The former refers to the wages and other forms of remuneration paid to individuals who work in country other than where they legally reside and includes for instance wages earned by seasonal and short-time workers on temporal migration schemes. The latter refers to capital transfers of financial assets made by migrants as they move from one country to another for more than a year. In the following, migrant remittances are defined broadly as financial flows associated with migration. Virtually all discussions on the migration–development link have touched upon remittances for the obvious reason of their sheer magnitude (Skeldon  2008). Available remittance statistics produced by banks and

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international institutions include only money transferred through formal financial channels. Despite this limitation, these statistics suggest a steady increase in remittances directed towards developing countries. The largest volume of remittances is sent directly from migrants to family members left behind in the countries of origin. The money sent provides a vital lifeline and is generally used to cover basic needs, such as food, education and healthcare. Migrants may additionally send money for building or improving housing, often because they hold on to an idea of return. While such remittance flows generate an immediate demand for products and services in the areas of destination, the longer-lasting impacts—the multiplier effects in economic terms—are generally believed to be low. In some instances, remittances may spur renewed migration as more and more come to rely on remittances for immediate, basic needs rather than investment or savings. Another related outcome may be a distortion of local markets and inflation in, for example, land prices due to migrant investments (Sørensen et  al. 2002). Nevertheless, transnational migration research informed by economic sociology has pointed to macroeconomic development effects of migration beyond remittances directed towards the Global South, including multiplier effects in international financial arrangements, international trade, and the production and consumption of culture. Migrant demand for nostalgic products such as home country food, drinks and music or for communication, money transfer and travel services may, for example, stimulates economic development that is not only north–south but also south–north, south–south and even north–north. Besides family remittances, organised groups of migrants may contribute collectively to development with the intention of either collaborating with specific projects or providing humanitarian relief in the wake of natural or human disasters. HTAs are formed by migrants from the same community and allow these to maintain ties with their places of origin, often through the means of material support. They simultaneously create an environment for accommodating newcomers (assist with lodging and initial work contracts) in the countries of destination. HTAs are operating throughout major migrant destinations in North America, Europe, parts of East Asia, the Middle East and Africa. Most HTAs initially rely on voluntary work and do not have official NGO status. Those associations that manage to survive and mature are likely to adopt a more formal status along the way and seek additional funding from governments and international aid organisations. But, increasingly, governments and aid organisations may also target the HTAs for their collective remittance practice.

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Collective remittances are typically organised and sent by HTAs or diaspora associations—centred on a specific hometown, district region or country. Religious congregations established by or catering to migrants may constitute yet another outlet for collective remittances. As  platforms for diaspora philanthropy, collective remittance projects can range from the provision of electrification, sanitation and clean water systems to the construction of health clinics, schools and orphanages in a particular area. When used in this way, remittances can provide communities in developing countries with access to vital services and goods that would otherwise not be available (Adida and Girod 2011). In addition to socially oriented projects, collective remittances may also be used to finance productive, commercially viable projects, as, for example, when groups of migrants invest in equipment to upgrade the production of traditional handicrafts or agricultural crops in their home area. In these cases, remittances may be hard to distinguish from foreign direct investments (Skeldon 2008). Not all projects financed through collective remittances succeed equally well. Some projects initiated by migrants may reflect more narrow migrant wishes and aspirations than pressing needs experienced by the local population. While individual remittances far supersede transfers from HTAs, international efforts to build partnerships to enhance remittances developmental impact have moved from the individual to the collective level. Apart from important work on lowering the high transaction costs of sending remittances through attempts to regulate the money transfer business area and provide cheaper technical remittance tools based on debit cards and cell phone transfers, new emphasis has been placed on building partnerships with organised migrant groups. Such partnerships generally rest on the assumption that collective remittances hold a development potential different from individual remittances, and that their long-term effect may potentially ease the continued need for migration and individual resource transfers. As migrants often maintain strong attachments to their places of origin, the status acquired from contributing to local development through HTA associational practices can in itself be a motivational factor (Goldring 2002). While one of the primary activities of HTAs is fundraising for various projects in their communities or countries of origin, their organisational structure may additionally allow for exchanging experiences on issues relating to cultural heritage, integration and rights claims in the countries of settlement, and as such provide an integrative and supportive environment for newcomers. Attachments and motivations will vary according to the situation of particular migrant groups, the characteristics of the receiving countries and the social and

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political conditions of the countries and communities of origin (Lacomba and Cloquell 2014). Frequently, issues of (dis)trust and (lack of ) confidence seem to be among the obstacles for success. Migrants sometimes hold strong animosity towards working with the governments in their countries of origin. This animosity may be based on political disagreements, especially in situations of conflict, but could also stem from a general dissatisfaction with the workings—typically corruption—of state institutions in the country of origin (Faist 2008; Turner and Kleist 2013). Attempts to institutionalise the sending of collective remittances on national scales, as, for example, in the often highlighted Mexican three-for-one programme where each transferred migrant dollar is matched by three levels of government (federal, state and municipal), may be neither directly replicable nor particularly appealing to migrant organisations concerned with hometown or homeland development (Sørensen et al. 2002). Many of the changes that migration gives rise to do not result from financial remittance flows only. Other kinds of transfers are important, among them social remittances. Social remittances are usually defined as the ideas, practices, identities and social capital that flow from migrant-receiving to migrant-sending country communities. Social remittances are transferred by migrants during home visits or exchanged by letters, phone, Internet or other modern forms of communication. They may affect family power relations, gender roles, class and race identity, and alter political, economic or religious participation. They may also promote migrant entrepreneurship across borders. Within HTAs, social remittances include modes of membership recruitment and socialisation, strategies, leadership styles and forms of inter-organisational practice (Levitt 1998). Initiatives involving temporary returns of professionals to counter brain drain, as well as assisted return and reintegration programmes of refugees and failed asylum seekers, have inarguably included social remittance logics in concrete programme activities. International migration–development cooperation generally has limited the understanding of social remittances to skill transfers. Social remittances are central for understanding how migration modifies the lives of non-migrants. Given that social remittances almost inevitably flow together with financial remittances, changes in normative structures and general practices among recipients may be pertinent to ensure their continuous flow (Levitt and Sørensen 2004). Just as is the case with financial remittances, the perception of the effect of social remittances may be positive or negative: when leading to a higher degree of gender equality, social remittances are generally viewed positively; when including the transfer of drug abuse habits or gang culture, their effect is doomed to be negative.

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Assumptions Behind Migration– Development Links

Over the last decade, migration has entered the development agenda and several governments have announced a decision to enhance the links between their aid and migration/refugee policies within an overall focus on poverty reduction. French and Spanish co-development policies are clear examples of this decision; European Union Mobility Partnerships are other examples. The enhancement of this migration–development link is reflected in various policy documents. A careful reading of such documents reveal the following logic: a combination of population growth in the South and greater awareness of (better) living conditions offered in the North presents the international community with a development challenge. On the one hand, migration can be an ‘engine for development’ through the transfer of remittances, experience and knowledge brought back upon return. This conceptualisation of the migration–development nexus obviously mirrors the dominant development paradigm, namely that of economic development. In this reading, migrant remittances carry a potential for poverty reduction and local investment in the Global South. Second to migrant remittances, south–north migration potentially leads to a transfer of human capital and ideas and practices (social remittances) from the North to the South. Finally, it seems as if the conventional understanding of the migration cycle as constituted by the three R’s of recruitment, remittances and return (Papademetriou and Martin 1991) has been substituted by a desirability of temporary migration. Temporary migrants are expected to transfer a higher percentage of their income than permanent migrants (see e.g. UNDP 2009). As they are obliged to go back home when their contract ends, developing countries will not be drained from valuable human resources, and developed countries will not have social obligations beyond the contract period. The shifting emphasis towards temporary migration is a good example of the swinging migration–development pendulum mentioned above. Bringing together migration and development policy concerns of various governments and international organisations, a Global Commission on International Migration was established in 2005, to ‘promote a more coherent, comprehensive and global response ton migration issues’ (see www.gcim.org). The following year, the UN High-Level Dialogue on International Development began discussions on ‘the multidimensional aspects of international development in order to identify appropriate ways and means to maximise its development benefits and minimise its negative impacts’ (see  www.un.org/esa/ population/migration/hld/index.html). Subsequent yearly meetings of the

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Global Forum on Migration and Development have sought to establish ‘a new global process designed to enhance the positive impact of migration on development (and vice versa) by adopting a more consistent policy approach, identifying new instruments and best practices, exchanging knowhow and experience about innovative tactics and methods and, finally, establishing cooperative links between the various actors involved’. After the first constitutive meeting in Brussels, discussions have included empowering of migrants for development, integrating migration policies into development strategies for the benefit of all and ‘partnerships for migration and human development through shared prosperity and shared responsibility’ (see www. gfmd.org). The results of more than 10 years of intense debate have led to substantial achievements on the remittance front, first and foremost lower transfer fees and easier access to sending and receiving remittances. On the policy alignment front, however, there has been less convergence (Glick Schiller 2012). While there has been increasing policy attention to promoting return of irregular migrants and failed asylum seekers, fewer attempts to actively include migration concerns in development policy have resulted. One obvious question is to ask why this is so? Possible answers should probably be found in the current geopolitical context in which development has become subordinated to concerns around how to prevent the pressure of unwanted migrants, introducing development mainly as an instrument of migration policy rather than migration as an inherent feature of development policy (Lavenex and Kunz 2008). In such contexts, ‘development may merely serve as a vehicle to export receiving countries’ obsession with migration control’ (Geiger and Pécoud 2013: 372). Critiques of current migration–development nexus policy practice should be found in this fact.

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Promoting Development Through Cooperation with HTAs and Diaspora Groups

Critical analysis of the various claims made by international institutions with regard to the role of HTAs and diasporas in home country development reveals an insufficient understanding of the heterogeneity of organised migrant groups and the conditions necessary for such groups to take on a ‘developmental’ role. Remittances do not, in and of themselves, bring social reform; HTAs come in different shapes and are not necessarily perfect partners in development cooperation.

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Whether the activities of HTAs are likely to promote development in the countries of origin is narrowly related to factors such as the migrant group’s incorporation into the country of destination, the level of solidarity within the migrant group as well the availability of material and human resources within the associations, the vitality of civil society in the countries of origin, and the external assistance HTAs are able to mobilise within home country governments and alliances established with civil society and development agencies in the countries of destination, often under the heading of ‘co-development’ initiatives (Lacomba and Cloquell 2014). The engagement of HTAs cannot be a substitute for state or private investments in home country development. Thus, macrostructural features such as a stable political situation, low levels of social conflict, economic stability and home country willingness to establish durable public policies around HTA engagement are critical prerequisites for HTA and codevelopment activities to succeed. In the destination country, migrants’ labour market incorporation and socio-economic integration play a decisive role. Apart from co-development activities, European development agencies have pursued migration–development initiatives under the heading of diaspora cooperation. These initiatives are often directed towards fragile areas that formal development actors find difficult to access due to conflict or other security problems. Contrary to the rather unproblematic perception of HTAs, diaspora organisations are often viewed as security threats or long-distance nationalists whose distance make them unaccountable or prone to affiliate with local actors engaged in conflict maintenance rather than peace and reconciliation efforts. However, when perceived as collective development agents, diasporas may serve as bridgeheads between the established development industry and local actors. In the latter case, concrete diaspora projects generally entail capacity building and matching fund schemes directed towards social service provision, infrastructure and the building or strengthening of civil society (Kleist 2014). No matter the type and practicalities related to HTA and diaspora project support, the cooperation landscape seems extremely volatile. Development agencies have tended to merge project quality with value assessments and select only those projects that are in line with agency priorities for support. Generally, funding schemes have been financially modest and short term, potentially creating competition rather than cooperation between different organised migrant groups (Kleist op. sit.). This volatility suggests that the enthusiasm around migrants, remittances and HTAs conveniently underplays the role of states of origin and destination politics in promoting development.

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Conclusion

A considerable amount of research on the links between migration and development has been conducted over the last 10 years, of which only a minor part has been cited here. Part of this research has concerned ways to make remittances a more effective tool for poverty reduction and development in migrant-sending countries in the Global South, how to mitigate the negative effects of migration such as brain drain and enhanced social inequality due to unequal remittance distribution within countries and communities, and how to align with HTAs and diaspora groups and create partnerships for development (for a summary, see Page and Plaza 2008). Another part of this research has questioned the credibility behind international policy efforts to link migration and development as long as migration control remains a political priority for migrant-receiving states and the international policy-setting fora these states dominate (for a summary, see Geiger and Pécoud 2013). Criticisms grounded in a human development perspective have found that even when remittances have an effect on poverty reduction and economic growth, the impact is often modest, the redistributive effect may be lacking, and in the cases where remittances continue to flow during economic crisis, their steady flow cannot substitute for sound public policies in the countries of origin (Blossier 2010). There is therefore a case for critically questioning the monetarising and instrumentalising bias surrounding the production of knowledge about remittances. As coined by José Luís Rocha, too much focus on the financial aspects of remittances easily ignores the human development aspects of the social and patriarchal relationships remittances destroy or build, the family micro-policy such transfers determine and the state reduction they encourage, thereby sidestepping any mention of the political and socioeconomic conflicts of the societies where the remittances end up (Rocha 2008). Likewise, a persistent focus on the north–south flow of remittances—whether in individual or collective form—neglects the human cost of separating family members for extended periods; the exploitation, exclusion and criminalisation migrants face at the bottom of the labour market in the Global North; as well as the growing share of these remittances that goes into financing the migration over ever more controlled international borders (Sørensen 2015). As access to mobility (and protection of continued mobility opportunities) is a fundamental premise for nurturing the development potential of migration (Sørensen et al. 2002), it should not require much mathematical skills to figure out that control and prevention of south–north migration flows will

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have an effect on individual migrants and the remittances sent to families and communities, and, by consequence, on the role migrants and HTAs can play in promoting development. The collateral consequences of current massive deportation of undocumented migrants or repatriation of failed asylum seekers are indeed causing serious problems in many migrant-sending countries, first and foremost through the matter of lost remittances. For families that have come to depend on remittances, deportation represents a financial catastrophe, in particular in those instances where migration is based on debt and the loans have not been repaid. In situations where economic recession is accompanied by mass deportations—or conflict resolution by large-scale repatriation—remittances not only diminish but more pressure on scarce or unevenly distributed local resources almost certainly will occur, raising the potential for social and political instability. In the USA, as well as in the European Union, migration management is instituting new forms of governing movement and people. To circumvent state processes of governing mobility, migrants have come to rely on new recruitment processes, remittances are increasingly spent on repaying debts financing undocumented travel arrangements and increasingly return is occurring in the form of deportation. In a global context of state withdrawal from providing public services, policy attempts to govern mobility for the benefit of development could be seen as reluctance to seriously approach global inequality and change status quo. Such issues need to be considered in future migration–development research. So do the very premises on which conventional migration–development logics build. Economic development cannot be isolated from human development (and vice versa); migration cannot be a vehicle for national development if no sound national development plan—and democratic structures to ensure its implementation—exists. Scholars involved in the debate have argued that the migration–development field suffers from a lack of theoretical rootedness and rely too much on scattered empirical results that not only point in different directions but also impede theoretical development and a more generalised understanding of migration–development interactions. To move the migration–development agenda forward, theoretisation surely is important, but so is the need to recognise the role played by policymaking in the Global North and South in generating and maintaining conditions that make it necessary for people to migrate, maintain links and contribute to home country development from afar.

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References Adida, C.L., and D.M.  Girod. 2011. Do migrants improve their hometowns? Remittances and access to public services in Mexico, 1995-2000. Comparative Political Studies 44(1): 3–27. Bakewell, O. 2008. “Keeping them in their place”: The ambivalent relationship between development and migration in Africa. Third World Quarterly 29(7): 1341–1358. Blossier, F. 2010. Migradollars and economic development: Characterizing the impact of remittances on Latin America. Council of Hemisphere Affairs. http:// www.coha.org/migradollars-and-economic-development/. Accessed 28 Mar 2014. Castles, S., and R. Delgado Wise (eds.). 2008. Migration and development: Perspectives from the south. Geneva: International Organization for Migration. De Haas, H. 2012. Migration and development: A theoretical perspective. International Migration Review 44(1): 227–264. Faist, T. 2008. Migrants as transnational development agents: An inquiry into the newest round of the migration-development nexus. Population, Space and Place 14(1): 21–42. Geiger, M., and A. Pécoud. 2013. Migration, development and the “migration and development nexus”. Population, Space and Place 19(4): 369–374. Glick Schiller, N. 2012. Unraveling the migration and development web: Research and policy implications. International Migration 50(3): 92–97. Glick Schiller, N., and T.  Faist. 2009. Introduction: Migration, development and social transformation. Social Analysis 53(3): 1–13. Goldring, L. 2002. The Mexican state and transmigrant organizations: Negotiating the boundaries of membership and participation. Latin American Research Review 37(3): 55–99. Kleist, N. 2014. Understanding diaspora organizations in European development cooperation: Approaches, challenges and ways ahead. New Diversities 16(2): 55–70. Lacomba, J., and A. Cloquell. 2014. Migrants, associations and home country development: Implications for discussions on transnationalism. New Diversities 16(2): 21–38. Lavenex, S., and R. Kunz. 2008. The migration-development nexus in eu external relations. European Integration 30(3): 439–457. Levitt, P. 1998. Social remittances: Migration driven local level forms of cultural diffusion. International Migration Review 32(4): 926–948. Levitt, P., and N.N.  Sørensen. 2004. ‘The transnational turn in migration studies’, Global Migration Perspectives No. 6. Geneva: Global Commission on International Migration. Page, J., and S. Plaza. 2008. Migration, remittances and development: A review of global evidence. Journal of African Economies 15(2): 245–336. Papademetriou, D., and P.  Martin (eds.). 1991. The unsettled relationship: Labor migration and economic development. Connecticut: Greenwood Press.

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Rocha, J.L. 2008. Centroamericanos – Redefiniendo las Fronteras. Managua: Impresiones Helios. Skeldon, R. 2008. International migration as a tool in development policy: A passing phase? Population and Development Review 34(1): 1–18. Sørensen, N.N. 2015. Great recession, migration management and the effect of deportation to Latin America. In Immigrant vulnerability and resilience, ed. M. Aysa-Lastra and L. Cachón. New York: Springer. Sørensen, N.N., N. Van Hear, and P. Engberg-Persen. 2002. The migration development nexus: Evidence and policy options. International Migration 40(5): 3–47. Stepputat, F., and N.N. Sørensen. 2014. Sociology and forced migration. In Oxford handbook of refugee and forced migration studies, ed. E.  Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, G. Loecher, K. Long, and N. Sigona. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Turner, S., and N. Kleist. 2013. Agents of change? Staging and governing diapsoras and the African State. African Studies 72(2): 192–206. UNDP. 2009. Human development report 2009: Overcoming barriers: Human mobility and development. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. World Bank. 2014. Migration and development brief 22. April 11, 2014. Washington, D.C: World Bank.

Part V (In)Security, Mobility and Geopolitics

20 Mobility, Immobility and Migration Ronald Skeldon

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Introduction

If globalisation has been one of the major characteristics of the world’s economies over recent decades, the movement of people has been one of the most obvious expressions of the process. Migration links economies, societies and states in a very tangible way. International migration is an issue that states cannot deal with on their own but must do so in the context of bilateral or multilateral relations. Thus, migration has emerged as one of the major political, social and economic issues of our time: that there are too many migrants, that countries have lost control of their boundaries, that migrants are taking the jobs of local populations, that migrants are exploiting the welfare benefits of destination countries, that the loss or the ‘poaching’ of the brightest prejudices the development prospects of origin countries. The interpretations in these and many other concerns are often guided more by opinion than robust data, and more nuanced interpretations are required. This chapter guides the reader through migration studies, highlighting its strengths and weaknesses, pointing towards recent research findings and suggesting avenues for future enquiry. Given that migration touches upon so many dimensions of economies and societies, it is axiomatic that it is related to development and is perhaps best conceptualised as an integral part of development itself. It is difficult to envisage any aspect of development without some implications for human

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movement, and the movement of people from one part of the world to another is likely to induce wider transformations in society and economy. Moving away from these lofty conceptual heights to more specific ideas about development, migration is not a Millennium Development Goal (MDG) and rightly so. The international community would never have been able to agree on a goal for migration, let  alone specific targets. Yet, the achievement of the MDGs will have implications for migration: the reduction of poverty, improvements in education levels or the elimination of discrimination based upon gender, for example, are all likely to have implications for human movement. So it will be for the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) that will follow the MDGs from 2015. However, migration, rather than something that is necessarily ‘positive’ or ‘negative’ for development, must be seen as a challenge that needs to be addressed rather than a ‘thing’ in its own right that has to be controlled or managed. The focus of policy needs to be on what generates migration in the first place and not the consequences that are seen in the movements of people. These issues will be examined below after a review of some of the methodological fundamentals of the topic, which will lead on to a brief sketch of global trends.

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Methodological Issues

Migrants are most commonly defined as those people who are registered in a place different from the area in which they were born. These places are most commonly individual countries in the study of international migration or the basic administrative units into which a country is divided in the study of internal migration. As most people move over relatively short distances, the smaller the units, the greater the number of people a census or survey will identify as migrants. Hence, data generated from large units can give the impression that populations are relatively immobile compared with data generated from a population divided into relatively small units. This fundamental issue makes the generation of comparable data on the volume of migration across countries highly problematic. We cannot say with confidence that one population is more or less mobile than another in the same way that we can generate comparative measures for the other two demographic variables, fertility or mortality. However, innovative methods applied to existing data in order to improve comparability across states can be found in the work of Martin Bell and his colleague (see, e.g., Bell and Charles-Edwards 2013). Until continuous registration of changes in usual place of residence becomes widespread or detailed geocoding of individuals on a longitudinal basis by

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standard geographical area becomes more than a technological dream, data weaknesses will continue to plague the study of migration. In the interim, we will have to rely on continued improvements in the coverage of migrationrelated questions in censuses: currently, about three quarters of states in the world collect basic birthplace data, for example (UN 2012). Innovative technological solutions such as the use of mobile phone data may help to generate different approaches in the future. Other conceptual issues further complicate the study of migration. Migration is rarely a simple movement from origin to destination. It is more generally a complex sequence of movements that involve much onward, but more commonly return, migration. Return remains one of the more problematic issues in migration studies as people who have returned to their origin area are registered by most censuses and surveys as in their places of origin, and hence as non-migrants. Information on place of usual residence 1 or 5 years ago helps to reduce this enumeration problem but does not eliminate it. Only detailed individual migration histories that are expensive to compile and require specialist interviewers provide complete information on the mobility of human populations and these are only possible for small sample populations. Return can be short term and often repetitive, which gives rise to the concepts of ‘circular migration’ or ‘circulation’. In practice, migration is assumed to represent a more definitive or longerterm movement move from one place to another, while shorter-term movements are encompassed by the term ‘mobility’. Migration is a subset of mobility, with the latter encompassing all forms of human movement including circulation, which can range from daily, weekly, monthly to other forms of shorter-term movements. Immobility is rare in any population, the basic punishment in most societies being the removal of the right to move through imprisonment, but certain groups move more often and over longer distances than others. The following sections will sketch the emergent trends in migration and mobility at global and sub-global levels and attempt to explain how these trends have come about. An excellent recent overview of conceptual and methodological issues in migration research can be found in the essays in Vargas-Silva (2012).

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Global Patterns of Migration

The number of international migrants in the world in 2013 was 232 million, up from 154 million in 1990 (UN 2013). While a substantial number, it represented just 3 % of the world’s population as being outside the bor-

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ders of their state or territory of birth, a percentage that had not increased significantly over the period since 1990, and probably since 1960 (Czaika and de Haas 2014). There are more international migrants in the world today because there are more people alive in the world today. The figure of 232 million international migrants is based upon the stock of the foreign born in each state or territory or, where these data are missing, the stock of foreign citizens. While the United Nations considers that migrants are people who have resided at a destination for 12 months of more, those falling into the 232 million are simply those recorded by the various national census definitions around the world. Recent and short-term migrants may or may not have been included in the data depending upon national definitions. Return migrants were automatically excluded. Hence, some doubt exists about the nature, as well as the number, of international migrants in the world. Also, with a relatively stable estimate of global migration at around 3 % of the population, the data might give the impression that most of the world’s population is immobile, at least internationally. However, the study of migration extends beyond international migration and incorporates complex forms of human movement including the circular and return migrations described above but, most importantly, internal migrations including those associated with urbanisation. These migrations are not included in the figure of 232 million and, in 2009, an estimate of 740 million internal migrants, which was recognised as ‘conservative’, was published (UNDP 2009: 1). While increasing the total number of global migrants more than fourfold, it still represents a small minority of world population. Using smaller geographical units in order to measure migration would generate much higher estimates of internal migration, and consequently the overall total proportion of migrants. Global numbers of migrants are not particularly meaningful, however, as some parts of the world are characterised by higher levels of migration than others, in terms of both destination (immigration) and origin (emigration). For example, the stock of migrants represented over 86 % of the population of Qatar in 2010 and 70 % of the population of the United Arab Emirates (World Bank 2011). The proportion of the immigrant population of the much larger Saudi Arabia was 27.8 %. Data from the same source for Australia, Canada, the USA and the UK were, respectively, 25.7 %, 21.3 %, 13.5 % and 11.2 %. It must be emphasised that it is necessary to go beyond the numbers in any analysis of migration as the immigration into the countries of the Gulf Co-operation Council is very different from that into Australia or the USA. The former is made up primarily of contract labour migrants, while the latter consists of many who enter with the view of becoming future

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citizens. A big difference exists between countries such as the USA, Canada and Australia, where immigration is part of nation or state building, and countries in Europe which are still largely ambivalent about the role of immigrants. Even more extreme differences exist with countries in the Middle East, where rights of permanent settlement are virtually non-existent. In terms of the stock of emigrants outside the borders of countries, again significant variations exist across the world, with the populations of small, mainly island, countries in the Pacific and the Caribbean being most affected in relative terms. Over 40 % of the populations of Barbados, Tonga, Antigua and Barbuda, St Kitts and Nevis, Grenada and Samoa were outside their countries of birth, for example. However, a few larger countries also had significant emigration. For example, Albania and El Salvador had emigrant stocks in 2010 of 1.44 and 1.27 million, which represented respectively 45.7 % and 20.5 % of the birth populations. However, the country with the largest number of emigrants abroad in 2010 was Mexico with some 11.9 million, which represented 10.7 % of all Mexican born. It is not just countries in the so-called Global South that exhibit relatively high rates of emigration: some 7.5 % of the population born in the UK is estimated to be abroad. Again, those abroad from the UK are very different from those abroad from Mexico, with emigration from the UK dominated by the highly skilled compared with less-skilled workers from Mexico. An analysis of global patterns of international migration from 1960 to 2000 has shown no overall acceleration in migration rates but an increasing number of origin areas generating migrants to a relatively restricted number of major destination countries (Czaika and de Haas 2014). This evolving pattern of more and more origins becoming focussed on just a few destinations has been previously observed in internal migration (Skeldon 1990). The incorporation of new areas into the global migration system seems to be an essential part of this process and is discussed in more detail below. Certainly, new destinations emerge, as in cases in eastern Asia, for example, where China may also ultimately emerge as a major destination (Pieke 2012; Skeldon 2011). However, certain areas, such as Argentina, seem to fade and areas that were once important origins for migrants emerge as destinations, as in the case of several countries in western and southern Europe. The global patterns of migration shift and the volume of migration may decline within or among certain countries (Skeldon 2013). The flows among countries need to be augmented by analyses at the subnational level. Within the destination and origin countries that have relatively high immigration and emigration, the specific places of destination and origin are themselves concentrated. In the case of destination countries, cities are the

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principal destinations for international migrations. For example, Inner and Outer London together accounted for 36.6 % of the 7.7 million foreign born in the UK in 2012 (MO 2013). In Inner London alone, the foreign born represented fully 40 % of the resident population. Similarly, the populations of both New York and Los Angeles had just over one-third of their populations foreign born in 2010, compared with 12.7 % for the country as a whole (Mayor of London 2013). In the case of origin countries, the identification of specific origins of international migration is more problematic. The data rarely exist and most of what we know comes from microstudies of origin areas. These have been concentrated in areas outside large urban areas and one of the big unknowns is the role of large cities as origins of international migration. Intuitively, they should play a major role, most clearly in the case of highly skilled migration, where the institutions to train the highly skilled tend to be located in large cities. Nevertheless, not all of the major origins lie in cities. The migrations from both Bangladesh and Pakistan to the UK, for example, have overwhelmingly come from mainly rural and quite isolated parts of these countries in, respectively, Sylhet and Mirpur districts (Gardner 1995; Ballard 1987). The history of colonial recruitment policies that then gave rise to the cumulative causation (Massey 1990) that allowed pronounced emigration to develop from specific points of contact was an important part of the process. The migrants from Sylhet and Mirpur were largely unskilled or semi-skilled but went to very different parts of the UK: the former to London and the latter mainly to northern English cities, which were undergoing deindustrialisation and where cheap accommodation was available. Over time, the ‘London effect’ associated with its status as the centre of economic growth in the UK raised the education status of those migrants settling there and they overtook migrants who settled elsewhere: hence, the significance of specific destinations, as well as of specific origins, in the eventual integration of immigrants in any country. The key point of this discussion is that descriptions of country-to-country or large region-to-large region flows such as South–North or South–South obscure much of the nature and dynamics of migration. Migration is a process that diffuses in particular ways through time and across space (Skeldon 1997). Clear channels of movement linking cities through systems of movement exist in the case of international migration, and channels that link settlements at different levels of the urban hierarchy exist in the case of internal migration. These linkages change over time. This discussion reinforces the need for subnational approaches to international migration in order to locate it within transnational networks of cities and national urban hierarchies and to move beyond ‘methodological nationalism’ (see the essays in Glick Schiller and Çaglar 2011, also Faist et al. 2013).

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Causes of Migration

Migrants tend to move from relatively poor, or less developed areas, to wealthier, more developed areas. However, the evidence shows that the poorest tend not to migrate internationally, and the poorest countries do not participate in the global migration system to the same extent as middle-income and wealthier economies (Skeldon 1997; de Haas 2010). Initially at least, development and migration are positively related. Migrants require capital, both physical and social, in order to pay for and to facilitate their movement: the poorest have little access to this capital. Even though migrants often appear poor, they do tend to have more education and greater access to resources than the populations from which they are drawn, even though in cases of internal migration these differences may be quite small. The poorest do move but tend to do so over shorter distances and for shorter periods of time. The idea of the migrant simply responding to economic forces as an income maximiser also seems misplaced. Certainly, economic factors are important, but more in the context of family or joint decision-making within a risk-minimising framework that is central to the New Economics of Labour Migration (NELM) rather than the neo-classical individualist income-maximising approach to migration. Excellent reviews of the basic theories of migration are contained in Massey et  al. (1993) and Castles et al. (2014). These approaches have generated much insight into migration at the meso-level, and these have been supplemented by micro-level studies based upon in-depth examination of migrants in origin and destination societies. The NELM approach has fitted well with ideas about mobility rather than just migration as household risk-minimising strategies are realised through a diversification of the household resource base that can involve the incorporation of seasonal off-farm employment in plantations or towns. Hence, the rural household becomes the centre of systems of circulation as family members access labour markets that are easy to enter and leave such as a carrier around markets, a pedicab driver or a labourer in the construction industry. All such systems have ‘leakages’ as the migrants find longer-term employment in towns and, over time, more and more spend longer at destinations. This process can evolve to the extent that the centres of circulation shift from rural to urban as populations drain from the villages and migrants only return to the villages for annual festivals or recreational visits (Skeldon 1990, 2012). By this time, rural depopulation is under way. Across much of the developed world, village populations, which have lost their reproductive capacity, are in decline, presenting challenges to local and national authorities to

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provide basic services to often isolated areas at reasonable cost. A recent insightful account of Europe’s ‘dying villages’ will be found in the work of Tom Pow (2012). Such systems of circulation also exist at the international level. Most involve labour migrants on contract, systems that are likely to persist because the migrants have no right to settle at destinations, as in the Gulf States. However, others involve more skilled migrants moving to settler destinations such as Australia, Canada or the USA. Migrants from Hong Kong, Taiwan or countries in Southeast Asia have been observed entering those settler countries as permanent residents and establishing their families there, but with the principal breadwinner or breadwinners then returning to their origins to continue their employment in higher-earning and lower tax regimes while circulating transnationally (see Skeldon 1994; also Pe Pua et al. 1996). More generally, the difference between ‘migrants’ and more temporary movers is becoming blurred. While more than one million people entered the USA as permanent immigrants each year from 2010 to 2012, 1.6– 1.7 million students and their families and around three million temporary workers and their families also entered each year. About 6 % of these temporary workers were agricultural workers, with the vast majority of the remainder being skilled workers and their families. The pattern for Australia was similar, although in Canada permanent settlers still dominated the flows, even if the numbers of students and temporary workers were substantial and rising. Students make a fertile recruiting ground for countries looking for skills as they have been trained to local standards. Many of those who entered as temporary workers, particularly the more skilled, will seek to become permanent residents. As seen above, a component of those who entered as permanent migrants become temporary circulators; others return home upon retirement. Hence, any hard and fast distinction between immigrants, as more permanent settlers and temporary workers, becomes increasingly hard to sustain in regard to those who enter through one or other of those immigration channels. Mobility is a more useful and inclusive term and the data suggest that we have moved into an age of mobility rather than an age of migration. While the mobility of both skilled and less-skilled workers occurs, it is perhaps the mobility of the highly skilled among the major cities of the world that has garnered so much recent attention and is so closely associated with globalisation under neo-liberalism in what Leslie Sklair has termed the ‘Transnational Capitalist Class’ (2001).

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Migration, Mobility and Development

The focus on migration has also often sidelined those who have not moved. As implied above, almost all people move but some move further and for longer periods of time than others. Hence, the causes and consequences of groups with lesser mobility need equal attention. The danger has been that migration as the objective of study has become reified into a ‘thing’ in its own right rather than as a consequence of broader economic, social and political transformation. Certainly, migrants, by linking places together and transferring both physical goods and ideas from one place to the other, can facilitate and reinforce these transformations. However, locating particular patterns of movement to particular economic, social and political contexts is likely to provide greater understanding of the whole process of migration. Shifting the perspective to this level allows migration to be seen as an integral part of, rather than separate from, development. Migration thus needs to be placed within a broad framework of change in which the idea of transitions becomes central: that change diffuses systematically through time and across space. The hypothesis of a ‘mobility transition’ was advanced by Zelinsky (1971) almost half a century ago in which patterns of migration were linked to the stages of the ‘demographic transition’, or systematic shifts in fertility and mortality. This was a macro-level descriptive model based largely on the Anglo-American experience but contemporary research based at regional and local levels in the developing world supported the idea of systematic shifts in mobility over time (Skeldon 1990). Such grand narrative perspectives fell out of favour in the social sciences in the 1980s and 1990s, with much of that subsequent work appearing to lack context, but signs exist that broader perspective and integrative approaches are coming back into favour (see, e.g., Castles et al. 2010; also de Haas 2010; Skeldon 2012). However, perhaps the clearest examples of this type of work are to be found in the work of historians. Following on from the broad sweep of global migration over the last millennium by Hoerder (2002) is Osterhammel’s massive assessment of the transformation of the world in the nineteenth century in which ‘mobilities’, as well as ‘cities’ and ‘frontiers’, appear among the grand ‘panoramas’ to provide an overarching structure. The city and the frontier provide respectively core and periphery destinations for migration; ‘as spaces of boundless possibility, they attract migrants like nothing else in the age’ (Osterhammel 2014: 322). The rise, and fall, of different mobilities are charted across time and space in the context of economic, social and political change and the massive bibliography of evidence in this book rewards mining.

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Considerable research has been carried out on the economic, social and cultural dimensions of migration but much less on the political dimension. Circuits of human mobility essentially define the nation but, as emphasised at the outset, migration is a central part of globalisation and transnational systems of mobility. How these impact upon the state and, more broadly, how migration has varied through the evolution of the state and state structures as, for example, from princely states through kingly states, territorial states and state-nations to the nation state (Bobbitt 2002) still remain largely unexamined. The seminal works of Zolberg, however, on forced migrations and the creation of the nation state and his work on policies that can create the nation are significant pointers in this direction (Zolberg et al. 1989; Zolberg 2006). More generally, the migration and development debate that has come to dominate the field in recent years has had a more instrumentalist approach: that migration, when correctly managed, can be an effective contributor to development. However, effective management of migration can only be implemented where some form of equally effective governance exists, which is not always or even generally the case. Even where favourable conditions do exist, the evidence that remittances or diasporas contribute effectively to development is not robust. Remittances can improve the welfare of those who receive them but whether they promote broader development is less certain (Skeldon 2008; see also Sørensen, this volume). If much of global international migration originates in cities, then the remittances flow back to the cities and not to the poorest parts of countries of origin. On the other side of the coin, the evidence that the exodus of the skilled is prejudicial to the development prospects of origin countries is equally lacking (Clemens 2013; Skeldon 2009). Again, if skilled international migrants are leaving urban areas, which have the institutions necessary to train them, they are not leaving those areas where the development is needed. The counterfactual does not follow: had they not migrated internationally to metropolitan areas, they would have moved to those areas of greatest need domestically. In terms of health, education and other basic dimensions of development, the most deprived areas need people with basic skills rather than the high-fliers in order to achieve the MDGs. If people are educated to global standards, they are likely to migrate globally and resentment will occur, with skill waste, if they are not permitted to move internationally. The developmental role of the ‘diaspora’, the community of people from any specific origin area outside that origin, is the third pillar of the current debate in migration and development. In the diaspora are to be found many of the most skilled and wealthy from any area of origin. However, their developmental impact may be greatest in destination rather than in origin areas, through

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new ideas that are diffused back home, perhaps through period return, which are seen to be a powerful force for change. A historical perspective may bring an instructive light to current interpretations and for insightful interpretations of the Scottish diaspora (see Devine 2011; Herman 2002). The ideas of the Scottish Enlightenment made as great an impact outside Scotland as they did at home as they ‘invented the modern world’ (Herman 2002) and Highland Scots prospered more overseas or in the south than they could at home in marginal environments. Diasporas are also highly heterogeneous and not all in the diaspora may work for development in their homeland. Some actively seek to undermine the government at home. The migration and development debate has focussed primarily on more permanent forms of migration, although it has ventured into forms of circular migration, mainly as a way to supply labour without it becoming a permanent part of destination countries. Countries of origin benefit from the remittances sent back by their migrant workers without losing permanently their best brains in the process. Countries of destination benefit from the brawn and the brains, albeit on a temporary basis and the migrants benefit from higher earnings than they would have had if they had stayed at home. It is seen by some as a ‘win-win-win’ situation. However, as suggested above, ‘leakage’ occurs as the circular migrants are drawn into longer-term employment (Skeldon 2012). As seen above, temporary workers have a tendency to stay for longer periods of time: it is not in the interests of all employers to have a constant turnover of workers, or those who came as students are offered employment, or migrants end up marrying a local spouse. Circular migration is a very difficult type of migration to ‘manage’. Initially, as discussed above, migration and development are positively related. However, over time, as countries go through transitions to postindustrial societies and through a demographic transition from higher to lower mortality and fertility, migrations may decelerate. One of the few generalisations that can be made about migration is that the majority of migrants are young adults and the number of migrants in any country is going to be to some extent a function of the number of young adults in that society. We have seen a sharp decline in the number of internal migrants in both Japan and South Korea as these societies have aged (Skeldon 2013). Demography, however, is but part of the explanation as a long-term secular slowdown in internal migration in the more youthful society of the USA has been observed with home ownership and the nature of employment among other important explanatory factors (Frey 2009; Bogue et al. 2009). While the reasons for the emergence of this pattern may be complex, it draws attention to the fact that volumes of migration need not be ever expanding and that other forms of

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mobility may be starting to replace migration in highly urbanised and economically developed societies. One form of mobility that is generally excluded from the whole migration– development debate has been a form of circular movement that involves much larger numbers of people than any of the estimates of international or internal migration considered so far. In fact, they are generally excluded from any discussion of migration: the tourist. In 2013, some one billion international arrivals were estimated, up from 25 million in 1950, and an additional five to six billion domestic tourists could be added to the total. Global international tourism was estimated to generate around US$1.4 trillion in export earnings and just over 10 % of world jobs. The market share of emerging economies in global tourism increased from 30 % to 47 % between 1980 and 2013 (WTO 2014). The developmental impacts of these flows on local, regional and global economies dwarf those of other migrations and will need to be brought into the current debate. This entry has outlined briefly the main patterns and trends of global migrations and mobility as well as introducing their main causes and consequences. It has attempted to place migration and mobility in as broad a framework as possible in order to show how population movements change over time. Migration and migrant labour have always been seen as relatively immobile compared with the flows of capital and information in the process of globalisation. That the rise in temporary forms of mobility may at least partially correct this relative imbalance remains to be seen. The links between migration, mobility and development were explored and the need to move beyond a fairly narrow focus on remittances, skilled migration and diaspora was highlighted. An extensive literature exists on migration and mobility but lacunae remain equally extensive to the point that this entry is often stronger on hypothesis than fact. It is to be hoped this entry may aid the identification of future paths of research into mobility, immobility and migration and enable future generations of scholars of migration to take up issues raised and take them forward.

References Ballard, R. 1987. The political economy of migration: Pakistan, Britain, and the Middle East. In Migrants, workers, and the social order, ed. J.  Eades, 17–41. London: Tavistock. Bell, M., and E.  Charles-Edwards. 2013. Cross-national comparisons of internal migration: An update on global patterns and trends. Technical Paper No.2013/1.

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New York: Population Division, United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs. Bobbitt, P. 2002. The shield of Achilles: War, peace and the course of history. London: Allen Lane. Bogue, D.J., G.  Liegel, and M.  Koslowski. 2009. Immigration, internal migration, and local mobility in the United States. London: Elgar. Castles, S., H. de Haas, N. van Hear, and E. Vasta (eds.). 2010. Theories of migration and social change. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 36(10), special issue. Castles, S., H. de Haas, and M. Miller. 2014. The age of migration: International population movements in the modern world, 5th ed. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Clemens, M. 2013. What do we know about skilled migration and development? MPI policy brief, no 3. Washington: Migration Policy Institute. Czaika, M., and H. de Haas. 2014. The globalization of migration: Has the world become more migratory. International Migration Review 48(2): 283–323. De Haas, H. 2010. Migration transitions: A theoretical and empirical inquiry into the development drivers of international migration. IMI Working Paper 24. http:// www.imi.ox.ac.uk/pdfs/wp/wp-24-10. Oxford: International Migration Institute. Devine, T.M. 2011. To the ends of the earth: Scotland’s global diaspora. London: Allen Lane. Faist, T., M. Fauser, and E. Reisenauer. 2013. Transnational migration. Cambridge: Polity. Frey, W.H. 2009. The great American migration slowdown: Regional and metropolitan dimensions. Washington, D.C: Brookings. December. Gardner, K. 1995. Global migrants, local lives: Travel and information in rural Bangladesh. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Glick Schiller, N., and A. Çaglar (eds.). 2011. Locating migration: Rescaling cities and migration. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Herman, A. 2002. The Scottish enlightenment: The Scots’ invention of the modern world. London: Fourth Estate. Hoerder, D. 2002. Cultures in contact: World migration in the second millennium. Durham: Duke University Press. Massey, D. 1990. Social structure, household strategies and the cumulative causation of migration. Population Index 56(1): 3–26. Massey, D., J. Aranago, G. Hugo, A. Kouaouci, A. Pellegrino, and J. Taylor. 1993. Theories of international migration: A review and appraisal. Population and Development Review 19(3): 431–466. Mayor of London. 2013. World cities culture report 2013. London: Greater London Authority. http://www.london.gov.uk/sites/default/files/WCCR2013.pdf MO. 2013. Migrants in the UK: An overview. Oxford: The Migration Observatory. http://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/briefings/migrants-uk-overview Osterhammel, J. 2014. The transformation of the world: A global history of the nineteenth century. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

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Pe-Pua, R., C. Mitchell, R. Iredale, and S. Castles. 1996. Astronaut families and parachute children: The cycle of migration between Hong Kong and Australia. Canberra: Bureau of Immigration, Multicultural and Population Research. Pieke, F.N. 2012. Immigrant China. Modern China 38(1): 40–77. Pow, T. 2012. In another world: Among Europe’s dying villages. Edinburgh: Polygon. Skeldon, R. 1990. Population mobility in developing countries: A reinterpretation. London: Belhaven. Skeldon, R. (ed.). 1994. Reluctant exiles? Migration from Hong Kong and the new overseas Chinese. Armonk: M. E. Sharpe. Skeldon, R. 1997. Migration and development: A global interpretation. London: Longman. Skeldon, R. 2008. International migration as a tool in development policy: A passing phase? Population and Development Review 34(1): 1–18. Skeldon, R. 2009. Of skilled migration, brain drains and policy responses. International Migration 47(4): 3–29. Skeldon, R. 2011. China: an emerging destination for economic migration, Migration Information Source, Country Profiles. Washington, D.C.: Migration Policy Institute. http://migrationinformation.org/Profiles/display.cfm?ID=838 Skeldon, R. 2012. Going round in circles: Circular migration, poverty alleviation and marginality. International Migration 50(3): 43–60. Skeldon, R. 2013. Global migration: Demographic aspects and its relevance for development, Technical Paper No. 2013/6, Population Division, United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Dec 2013. http://www.un.org/esa/ population/migration/documents/EGM.Skeldon_17.12.2013.pdf Sklair, L. 2001. The transnational capitalist class. Oxford: Blackwell. UN. 2012. Data collection on international migration, Background note by Ms. Keiko Osaki-Tomit, Tenth Coordination Meeting on International Migration. New York: Population Division, United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affair. http://www.un.org/esa/population/meetings/tenthcoord2012/ Census%20and%20Migration%20Questions%202012.pdf UN. 2013. International migration report 2013. New  York: Population Division, Department of Economic and Social Affairs. http://www.un.org/en/development/ desa/population/publications/pdf/migration/migrationreport2013/Full_ Document_final.pdf UNDP. 2009. Human development report 2009: Overcoming barriers: Human mobility and development. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Vargas-Silva, C. (ed.). 2012. Handbook of research methods in migration. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. World Bank. 2011. Migration and remittances: Factbook 2011, 2nd ed. Washington, DC: The World Bank. WTO. 2014. Tourism highlights 2014 Edition. Madrid: United Nations World Tourism Organization. http://dtxtq4w60xqpw.cloudfront.net/sites/all/files/pdf/ unwto_highlights14_en_0.pdf

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Zelinsky, W. 1971. The hypothesis of the mobility transition. Geographical Review 61(2): 219–249. Zolberg, A.R. 2006. A Nation by design: Immigration policy in the fashioning of America. New York: Russell Sage. Zolberg, A.R., A. Suhrke, and S. Aguayo. 1989. Escape from violence: Conflict and the refugee crisis in the developing world. New York: Oxford University Press.

21 ‘Make Migration a Choice not a Necessity’: Challenging the Instrumentalisation of Migration as a Tool for Development Nicola Piper

1

Introduction

International migration and its link to development has been subject to discussion among policymakers and academics for several decades (see also Skeldon, this volume; Sørensen, this volume). This debate was influenced by the predominant schools of thought at different moments in time, such as modernisation and later dependency theory (Faist 2009). The relationship between migration and development has become subject to renewed interest over the last decade which coincides with, or is part of, the emerging global governance of migration (Grugel and Piper 2007; Betts 2012; Koser 2012). The global discourse on international migration in its present phase is based on two dominant, interrelated frameworks and policy concerns: (1) the  ‘management of migration’ discourse, which operates on the basis of controlling the (legal) exit and entry of workers, and their access to employment opportunities; (2) the ‘migration-development nexus’ discourse, with its particular focus on poverty alleviation in resource-poorer countries of origin through migration to typically resource-richer destination countries. These two discursive frames have one core element in common: the focus on controlling population movement through state cooperation whilst extracting mostly economic benefits from migration.

N. Piper ( ) University of Sydney, UK © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 J. Grugel, D. Hammett (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of International Development, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-42724-3_21

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The core modality by which to regulate migration resulting from global deliberations is temporary or circular migration which has emerged as the key policy prescription and has found a firm place on the global as well as regional policy agendas (Wickramasekara 2012). At the same time, only lip service is being paid to the human rights of migrants, especially in their role as workers: there have been moves to regulate migration (‘migration governance’) whilst ignoring the regulation of workplace dynamics and labour relations (‘labour governance’). This is evident from the under-ratification of migrant rights-specific international standards and the piecemeal process of easing the many hardships experienced by individual migrants resulting from exploitative practices of recruitment agencies and the employer-tied nature of temporary migration schemes that have become prevalent around the world (Human Rights Watch 2006; Amnesty International 2013). Parallel to these state-led efforts (states are the key constituents in international organisations concerned with migration where they shape agendas directly), migrant rights activists have formed global networks to channel their resistance against the dominant migration policy paradigm which has treated the rights of migrant workers and their families as a side issue. The starting point for activists, however, is that better rights protection is paramount to migrants’ ability to contribute to development in a holistic understanding: social and economic, of migrants and non-migrants. Moreover, they also take a critical stance towards the drive to institutionalise migration as a tool for development, whilst most of these efforts are based on a very narrow, that is, remittance focussed, view of development. In this context, the issue of provision of, and access to, rights has emerged as a central concern. Gender plays an important role shaping these dynamics. Given the feminisation of migration (the increasing role and numbers of women migrating as primary wage earner) in response to gendered ‘demand’ (ageing societies, labour shortages in the global care economy, crumbling public care services in the Global North) and ‘supply’ structures (primarily lack of employment opportunities in often highly gender-segregated societies), many migrant women end up working as domestic or care workers. Physical isolation (work in private households) and legal non-recognition (work in ‘grey’ areas of the care market or as informal workers) also lead to political exclusion in terms of labour activism: trade unions have traditionally concerned themselves with formal sectors and the organising of skilled workers. Migrant rights organisations have typically filled that void. The strategies for challenging the dominant discourse and policy prescriptions of migrant rights networks are being carried out on two major levels: the transnational and the global. As the name implies, the transnational level

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reaches beyond the borders of the nation-state, but does not concern itself (exclusively) with the relations between nations (which would be the international level); the main perspective is those of non-state actors which could be transnational corporations or, as in the present case, civil society actors. The global level refers to global regimes and institutions or the global public sphere (Piper and Uhlin 2004). On the transnational level, it is comparatively easier to identify specific targets and plan concrete actions for such challenges. The members of such networks challenge policies of the countries of origin and destination. Their bargaining power is usually greater in the case of the former, since they usually remain citizens and thus voters of their countries of origins. Blaming and shaming are part of the strategies in a national and transnational context: the articulation of grievances as an issue of rights is often the first step towards politicisation and political action. Many migrant rights organisations actively engage in such politicising process through consultations with members, the formation of organisational networks or the establishment of party chapters or trade unions (Piper and Rother 2011). At the global level, it is through networks that these organisations address the rights imbalance in current discourse and policy practices in the area of migration to address migrants’ political agency and broader empowerment. This chapter argues that what is emerging in ideational terms is a comprehensive rights-based approach (RBA) to migration that is in particular geared at liberating the Global South, where the majority of low-wage migrant workers, subjected to global disciplining efforts, stem from. What is emerging in agential terms are multiple networks of networks which the migrant rights movement creates or taps into in order to raise the key concerns by the majority of migrants at global fora. This is evident from the mobilising efforts around the United Nations (UN) as well as extra-UN processes (the Global Forum on Migration and Development (GFMD)), further reflected in the general attendance of, and the composition of panels at, the two sole civil society processes: the World Social Forum on Migration and the Peoples’ Global Action on Migration, Development and Human Rights.

2

Migration from a Global Justice Perspective

The cross-border movement of workers today is hardly a matter of free choice. It is rather a function of market forces, restrictive regulation and macro-level politics than an aspect of personal choice (Koskenniemi 2002). Critical academic and activists have come to refer to this situation as ‘forced migration’

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(Delgado Wise et al. 2010), a term hitherto preserved to refugee migration. This is so because the lack of decent work in countries of origin and the displacement of peasants and other workers as the result of neoliberal economic policies and so-called ‘free’ trade agreements are seen as providing no choice to the many who turn to overseas employment. The highly restrictive and selective migration policy environment, in combination with the expanding web of private recruitment agencies, also leaves little choice with regard to the ‘what’ (type of job), ‘how’ (visa conditions) and ‘where’ (country of destination) when opting for legal channels of migration. This state of affairs has led migrant rights activists to argue that, ‘the right not to emigrate should be in place in the countries of origin. This implies creating the necessary conditions that transform migration into a choice rather than a necessity’ (Final Declaration of the 5th World Social Forum on Migration, clause 31, 2012). The increasingly restrictive nature of migration policies promoted and practiced globally, and the prevalence of migrants in sectors shunned by local workers because of the low pay, unattractive working conditions or for lifestyle reasons, mean the migration and work status of migrants are marked by comparatively high levels of precariousness. This means it is not sufficient to address migrant rights solely from the viewpoint of the post-migration/immigration phase but to integrate the pre-migration and return phases into a comprehensive RBA to migration—and the causes of migration. A comprehensive rights-based perspective to migrant rights, therefore, highlights the current failure of migration and labour governance practiced ‘here and there’ (i.e., in countries of origin and destination), thus linking causes and consequences of migration. Further, it points to the importance of a broad-based social justice approach which, for migrant activists whose advocacy is based on the average migrant experience, revolves around safe, secure and fairly paid work, access to social protection and portable social rights, dignity and respect for migrants in the countries of destination and their countries of origin. In addition, equally crucial are political rights—that is, the right to join and form collective organisations in order to demand and claim rights. A comprehensive RBA then addresses two aspects: (1) migration—which is to be understood as a process which involves three main stages, that is, premigration, overseas stay and return migration (i.e., the full circle of migration); and (2) rights of migrants as workers—which relate to the obligations and responsibilities of not only country of destination societies (post-migration) but also country of origin societies, and thus also address the root causes of migration and the vicious cycle of migration and remigration. This means

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that an RBA to migration has to be placed alongside an RBA to development, understood in a holistic sense beyond macroeconomics. The nascent global migrant rights movement has in fact invoked the UN Declaration on the Right to Development from 1986 in its formulation of a critique to the dominant discourse on the migration–development nexus. Applied to the realm of employment and work it is the ILO’s ‘decent work’ agenda that forms the basis from which to argue for the need to create decent employment opportunities ‘here and there’, to render migration a greater choice rather than a force as it is being experienced by many migrant workers. In political representational terms, such approach points to the importance to membership in political organisations as quasi-citizenship and to such organisations’ operations across borders (Gordon 2008). These kinds of connections are reflected in the migrant rights movement’s mobilising efforts. In a context where migrant rights are not recognised (with migrants treated as non-citizens and therefore not legitimate bearers of rights on the one hand, or deprived of rights as ‘absent’ citizens on the other hand) let  alone have their rights put in practice, the promotion and protection of migrant rights through participation by migrant rights organisations becomes a central pillar of rights-based migration governance. In recognising the political agency of migrants and the importance of their participation or representation in decision-making processes, the RBA goes beyond a legalistic approach. By developing a comprehensive RBA to migration and to development, this perspective involves not only (legal) recognition and (political) representation but also (material) redistribution. What is at stake here is neither a classical understanding of citizenship nor a liberal, individualistic notion of human rights. The terminological choice made here of the somewhat diffuse sounding notion of ‘migrant rights’ pertains in the present interpretation to broader mobility rights that go beyond national citizenship rights tied to a post-migration context, as well as to political representation (Gordon 2009) and political responsibility (Young 2004) beyond the confines of the nation-state. Moreover, the phrase ‘migrant rights’ includes the material elements that the liberal notion of human rights tends to gloss over. Thus, the notion of ‘rights’ is approached from a global justice perspective that builds on Nancy Fraser’s threefold conception of the ‘three Rs’: her argument that the two major families of justice claims—claims for socioeconomic Redistribution and claims for socio-legal Recognition—have to be supplemented by political Representation, set within the context of an increasingly globalising world (2005). Redistribution and recognition, as Fraser points out, are in themselves political ‘in the sense of being contested

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and power-laden’ (2005: 74), and thus intricately linked to the issue of representation which concerns the procedures that structure public processes of contestation. Taking these claim-making processes out of the national realm is highly important for migrants who are often excluded from political processes in countries of destination—and to some extent from their countries of origin also. It is these multiple exclusions which the global migrant rights movement is trying to address through mobilising in the form of intersecting networks. The notion of ‘migrant rights’ is in this sense intricately linked to an understanding of rights as political. Inspiration is taken here from Koskenniemi (2002) who treats rights not as a ‘given’ or part of a moral order but as historically contingent and products of politics. He refers to this process as ‘field constitution’ whereby an aspect of reality comes to be characterised in terms of rights at a particular moment in time. This process involves delicate politics, allocation of resources and struggle over institutional competencies. Such dynamics can be observed with regard to the fragmented global migration governance in institutional and competency terms, and international organisations’ aspirations to become the key migration agent. Such dynamics can equally be observed within the sphere of civil society (Piper and Rother 2014) and increasingly so with funding sources drying up. Overall, in conceptual terms, as only some aspects of reality become recognised in terms of rights while others do not, the process of field constitution is not ‘politically innocent’ (Koskenniemi 2002: 83). In turn, a ‘political’ position on rights allows us to reclaim the emancipatory potential of rights and to treat them as open-ended, hence ‘irreducibly political’ (Koskenniemi 2002: 80). Our understanding of rights is, hence, shaped through actual struggles informed by people’s own understanding of what they are justly entitled to. Drawing meanings of rights from the perspective of those claiming them ‘transforms defined normative parameters of human rights debates’ and establishes ‘actor-oriented perspectives’ on rights (Nyamu-Musembi 2002: 1). Conceptualising grievances as rights and the actual claiming of rights are actions which derive from the changing aspirations of people, and such change is typically induced by claims-making mechanisms typically based upon freedom of speech (discursive element) and freedom of association (agential element) (Nett 1971). Where such freedom does not exist due to political oppression, transnational advocacy networks are often used as a strategy (Keck and Sikkink 1998). Thus, a non-legalistic perspective on rights draws our attention to the vital role played by civil society organisations and their networks as vectors of collective agency and action in ensuring the promotion and shaping of human rights discourse and protection, that is through ‘bottom up’ processes involving political activism (Grugel and Piper 2009; Piper 2009).

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Activist Networks

Networks are manifested at multiple geographical and organisational scales. In other words, the organisational network can be understood as a vehicle for multisited governance including ‘bottom up’ processes through social justice organisations, leading to a conceptualisation of governance that is not only a ‘top down’ phenomenon (Grugel and Piper 2011; Powell and SmithDoerr 1994). The network concept and methodology allows us to analyse activist responses to global economic injustices that result from a networked global economy. In the words of Dicken et al. (2001: 106, original emphasis): ‘Instead of conceiving of the global economy as a disembodied and disembedded set of supra-human forces, the network understanding of how commodities and services are produced, distributed and consumed highlights the grounded mechanisms through which a web of international economic relationships is actually created and reproduced. In this way, points of resistance and opposition can be identified in order to rework aspects of the global economy towards an agenda based on social justice. In other words, a network methodology provides discursive spaces for challenging certain relationships within the global economy.’ This means the network concept and methodology can be used to reinstate a sense of power in non-elites, such as (migrant and non-migrant) workers labouring in marginalised sectors or jobs—a sense of power which the concept of a global economy or capitalist globalisation often takes away. Drawing on Bruno Latour’s (1996) network conception and applying it to the context of the US labour movement, Andrew Herod (2007) has used the notion of ‘defiance agency’ to reject a view of labour as a passive victim of capitalist globalisation and critique traditional or conventional accounts in which workers are thought to be confined to the national realm and, thus, thought to suffer from spatial impotence. Conceiving of geographical scales as containers of social life allows political actors to represent such scales as spatial enclosures, which is a central aspect of exercising political power. In this way, capitalists convince workers that they are doomed to be constrained within the national scale. This can be a powerful psychological weapon in matters of class struggle, as argued by Herod (2007). However, workers do play a role in shaping the global geography of capitalism which is actively and constantly struggled over. They do this so more effectively than before via global unions and crossborder union campaigns (Bronfenbrenner 2007). Unions are, however, not the only actors in this landscape of worker activism. Although trade unions have been the historically most significant channel for collective worker agency in the struggle for justice (in the form of

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improved working conditions and labour rights), the vast majority of workers are beyond the reach of official trade union structures which rarely represents the needs of the poorest, those working in the informal economy (Hale 2004; Leather 2004) or migrant workers. Studies on organisational networks in general and labour networks specifically have bypassed the specific experience of migrant workers, the majority of whom end up in small workplaces, often in the informal sector, where organising poses specific problems when compared to large factories (Brown and Getz 2007). The three sectors identified by the ILO as particularly precarious—agriculture, construction and domestic work—have many common features: they are the classic sectors where migrant labour is concentrated and where labour relations are largely unregulated; they involve work in great isolation either in private households or at workplaces in remote areas (rural or urban), removed from mainstream society and visibility. The temporary or undocumented nature of their residential and/or employment status make political activism on their behalf or by them a risky undertaking. Nonetheless, migrant workers could, and do, make significant contributions to the struggle for workers’ rights as demonstrated by studies that have mapped the landscape of migrant worker organising from either a trade union perspective or a non-union perspective (Ally 2005; McIlwaine and Bermudez 2011; Piper 2009). It is especially when seen through the lens of transnational networks that the force behind the gradual build-up of a migrant rights movement becomes evident, as has been well demonstrated not only in the Asian case (Ford and Piper 2007, Piper and Ford 2006; Piper 2009) but also globally (Piper 2010).

Example 1: The People’s Global Action on Migration, Development and Human Rights The first global meeting on migration at the UN level, the UN High-Level Dialogue on Migration and Development in 2006 has resulted in the holding of the annual GFMD as well as the establishment of the People’s Global Action on Migration, Development and Human Rights (PGA), comprising regional and national migrant rights networks. It can be described as the first truly global network of migrant associations which has since organised parallel events around the GFMD meetings. Migrant Rights International (MRI) is the driving force behind the PGA together with the Migrant Forum in Asia (MFA), the largest regional network of migrant associations. The PGA brings together groups from around the globe ‘to share information, dialogue,

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strengthen their analysis and develop joint positions on current and emerging issues on migration’ and to provide ‘essential space for lobbying and pressuring governments and international bodies to look at migration from a human rights perspective and to make governments accountable to their international human rights and development commitments’ (see http://www.mfasia. org/peoplesglobalaction/PGMDHR.html). The annual meetings of government officials of the GFMD are preceded by the official Civil Society Day(s). These follow a wide definition of ‘civil society’ including organisations and individuals beyond those engaged in migrant rights activism. Together with the initial one day only given for civil society deliberations (meanwhile extended to two) and for the formulation of a response to the official government agenda, the PGA organisers decided to stage a parallel event focussed on human rights issues, with workshops allowing migrant organisations from around the world to discuss pressing issues. At the PGA in Mexico City in 2010, there were nearly 800 delegates representing migrant associations, trade unions, human rights and women’s groups, faithbased and anti-poverty organisations as well as academics (Rother 2012). Migrant organisations have been critical of the official GFMD meeting for their efforts to institutionalise migration as a development programme: migrant rights advocates do not believe that migration will solve the economic problems that beset the many countries of origin, forcing their people to seek work overseas. They demand that decent work is created in countries of origin, that national resources be utilised for the benefit of their own people and that their governments not be subservient to the dictates of international financial institutions or destination countries (see also www.december18.net and reports on the GFMD 2009). In this sense, the concept of migrant rights means more than ensuring fair labour rights at the destination. A more radical understanding of migrant rights includes the right to not have to migrate in the first place. The fact that migrant rights activists advance a comprehensive approach to migration by addressing social rights of migrants in both origin and destination countries is, as argued elsewhere (Basok and Piper 2013), a direct result of the global networking activities between regional and national networks comprising migrant associations and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) situated in origin and destination countries of migration. Despite (or possibly because of ) the persisting obstacles to the advancement of an RBA to migration, regional and global networks of migrant rights activists, allied with trade unions, are expanding. They act across places and thus pool isolated grassroots activists into a critical mass. In addition to acquiring more experience in dealing with multistate fora, the global migrant rights movement has gained greater visibility and a louder voice—similar to other

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advocacy networks working on different issues (Diani 2003). In this sense, the emerging global migration governance provides political opportunities to migrant rights advocates to generate responses and ‘actions’ in equally a global manner through networking and coordinated campaigns—strategies which in turn capitalise on already existing networks regionally and nationally.

Example 2: The New ILO Convention on Decent Work for Domestic Workers (No. 189) In addition to the multistate fora that have taken place since early 2000, the ILO Congresses in 2010 and 2011 during which a new convention on domestic work was negotiated and finally adopted have further led to a flurry of grassroots and network activities, across borders and types of social justice organisations. The fact that the ILO has agreed to table such a convention is testimony to the effectiveness of advocacy campaigns through which the cross-organisational networks have circulated and mobilised new understandings of domestic work. These fairly recent networking activities among migrant and non-migrant domestic worker associations have sprung up or intensified in preparation of the ILO’s Congress in 2010 (see www.domesticworkerrights.org). Throughout the globe, national domestic workers’ associations and unions have extended their work to foreign workers who have only recently joined their ranks (Ally 2005; Chammartin 2009). Regional networks, such as CONLACTRAHO (the Latin American and Caribbean Confederation of Women Domestic Workers), the Asian Domestic Workers Network, as well as European networks, such as RESPECT and SOLIDAR, have taken on board domestic workers’ concerns. The integration of foreign domestic workers in national and transnational organising campaigns indicates the trend among many trade unions towards treating foreign migrant workers first and foremost as workers, regardless of their migration status, and thus indicates an understanding of workers’ rights beyond the nation-state-bound citizenship framework. Encouraged by the prospect of a new ILO convention to protect domestic workers, more organisations have engaged in alliance building with trade unions at the centre. Given the tripartite nature of the ILO, which does not directly include migrant associations, the latter have to channel their advocacy through unions. To this end, a new network grew out of a conference held in 2006 on ‘Respect and Rights: Protection for Domestic Workers’ led by the International Union of Food, Agricultural, Hotel, Restaurant, Catering, Tobacco and Allied Workers’ Association (see www.domesticworkerrights. org for conference report). In 2009, the Steering Committee of this global

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network decided to consolidate the structure that was established in September 2008 and to name it International Domestic Workers Network (IDWN) which comprises migrant and non-migrant organisations. In preparation for the ILO Congress in 2010, regional conferences and workshops by activists have taken place in Asia (for more details, see www.wiego.org, under ‘occupational groups’). Together, they constitute an example of alliances and networks working towards greater respect for gender equity, decent work, informal worker and migrant justice in one of those sectors that have been historically outside of the purview of conventional trade unionism: domestic work (Ally 2005). Domestic workers have traditionally lacked union organising or organised at the margin of male-stream labour politics. Foreign domestic workers’ concerns have been prevalent within regional networks of migrant organisations for quite some time, especially in Asia where the sheer enormity of domestic work carried out by foreign women, most of whom migrate within the region of Asia as temporary, employer-tied live-in domestic workers, has resulted in activist responses. One such network is Coordination of Action Research on AIDS and Mobility (CARAM) Asia whose secretariat is located in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. As its title indicates, it is concerned with not only domestic worker issues but also issues that revolve around health and migration. Yet its work has been particularly influential in the area of migrant domestic work which has also been at the core of its national networking activities which include women’s organisations. As a follow-up to a regional summit on domestic workers in 2002, CARAM Asia launched a campaign to make foreign domestic workers’ (FDW) issues visible and expose the violations of their rights. It also seeks to bring about legal and extralegal protection of FDWs and lobbies for the recognition of domestic work as ‘proper’ work. To do so, it organised two consultative meetings with the UN Special Rapporteur for the Human Rights of Migrants whose mandate is to ‘gather data’ and produce knowledge on the violation of rights of migrants, including migrant workers. In addition, the network also produced a declaration called the Colombo Declaration at the conclusion of a regional summit on FDWs. The Declaration conceptualises the rights of FDWs in relation to human rights principles and standards, as illustrated by these statements: ‘Protecting the rights of foreign domestic workers necessitates the inclusion of domestic work in national labour legislation in accordance with international labour standards and human rights principles and practices including gender justice. We also need to define domestic work in the context of human rights principles especially for developing and implementing work contracts’ (excerpt from the Colombo Declaration—see www2.ohchr.org/english/bodies/ cmw/docs/DGD/CARAMAsia.doc). Although this network engages with the

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UN system, it has decided to remain outside the GFMD process viewing it as an unacceptable venue for discussing global policy on migration. By contrast, the MFA (headquartered in Manila) is together with the international network MRI (based in Geneva) the driving force behind the PGA process and thus, does engage with extra-UN global process. The circulation and mobilisation of new understandings of FDWs’ rights through coalitionbuilding activities across various nationality groups and different types of organisations has been particularly well documented in the case of Hong Kong where the first pan-Asian domestic worker organisation, the Asian Migrant Centre (AMC), was formed (Hsia 2009; Wee and Sim 2005). The AMC is a member of the ever-expanding MFA, which in turn is part of the MRI. International organisations, such as UN Women and ILO, have created political opportunities for these networks to raise new issues, concerns and interpretations concerning the rights of domestic workers, at both the regional and global level, and have responded with new initiatives. This is evident from UN Women’s activities in their regional office in Bangkok and the ILO’s project on domestic workers in South East Asia run by its regional office in Jakarta. The ILO Jakarta office has run a regional programme on domestic workers’ employment rights in South East Asia for several years and has collaborated with migrant rights organisations in the definition and implementation of the programme. As a result, the ILO has compiled data to draw up specific recommendations on the protection of (mainly female) migrant workers in the domestic sector. The action of social justice organisations remains paramount in building on one political opportunity to create a chain of such opportunities. To this effect, the IDWN drew up a list of actions immediately after the formal adoption of the new ILO Convention No. 189 in order to launch information campaigns to ensure its ratification. In this sense, such conventions open up further political opportunity structures, as the one offered by the ILO tripartite mechanism and thus most likely ensure continuing engagement of trade unions in the struggle for social justice and equality for domestic workers.

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The nascent global migrant rights movement is spearheaded by organisations that are located in the Global South (many of whom in Asia) or whose advocacy is based on the experience of migrant workers who stem from the Global South. The most common denominator of the two ‘networks of networks’ described and analysed here is their common aim to liberate migrant workers

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from their role as ‘agents of development’. They do so by framing economic migration as ‘forced’ through their demand to turn migration into ‘a choice, not a necessity’. This is to be achieved on the basis of creating decent work ‘here and there’, that is, better job opportunities at home and abroad. In this sense, the global migrant rights movement illustrates a form of resistance that is rooted in transformative justice as linked to institutional change. Their key message is that for many, migration across borders in the search of work and livelihoods pertains to forced migration on the basis of failed development projects, the combination of various crises (debt, financial, social), the workings of the global network economy and global production processes that result in the race to the bottom and social dumping. This message results in the demand for decent work ‘here and there’ and social protection for all. In this sense, the issue of migrants’ rights has moved beyond mainstream citizenship studies and conventional human rights approaches: migrants’ rights are conceptualised as a global justice issue, implicating multiple levels of politics and policymaking and thus making migrants’ welfare an issue of responsibility for more than just country of origin or country of destination. This is also reflected in the Sustainable Development Goals which highlight employment and job creation as one of the main goals. The migrant rights movement, however, laments the lack of attention paid to the neoliberal capitalist system that keeps on rolling back the state as regards social protection and the provision of public goods whilst leaving the governance of the workplace to voluntary acts by corporations (corporate social responsibility, ethical recruitment)—areas where state regulation is required. It is through the civil society-led processes that a radical rethinking of migration and the socio-economic development models that surround migration is being pursued. These gatherings are used to deepen the analysis of the migration–development nexus and to sharpen their counter-discourse of a systematised labour export–import programme that in their view amounts to forced migration. The key messages that have emanated from these ‘networks of networks’ and cross-sectoral alliances are: guarantee to the right to free movement on the one hand and the creation of employment/livelihood opportunities for people ‘at home’, that is, the right not to have to migrate in the first place, on the other hand. The activists are politically savvy enough to realise that the ‘right not to have to migrate’ can be misinterpreted and abused. Instead, they resort to the demand for decent work ‘here’ and ‘there’. The unified message that has come out of the civil society-led initiatives in response to the migration–development nexus and ‘management of migration’ discourse promoted by global governing bodies is that development goes

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beyond economics and involves full human, or people-centred development. Instead of the current ‘migration-development’ paradigm embedded in a neoliberal policy framework that views migrants as ‘agents of development’, the demand is for a focus on the ‘migration-employment nexus’, that is, combined migration and labour governance and, thus, a greater role for the ILO in the global governance of migration.

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Keck, M., and K. Sikkink. 1998. Activists beyond borders: Advocacy networks in international politics. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Koskenniemi, M. 2002. Human rights, politics, and love. Finnish Yearbook of International Law 13: 79–94. Latour, B. 1996. On actor-network theory: A few clarifications. Soziale Welt 47: 369–381. Leather, A. 2004. Guest editorial: Trade union and NGO relations in development and social justice. Development in Practice 14(1–2): 13–19. McIlwaine, C., and A. Bermudez. 2011. The gendering of political and civic participation among Colombian migrants in London. Environment and Planning A 43: 1499–1513. Nett, R. 1971. The civil rights we are not ready for: The right to free movement of people. Ethics 81: 212–227. Nyamu-Musembi, C. 2002. Towards an actor-oriented approach to human rights. IDS Working Paper 169. Brighton: IDS. Piper, N. 2009. Editorial introduction: The complex interconnections of the migration-development nexus - a social perspective. Population, Space and Place 15(2): 93–102. Piper, N. 2010. Temporary economic migration and rights activism – an organisational perspective. Ethnic and Racial Studies (special issue on Mobilization of Migrants and Minorities, guest-edited by J. Solomos and D. Pero), issue no. 1, 1–33. Piper, N., and S. Rother. 2014. More than remittances - Resisting the global governance of migration. Journal fuer Entwicklungspolitik/Austrian Journal for Development Studies 1: 44–66. Powell, W., and L. Smith-Doerr. 1994. Networks and economic life. In The handbook of economic sociology, ed. N.J.  Smelser and R.  Swedberg, 368–402. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Rother, S. 2012. Standing in the shadow of civil society? The 4th Global Forum on Migration and Development (GFMD) in Mexico. International Migration 50(1): 179–88. Wee, V., and A. Sim. 2005. Hong Kong as a destination for migrant domestic workers. In Asian women as transnational domestic workers, ed. S. Huang, B.S.A. Yeoh, and N. Abdul Rahman, 53–77. Singapore: Marshall Cavendish.

22 Slavery, Human Trafficking, and Forced Labour: Implications for International Development Genevieve LeBaron

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Introduction

In the summer of 2014, left-leaning UK broadsheet newspaper The Guardian ran a front-page news story documenting the rampant use of forced labour, human trafficking, and slavery by employers in Thailand’s shrimp industry (Hodal et al. 2014). Through a 6-month undercover investigation, Guardian journalists documented the routine beating, entrapment, and killing of workers within the shrimp industry, and traced the shrimp produced through these practices into the freezers of some of the world’s largest retailers, including Tesco, Costco, and Walmart. In the wake of the report, debate raged among governments, business, and the public: who was responsible for forced labour in global supply chains? Given that retailers do not own the firms producing the shrimp, could they be held accountable for ensuring labour standards within their complex global production networks? Was this ‘state-sanctioned slavery’, with the Thai government to blame? Or were Western consumers the problem, and therefore the solution, or had they become too cash-strapped to buy ‘ethically’? These are meaningful questions, and the debate surrounding the Guardian report was an important one in raising awareness about the role of forced labour in global production and consumption. But, reflecting wider limitations in policy and academic discussions of forced labour

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and international development, the most important questions about forced labour’s relationship to the contemporary global economy remained unasked. For instance, while outraged commentators called on retailers to ‘pressure suppliers to reduce the misery involved in bringing prawns to our plates’ (Guardian 2014), scarcely anyone questioned the role of retailers’ low-cost, high-volume business model in fuelling suppliers’ demand for sub-minimum wage labour. There was little discussion of why or how huge swathes of workers had become vulnerable to conditions of forced labour. Nor of what the root causes of their vulnerability might be, including poverty, coercive mobility regimes, a lack of social protection and access to decent work, or the intensification and individualisation of risk triggered by decades of neoliberal globalisation. Proposed solutions were similarly superficial. While there was near consensus among commentators, including the US government (see Roberts et  al. 2014), that the Thai government should respond to the problem of forced labour by cleaning up the shrimp industry, the broader role of states in establishing the economic, political, and social contexts in which forced labour thrives remained unquestioned. In spite of national and global conventions banning trade in products of slavery, few called on the retailers to simply stop selling the goods, nor on the USA and UK to stop importing them. In short, and emblematic of media and policy conversations, the problem of forced labour was discussed in a fashion that neglected the wider dynamics of international development, including the shifting organisation of global production, the soaring size and power of transnational corporations, and the role of trade and investment policy, poverty, and deepening inequality. This tendency within public debate and global and national policy initiatives to address forced labour has been paralleled in the sizable academic literature on forced labour. Although a large, interdisciplinary body of research has proliferated over the last decade to document forced labour and understand the distinctive forms that it takes today, most accounts have focussed on the symptoms of these problems without sufficient attention to their root causes, and without seeking to understand how forced labour fits into broader patterns of international development. This situation is beginning to change, as a new interdisciplinary wave of scholarship is emerging to understand the role and causes of forced labour within the global economy rather than approaching it as an individualised and isolatable phenomenon (see Barrientos et al. 2013; Crane 2013; Fudge and Strauss 2013; LeBaron and Ayers 2013; Phillips 2013; Strauss 2012b). While these recent interventions have made important strides towards illuminating the dynamics of forced labour within the contemporary global economy, further empirical and theoretical work is needed to achieve a robust and nuanced understanding of forced labour and its implications for international development.

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Before diving into the argument, however, I must begin by touching on the issue of definitions. In recent years, scholars have extensively debated the concepts and definitions of ‘forced labour’ and overlapping practices like ‘slavery’ and ‘human trafficking’ (see Allain 2013; Anderson 2013; Bales 2003; Bernstein 2007; Chang and Kim 2007; Quirk 2008). Many scholars have decried the sloppy, nebulous, and conflated use of these terms in academic literatures (see Howard 2014b; LeBaron and Ayers 2013; O’Connell Davidson 2014b), and challenged the standard definitions of these terms within policy and practice (Lerche 2007; O’Connell Davidson 2014a). It is worth noting here that ‘modern slavery’ and ‘human trafficking’ are slippery terms, and ones that are often invoked by politicians, the media, NGOs, and activists to describe an ever-expanding range of situations. The concept of forced labour is somewhat better, at least in terms of being more consistently and precisely defined through an international, legally accepted definition. The International Labour Organization’s (ILO’s) 1930 Forced Labour Convention defines forced labour as ‘all work or service which is exacted from any person under the menace of any penalty and for which the said person has not offered himself voluntarily’. Most studies of forced labour are grounded in this definition, though the meanings and attributes of ‘coercion’ and ‘involuntariness’ can vary. Importantly, however, the appropriateness of the term ‘forced’ has been challenged by those who claim the term can obscure workers’ agency, including recent studies that reveal that workers sometimes knowingly enter into ‘forced’ labour situations in the face of lacking alternatives to secure subsistence (Howard and LeBaron 2015; McGrath 2012; Rogaly 2008). Bearing in mind these limitations, the concept is used here recognising the diverse forms of unfreedom associated with severe labour exploitation in the contemporary global economy. In this chapter, I argue that the tendency to study severe labour exploitation in isolation from wider processes and dynamics of international development has led to serious blind spots in the literature on forced labour and related forms of labour exploitation and domination. After analysing the roots of this tendency in two prominent approaches, I provide an overview of a promising body of research that is repositioning forced labour as a political–economic problem. I argue that meaningful progress will hinge on our ability to gather reliable and comparable large-scale data, including at industry and country levels, as well as to move beyond conceptual weaknesses that limit current academic and policy debates. Overcoming such limitations is important, I conclude, given that forced labour continues to thrive at a growing cost to governments and civil society organisations channelling millions of dollars a year into efforts to combat it.

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Forced Labour, Trafficking, and Slavery in the Global Economy

Recent scholarship on forced labour in the global economy has established that far from being limited to the shrimp sector, severe exploitation plays an important role in a range of industries including agriculture (Allain et al. 2013; Bishkek 2013), fishing (ILO 2013), mining (Verité 2014c), garments (Bhaskaran et al. 2013), electronics (Verité 2014a), domestic work, and the service sector (Owens et al. 2014). The global production of dozens of staple commodities, including sugar, cotton, fruit, fish, bricks, gold, coltan, and cocoa, is now thought to depend heavily on forced labour. The illegal profits derived annually from forced labour in the private economy are estimated at US$150 billion (ILO 2014). Evidence suggests the greatest number of cases of forced labour are concentrated in China and India, and the highest concentrations may be in Pakistan, Haiti, and Mauritania (ILO 2012), though precise and comprehensive data on the prevalence of forced labour and its geographic distribution remains sparse. Recent studies demonstrate that severe exploitation is an enduring problem in the contemporary global economy, and an emergent literature is beginning to unearth how forced labour fits into wider political–economic patterns (Anderson and Davidson 2003; Barrientos 2013b; Crane 2013; LeBaron 2014b; Mosely 2011; Phillips 2011; Strauss 2012a; Verité 2014b). This developing literature is important as it marks a break from the longstanding tendency to study forced labour in isolation from wider processes and dynamics of international development, including the power dynamics and social relations that are typically foregrounded in studies of labour and employment relations (see Appelbaum and Lichtenstein 2006; Locke 2013; Peck 2001; Taylor 2009, 2011). As Stephanie Barrientos, Uma Kothari, and Nicola Phillips describe it, forced labour has often been ‘thought to represent a separate category of labour relations’ which needed to ‘be viewed through different theoretical and empirical lenses’ (2013: 1038). For this reason, many scholars, as well as governments and international organisations, have attempted to sever forced labour from the capitalist global economy in which it operates, and to understand it in isolation from this broader set of relations. Such an approach has obscured more than it has illuminated about how forced labour fits into broader dynamics and patterns of international development, like the shifting organisation of global production and labour markets, trade and investment policy, or surging inequality. Extensive empirical and theoretical work is required to understand how forced labour

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fits into the broader picture of capitalist globalisation, and to comprehend the political–economic drivers that shape both the supply of populations vulnerable to severe exploitation and the business demands for it. But before turning to examine these remaining gaps in knowledge, it is first important to understand why the widespread presence of forced labour and its clear ties to contemporary capitalist global markets have been under-investigated by scholars of political economy and development. The emerging literature on forced labour in the global political economy has diverse and complex roots, including in the fields of migration studies and geography, but it is distinguishable through its efforts to overcome major impasses associated with two key bodies of scholarship: the Marxist literature on capitalism and ‘unfree labour’ that developed throughout the 1990s, and the liberal ‘new slavery’ literature, which emerged in the 2000s and is loosely tied to the interdisciplinary fields of human rights scholarship and development studies. While scholarship within these two literatures is distinguished by major theoretical differences, particularly regarding conceptualisations of capitalism and the role of states within it, both literatures have attempted to neatly detach forced labour from other types of labour exploitation and the global economy more broadly. Therefore, both literatures have largely obstructed rather than deepened the task of understanding forced labour’s role in broader dynamics of international development. Throughout the 1990s, Marxist scholars in the fields of politics and agrarian studies extensively debated the role of ‘unfree labour’ in capitalist production (see LeBaron 2011; Rioux 2013). In these debates, unfree labour was typically conceptualised a priori in opposition to ‘free’ labour relations, which was usually defined with reference to Marx’s definition in Capital, Volume 1. These debates were primarily theoretical, and focussed around the question of whether or not unfree labour contributed to capitalist processes of accumulation and profitability. There were two main schools of thought. The first, developed by scholars like J. Mohan Rao and ‘political Marxists’ like Ellen Meiksins Wood maintained that unfree labour was fundamentally incompatible with capitalism and could therefore be understood as existing somehow outside of the global capitalist market. The ‘semi-feudal thesis’ popularised by scholars who held this view maintained that unfree labour was a pre-capitalist relation fated to be supplanted by a ‘free’ workforce as capitalism swept across the Global South. The second school of Marxist thought rejected the incompatibility of capitalism and unfree labour, arguing that unfree labour is compatible with capital accumulation (Brass 1999, 2010; Brass and van der Linden 1997; Lichtenstein 1996; Marx 1990). Scholars such as Tom Brass developed the ‘deproletarianisation’ thesis, which ‘challenged the prevailing orthodoxy

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that capitalist transformation of the agrarian sector led to the replacement of unfree workers with free equivalents’ (Brass 2014: 571), and asserted that under some circumstances, unfree labour was intentionally introduced by employers within modern capitalism. As Jairus Banaji has convincingly argued, the explanatory power of the Marxist debates on unfree labour was curtailed by ‘formal abstractionism’ (2010), and a series of methodological limitations including the tendency to adhere to rigid binaries. Indeed, accounts often appeared to be more interested in fracturing reality into binaries (‘unfree’/‘free’ and ‘non-capitalist’/‘capitalist’) than in understanding and explaining existing labour relations. Because this debate was so focussed on establishing the once-and-for-all relationship between unfree labour and the capitalist mode of production, it gave very little attention to the contemporary political–economic dynamics surrounding forced labour. Although this body of research yielded some important empirical and historical analysis, particularly of Latin America and India, it reached an impasse regarding the empirical and analytical question of how forced labour fit into contemporary capitalism. Furthermore, not only did this approach create little space to understand forms of labour that do not fall neatly into the binary (especially feminised labour including sex work and unpaid domestic work) but it also tended to gloss over the substantial unfreedom that exist in the ‘free’ labour market, overlooking the irony with which Marx himself used the term. In the late 1990s, as forced labour, human trafficking, and modern slavery were becoming a problem of major media, policy, and public concern, a new literature dedicated to these issues emerged within the broad and interdisciplinary fields of development and ‘human rights’ scholarship (see Bales 2005; Bales and Soodalter 2010; Kiremire 2004; Skinner 2008). This body of research was perhaps even less interested than the Marxist tradition in the question of how forced labour fit into broader patterns of labour exploitation or the global capitalist economy. Rather, its main focusses were twofold: (1) establishing ‘modern slavery’ as an alarming and growing global problem and describing the conditions and human rights abuses associated with this trend; (2) analysing how ‘new’ or ‘modern’ forms of slavery differed from historic forms of slavery, especially the transatlantic slave trade. Towards these aims, early accounts used anecdotal evidence and media reports to analyse, often in highly descriptive and sensationalist ways, the specificity of contemporary forced labour. Kevin Bales’ book Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy (1999) is emblematic and highly influential within this body of writing, as well as to advocacy and policy efforts. Disposable People argues that there is a

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new and rapidly growing wave of modern slavery, which Western consumers are linked to through globalisation. As Bales writes, ‘The new slavery is like a new disease for which no vaccine exists…. And this disease is spreading. As the new slavery increases, the number of people enslaved grows every day. We’re facing an epidemic of slavery that is tied through the global economy to our own lives’ (2012: 32). Committed to methodological individualism, the ‘new slavery’ literature understood forced labour as a relatively timeless relation of domination between ‘the poor’ and ‘the violent’, which originated in ancient times and has persisted into the capitalist era. Because slavery was understood as an individualised and transhistorical relation, it could be neatly severed from the myriad other forms of exploitation present in the capitalist global economy and presented as an independent issue that could be solved by rescuing individual victims. Slavery was often presented as an anomalous and individuated moment of coercion in an otherwise seemingly democratic and neutral free market system, implying that its elimination did not necessarily require broader transformations in the capitalist global economy. Political–economic explanation rarely figured into the literature’s descriptions of modern slavery or its proposed solutions. Although Disposable People and other accounts within this literature frequently mention the concept of ‘globalisation’, and its links to ‘poverty’ and ‘vulnerability’ among victims of modern slavery, the paradigm rarely provided substantive political–economic or historical analysis to explain how exactly these dynamics linked to forced labour. Where globalisation was mentioned, the concept frequently seemed to refer to the cultural shifts associated with the rise of mass production and consumption, such as purportedly growing connections between Western consumers and modern slaves, rather than as a historical, political, economic, and social set of processes. Although poverty, globalisation, and vulnerability are frequently mentioned, this early literature provided little analysis of these dynamics nor an adequate explanation of how such factors contribute to the problem of forced labour (LeBaron 2014a; Lerche 2007). As such, the role and impact of processes of capitalist globalisation in fuelling forced labour and labour exploitation more broadly remain under-investigated. The evolution of the ‘neo-slavery’ literature throughout the 2000s was closely tied to advocacy efforts to heighten public awareness about slavery and human trafficking, and to spur policy initiatives to combat these problems. Accounts in this tradition contributed the evidence that allowed for slavery and trafficking to be ‘increasingly represented in international and domestic US and European policy circles as a vast an ever-growing problem affecting every corner of the earth, part of a dark underbelly of globalisation’ (O’Connell Davidson 2014b: 29). The problem was that large swathes of this

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evidence base were anecdotal and often presented without a rigorous description of the methodology that had been used to generate it (see Howard 2013, 2014a). Indeed, the effort to establish modern slavery and human trafficking as a major and ever-expanding global problem was often based on very lowquality data, glossing over the major gaps in knowledge that existed in an attempt to muster evidence that the problem of forced labour was an alarming and extensive one. Thus, while this body of work played an important role in countering the longstanding tendency in political economy to neglect or externalise forced labour, it also tended to analyse forced labour in isolation of labour exploitation and the global economy more broadly. As such, little attention was given to the root causes underpinning the individuated incidents of exploitation and domination documented in the literature, especially the systemic forms of power, insecurity, and inequality that contribute to the problem of forced labour. For different reasons, both the Marxist and neo-slavery debates gave little attention to explaining, in either analytical or empirical terms, how forced labour fit into broader processes of capitalist globalisation. The neglect of the broader political–economy dynamics has had a significant ‘real world’ impact, not least because it has paralleled the neglect of systemic dynamics in the recent wave of policy and advocacy initiatives to combat forced labour. Throughout the early 2000s, many solutions proposed by ‘new abolitionist’ NGOs including the Free the Slaves co-founded and then chaired by Kevin Bales, were premised upon the ‘liberation’ of ‘slaves’ into capitalist labour markets, overlooking the insecurity, coercive mobility regimes, lacking social protection, and racial, ethnic, class, and gendered forms of discrimination typical of these markets which rendered the victims vulnerable to forced labour in the first place. Although today there is much wider recognition among advocacy and policy organisations of the need for a more systemic approach to eradicating slavery, the depoliticised nature of conversations about forced labour in recent decades has left its mark. Notably, some recent policy initiatives to combat forced labour have been argued to actually worsen conditions for migrants and others at the bottom rungs of the labour market (O’Connell Davidson 2014b).

3

Moving Forward: Understanding Forced Labour in International Development

Due in part to rising awareness of the limits of the ‘new slavery’ paradigm sketched above, there is growing recognition among policymakers, businesses, and civil society of the need to understand and tackle the root causes of forced labour.

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Yet, little is known about the political–economic factors that cause it to thrive in various regions and industries. This knowledge gap is increasingly recognised as problematic, in part because existing policy initiatives are recognised as not responding to structural factors. As such, forced labour continues to thrive. A new literature is beginning to make significant progress in addressing this shortcoming by resituating forced labour as a problem of global political economy (Howard and LeBaron 2015; McGrath 2013; Phillips and Mieres 2014). Recent studies have illuminated the pressures generated towards forced labour through ‘adverse incorporation’ into global production networks (Phillips  2011), high levels of subcontracting (Mosely 2011), the power of retail buyers (McGrath 2013), shifting global production patterns (Selwyn 2014), and uneven value distribution along supply chains, especially narrowing profit margins for businesses in the lower tiers of production within those chains (Crane 2013). Meaningful progress towards the task of understanding how forced labour is influenced by and contributes to wider processes of international development will depend on our ability to generate reliable global and country-level data on forced labour, as well as our ability to overcome enduring conceptual blind spots.

Methodological Approaches and Measurement Tools Excitingly, much of the recent research on forced labour relies on original empirical data, generated through case study methods including ethnographic field research among victims (Howard 2013), household surveys (Bhaskaran et  al. 2013), and interviews with former victims (McGrath 2012; Phillips 2013). This research has surely been demanding and challenging to conduct, given that forced labour and related practices like trafficking and child labour are illegal, and researching them is almost always difficult and very often dangerous. Although the varying definitions and indicators used in the studies create complexity in terms of comparability, this emerging evidence base is yielding important insights about the incidence and patterns of forced labour in various industries and geographical spaces. There is nevertheless a need to overcome the paucity of reliable and comparable data on forced labour at the national and industry levels in order to facilitate multi-country and multi-industry analysis. At present, no reliable national-level data exists estimating incidences of forced labour by country. Although a global estimate of forced labour has been developed by the ILO (ILO 2012) using a statistical methodology, this estimate is broken down by region (Asia-Pacific; Africa; Latin America and Caribbean;

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Developed Economies and European Union; Middle East; Commonwealth of Independent States; and Central, Southeast, and Eastern Europe) and economic activity (agriculture, construction, domestic work, and manufacturing) rather than nationally. This may be due to sensitivities around the ILO’s tripartite constituents (the organisation comprises member countries, worker, and employer groups), as well as the high cost of conducting country-level surveys of forced labour.1 The Global Slavery Index recently launched by Kevin Bales and the Walk Free Foundation, an Australian charity, provides an alternative global estimate of forced labour. However, this Index relies on secondary data sources of varying quality and rigour, and has been widely criticised by scholars. Neil Howard has argued that the Index relies on data which ‘is usually second-hand and often of seriously poor quality. This means the picture [it creates] is frequently inaccurate’ (Howard 2014a). Fiona David, Director of Research for the Walk Free Foundation, has herself acknowledged the limitations of the Index’s data and methodology (David 2014). Although the index has been perceived as helpful in raising awareness about the issue of forced labour and ‘naming and shaming’ the ostensible worst offender countries, its social scientific rigor is open to doubt. There is also a paucity of reliable and comparable sector-level data on forced labour. Although up-close sector-level studies have recently been conducted by scholars (cf. Allain et al. 2013; Barrientos 2013a; Locke 2013) and organisations including the ILO, the US labour rights organisation Verité, and the United States Trafficking in Persons office, the fact that such studies generally focus on a small portion of an industry or supply chain within one or two countries means that findings are difficult to add up. Very different regional contexts, supply chain dynamics, and indicators used to identify forced labour, as well as the small scale of the existing studies make it difficult to synthesise across the sparse sector-level data that does exist. Comprehensive and comparable sector-level data will no doubt be difficult to generate, given the high fragmentation of global production processes combined with the general reluctance of companies (both retailers and third-party companies with access to workers, such as audit firms) to grant access to their workers and supply chains for the purpose of forced labour research. Nevertheless, until this type of data can be obtained, it will be difficult to understand how and where forced labour fits into overall patterns of global production, including its role within the business models and supply chains of various industries.

1

Personal communication with the ILO Special Action Programme to Combat Forced Labour (SAP-FL), Geneva, 25 June 2014.

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Globalisation and Forced Labour The ILO estimates that over 21 million people are today victims of forced labour, trafficking, and slavery. That figure includes over 19 million people exploited in the private economy, for whom the promise of globalisation has yet to materialise. Forced labour is highly gendered, with women and girls constituting over 55 % of victims, while migrants account for almost half of the global total (ILO 2014). While there is near consensus in the academic literature that globalisation has contributed to the prevalence and composition of contemporary forced labour, little detailed research has been conducted to map precisely and systematically how processes of globalisation have exacerbated the problem, or to determine how national-level political–economic frameworks associated with globalisation have influenced its pervasiveness and role in the global economy. Although case studies and fieldwork have begun to shed light into the dynamics between globalisation and forced labour, efforts to understand the links between forced labour and these wider dynamics of international development are hampered by the current lack of large-scale data. For instance, scholars frequently suggest that the wave of neoliberalisation that took hold in the late 1970s, bringing about an ‘open-ended and contradictory process of politically assisted market rule’ (Peck 2010: xii) has accelerated forced labour. But without longitudinal country-level data, it is difficult to analyse how the implementation of political–economic policies to bolster market openness, industrial competitiveness, and enhance the power and mobility of capital have impacted upon prevalence of forced labour, never mind to establish causation or correlations. There remains a need to analyse precisely how incidence of forced labour has been affected by processes of capitalist globalisation, including the following: • The enhanced power and mobility of transnational corporations, and shifting global patterns of corporate production; • National policies and international agreements to liberalise markets at the subnational, national, and global levels; • The elimination of national and sector-level labour protections which came to be seen as ‘red tape’ obstructing growth and profits; • Restrictions on the international mobility of labour, such as through restrictive immigration regimes; • Shifting levels and forms of poverty and inequality, both globally and within countries and cities; • The marketisation and privatisation of social reproduction, including shrinking access to land, water, and food in many parts of the world.

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Indeed, if the goal of new research is to understand how and why forced labour materialises and persists in the global economy, then quantitative and qualitative analysis of how global and country-level political–economic frameworks have influenced the prevalence of forced labour is surely an urgent task. This type of analysis is especially important given the possibility that reliable data on the systemic cause factors of forced labour could influence the ongoing global wave of ‘anti-slavery’ initiatives, including national action plans and ‘modern slavery’ bills, as well as new international conventions to define and eradicate forced labour.

Conceptual Blind Spots: Power, States, and Corporations Given the recent nature of this new body of research, and the sheer massiveness of the task of understanding how contemporary forced labour fits into broader patterns of international development, it is no surprise that empirical gaps remain. The same is true of conceptual blind spots, of which there are no doubt still many. Here I will touch on three, which could be explored as new directions in international development studies. In the first case, scholars of forced labour, human trafficking, and slavery have commonly overlooked the power and governance dynamics surrounding these problems. These include structural forms of power, such as the power of states and corporations in fostering or quashing the contexts in which forced labour can thrive, as well as the economic power of dominant classes, which shape patterns of production, consumption, and employment in ways that might affect incidence of forced labour. It is only by studying the power relations that manifest forced labour that the agency of those perpetrating it can be recovered and tackled, meaning there is a need to precisely delineate the power dynamics that mediate and allow for the use of forced labour. To take one example, recent debates have been largely silent regarding the structural power of business in shaping both public and private responses to the problem of forced labour. In the wake of consumer and advocacy pressure on governments and business to address forced labour, brand and retail corporations have exerted structural power towards closing this governance gap in ways that deflect the possibility of fundamental shifts in their business models to reduce the likelihood of forced labour. In the USA and UK, businesses have lobbied in favour of transparency legislation that would require large businesses to report on the efforts (if any) they are making to eradicate forced labour and trafficking from their supply chains, whilst lobbying against more stringent initiatives. They have also developed coalitions, such as the Global

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Business Coalition Against Human Trafficking,2 engaged in multi-stakeholder coalitions like the Better Together Initiative, and developed private corporate social responsibility initiatives to ‘combat slavery’, which have surely influenced policy processes by positioning business as an ally, rather than adversary, in efforts to eradicate forced labour in global production networks. These types of power and governance dynamics, and their consequences for victims of forced labour, sorely require scholarly analysis. In the second and related case, there is a need to more deeply explore the role of states in fostering the contexts in which forced labour can thrive. Too often, states are represented in academic and policy literatures as agents with a role to play in solving the problems of forced labour, trafficking, and slavery, but without attention to their role in allowing these problems to arise in the first place. To take one example, while accounts of forced labour and trafficking in Canada often point to the need for government to improve protection for victims of trafficking and forced labour (see Perrin 2011), few have analysed the role of Canada’s immigration and labour market policies in giving rise to these types of exploitation. This is problematic since, according to one interview conducted with the province of British Columbia’s Office to Combat Trafficking in Persons, two-thirds of forced labour cases brought before their office involve members of Canada’s official temporary foreign worker programmes.3 Like many other countries, Canada operates a temporary foreign worker programme which institutionalises bonded labour by tying often heavily indebted foreign workers to a single employer (see Ferguson and McNally 2014; Walia 2010); the role of such programmes, alongside the broader dynamics of state power and policy, need to be interrogated in studies of forced labour. Recovering the role of states in forced labour debates will require a historically integrated political–economy analysis of the role that state policies in areas, including the labour market, immigration, and in relation to capital and firms, have played in facilitating or eradicating firms’ use of forced labour. In short, the task is one of recovering the politics at stake in the political economy of forced labour. Finally, there is a need to examine and question the agency and power of transnational corporations in facilitating the emergence and persistence of forced labour. While it is frequently noted in academic and policy conversations that corporations experience difficulty identifying forced labour due to the complexity of their multi-tiered global supply chains, approaching 2

See: http://www.gbcat.org/ Personal communication with Rosalind Currie, Director of the British Columbia Office to Combat Trafficking in Persons, Vancouver, January 2012. 3

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corporations in this way overlooks their agency in reorganising production practices in this way. After all, the complexity of global supply chains has not occurred spontaneously, but rather, corporations themselves have given rise to these developments as they have continually restructured production over recent decades to reduce costs and legal ownership to curtail liability (LeBaron 2014b). As they have implemented a low-cost, high-volume model of global production, corporations have given rise to business models and management practices that create a demand for sub-minimum wage labour, including forced labour. There is a need for scholars of forced labour to confront the agency of corporations leading supply chains, rather than seeing them as neutral actors.

4

Conclusion

In recent decades, the tendency to study forced labour and overlapping practices in isolation from wider processes of international development has led to some serious empirical and conceptual blind spots in the literature. Academics and practitioners have come a long way towards addressing this limitation, and a cutting-edge literature is emerging to understand how forced labour fits into broader dynamics of international development. This literature could be strengthened through the production of large-scale data and through more focussed political–economic analysis of existing data. There is also a need for debate and greater heuristic clarity regarding the role, power, and agency of states and corporations in facilitating forced labour.

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Fudge, J., and K. Strauss (eds.). 2013. Temporary work, agencies and unfree labour: Insecurity in the new world of work. New York: Routledge. Guardian. 2014. The guardian view on the supermarkets’ slave labour problem. The Guardian. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jun/10/supermarketsslave-labour-problem-prawns Hodal, K., C. Kelly, F. Lawrence, C. Stuart, T. Remy, I. Baque, . . . M. O’Kane. 2014. Globalised slavery: How big supermarkets are selling prawns in supply chain fed by slave labour. The Guardia. http://www.theguardian.com/global-development/ video/2014/jun/10/slavery-supermarket-supply-trail-prawns-video Howard, N. 2013. “Its easier if we stop them moving”: A critical analysis of anti-child trafficking discourse, policy, and practice-- The case of Southern Benin. Unpublished Dphil Dissertation, University of Oxford. Howard, N. 2014a. Keeping count: The trouble with the global slavery index. The Guardian, 13 Jan 2014. http://www.theguardian.com/global-developmentprofessionals-network/2014/jan/13/slavery-global-index-reports Howard, N. 2014b. Protecting children or pandering to politics? A critical analysis of anti- Child trafficking discourse, policy and practice in Southern Benin. In Child and youth migration: Mobility-in-migration in an era of globalization, ed. A. Veale and G. Donà. London: Palgrave. Howard, N., and G. LeBaron. 2015. Confronting root causes: On the political economy of forced labour in the global economy. Geneva: International Labour Office. ILO. 2012. ILO global estimate of forced labour: Results and methodology. Geneva: ILO. ILO. 2013. Caught at sea: Forced labour and trafficking in fisheries. Geneva: ILO. ILO. 2014. Profits and poverty: The economics of forced labour. Geneva: ILO. Kiremire, M. 2004. The world’s second slavery. Pambazuka News, 21 Oct 2004. http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/25241 LeBaron, G. 2011. Neoliberalism and the governance of unfree labor: A feminist political economy account. Ontario: York University. LeBaron, G. 2014a. Reconceptualizing debt bondage: Debt as a class-based form of labor discipline. Critical Sociology 40(5): 763–780. LeBaron, G. 2014b. Subcontracting is not illegal, but is it unethical? Business ethics, forced labour, and economic success. Brown Journal of World Affairs 20(2): 237–249. LeBaron, G., and A. Ayers. 2013. The rise of a ‘new slavery’? Understanding african unfree labour through neoliberalism. Third World Quarterly 34(5): 873–892. Lerche, J. 2007. A global alliance against forced labour? Unfree labour, neo-liberal globalization, and the international labour organization. Journal of Agrarian Change 7(4): 425–452. Lichtenstein, A. 1996. Twice the work of free labor: The political economy of convict labor in the new south. London: Verso. Locke, R. 2013. The promise and limits of private power: Promoting labor standards in a global economy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Marx, K. 1990. Capital, Volume 1. New York: Penguin Classics. New Edition.

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McGrath, S. 2012. Many chains to break: The multi-dimensional concept of slave labour in Brazil. Antipode 45(4): 1005–1028. McGrath, S. 2013. Fuelling global production networks with slave labour?: Migrant sugar cane workers in the Brazilian ethanol GPN. Geoforum 44: 32–42. Mosely, L. 2011. Labor rights and multinational production. New York: Cambridge University Press. O’Connell Davidson, J. 2014b. The making of modern slavery: Whose interests are served by the new abolitionism? London: British Academy Review. O’Connell Davidson, J. 2014a. Convenient conflations: Modern slavery, trafficking, and prostitution. OpenDemocracy.net, 4 Nov 2014. https://www.opendemocracy. net/beyondslavery/julia-o%27connell-davidson/convenient-conflations-modernslavery-trafficking-and-prostit Owens, C., A. Farrell, J. McDevitt, M. Dank, R. Pfeffer, J. Breaux, . . . R. Heitsmith. 2014. Understanding the organization, operation, and victimization process of labor trafficking in the United States. The Urban Institute. Peck, J. 2001. Workfare states. New York: The Guilford Press. Peck, J. 2010. Constructions of neoliberal reason. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Perrin, B. 2011. Invisible chains: Canada’s underground world of human trafficking. Canada: Penguin. Phillips, N. 2011. Informality, global production networks and the dynamics of “adverse incorporation”. Global Networks 11(3): 380–397. Phillips, N. 2013. Unfree labour and adverse incorporation in the global economy: Comparative perspectives on Brazil and India. Economy and Society 42(2): 171–196. Phillips, N., and F.  Mieres. 2014. The governance of forced labour in the global economy. Globalizations, 1–17. Quirk, J. 2008. Unfinished business: A comparative survey of historical and contemporary slavery. Paris: UNESCO. Rioux, S. 2013. The fiction of economic coercion: Political marxism and the separation of theory and history. Historical Materialism 21(4): 1–37. Roberts, D., K. Hodal, and A. Kelly. 2014, 11 June 2014. US may blacklist Thailand after prawn Trade Slavery Revelations. The Guardian. http://www.theguardian.com/ global-development/2014/jun/11/us-blacklist-thailand-prawn-trade-slaveryrevelations Rogaly, B. 2008. Migrant workers in British horticulture. Population, Space and Place 14: 497–510. Selwyn, B. 2014. Commodity chains, creative destruction, and global inequality: A class analysis. Journal of Economic Geography 1–22. Skinner, B. 2008. A world enslaved. Foreign Policy 165: 62–67. Strauss, K. 2012a. Coerced, forced, and unfree labour: Geographies of exploitation in contemporary labour markets. Geography Compass 6(3): 137–148. Strauss, K. 2012b. Unfree again: Social reproduction, flexible labour markets, and the resurgence of gang labour in the UK. Antipode 45(1): 180–197.

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Taylor, M. 2009. Who works for globalisation? The challenges and possibilities for international labour studies. Third World Quarterly 30(3): 435–452. Taylor, M. 2011. Race you to the bottom… back again? The uneven development of labour codes of conduct. New Political Economy 16(4): 445–462. Verité. 2014a. Forced labor in the production of electronic goods in Malaysia, A comprehensive study of scope and characteristics. http://www.verite.org/sites/ default/files/images/VeriteForcedLaborMalaysianElectronics_2014_0.pdf Verité. 2014b. Research on indicators of forced labor in the production of goods: A multi-country study. http://www.verite.org/research/indicators_of_forced_labor Verité. 2014c. Risk analysis of indicators of forced labor and human trafficking in illegal gold mining in Peru. http://www.verite.org/sites/default/files/images/ IndicatorsofForcedLaborinGoldMininginPeru.pdf Walia, H. 2010. Transient servitude: Migrant labour in Canada and the apartheid of citizenship. Race & Class 71–84.

23 International Development and the Global Drugs Trade Neil Carrier and Gernot Klantschnig

Drug abuse furthers socio-economic and political instability, it undermines sustainable development, and it hampers efforts to reduce poverty and crime (Jan Kavan, President of the United Nations General Assembly, 2003 (Quoted in: Singer, M. 2008. ‘Drugs and Development: The global impact of drug use and trafficking on social and economic development’, International Journal of Drug Policy 19, pg. 468))

1

Introduction

The global flow of commodities has long had a profound impact on economic development. Almost equally significant has been the history of the illicit flow of commodities: the trade and trafficking of either goods deemed illegitimate by some authority or other or ‘licit’ goods smuggled outside of legitimate trade routes. Thus, it is no surprise that the increase in global trade since the 1980s— in the wake of neoliberal policies and improvements in global infrastructure of communications and transport—has been accompanied by an increase in such illicit flows too, able to exploit the very same infrastructure and policies. While

N. Carrier ( ) African Studies Centre, University of Oxford, UK G. Klantschnig Department of Social Policy and Social Work, University of York, UK © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 J. Grugel, D. Hammett (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of International Development, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-42724-3_23

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global trade is praised by many as the source of economic growth and development, and as something to be pushed yet further so all countries can become rich, global illicit flows are rarely painted in a similarly positive light. Indeed, they are portrayed as the ‘dark side of globalisation’: flows which do not bring the longed for economic growth, but instead are impediments to development. International organisations such as the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) have increasingly drawn a negative link between organised crime, much of it involving various forms of trafficking, and development: illicit flows of commodities are seen as destabilising and non-conducive to the good governance required to nurture positive growth. Several types of goods constitute these illicit flows: from diamonds to abalone, currency to uranium, ivory to people. One category of commodities tends to draw the most concern, especially as regards development: drugs. Indeed, whether Afghanistan, Colombia or Guinea-Bissau, drugs are often held up as key symbols of economic decline, crisis and even state collapse. Historically, drugs and their trade have been a potent force in world history, from coffee to cocaine (Courtwright 2002). Unlike the smuggling of other valuable goods, such as diamonds, drugs are a very peculiar category as they are generally considered subject to misuse and abuse: in commonplace perception, these substances are seen as especially potent, with active alkaloids that can alter minds, cause addiction, overdose and death. In short, society often imbues drugs with great potency and agency. The scale of the global trade in illicit drugs is reckoned to be vast: the UNODC estimating it to be worth 500 billion dollars, equivalent to 8 % of all international trade. Such huge figures are criticised. Francisco Thoumi terms this the ‘numbers game’ (2005), whereby high numbers are desired by the likes of UNODC and other organisations that rely on the scale of the threat to remain influential: Thoumi estimates that illicit drugs constitute around 0.1 % of global trade. This chapter focusses on the global trade in ‘illicit’ drugs, exploring their links to development (understood here in its broad sense of social and economic change and ‘defined in a multiplicity of ways because there are a multiplicity of “developers”’) in particular on so-called ‘developing countries’ (Cowen and Shenton 1996: 4). While drugs in countries in Asia and Latin America have long been blamed for many societal ills, recent focus has shifted to Africa as the latest target in the global ‘war on drugs’ (Carrier and Klantschnig 2012). Much of this focus emerges from a trend in recent years for international smugglers of cocaine and heroin to use routes through Africa to get their shipments to Europe. Guinea-Bissau has been a major worry in this regard, seen as at risk of becoming a ‘narco-state’, but the whole western coastline of the continent as well as the Sahel region have been described as at risk from an ‘invisible tide’ of drug smuggling,

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weakening already precarious states and bringing addiction and corruption (Cockayne and Williams 2009). Drug consumption was once seen as a problem of the wealthy nations, although there is a much longer history of drug use in regions such as Africa and Asia, the increase in smuggling through Africa and elsewhere has generally meant a ‘spillover’ effect and the spread of consumption to these trafficking hubs. Research in GuineaBissau, Afghanistan, Kenya and elsewhere shows that ‘hard drug’ use has grown along with these networks. While highlighting the very real threat these substances and the, often criminal, networks that supply them can have in Africa and elsewhere, this chapter will suggest that a received wisdom that glibly ascribes a negative effect to all such substances and their trade should be critiqued. There are shades of grey in this regard: the category of ‘illicit drugs’ contains substances of very different harm potential, often only linked through their classification as ‘illegal’ in international and national legislation. Indeed, some substances—khat (the stems and leaves of the shrub Catha edulis chewed as a stimulant) and cannabis—in certain contexts—rural Africa, for example—are highly ambiguous in their relation to development, playing a key role in livelihoods and poverty alleviation, a key focus of development projects. Arguments can even be made about the harmfulness of their use for society and health being exaggerated. Finally, many increasingly question whether the drugs themselves or the drug policy designed to stop their flow and consumption are most harmful, and there is growing acknowledgement that different policy is required to deal with the global drug threat.

2

Drugs as Anti-development

In all the recent attention given to drugs and development, the link between them emerges in several different aspects of their trade and use. Most of the focus has been on ‘developing countries’, though there is clearly much concern over their impact in deprived areas of wealthier countries too, and how drugs hinder the implementation of the Millennium Development Goals (Costa 2008; UNODC 2010; USAID 2013). Merrill Singer, an anthropologist, has studied the negative impact of drugs upon developing countries in depth (Singer 2008a), and avoids focussing solely on economic growth: his research emphasises human rights and sustainability. He also focusses on both legal and illegal substances, strongly highlighting the malign effects of tobacco in the developing world, and divides up their impacts into the following categories: productivity, threat to youth, health problems, corruption and violence. In what follows, these categories are explored with particular reference to Africa, while also adding another category: environmental degradation.

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Productivity Singer draws attention to how drugs can impact negatively a country’s productivity on both the supply side, through injuries and health problems acquired in processing drugs, and through arrests of low-level employees in the drugs trade, and the use side, where health problems can reduce productivity of workers. Singer cites research that shows drug users have more accidents at work, and are absent much more often. A critical factor is the spread of HIV/AIDS through drug use that can deplete a workforce. Discourse around psychoactive substances in Africa and elsewhere often laments the waste of working hours through recreational usage of stimulants and intoxicants. Alcohol is often implicated in this, as is khat. Indeed, in the case of khat, long chewing sessions in the Horn of Africa and elsewhere are seen by many observers as examples of indolence that undermine a work ethic. However, in Africa, the impact of drugs on food security is seen as a greater threat. On a continent where hunger is a recurrent concern, the use of land to grow drug crops is seen by many as immoral and irresponsible. In regard to cannabis, the International Narcotics Control Board (INCB) report of 2003 spoke thus: a ‘worrisome development appears to be the increasing shift from cultivation of food crops to cannabis in some areas [of Africa], resulting in food shortages’ (2003: 39). A cable sent from the US embassy in Freetown to Washington speaks of the concern with which Sierra Leone authorities view increased cannabis production, seeing it as a major threat to food security.1

Threat to Youth Youth are always considered most at risk from drugs. For children and youth to consume drugs is considered both dangerous and a waste of their potential and productivity. Singer (2008a: 44) relates the especial threat to street children, whose numbers have swelled so markedly ‘as a result of widespread poverty, urban migration, and breakdowns in the social service sector following structural adjustment’. Drug use (particularly of solvents) among street children is a worldwide phenomenon, and Singer (loc. cit.) cites examples from India and Cambodia. As well as the health risks of consumption, there is concern for child labour in the production and trade of drugs. Children from poor families are far more likely to become involved in this labour, as research from Brazil demonstrates. Through drug use and involvement in their trade, 1

Cable from Freetown US Embassy to Washington, ID no. #09FREETOWN135, 14 April 2009. Available at: http://www.cablegatesearch.net/cable.php?id=09FREETOWN135 (accessed February 2015).

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children’s education can be severely affected. Older youth in poverty-stricken regions are also considered at risk of involvement in the drugs trade through a lack of employment alternatives. The cultural cachet and ‘cool’ that sometimes surround drugs and their trade can also prove enticing for youth, a globalised phenomenon found in developed and developing countries. In Africa, there is great fear of an ‘epidemic’ of drug use among young Africans. Drugs such as khat have a certain cachet (Carrier 2005), while youthful alcohol use is reckoned to be increasing rapidly too. The use of solvents is particularly high among street children, while education rates suffer through child labour in the production of drugs such as khat. The high rates of unemployment throughout the continent, from the Cape Flats to Dar-es-Salaam, also create fertile environments for the spread of drug use among marginalised youth, further damaging their prospects of employment (Scholes 2007; McCurdy 2014).

Health Problems Risks of blood-borne disease are high amongst injecting drug users (IDUs), and rates of HIV/AIDS can be very high among such users in developing countries. While sub-Saharan Africa is clearly a great worry in this regard (the work of McCurdy (2014) and others has traced the tragic connections between injecting drug use and HIV in Dar-es-Salaam and elsewhere), it is not alone in this respect, and Singer draws examples from Bangkok where HIV prevalence among IDUs stands at 40 % (Singer 2008b: 474). Of course, different substances are associated with a range of harms, all of which can potentially add extra stresses to households and communities, especially where healthcare provision is lacking. While blood-borne diseases and IDUs are very much a concern, there are clearly a much wider range of pathologies connected with drug use, all of which can have a significant impact on communities and healthcare systems. Singer emphasises how this is by no means limited to ‘illicit drugs’, but much harm emerges from the legal drugs, alcohol and tobacco. Indeed, the loss of markets in wealthier countries has meant that tobacco companies have long been focussing on markets in poorer countries, with all the attendant risks of pulmonary disorders, stroke and so forth.

Corruption and the Breakdown of Social Institutions Examples of the linkages of the drugs trade and corruption are very easy to find. Escobar’s ‘silver or lead’ approach is perhaps one of the most well known, where officials and others were offered gifts and money in return for favours,

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and threatened with death in return for resistance; parts of Mexico are now beset by similar corrupting influences of drug traffickers (Morton 2012). To quote Singer, ‘[d]rug-related corruption… not only involves the bribing of government officials to turn a blind eye to drug-related activities or to actively aid them, it also involves ensnaring law enforcement representatives to provide cover for the movement and street sales of illicit substances’ (Singer 2008b: 49). Thus, such public servants—often poorly remunerated in developing countries—and the institutions they represent become further corrupted and undermined. Ban Ki-moon, Secretary-General of the United Nations, argues that ‘it is the world’s vulnerable who suffer “first and worst” by corruption such as the theft of public money or foreign aid for private gain. The result … is fewer resources to fund the building of infrastructure such as schools, hospitals and roads’.2 Meanwhile, the income spent on drugs and the stresses that arise from arrests and health problems can tear apart families, rendering it ‘even more difficult to survive in a globalizing world’ (Singer 2008a: 51). In Africa, poor remuneration for police officers and other officials makes them susceptible to bribes and there are many cases of suspected drug-related corruption on the continent. Corrupt figures in government are also implicated, as such people are said to offer protection to drug traffickers. This is especially associated with Guinea-Bissau where such infiltration of the state by traffickers generated the fear that the country was at risk of becoming a ‘narco-state’. Such concerns have been felt in Kenya too, in the wake of accusations against certain MPs that they have been corrupted by drug cartels, facilitating shipments of cocaine in return.3 Drug smuggling is often considered a key aspect in the ‘criminalisation of the state’, being used in analyses by the likes of Bayart et al. (1998). With the increasing securitisation of development in the post-9/11 era has also come an increasing conflation of the ‘War on Drugs’ with the ‘War on Terror’, reflected in debates surrounding the use of heroin, cocaine and even khat by ‘terrorist’ groups to fund their operations.

Violence One only has to think of the recent history of Colombia, as well as the tragically high rate of drug-related deaths in Mexico to realise the horror that can come with the trade in these high-value illicit commodities. Singer also relates 2

As paraphrased on the UNODC website: http://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/corruption/index.html (accessed February 2015). 3 Wikileaks Nairobi Cable No. 8, ‘International Drug Trafficking Ring Enjoys Impunity’, January 2006. Available at: http://kenyastockholm.com/2010/12/09/wikileaks-releases-nairobi-cable-no-8/ (accessed February 2015).

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the horrors that are associated with drugs in Jamaica and Haiti, as ‘cartels’ seek to maintain power against rival groups and law enforcement. History also provides the Opium War as an example of conflict over the drugs trade, while consumption of psychoactive substances including alcohol is often associated with volatility and violence. Clearly, such violence—whether at a societal or individual level—can destabilise regions, creating barren ground for economic and social development. In writings about Africa, drugs are also depicted as endangering the foundations of society through instigating and perpetuating violence. The use of cannabis amongst combatants in West and Central Africa is well attested, and many claim that such usage increases their courage and stamina levels.4 More importantly, drugs are often mentioned as ‘conflict goods’, helping ‘warlords’ fund militias (Cooper 2001). To quote the INCB report of 2003 once more: ‘Information gathered from war-torn countries in Western and Central Africa, in particular in the Central African Republic, Côte d’Ivoire and Liberia, indicates that the arms and ammunitions used by rebel groups and criminal organisations to destabilise those sub-regions may have been partly procured with the proceeds of illegal drug trafficking’ (2003: 39). The use of khat was similarly linked to conflict in Somalia at the time of the country’s collapse in the late 1980s/early 1990s (Anderson and Carrier 2006).

Environmental Degradation Environmental damage is widely associated with the production of drugs, including the leaking of hazardous pesticides and other chemicals into the ecosystem (for instance, through the processing of coca leaves into cocaine in South America) and deforestation as a result of cocaine production or cannabis cultivation: the illegality of cannabis means that it is often grown hidden among forests, sometimes resulting in the destruction of large areas of indigenous forest, as in the Mount Kenya region (Gathaara 1999). Khat cultivation is also associated with forest destruction, for example, in Ethiopia (Dessie 2008). There are also concerns about the use of pesticide in khat cultivation, and overuse of irrigation to water the crop. In Somaliland, there is a saying ‘cut a tree to chew a twig’ that suggests that demand for khat leads to increasing felling of trees in rangelands to make charcoal and thus raise funds (Anderson et al. 2007: 61). Such damage can have severe ramifications for people’s immediate health, as well as the long-term consequence of dwindling natural resources. 4

For example, see the following report on drug use by ex-combatants in Liberia: http://www.irinnews. org/Report.aspx?ReportId=81910 (accessed February 2015).

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These themes reflect real dangers and potential dangers for developing countries; however, it is worth being cautious in this regard as this is such a sensationalised topic. The ‘numbers game’ is a clear example of how the scale of the global drugs trade is often exaggerated. Furthermore, much sensationalised reporting about drugs and development is based on little exploration of causality. Instead, received wisdom dominates, and that drugs have a detrimental impact is taken for granted. For example, in the recent focus on Africa, there are no data presented to support arguments of drug-related economic decline nor any solid evidence that development would progress apace were it not for drugs (Costa 2008; UNODC 2010; USAID 2013). Whether the drugs trade causes corruption or is attracted to already existing corruption needs to be further questioned, although this risks a ‘chicken/ egg’ style debate. Also, there is little evidence beyond hearsay to support a straightforward causal link between trade and use of drugs and such conflict as that which has engulfed Somalia, although clearly the likes of the Taliban in Afghanistan derive income from opium cultivation and trade. The most compelling case for a large-scale negative impact of drugs on development is surely that connected with their smuggling and the connected criminality and corruption. But even here it is unclear whether the drugs trade has corrupted states such as Guinea-Bissau, when the criminality and corruption of the state pre-existed Africa’s recent absorption into the international drugs trade (Carrier and Klantschnig 2012: Chap. 4).

3

Unambiguously Bad?

That drugs are inherently bad for development is seen by many—especially the likes of UNODC and INCB to be self-evident. However, in reality, the situation in many developing countries is more ambiguous than this: global demand for drugs has provided livelihoods and economic growth to some regions, often acting to insulate communities—especially rural ones—during economic hard times. Indeed, globally drug crops have become a key economic resource for many farmers, and persuading—or forcing—those on the margins of the world economy to give up such important sources of livelihoods has proved extremely difficult, whether in regard to coca farmers in South America or opium farmers in Afghanistan. Singer (2008b: 472) describes well the ‘paradox for development initiatives’ posed by drugs, that despite their potentially negative impact on societies listed above, they provide poor households with opportunities in several parts of the world, ‘Opium, for example, is the biggest employer in Afghanistan… Similarly,

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in South America, the cocaine trade attracted thousands of families fleeing extreme poverty in other locations to coca growing areas, coca being perhaps the only cultigen they could make a living from in a region in which the soil is not well suited to intensive agriculture. Among poor farming families in Myanmar, Grund … notes that growing opium poppies “pays for what most people in developed countries take for granted”. In the words of one Myanmar man, “Opium is our food, our cloths, our medicine, the education of our children”.’ Similarly, in Africa, drug crops are also entwined with livelihoods. Not all these crops are illegal. In fact, many African drug crops are ‘respectable’ and traded legally throughout the world: tea, coffee, kola and tobacco being good examples, while the production of alcoholic drinks—whether legally or illegally—is a major source of income at both local and national levels. Carrier has studied khat in detail, focussing on its cultivation in the Meru District of Kenya and following its transnational networks that take it as far as the UK and the USA, where it is much in demand by diaspora communities of Somalis and Ethiopians (Carrier 2007). Khat is legal in Ethiopia, Kenya and Yemen—where it is a major cash crop—though illegal in many other parts of the world, including the UK which banned the substance in 2014. While many lament that farmers had turned to the crop instead of more legitimate ‘drug crops’ such as coffee and tea (Carrier 2014), in general, farmers have done very well out of the substance, and the growth of its global trade acted as a boost to production in East Africa, linking rural farmers to consumes thousands of miles away (Carrier 2007; Anderson et al. 2007). By the late 2000s, Kenya was exporting almost 50 tonnes weekly to the UK (Carrier 2014). Farmers of this drug have long earned better income from the crop than from the likes of coffee, and while there is fear over its cultivation taking the place of food crops, its booming demand has helped in enhancing food security and encouraging in investment in off-farm activities (Gebissa 2004). A more universal example is cannabis. This crop has long been cultivated throughout the world, often for personal consumption. However, the cannabis economy grew enormously in the twentieth century, and it is still one of the world’s most smuggled substances. In Africa, it is widely cultivated and commoditised, and the products of the likes of Malawi are in demand regionally and globally. Though linked to conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo or Nigeria’s Niger Delta, evidence from these countries suggest the substance to be rather more benign than portrayed, offering income to those affected by declining terms of trade, for instance, for cocoa farmers, or others very much at the margins (Klantschnig 2014;

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Laudati  2014). Like khat, cannabis is often accused of leading to increased dependence on food imports, but in places like Lesotho research suggests that cannabis is acting as a ‘compensation crop’. In the case of the small mountainous kingdom (one of the few countries where significant research on cannabis production has been conducted), an increase in production is linked to a decline in wage labour, high demand for cannabis in surrounding South Africa, and a landscape degraded by soil erosion caused in part by overgrazing (Bloomer 2008, 2009). In this situation, cannabis has become a major source of foreign revenue through trade to neighbouring South Africa and even to Europe, and is a mainstay of the rural economy. Bloomer states that ‘while there is no official data, other than police seizure statistics, all observers with knowledge of rural livelihoods in Lesotho agree that cannabis is the nation’s most significant cash crop’. As a crop capable of growing on more marginal land, it has proven especially attractive for land-poor farmers as food and other crops can be focussed on the better quality arable land. It is important to note how the unambiguous legal status of cannabis in African countries—it is technically illegal throughout the continent—is not matched by unambiguous action against its cultivation. Indeed, its production is tolerated by many state officials because of its economic importance, and in many ways this illegal crop is de facto legal. The state has lacked the capacity to enforce the illegality of the drug, as famers and traders have easily avoided the state altogether. Even the risk of arrest or having one’s crop of cannabis destroyed is low in many parts of the world, including rural Africa, where the power of the state is often too weak to reach farmers, and too constrained by a lack of will power in tackling a crop so fundamental to many livelihoods. In a rational assessment of which crop to produce, therefore, illegality—and the risk of future illegality—is for many farmers not that critical a factor. Until viable alternatives are found upon which livelihoods can be based, internationally suspect crops such as cannabis and khat will continue to be farmed. As many African leaders have realised, international political will to combat the production of such crops in Africa is lacking, in contrast to the will to combat smuggling routes bringing harder drugs into Europe and North America. As with khat, while few farmers get rich from growing cannabis, it now plays a significant role in many rural African economies. In such contexts, there is little legitimacy in international condemnation of these crops that in some ways have benefitted rural regions far more than many more conventional development projects have managed. Beckerleg (2010: 182) has argued that the success of a crop such as khat, treated with disdain by many as a ‘drug’, is subversive

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of development, being successful, yet disconnected from mainstream ‘development’ agencies including non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and governments. Of course, there remain risks in cultivating crops regarded as anathema in much of the outside world. Such risks were highlighted recently when the UK banned khat, losing farmers in Kenya a market worth £12 million or so annually (Carrier 2014). While they could not be recommended as crops farmers should grow to escape poverty, their economic value to rural areas around the world should not be underestimated. The argument might be made that although such crops have helped farmers, the consequences of their consumption far outweigh the benefits to rural agriculture. Cannabis and khat make consumers unproductive, cause health problems and deplete incomes better spent on food and education. While there is some truth in this, the harms of these substances are actually rather ambiguous. Firstly, the great demand that exists for these crops creates the economic opportunities that traders, farmers and transporters exploit. Also, consumption is not simply ‘leisure’: Laniel emphasises the functional use of cannabis throughout much of Africa, while the use of khat’s stimulant effects in work contexts is well established. The use of beer as a reward for labour on farmland is another example of how stimulants and intoxicants can be consumed ‘productively’ (Englund 1999). From an anthropological perspective, even consumption in ‘leisure’ contexts is not simply ‘unproductive’: Weir’s analysis of Yemeni khat consumption is most helpful in this respect, showing how mutual support networks are strengthened through khat parties, while news of job and business opportunities are shared (Weir 1985). Just as the sharing of food—‘commensality’—and gifts help bind people together, so does the sharing of cannabis, khat and other such substances: their consumption is productive of social ties. Crops such as coca, cannabis and khat—and even opium—are also culturally significant in various respects, being valued not just economically but also for their role in ceremonies, healing, sociality and so forth. This cultural insulation makes it yet harder to persuade farmers to desist from growing them. This is not to deny the very real difficulties faced by consumers of drugs— especially those using ‘harder’ drugs, and the many children dependent on solvents—or the way that drug consumption (khat and cannabis included) can break people apart as well as bring them together, so acting to curb development. However, it must be stressed that the impact of drugs upon development is far more complicated than the ‘received wisdom’ discussed above suggests.

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Countering the Threat

Given all the above, the obvious question is what can be done to mitigate the threats drugs and their global trade pose to development. Most tried— yet rarely trusted—are the supply-side policies of the ‘war on drugs’. Billions of dollars are expended in policing the global trade. Throughout the world, agencies modelled on the US Drug Enforcement Administration and customs officers make seizures and arrests; indeed, a global network of anti-drug agencies attempt to counter the global networks of traffickers, developing their own institutional interests along the way (Klantschnig 2013). However, unless every border could be sealed, the closure of one route has the effect of opening up another. The recent large-scale trafficking through Africa is a case in point: as routes through the Caribbean became tightened, smugglers switched to West Africa. It is also arguable that such supply-side measures as well as being ineffective in stopping the supply of drugs (prices of which continue to fall, suggesting supply is increasing) are also a key reason for the bloodshed and corruption associated with the global drugs trade by increasing the stakes and leading to a militarisation of both smuggling and anti-smuggling. As Singer (2008a: 83) states, ‘in many developing countries the War on Drugs has undercut civil liberties and human rights, strengthened the armed forces in countries with a history of harsh military rule, supported militarization of local police forces, spread the use of torture by law enforcement, provided support to powerful leaders who are themselves heavily implicated in the drug trade, contributed to a significant social conflict and political instability, and undercut the livelihood of impoverished people without providing them with alternative means of making a living’. Disaggregating the effects of drugs and that of the War on Drugs is not something attempted in a concerted manner by the UNODC or the INCB, although the UNODC has recently acknowledged the ‘unintended consequences of drug control’, ‘the most formidable of which is the creation of a lucrative black market for controlled substances, and the violence and corruption it generates’ (UNODC 2009: 165). ‘Alternative development’ programmes—substituting other crops for the likes of opium, cannabis and coca—have rarely been successful as the value of drug crops is kept inflated by the risk factor, while local infrastructure is often developed specifically for those crops. For alternative development to work, higher value crops have to be found, and the infrastructure established to make them a viable alternative: this requires much to go right, including demand for the replacement crops to be established. On the demand

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side, harm-reduction measures are becoming more commonplace, despite resistance from anti-drugs groups who see them as promoting drug use. For developing countries with high HIV rates, needle-exchange programmes and methadone treatment are beginning to be rolled out though much more needs to be done (Ratliff et al. 2013). There is considerable change afoot in the current era. Voices calling for a different approach to drugs and their trade are becoming more confident, and many countries have enacted various forms of decriminalisation or legalisation, especially in regard to cannabis. Uruguay has legalised state-produced cannabis for its citizens, while the US states of Colorado and Washington have legalised its regulated production, sale and consumption. In the case of Colorado, state coffers have been boosted greatly by taxing its sales, much of which is earmarked for the school system. UNODC and the INCB strongly object to these measures, and continue to press other countries, including those of the developing world, to continue to police cannabis (cannabis possession accounts for most drug-related arrests throughout the world). Drugs have always been regarded with ambivalence by societies throughout the world: alcohol being one of the best examples of a substance seen as socially beneficial in some ways, but in need of regulation. Regulation is not a perfect solution to reducing the harms associated with such substances, but there are few easy options in dealing with humanity’s ambiguous relationship to such substances. In all this, however, there is a sense that little will be achieved until lives and livelihoods in general are improved. While causality is difficult to prove—and drugs trade and consumption continue among the wealthy in society too— poverty exacerbates problems associated with drugs (including legal ones such as alcohol), encouraging people to get involved in their profitable trade, and sometimes become problematic consumers. As Alexander (2010) shows, where problematic drug consumption is common, so are underlying societal ‘development’ problems, often linked to deprivation. McCurdy’s work on heroin use in Dar-es-Salaam also vividly shows the connection between marginalisation and addiction, as does that of Bourgois in the different context of New York and San Francisco (McCurdy 2014; Bourgois 1996; Bourgois and Schonberg 2009). Many of these social and structural problems such as poverty, unemployment, social exclusion, environmental degradation, violence or even war, require a more multidimensional approach than the one currently promoted by international drug policymakers and development planners. Thus, truly tackling the problems associated with the global drugs trade requires tackling these wider ‘development’ problems.

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References Alexander, B.K. 2010. The globalization of addiction: A study in poverty of the spirit. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Anderson, D., and N. Carrier. 2006. “Flowers of paradise” or “polluting the nation”, contested narratives of khat consumption. In Consuming cultures, global perspectives: Historical trajectories, transnational exchanges, ed. J. Brewer and F. Trentmann, 145–166. Oxford: Berg. Anderson, D., S.  Beckerleg, D.  Hailu, and A.  Klein. 2007. The Khat controversy: Stimulating the debate on drugs, 61. Oxford: Berg. Bayart, J.F., S. Ellis, and B. Hibou. 1999. The criminalization of the state in Africa. Oxford: James Currey. Beckerleg, S. 2010. Ethnic identity and development: Khat and social change in Africa. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Bloomer, J. 2008. A political ecology approach to extra-legal rural livelihoods: A Lesotho-based case study of cultivation of and trade in Cannabis. Un-published PhD Thesis. Dublin: Trinity College Press. Bloomer, J. 2009. Using a political ecology framework to examine extra-legal livelihood strategies: A Lesotho-based case study of cultivation of and trade in cannabis. Journal of Political Ecology 16. Bourgois, P. 1996. In search of respect: Selling crack in El Barrio. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bourgois, P., and J.  Schonberg. 2009. Righteous dopefiend. Berkeley: University of California Press. Carrier, N. 2005. Miraa is cool: The cultural importance of Miraa (Khat) for Tigania and Igembe Youth in Kenya. Journal of African Cultural Studies 17(2): 201–218. Carrier, N. 2007. Kenyan Khat: The social life of a stimulant. Leiden: Brill. Carrier, N. 2014. A respectable chew?: Highs and lows in the history of Kenyan Khat. In Drugs in Africa: Histories and ethnographies of use, trade and control, ed. G. Klantschnig, N. Carrier, and C. Ambler, 69–88. New York: Palgrave. Carrier, N., and G. Klantschnig. 2012. Africa and the war on drugs. London: Zed Books. Cockayne, J., and P. Williams. 2009. The invisible tide: Towards an international strategy to deal with drug trafficking in West Africa. International Peace Institute Policy Paper, http://www.ipinst.org/publication/policy-papers/detail/244-the-invisibletide-towards-an-international-strategy-to-deal-with-drug-trafficking-throughwest-africa.html. Accessed Feb 2015. Cooper, N. 2001. Conflict goods: The challenges for peacekeeping and conflict prevention. International Peacekeeping 8(3): 21–38. Costa, A.M. 2008. Every line of cocaine means a little part of Africa dies. The Guardian, 9 Mar. ‘Comment is free’ section. www.guardian.co.uk/ commentis¬free/2008/mar/09/drugstrade.unit¬ednations Courtwright, D. 2002. Forces of habit: Drugs and the making of the modern world. Harvard: University Press. Cowen, M., and R. Shenton. 1996. Doctrines of development. London: Routledge.

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Dessie, G. 2008. Khat expansion and forest decline in Wondo Genet, Ethiopia. Geografiska Annaler 90(2): 187–203. Englund, H. 1999. The self in self interest: Land, labour and temporalities in Malawi’s Agrarian change. Africa 69(1): 139–159. Gathaara, G.N. 1999. Aerial survey of the destruction of Mt. Kenya, Imenti and Ndare Forest Reserves, Kenya Wildlife Service report. http://www.unep.org/expeditions/ docs/Mt-Kenya-report_Aerial%20survey%201999.pdf. Date accessed Jan 2012. Gebissa, E. 2004. Leaf of Allah: Khat and agricultural transformation in Hararge. INCB. 2003. Report of the international narcotics control board. http://www.incb. org/incb/annual_report_2003.html. Date accessed Jan 2012. Klantschnig, G. 2013. Crime, drugs and the state in Africa: The nigerian connection. Leiden: Brill/Republic of Letters. Klantschnig, G. 2014. Histories of Cannabis use and control in Nigeria, 1927-1967’. In Drugs in Africa: Histories and ethnographies of use, trade and control, ed. G. Klantschnig, N. Carrier, and C. Ambler, 69–88. New York: Palgrave. Laudati, A. 2014. Out of the Shadows: Negotiations and networks in the Cannabis trade in Eastern democratic Republic of Congo. In Drugs in Africa: Histories and ethnographies of use, trade and control, ed. G.  Klantschnig, N.  Carrier, and C. Ambler, 69–88. New York: Palgrave. McCurdy, S. 2014. Tanzanian heroin users and the realities of addiction. In Drugs in Africa: Histories and ethnographies of use, trade and control, ed. G.  Klantschnig, N. Carrier, and C. Ambler, 145–160. New York: Palgrave. Morton, A.D. 2012. The war on drugs in Mexico: A failed state? Third World Quarterly 33(9): 1631–1645. Ratliff, E.A., S.  McCurdy, J.K.K.  Mbwambo, B.H.  Lambdin, A.  Voets, S.  Pont, H. Maruyama, G.P. Kilonzo. 2013. An overview of HIV prevention interventions for people who inject drugs in Tanzania. Advances in Preventive Medicine 2013. Scholes, R. 2007. Illegal use and in particular tik and criminal groups in the Western Cape, Unpublished dissertation, University of Cape Town. Available at: www. lawspace2.lib.uct.ac.za/dspace/bitstream/2165/329/1/ SCHOROD003.pdf Singer, M. 2008a. Drugs and development: The global impact of drug use and trafficking on social and economic development. International Journal of Drug Policy 19(6): 467–478. Singer, M. 2008b. Drugs and development: The global impact on sustainable growth and human rights, 41ff. Long Grove, Illinois: Waveland Press. Thoumi, F. 2005. “The numbers” game: Let’s all guess the size of the illegal drugs industry! Journal of Drug Issues 35: 185–200. UNODC. 2009. World drug report 2009. http://www.unodc.org/documents/wdr/ WDR_2009/WDR2009_eng_web.pdf. Date accessed Jan 2009. UNODC. 2010. World drug report 2010. Vienna: UNODC. USAID. 2013. The development response to drug trafficking in Africa: A programming guide. Washington, DC: USAID. Weir, S. 1985. Oat in Yemen: Consumption and social change. London: British Museum Press.

24 The Violence of Development: Guerrillas, Gangs, and Goondas in Perspective Gareth A. Jones and Dennis Rodgers

Dangerous human proclivities can be canalized into comparatively harmless channels by the existence of opportunity for money-making and private wealth, which, if they cannot be satisfied in this way, may find their outlet in cruelty, the reckless pursuit of power and authority, and other forms of self-aggrandizement. (John Maynard Keynes 1936: 374)

1

Introduction: Violence and Development

There has been a growing debate during the past decade or so in development studies regarding the nature of what is generally referred to as the ‘securitydevelopment nexus’ (Buur et  al. 2007; Duffield 2007). Although different conceptions of this nexus exist, a mainstream consensus seems to have emerged—especially within policy circles—whereby ‘conflict’ is broadly seen as a phenomenon that is the opposite of ‘development’. This particular vision of things was pithily summarised by Collier et al. (2003: 3), when they contended that ‘war retards development, but conversely, development retards war’.

G.A. Jones ( ) Department of Geography, London School of Economics & Political Science, UK D. Rodgers Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences, University of Amsterdam, UK © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 J. Grugel, D. Hammett (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of International Development, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-42724-3_24

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Certainly, according to data provided by the 2008 Report on the Global Burden of Armed Violence, the monetary value of lost productivity due to premature deaths worldwide might fall between US$95 and US$163 billion per year (Geneva Declaration 2008). Moreover, as the UN Millennium Project (2005a:  183) observed, ‘of the 34 poor countries farthest from reaching the [Millennium Development] Goals, 22 are in or emerging from conflict’, and more generally, studies have suggested that so-called ‘failing’ or ‘fragile’ states have the worst record in conventional development terms (Kharas and Rogerson 2012). From this perspective, as the World Bank’s 2011 World Development Report on ‘Conflict, Security, and Development’ made plain, the need to ‘accept the links between security and development outcomes’ would seem obvious (2011b: 276; for critiques, see Jones and Rodgers 2011; Watts 2012). As the quote by John Maynard Keynes above highlights, however, such a vision of things is by no means new. Keynes was writing in the aftermath of the Great Depression and was effectively warning that without the promise of future prosperity, base human instincts might threaten violence, authoritarianism, and corruption in the future. His observation of course proved prescient but it overlooked the fact that ‘cruelty, the reckless pursuit of power and authority, and other forms of self-aggrandizement’ constitute a fairly accurate précis of the colonialism that was arguably the origin of the exceptional economic growth enjoyed by Europe during the latter half of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth century (see Davis 2001; Rodney 1972). Certainly, as Karl Marx (1967 [1887]) famously discussed in Volume 1 of Capital, there can be little doubt that Empire constituted a major spur for the extension of endogenous European capitalism. Marx focussed principally on the way the resources from Empire provided the basis for factory production in Europe in the form of raw materials, and how this reorganisation of production entailed immense ‘social turmoil’ in class relations, but he was very aware that the process of capitalist accumulation was far more destructive in the colonies. Writing in the pages of the New York Daily Tribune, for example, Marx (1853) noted how the British Empire was inducing the near total dismantlement of the economic, social, and cultural fabric of ‘Hindostan’. Mike Davis (2001) goes even further and argues that economic development in Europe was actively predicated on the calculated, even deliberate, inducement of death through food scarcity leading to mass starvation. He points particularly to three separate but interrelated global famines that occurred in 1877–78, 1888–91, and 1896–1902, and left between 30 and 60 million people dead in what is now called the ‘Global South’. Davis contends that the conventional explanation for these famines, that they were an unfortunate consequence of El Niño, ignores the role of colonial rule in converting land from subsistence to export crops, removing trees to build railroads,

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changing irrigation patterns that flooded lands, undermining tribal and village institutions, increasing taxation and holding back relief programmes that interfered with the ‘economic laws’ of laissez-faire capitalism. Numerous critical writers—such as David Harvey (2005), Tania Murray Li (2009), and Saskia Sassen (2010)—have echoed Marx’s line of analysis, arguing that contemporary capitalism effectively constitutes an updated form of ‘primitive accumulation’. In the name of development, Special Economic Zones, mining concessions, agribusiness, major infrastructure, and real estate projects involve the deliberate dispossession of resources, especially land, from the poor through state-led combinations of legal measures and coercion (Cáceres 2014; Hsing 2010; Jones 1998; Levien 2013). In many ways, as Robert Bates (2001: 34) puts it more broadly, economic production and capital accumulation have always been underpinned by various forms of instrumental violence, to the extent that ‘coercion and force are as much a part of everyday life as markets and economic exchange’. In other words, contrary to Keynes’s view that order and peace are achieved through opportunities for moneymaking, Bates suggests that order, violence, and economic accumulation generally operate together and in synch. This is something that obviously has significant implications for contemporary development agendas, not only potentially undermining the current consensus that negatively associates violence and development but also highlighting that development is not necessarily a benign process, and generally involves both winners and losers. Seen from this perspective, it can be argued that violence is in fact at the centre of development processes, both implicitly and explicitly. Implicitly, we only have to think of the case that Frantz Fanon (1961) famously made over half a century ago justifying anti-colonial violence as a legitimate reaction to imperialism’s brutal production of ‘the Wretched of the Earth’. Although the legitimisation of violence has fallen out of fashion in the contemporary period, Fanon’s general line of thinking arguably continues in the form of debates about ‘structural violence’ (see Farmer 1992, 1996). Explicitly, however, it is perhaps in relation to so-called ‘non-state armed actors’ that violence emerges most clearly as a major developmental issue. Part of the reason for this is the widespread notion that there has been a global decline of state authoritarianism in the past few decades. Whereas states in the past were generally the principal institutional vectors for instances of large-scale violence such as those associated with colonialism, the end of the Cold War is generally perceived as having constituted not only the culmination of a long process of decolonisation but also the beginning of a worldwide wave of democratisation, and concomitantly a transformation in the political economy of violence (Allen 1999; Kruijt and Koonings 1999; Westad 2005). In particular, planetary brutality is now understood to stem mainly from non-state sources, such as militias,

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gangs, drug-trafficking organisations, or ‘global ideological struggles’—that is, guerrilla groups and terrorist organisations (World Bank 2011b: 54). It is interesting to note that these non-state armed actors are more often than not seen as inherently non-development, insofar as they are generally considered to be parochial in nature, predicated on a ‘spoils politics’, and concerned with extraction rather than production (Hazen 2013). There is however an established body of literature that considers violent non-state armed actors in much more productive terms, including Charles Tilly’s (1985) famous work on ‘war-making and state-making as organised crime’, where he explicitly traces the developmental aspects of non-state armed actors from a historical perspective, and Vadim Volkov’s (2002) analysis of ‘violent entrepreneurs’ and the benefits that can accrue to patrons and associates in weak state contexts. This chapter inscribes itself within this tradition, and explores different articulations of three major forms of contemporary non-state violence, namely guerrillas, gangs, and goondas, in order to propose a more nuanced conception of the potential relationship between non-state armed actors, violence, and development than is currently mainstream within development studies.

2

Guerrillas

Guerrillas are often considered to be fundamentally ambiguous in nature. Certainly, it is common to hear the expression—originally inspired by the work of Walter Laqueur (1977)—that ‘one man’s guerrilla is another’s freedom fighter’ used to suggest that the underlying dynamics of guerrillas are relative. This implicitly challenges the notion that guerrillas might be developmental, insofar as development is generally seen as a normative process, although to a certain extent the real issue here is more the fact that ‘History is written by the victors’—to quote another famous expression—and unless guerrillas win, they will inevitably be portrayed negatively. Having said this, guerrilla-like phenomena are by no means new. As Eric Hobsbawm (1973: 165) has pointed out, comparing guerrillas and social bandits, ‘every peasant society is familiar with the “noble” bandit or Robin Hood who “takes from the rich to give to the poor”.’—a form of redistribution that is arguably fundamentally developmental in nature, albeit rather local in scope. Hobsbawm (1973: 166) however goes on to suggest that contemporary guerrillas are fundamentally different. In particular, their ‘novelty is political, and it is of two kinds. First, situations are now more common when the guerrilla force can rely on mass support… It does so in part by appealing to the common interest of the poor against the rich, the oppressed against the government; and in part

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by exploiting nationalism… The second political novelty is the nationalization not only of support for the guerrillas but of the guerrilla force itself… The partisan unit is no longer a purely local growth; it is a body of permanent and mobile cadres around whom the local force is formed.’ Seen from this perspective, modern guerrillas can plausibly be conceived as fundamentally developmental in a much broader way. On the one hand, this is simply an extension of the general notion that revolutions can be intrinsically developmental, insofar as they might free a given population from a situation of oppression or constraint. Even if in reality this is all too frequently a rather conditional claim (see Trotsky 2004 [1936], for the original statement on the question), one could argue that this makes revolutions a fundamental reflection of Amartya Sen’s (1999a) conception of ‘development as freedom’. On the other hand, it is striking how yesterday’s victorious guerrillas often become the drivers and beneficiaries of tomorrow’s economic development in many countries. Although this is by no means always the case—see Hoffman (2011) and Utas (2014)—this certainly occurred in Nicaragua, where the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) guerrilla came to power in 1979 before then losing elections in 1990. Although the FSLN was voted back into office in 2006, during its decade and a half out of power, its cadre became the nucleus of a newly emergent ‘national bourgeoisie’, as Florence Babb (2004) and Dennis Rodgers (2008, 2011) have highlighted. At the origins of this particular development is the fact that the FSLN had not expected to lose the elections in 1990 and faced a critical dilemma following its defeat. As Sergio Ramírez (1999: 55), FSLN vice president of Nicaragua between 1984 and 1990, described in his memoirs, ‘the fact is that Sandinismo could not go into opposition without material resources to draw upon, as this would have signified its annihilation. The FSLN needed assets, rents, and these could only be taken from the State, quickly, before the end of the 3 month transition period [before formally handing power over the victorious opposition]. As a result there was a hurried and chaotic transfer of buildings, businesses, farms, and stocks to third persons who were to keep them in custody until they could be transferred to the party. In the end, however, the FSLN received almost nothing, and many individual fortunes were constituted through this process instead.’ This somewhat unedifying episode in the FSLN’s history is known as the ‘piñata’,1 and effectively created the nucleus of a Sandinista economic group. Media reports have identified over 50 businesses directly associated with the 1

A piñata is a decorated papier-mâché figure filled with sweets, which often features at parties in Latin America. It is struck with a stick by a blindfolded person until it breaks open and its contents spill out, at which point a scramble ensues as people attempt to grab as many treats as possible.

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FSLN, including financial service providers such as Fininsa or Interfin, the Victoria de Julio and Agroinsa sugar refineries, INPASA printers, media outlets such as the Canal 4 television station or the ‘Ya!’ radio stations, as well as Agri-corp, the biggest distributor of rice and flour in Nicaragua with a US$100 million turnover (Mayorga 2007: 92–4). During the mid-1990s, there furthermore emerged an organised ‘Sandinista entrepreneurs bloc’ (‘bloque de empresarios sandinistas’), led by the former FSLN commandante and member of the National Directorate Bayardo Arce Castaño, who is a major stakeholder in Agricorp—run by his brother-in-law Amílcar Ibarra Rojas— and is also associated with the real estate development company Inversiones Compostela, run by his wife Amelia Ibarra de Arce, which has over US$4 million worth of investments in Managua. Other members of this group include the prominent Sandinistas Dionisio Marenco and Herty Lewites, for example. The group is the financial lifeline of the FSLN, particularly at election time. In 2000, for instance, it raised almost US$2 million to finance Lewites’ campaign to be elected mayor of Managua (see Rodgers 2011). The obvious question concerning this emergent Sandinista national bourgeoisie was whether it has been in any way ‘progressive’, in the pro-nationalist, anti-imperialist Leninist sense of the term, that is to say, whether it became the lynchpin for a process of productive capital accumulation and national development that has been sorely lacking in a post-revolutionary Nicaragua that has ‘mal-developed’ along neo-liberal lines favouring transnational rather than national interests. The answer is clearly no. Far from seeking reform, what Edelberto Torres-Rivas (2007) famously labelled ‘right-wing Sandinismo’ instead established an political–economic settlement whereby Nicaraguan elite and FSLN businesses derive a low level of profit from exclusive monopolies over protected sectors of the domestic market, disconnected from transnational imperatives. This is a strategy more familiar to nineteenthcentury hacienda-style capitalism than any form of progressive capitalism, and to this extent, far from constituting the accession to power of a developmental national bourgeoisie—and even less a return to the utopian politics of Nicaragua’s past—the FSLN’s electoral return arguably ultimately constituted little more than a wry illustration of Marx’s (2004 [1852]: 3) famous aphorism that ‘great historic facts and personages recur twice… once as tragedy, and again as farce’. The greatest irony, however, is that this elite oligarchy is in many ways reminiscent of the political–economic settlement established by the Somoza dynastic dictatorship that held sway over Nicaragua between 1934 and 1979—and which gave rise to the Sandinista guerrilla violence in the first place. Seen from this perspective, it is legitimate to wonder if and when a new guerrilla cycle might open up in Nicaragua.

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Gangs

Images of urban gangs as the embodiment of a modern-day barbarism are common on cinema and television screens, in magazines, and online games. Gang members are most usually presented and perceived either as evil and deranged sociopaths or as the exemplification of an anomic and senseless violence in a world that is increasingly characterised by the loss of traditional sociopolitical reference points. This view is further reinforced because gangs are conventionally considered as emerging in spaces that lack the tangible signs of development—that is, in ghettoes, slums, or council estates—and are therefore thought to be a response to a lack of accumulation or mechanisms through which to (re)distribute societal wealth such as the welfare state, for example. Nevertheless, a number of studies have also explored the ways in which gangs can be considered as developmental in scope and as institutional vehicles for economic accumulation. Although studies most consistently reflect on the cultural and sociological motives for young men to join or form gangs (see e.g. Jensen 2008), within these narratives is often an economic rationale, the desire to survive in harsh conditions or to ‘get out’ by making it big (Contreras 2013; SánchezJankowski 1991). In most cases, this has involved what might be termed ‘petty capital accumulation’, as most gang activities involve small-scale, localised crime and delinquency such as theft and muggings, as well as, sometimes, extortion and racketeering (Fleisher 1995; Rodgers 2006; Thrasher 1927), although there is a long tradition of studies highlighting how gangs can also facilitate more lucrative economic activities such as drug dealing (Bourgois 1995; Padilla 1992). Certainly, gangs can further and protect economic activities through the use or threat of violence which, in economic terms, operates to protect market position and enforce contracts (Beckert and Wehinger 2013). At the same time, however, gangs need to be careful on how and how much violence is deployed so as not to draw attention from police or security agencies or the retaliation of local communities (Sánchez Jankowski 1991; also Anderson 1999).2 Although gangs are occasionally analysed as protofirms—and the comparator is often mafia organisations—there is a fairly large body of literature that shows that the profits of crime are usually low and generally very unevenly distributed. As Steven Levitt and Sudhir Venkatesh (2000) have highlighted 2

Linked to this, gangs often perform ‘social responsibility’, therefore, by supporting community projects or as benefactors of festivals, parties, and responding to disasters. In so doing, gangs have been conceptualised as parallel or alternative states (Arias 2014; RAND 2012; Zaluar 2001).

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drawing on the latter’s research with a Chicago gang, the profits of streetlevel drugs trade are only just above viable alternative sources of income due to the fact that ‘the problem of crack dealing is [that] …a lot of people are competing for a very few prizes [and] …an immutable law of labor [is that] when there are a lot of people willing and able to do a job, that job generally doesn’t pay well’ (Levitt and Dubner 2005: 105). Dealers also have to suffer losses from the protection payments demanded by police and ‘stick ups’ by other gangs (Contreras 2013), as well as the fact that the ties between members limit opportunities for many to use their involvement in criminal activity to ‘get out’. The classic example in this respect is provided by William Foote Whyte (1993 [1943]: 108) in his classic analysis of gangs in the ‘Italian Slum’ of 1930s Boston. As Whyte notes, the leader of the ‘corner boys’ known as ‘Doc’ is both intelligent and successful at what he does but loyalty to the gang and the neighbourhood operates to diminish his social mobility. Nevertheless, in different circumstances, gang involvement in the drug trade has been shown to generate and distribute benefits for members and the wider community. In his study of the dynamics of a drug-dealing gang in a poor neighbourhood in Managua, Dennis Rodgers (2007: 79) highlights how ‘drug-fuelled economic development extended far beyond just those directly involved in the trafficking, to the extent that from a nucleus of about 30 individuals up to 40 per cent more households in barrio Luis Fanor Hernández were visibly better off than in non-drug-dealing neighbourhoods’. This points to the fact that the developmental potential of drug dealing by gangs is less a function of either the activity itself or the gang, but more the context within which it occurs. Drug dealing in Nicaragua occurs within broader economies that are more impoverished, more segmented, and where the cost of living is lower than in the USA, which is why drug dealing is both more lucrative and its profits are shared beyond a small, exclusive group (see also Zaluar 2001, for a similar situation in Brazil). What this highlights is the fundamentally contingent nature of developmentalism, which far from being normative is actually highly relative, and dependent on the broader societal political economy. The last point to consider then is whether gangs have the interest or capacity to radically alter that political economy. In his classic manifesto, The Wretched of the Earth, however, Franz Fanon (2001 [1961]: 54) acknowledged that what he called the gangster was often ‘a thief, a scoundrel or a reprobate’, but he also contended that when the gangster’s violence was directed against colonial authority, it became imbued with popular legitimacy through a process of ‘automatic’ identification, and the gangster as a result ‘lights the way for the people’. As Steffen Jensen and Dennis Rodgers (2008: 233–234) highlight, however, ‘even if gangs can be seen as potentially offering a glimpse of the

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possibility of emancipatory social change, the tragic truth is that in the final analysis their existence [more often than not] actively suppresses the perception of such potential transformation’. They instead propose that gangs are perhaps better seen as ‘war machines’, because they ‘are really not fighting “for” anything but themselves. Although they can plausibly be said to be fighting “against” wider structural circumstances of economic exclusion and racism, most of the time the behaviour patterns of gang members are clearly motivated principally by their own interests rather than the active promotion of any form of collective good’ (2008: 231).

4

Goondas

Our final articulation of non-state violence considers the figure and role of the ‘goonda’ or ‘dada’. In line with Hobsbawm’s social bandit or Fanon’s conception of the gangster, goondas have been a long-standing feature of the social imaginary of violence, masculinity, and politics in South Asia. They are a frequent presence in newspapers, comics, movies—such as Company (2002) and Gangs of Wasseypur (2012)—and novels—such as Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance (1995). The goonda represents the classic characterisation of the criminal underworld, with figures such as Karim Lala, Chhota Rajan, or Dawood Ibrahim nationally and internationally famous (Prakash 2010). Ibrahim, in particular, has featured prominently on the FBI’s ‘most wanted’ lists and has been linked to Al-Qaeda and the Pakistan’s intelligence services, something that reflects the furthest extreme of a categorisation of goonda that ranges from neighbourhood ‘heavy’ to gangster to terrorist. The goonda has in fact long had a difficult relationship with political power and the state. During British colonial rule, goondas were singled out as the embodiment of elite and middle-class anxieties, in part for their involvement with the illegal trade in alcohol, gambling, and prostitution. In this imagination, the goonda was cast as the strong ‘up-countryman’, predisposed to violence, and with little respect for authority. Actual knowledge of goonda backgrounds, activities and motives, however, was, as Sugata Nandi (2010) notes, based on anecdote and accusation, often from merchant organisations threatened by their influence. The real fear of the colonial state was the potential for goondas to become key figures in political society, a shift that seemed to have been achieved before independence. The concern with the political power and networks of the goonda in more contemporary context has tended to focus on their relations or complicity with the state. In post-Independence India, the notion of a Weberian-style developmental state was quickly undermined by the reliance on networks of

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nepotism, patrimonialism, and mutual benefit to get things done. Studies showed how everyday politics, corruption, and crime were mutually constitutive, with the goonda linking politicians and bureaucrats to criminal organisations, and vice versa (Berenschot 2011; Michelutti 2008). Indeed, although the goonda and goondagiri (thuggery) were not the preserve of a single party or faction within the state, Rohinton Mistry adopted the popular term ‘Goonda Raj’ to describe the dominance and practices of the Gandhi family in 1970s politics (see Tarlo 2003). The world’s largest democracy appeared to be run through corruption and violence to the benefit of political elites, union leaders, and licit and illicit business interests. The role of the goonda to preserve the system within a set of tacit and possibly more explicitly agreed upon rules was however a poorly kept secret. In 1993, following the bomb blasts in Mumbai, the government succumbed to pressure to investigate the relations between leading crime bosses such as Dawood Ibrahim, widely implicated in the bombings, and state officials. A 1995 report by committee chaired by the Home secretary Shri N.N. Vohra confirmed suspicions of a state colonised by criminal groups and of crime organisations run by leading politicians.3 It did not however explore how economic, political, and civic life beneath the level of national institutions relied on the pervasive figure of the goonda. Certainly, there is plenty of evidence that goonda ‘musclepower’ is deployed to lean on politicians, union bosses, and business people in order to enforce deals and remove opposition to reforms, the acquisition of resources, or favours (Berenschot 2011; Levien 2013; Michelutti 2010), and goondas have attained key roles in major economic sectors such as coal mining, forestry, transport, real estate and construction, the film industry, and finance (Bharti 1989; Prakash 2010; Weinstein 2014). Referring specifically to the North Indian state of Jharkhand, Andrew Sanchez (2010: 167) in fact goes so far as to argue that ‘goondas may well play an integral role in the state’s political, industrial and financial infrastructures’. This kind of ‘co-operation’ between goondas, the political class, and capital blurs the boundaries between state and society, dictates the temporal intensity and spatial unevenness of development, and is ‘indispensable’ to mediating limited resources and state capacity (Berenschot 2011: 275; see also Hansen 2001). To this extent, it can be argued that goondas play a fundamentally developmental role. This is something that also becomes apparent when considered in light of goonda relations with the poor. The goonda can be identified with a clientelism that might, from time to time, serve to redistribute resources to the 3

The Vohra report was deemed so sensitive that only a short and bland summary was released in 1995. The detailed annexes remained secret for 20 years until a Supreme Court direction restricting disclosure was overturned following a Right to Information Request.

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poor or facilitate access to the state. Goondas can also mobilise communities not only to demonstrate or even riot in order to show their loyalty to a politician but also to express anger at state inaction. As Ward Berenschot (2012) observes in the context of Ahmedabad, goondas thereby offer communities reliable, speedy, and cheap access to the state (and concomitantly enhancing the reputation of local politicians whom they are associated with as ‘getting things done’). Certainly, there is no doubt neighbourhoods with a close relation to the goonda can often ensure an uninterrupted supply of services, from water services, rubbish collection, or the resolution of property disputes, as well as less interference from the state’s oversight of informal activities. Such ability to distribute resources feeds the popular imaginary of the goondas as hero (Prakash 2010). Having said this, gaining resources for one community might involve the removal of resources from another, and goondas’ capacity to exert ‘muscle’ is just as often wielded against their community, for instance in working for landlords to evict tenants or determine the allocation of public housing, medical services, and jobs. In India, these forms of discrimination are most often caste and religion based; hence, the goonda’s capacity to protect or to mobilise problematically often requires setting Hindus against Muslims, or vice versa, for example (Berenschot 2012; Sen 2007). The power of the goondas derives from the poverty of their surroundings, and their ability to open out political and economic opportunities is often related to a wider context of ethnic politics. But it is not just this, as Thomas Blom Hansen (2001) intimates when he describes what he calls the ‘dadaization’ of the Shiv Sena, the Marathi political party in Maharashtra. He points to the fact that its leadership changed from politicians with a business background to individuals of more popular origins who also had more criminal connections and a greater enthusiasm for violence. Hansen, for example, traces the rise of Anand Dighe in Thane, a suburb of Mumbai, and his use of populist ‘street politics’, takeover of festivals and public ritual, and recruitment of young sainiks (cadets), some of whom would be visibly armed at events. For Dighe, violence supported a masculinist image as a ‘saint-warrior’ and confirmation of his criminal connections, and therefore established his leadership.4 As Hansen (2001: 120, 231–232) argues, the style of Shiv Sena brought forth a ‘Hobbesian theatre of power’ that combined spectacle, sectarianism, and violence in ‘pure politics’.

4

At the same time, Shiv Sena also cultivated support among women, some of whom were prominent in demonstrations and violence against Muslims, gaining a sense of empowerment, freedom to move in public space, and respect as ‘gangsters’ (Sen 2007).

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Conclusion

Understanding the political economy of contemporary development demands that we consider the role of violence and the actions of non-state armed actors in a more nuanced manner than is generally the case. Rather than simply seeing these solely as sources of destruction and impoverishment, we also need to consider the conditions under which they can be linked to development processes, even if often in an uncertain manner. In this chapter, we have focussed on just three types of organisations that have violence as central to their modus operandi: guerrillas, gangs, and goondas, and explored how these could be considered developmental from the perspective of capital accumulation or political governance. We could have considered many others: vigilantes, drug-trafficking organisations, pirates, youth brigades, to name but a few. We could also have considered violence from a different perspective, the meanings and effect of violence, its organisation and coherence, and its relation with peace, the importance of demography, youth and gender, to law and human rights, and its prevalence, distinctiveness, and purpose over time and across space, between public and private spheres or neighbourhood and nation-state. Current debates, perhaps best encapsulated by the World Bank’s 2011 World Development Report, have however focussed on the negative relationship between violence and development, and this whether from an economic or political perspective. These tend to be overly simplistic and moralistic in their approach, and tend to ignore how many non-state armed actors are deeply involved in developmental processes around the world, and have been for a long time. Our exposition of guerrillas, gangs, and goondas highlights a number of important correctives to the prevailing wisdom that violence is the opposite of, or a hindrance to, development in all its forms. While we acknowledge that violence is often destructive and anti-developmental, if the primary measure of development is simply taken as capital accumulation—as it all too often is—the examples highlight how being, or being closely related with, a violent non-state actor provides opportunities for income generation or wealth acquisition. In some cases, gangs for example, the developmental benefits are hard to establish. Success will depend on access to activities such as the trade in drugs, smuggling, or protection, and the consistency of returns can be undone by changing motives or tactics of law enforcement and community reaction. If the empirical case is tenuous, however, ethnographic evidence shows strongly that a belief in the development potential of gang involvement is often a leading motive. Part of the attraction is that these actors emerge from or are embedded in  local social and political formations, and compared with the

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state can be regarded as reliable and predictable in an uncertain world. People are fully aware that a warlord, gangster, or strong man is not a normative social agent, but they often act—or promise to do so—in predictable ways. This is often in sharp contrast to the actions of the state which, at least from the viewpoint of the community of support, appears to act in an arbitrary fashion and without reference to the best interests of the area. Our analysis also shows that what are often referred to as ‘non-state’ armed actors do not operate consistently against the state but more usually at its margins. Gangs rarely operate as a deliberate challenge to the state but they often exploit opportunities to operate as parallel or alternative sources of political and economic power in circumstances where the state has limited presence or more usually limited legitimacy. Goondas, on the other hand, act in defiance of state norms but are central to the state, as the Vohra report outlined. They simultaneously serve to limit the legitimacy of state institutions and work in the service of state actors. Although guerrilla insurgencies generally do operate against the state, once they have achieved their aims of overthrowing an authoritarian regime, guerrillas generally then work with the state, often with the specific intention to recalibrate state–citizens relations and a country’s political and economic terms of development. Subsequently, however, this developmentalism can become more parochial, as the Nicaraguan Sandinistas illustrate well, having used political power to extract resources from and through the state, in part as a manoeuvre in preparation for a period in political opposition but in some cases for more avaricious self-serving motives. Nicaragua is by no means unique in this respect, of course—one only has to think of Angola, Indonesia, Mozambique, South Africa, or Vietnam, among many others, for example—and starkly highlights an important question to consider in relation to the connection between violence and development, which concerns its primary institutional vehicle. There is a long-standing theoretical and empirical tradition, from Hobbes to Tilly, that has argued for a historical understanding of state formation as being predicated on violence and coercion, and when seen from the perspective of gangs, goondas, or guerrillas, little seems to have changed in the twentyfirst century. Although the latter are generally perceived in a very negative manner, and more often than not receive the greatest proportion of blame for instances of global violence—along with terrorists and extremists— ultimately if contemporary development—including especially capital accumulation—remains a violent and exclusionary process, this is perhaps less the fault of non-state actors such as gangs, goondas, or guerrillas, but rather of states, who institutionally embody the particular relationship between violence and development.

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25 Aid and the ‘Circle of Security’ John Overton and Warwick E. Murray

1

Introduction: Drawing the Circle of Security

International aid has always been closely linked to wider geopolitical concerns. Aid donors, despite periodic commitments to poverty alleviation, human rights or welfare, have been ever mindful of the way international development assistance has aligned or not with their wider self-interest and concerns over trade, security and investment. This has been particularly apparent since 9/11 through significant and long-running interventions by USA and its allies in Iraq, Afghanistan and the wider Middle Eastern region. Security is not just associated with military concerns: social security and legal security are also important and form part of the wider ‘circle of security’ sought through aid and diplomacy. This circle sees military security ensuring territorial integrity and the supply of natural resources that act as inputs in the capital accumulation process. Social security, achieved though raising economic levels, creates both a market and a labour force for the consumption and production of goods. Legal security, ensured through the rolling out of democratic processes, ensures that capital and profits can be repatriated. As such, we contend that broadly defined security achieved through aid allows the circuit of capital to be drawn full circle and perpetuated indefinitely.

J. Overton( ) • W.E. Murray School of Geography, Environment and Earth Sciences, Victoria, University of Wellington, New Zealand © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 J. Grugel, D. Hammett (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of International Development, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-42724-3_25

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Table 25.1 Ranking of top twenty aid recipients in selected years (ODA disbursements from DAC donors) Rank 1998

2003

2008

2013

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

DR Congo Iraq Indonesia Afghanistan PR China Jordan Ethiopia Tanzania Viet Nam Serbia Cameroon Egypt Mozambique Colombia Bangladesh Zambia Philippines Uganda Bolivia Nicaragua

Iraq Afghanistan Ethiopia Sudan Viet Nam India West Bank and Gaza Tanzania PR China Mozambique Uganda DR Congo Egypt Kenya Pakistan Colombia South Africa Liberia Bangladesh Lebanon

Afghanistan Myanmar Viet Nam Tanzania Kenya Ethiopia India West Bank and Gaza Syrian Arab Republic Pakistan Mozambique Bangladesh Iraq South Sudan Nigeria Morocco DR Congo Brazil South Africa Uganda

PR China Egypt Indonesia India Tanzania Mozambique Vietnam Bangladesh Bosnia and Herz. Thailand Côte d’Ivoire Philippines PNG South Africa Pakistan Bolivia Uganda Ethiopia French Polynesia Peru

Source: OECD http://stats.oecd.org/ accessed 15 May 2015

This relationship between aid and different elements of security is manifested in the changing geography of aid. Table  25.1 presents a picture of the way aid, in the form of Official Development Assistance from OECD donors, has been distributed over time. It is clear that military interventions, as in Iraq and Afghanistan, have had a major impact on aid distribution, with very large volumes of humanitarian and development aid following in the tracks of the military. These two countries figure prominently in the aid landscape, as have other sites of military intervention or internal conflict: Bosnia, Côte d’Ivoire, Syria, the West Bank and Gaza and Sudan, for example. Yet this provides a far from complete explanation for the distribution of aid. We also see noticeable investment by donors in emerging economies—a putative focus on poverty alleviation that has built social and economic security and developed markets in China, South Africa, Brazil, Kenya and Vietnam, as well as many smaller and poorer economies. Finally, there is also evidence of aid going to countries to help build legal and bureaucratic systems, a series of statebuilding projects sometimes following conflict but also involving the reconstruction of systems of governance following neoliberal pushing back of states in the 1990s. Examples here include Tanzania, Mozambique, Papua New Guinea and Uganda where aid has been increasingly channelled through rebuilt local government institutions.

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Over the past three decades, there have been significant changes in how international aid programmes have been conceived and implemented, with significant implications for those who receive such aid. These shifts reflect manifestations of donor self-interest and the insertion of economic and geopolitical factors into aid strategies and policies. In this essay we trace three major phases—or regimes—of international development assistance (neoliberalism, neostructuralism and what we term retroliberalism), examine their conception of and policies intended to increase security and assess the implications of this for broader social, economic and political change.

2

Aid and the Market: Neoliberalism

Neoliberalism has had a profound effect on the reconfiguration of international development assistance across the globe in the 1980s and 1990s. Previously, much aid had been given following a prescription that drew on both Keynesian economic theory and modernisation theory. Economic growth was stimulated through spending on infrastructure and welfare services (especially education and health) and state bureaucracies grew significantly to manage these services. Funding for such projects came from grants from bilateral donors and loans from both bilateral and multilateral agencies and government borrowing from banks awash with funds following the oil crises of the 1970s. Resultant debt repayments became increasingly precarious, as some aid recipients teetered on the brink of defaults, threatening major banks and financial institutions with collapse. Neoliberalism was partly a response to this crisis, but also drew on mounting Western public opposition to high tax regimes and calls from business to reduce state regulation and control of markets: ideas were subscribed to by several right-of-centre governments in the West in the 1980s, most notably those of Ronald Reagan in USA (1980–88) and Margaret Thatcher in the UK (1979–90). In these countries, neoliberalism involved a rapid deregulation of the economy, ending subsidies and industry protection, privatisation of state assets, a move to user-pays services and severe cuts in welfare payments, and a freeing of currency and interest rates to market forces. The impacts included rises in unemployment and poverty, growing socio-economic equality, profound industrial restructuring and a significant cutting of state services. Counter-intuitively government expenditure overall did not fall, although the nature and direction of state spending did change profoundly. Neoliberal reform within Western economies soon redrew their external relationships. In some cases, neoliberal ideology was directly exported to close

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allies in the developing world: Chile under Pinochet’s dictatorship being one of the earliest and most severe examples. Elsewhere, the USA and UK used their influence (and funding) to change the core policies of multilateral agencies, such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank. Attempts were also made to bring other agencies into line, the US withdrawal of funding for UNESCO being one notable example. By the close of the 1980s, neoliberalism had become political and economic orthodoxy. This orthodoxy also pressured donors to reduce their aid budgets, as the reduction of the state sector and stringent efforts to cut government spending inevitably reduced bilateral and multilateral aid budgets (see Fig.  25.1). Previous steady rises in aid spending throughout the 1960s and 1970s were followed by marked cuts in the early and mid-1990s supported by ideologies—such as Garret Hardin’s ‘lifeboat ethics’—which supplemented neoliberal ideas with the belief that the poor were responsible for their own condition. Charity, it was felt, only provided incentives for the poor to be dependent on others rather than developing their own initiative and enterprise. Thus, aid agendas shifted from poverty alleviation towards aid as a coercive mechanism to force economic reform and promote market-led growth, reduce government spending and services, despite opposition from recipient states concerned that such measures would disproportionately impact on the poor and threaten the very survival of the state. High levels of indebtedness and

120000

100000

80000

60000

40000

20000

0 1970 Europe

1975

1980

Africa

Americas

1985 Asia

1990

1995

Middle East

Oceania

2000

2005

2010 2013

Developing Countries unspecified

Fig. 25.1 ODA disbursements, 1970–2010 (constant US$million 2012) (Source: OECD http://stats.oecd.org/ accessed 15 May 2015)

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imminent bankruptcy, coupled with ‘rescue’ bail-out packages from the IMF and World Bank that rescheduled debt repayments, made this coercion possible. However, there were conditionalities attached to these packages which required harsh and rapid reform under the auspices of ‘Structural Adjustment Programmes’ (SAPs) which required governments to sell off assets, sometimes large and unprofitable industries but also key economic activities such as transport and telecommunications. Many government services were either privatised, cut or moved to a user-pays basis, limiting access by the poor. Economic regulations and protection had to be removed and local industries were opened to foreign competition, while economic protectionist regimes remained in the West. Food subsidies and price controls were removed, while financial deregulation led to floating exchange and interest rates, often resulting in high levels of inflation, interest rates and unemployment. The new neoliberal aid regime had a profound and deleterious effect on developing countries: aid became a tool to enforce neoliberal reform and putative economic growth. Thus, economic growth rather than poverty alleviation became the guiding objective of international aid. Neoliberalism also resulted in major changes to the way in which aid was delivered. Hitherto, aid agencies had channelled aid through government agencies as leading agents in development either through direct budget support or long-term programmatic support for education or health. Instead, there was a shift towards more project-based modalities focussed on discrete activities with a defined time frame (such as the construction of a road, hydroelectric dam or irrigation scheme) as well as a shift away from working with government agencies to collaboration with civil society organisations which were seen as more cost-effective and closer to communities. They also suited ideologies of self-reliance and individualism. The neoliberal aid regime thus promoted a significant growth in the number of non-government organisations (NGOs) active in aid, both in donor and recipient countries: NGOs were subcontracted to deliver aid-funded activities in ways that by-passed the state, tapped public donations and established a ‘chain’ of NGOs involving fund raising, co-ordination, management and community-level disbursement (Wallace et al. 2007). The radical restructuring of aid during this early neoliberal phase thus involved reductions in aid, a severe curtailing of the state’s role in economic development and an active promotion of market mechanisms and private capital—and to a lesser extent civil society—in its place (Martinussen 2006). The impacts were felt quickly and profoundly, leading in many countries to a rise in unemployment, price rises for food and other essential commodities, and a reduction in public services. Public dissatisfaction and protests mounted, weakening governments: the ‘rolling back’ of the state—an explicit goal of early neoliberalism—began to pose a threat to its very survival in many instances.

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Some aid agencies began to question the severity of change that neoliberalism had wrought by the early 1990s. Poverty alleviation had not been an explicit objective of neoliberal reform yet rises in poverty were plain to see and in 1990, both the UNDP and World Bank called for a recognition of poverty as a development priority, a call later echoed by several bilateral aid agencies including the UK Department for International Development (DFID) and Australia (DFID 1997; AusAid 1997). Poverty alleviation thus emerged as a key objective and new Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs) replaced SAPs as the core vehicle for articulating the development strategies. PRSPs retained strong neoliberal conditions: the continued freeing of regulations, privatisation and trade liberalisation (Craig and Porter 2006). The move towards PRSPs was partly motivated by a real concern for the plight of the poor but also by fears that insecurity and collapse could bedevil states that failed to deal with the social impacts of harsh and rapid economic reform. Commentators such as Joseph Stiglitz (1998) suggested that moves to liberate the market and roll back the state had gone too far and that a secure and durable state was still necessary to promote development alongside a vibrant private sector (Naim 2000). There was also a realisation that the state was critical if globalisation was to continue to expand (World Bank 1997). Forms of ‘re-regulation’ were needed, including the national-level enforcement of global-level agreements including copyright laws, property rights, protection of foreign investors from discriminatory laws and so on Thus, new aid conditionalities came with aid in the 1990s. These involved a ‘rolling out’ of the state with new regulations to protect certain markets (and restrict others) and pressure for governments to join global organisations (such as the World Trade Organisation (WTO)) and accept their stringent requirements (Oxfam 2007; Murray and Overton 2011a). This later neoliberal concern for the state was often encapsulated in the term ‘good governance’, appealing to notions of transparency, accountability, democracy, consultation and human rights but in practice also meant the functioning of government mechanisms to protect private property and investment. There were military security elements in the forgoing. The rolling out of SAPs came during the final two decades of the Cold War and formed part of the West’s fight against socialism. Significant overt and covert interventions occurred in countries that did not conform and thus ‘threatened the security’ of the model in places as diverse as Chile, Nicaragua, Mozambique, Cambodia and Iraq. By promoting capitalist economic growth, controlling the spread of socialism, promoting ‘good governance’ and legal reliability the circle of security was completed. This allowed the accumulation of capital for Western corporations in the periphery pursuing the new international

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division of labour. Yet in pursuing these forms of security, which promoted the market and its operation on a global scale, neoliberalism simultaneously led to insecurity: the state and its associated legal and bureaucratic systems were fundamentally weakened.

3

Aid and Statebuilding: Neostructuralism

The later neoliberal period of PRSPs and rolling out the state laid the foundations for a new aid regime after the year 2000 (Fine et  al. 2001). This year saw the launching of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), a set of development priorities that solidified and disseminated concerns with poverty alleviation through a global commitment to eight key development goals and related targets. These articulated what was meant by poverty: factors such as income, literacy, gender equality, maternal and child health, access to clean water and adequate shelter. The MDGs mapped out a 15-year term to achieve what were ambitious targets, and they called for major commitment from donors and substantial increases in resources, both domestic and external, to undertake medium-term programmes to address these core poverty-related goals. Whilst being criticised for addressing the symptoms rather than the causes of poverty (Poku and Whitman 2011) the MDGs nonetheless focussed global attention—and aid—as never before, and formed one of two key global pillars for the then evolving aid regime (Murray and Overton 2011b). The second pillar was a series of agreements on how aid should be managed and delivered. These agreements concerned aid effectiveness and were overseen by the Development Assistance Committee (DAC) of the OECD. Following concerns in the late 1990s about the need to focus aid and measure progress and success, the DAC sponsored four high-level forums (Rome (2003), Paris (2005), Accra (2008), Busan (2011)) to address aid effectiveness. Initially involving the major OECD aid donors, the meetings came to include representatives of recipient countries, civil society, the private sector and nontraditional aid donors such as China (though the latter were observers rather than signatories). Of these meetings, the most influential was the 2005 Paris Declaration which articulated what were considered the five most important principles of good/effective aid practice. They marked an important turn in aid practice and a recognition that aid could not and should not be determined by donors alone. The first—and arguably most important—principle was ‘ownership’: the need for recipients to determine and control their own development strategies. The other principles were alignment (donors should align with

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the development strategies of recipients), harmonisation (donors should act in concert rather than competing with one another), ‘managing for results’ (a call for results-based monitoring and evaluation) and ‘mutual accountability’. Potentially the MDGs and the Paris Declaration provided the basis for a radically new aid regime, one far removed from the fundamentalist market orientation of neoliberalism. Furthermore, it seemed as if this potential could be realised as aid budgets grew through the early years of the new millennium (Porteous 2005). General economic prosperity and several global public campaigns to end poverty and relieve the burden of heavily indebted countries encouraged Western leaders to agree to commit more aid and write off debt: the G8’s Gleneagles Agreement in July 2005 was notable in this regard. The shift was also spurred by the adoption of ‘Third Way’ political ideologies in the West (e.g. the approach of the Clinton and Blair governments in USA and UK) and ‘neostructural’ approaches in Latin America (the Lagos and Bachelet (Chile), Lula de la Silva (Brazil) and Kirchner and Fernandez (Argentina) administrations of the 2000s being principal examples). The ‘neostructural’ label best sums up this era of aid (Leiva 2008; Murray and Overton 2011b), marking an explicit concern for poverty and inequality, recognising that unfettered free market approaches had certain harmful social consequences that could be remedied by forms of state intervention and forms of redistribution. Yet it also remained committed to globalisation and the basic neoliberal recipe of economic growth through deregulated markets and free trade (Biccum 2005). The state was viewed as having a key role in both providing basic welfare services and alleviating the worst excesses of poverty whilst still promoting free trade and market-led growth: an approach summarised by the Latin American policy think tank, ECLA, under the title ‘Growth with Equity’ (French-Davis and Machinea 2007). Neostructuralism involved an active project to (re)build states. This again flowed from the critical reviews of SAPs in the 1990s and the concern that states should be sufficiently robust and effective so that they could protect and facilitate globalisation and capitalism. It also recognised the need for states to provide basic services, such as education and health, which could address the MDGs and also have a strong, honest, transparent and accountable state sector that could manage the increased assistance that would flow from donors. The Paris Declaration called for recipient government leadership: ‘ownership’ effectively was articulated in the form of a democratic state and its institutions. Furthermore, aid effectiveness agreements shifted aid away from single projects towards higher-level modalities: sector-wide approaches (SWAps) and, ideally, general budget support (GBS) both of which required state institutions to take the lead (Koeberle and Stavreski 2006).

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The statebuilding mission of neostructuralism received a significant boost in the wake of 9/11 and other terrorist attacks and the War on Terror. The recognition that terrorist organisations had taken shelter in countries such as Afghanistan, where the state was very weak, or that some supposedly rogue states (such as Saddam Hussein’s Iraq) could pose a threat to the security of others, turned attention to the ‘securitisation of aid’ (Howell and Lind 2009; also Duffield 2007; Duffield and Waddell 2006; Marriage 2006). Military interventions in these countries instituted attempts to reconstruct governments that would not only be politically aligned with their Western sponsors and limit opportunities for terrorist groups to survive but also operate in ways and with political and financial systems that matched emerging global norms. Aid then was directed initially towards issues of security: police and justice systems (substantial military aid not being recognised as ‘official development assistance’) as well as customs and border security. Yet it soon embraced the standard neostructural concerns for financial management systems, democratic institutions, good governance and basic government services. Whilst huge volumes of aid flowed to Iraq and Afghanistan between 2001 and 2014 (and more recently has followed the interventions against ISIS in Syria and Iraq), the security concerns of Western donors also shaped aid distribution in other parts of the world. In the Southwest Pacific, for example, Australian aid was turned towards countries that seemed to be on the brink of instability. Australia had been a willing participant in the US-led invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, and the 2002 Bali bombings (which killed 88 Australian tourists) led to increases in Australian aid to Indonesia as well as countries (including Timor Leste, Papua New Guinea and Solomon Islands) in the ‘arc of instability’ (Fry 1997) with serious local conflicts and evidence of governments struggling to survive. The fear was that should these countries fail they may become a base for terrorist groups, a source of refugees, and suffer a breakdown of social order and well-being. Thus, Australian aid increased by 45 % in real terms between 2000 and 2010, with aid to Solomon Islands increasing 88 %, as a means of staving off perceived threats to Australia’s own security. The heavy emphasis within the neostructural approach of utilising aid to strengthen the capacity of recipient states was guided in theory by the Paris Declaration. The core principle of ‘ownership’ was backed by targets that sought to encourage donors to use untied aid: the use of local procurement systems (rather than insisting on buying from donors), abiding by the development priorities in the country’s own strategic plans, and working through local government agencies (Koeberle and Stavreskci 2006). All these mechanisms, it was thought, would strengthen local sovereignty and democracy (echoing earlier notions of ‘good governance’) as local institutions took control of development initiatives and eventually took full responsibility for their financing and maintenance.

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Yet, in practice, neostructural aid approaches may have had an opposite effect with regard to ownership—in effect an ‘inverse sovereignty effect’ (Murray and Overton 2011a). While the new aid approaches aimed to overturn the heavy hand of SAPs, aid continued to involve conditionalities that placed a burden upon recipient states and restricted their freedom of action with respect to development policy (Gould 2005; Hermes and Lensink 2001; Pender 2001). Higher-level aid modalities, such as SWAps, required states to demonstrate that they had effective and efficient financial management systems and performance targets meant that tranches of aid would not be released unless certain standards were reached, requiring training, capacity building and audits. These initiatives in themselves were costly, requiring the employment of international accountancy firms to conduct independent audits and substantial training of local personnel, often in foreign universities. To facilitate the transfer and management of aid funds, capacity building was predicated on the replication of donor systems and practices, whether in terms of finance, customs, property laws or even education. One means of achieving this has been the placing of staff from donor countries in counterpart agencies in recipient government departments to oversee the putting place of new systems and to train local staff. Another method has been to send recipient country staff on secondment to train within donor institutions. Thus, in reality states were being reconstructed in the image of donor states, rather than on the basis of local values, customs and values. The Paris Declaration principles called for the alignment of donors with local policies and systems but the practice was an alignment in reverse. Another element of the inverse sovereignty effect has resulted from the requirements of donors that public involvement and consultation occurs more widely than just through the institutions of the state: the involvement of local NGOs and communities in public meetings and submissions has often become mandatory. In these cases, state institutions must undertake costly and time-consuming processes that see donors themselves involved in meetings with individuals, NGOs as well as a wide range of state agencies. This burden of consultation can be particularly heavy in small states: in the small Pacific Island state of Tuvalu, the number of donor officials, consultants, mission representatives, politicians, journalists and researchers amounted to 10 % of the country’s population (Wrighton and Overton 2012). Local officials, politicians and community leaders were seriously overburdened meeting such visitors as well as attending meetings overseas which required Tuvaluan representation (Wrighton and Overton 2012). Consultation by aid donors has extended as the range of concerns of donor governments and their constituents has widened, leading to a proliferation of visits, meetings, policies and required audits.

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Therefore, as the neostructural aid regime has evolved, its expanding range of new conditionalities, consultations and concerns has sometimes severely stretched recipient capacities. Aid has brought significant new resources and opportunities yet, despite the rhetoric of ownership and alignment, it appears to have imposed new constraints on the ability of recipient states to define, steer and control their own development strategies and policies. The neostructural era of aid from the late 1990s until about 2010 marked a significant shift away from the severe market-led approaches of early neoliberalism. The recognition of poverty, welfare and state capacity as key concerns for aid was important in defining a period of major increases in aid volumes and greater focus. It also defined a series of good practice principles that stressed local ownership and control and encouraged donors to act in less overtly selfserving ways. The principles, however, were less visible in practice. The underlying neoliberal concern for protecting and expanding the global capitalist economy continued: the concern for poverty perhaps merely a guise to lessen open opposition to the social impacts of globalisation and create new markets and the apparent interest in statebuilding only a way to improve the ability of global capital to operate in new spheres and to assure repatriation to its source. Furthermore, the poverty focus has remained narrow and diffuse. Poverty alleviation, as under the MDGs, has put the gaze on certain symptoms of poverty rather than underlying causes, such as inequality of access to resources or human freedoms. In this sense, aid perhaps has diverted attention away from a critical examination of what creates poverty and has helped allow capitalist growth to continue more or less unabated. Similarly, the way neostructuralism has focussed on security and stability of polities and societies is not simply a product of a post-9/11 world but more an attempt to rectify the inherent threat to security unleashed by the previous era of neoliberal destabilisation. In doing so, and by completing the circle of security, it facilitated the continued expansion of the global economy.

4

The Retroliberal Turn

The 2007–08 economic crisis, resulting from the collapse of the US sub-prime market, led to financial crises and recession in most economies, particularly in the West (Altvater 2009; Sidaway 2008). Government budgets were slashed and economic activity declined. It rapidly became referred to as the ‘Global’ Financial Crisis (GFC) even though its impact was uneven; poorer countries suffered less immediate recessive impacts and some economies, such as China, seemed to be little affected. In such circumstances, it seemed inevitable that

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the previous decade of aid increases would be suddenly and severely reversed. Yet, surprisingly, aid volumes did not decline, at least at first. Some countries did make reductions in their aid budgets, others kept them steady yet others, such as the UK, increased their aid budgets. This continued concern for international development aid is of interest in itself, yet it disguises what has been a fundamental shift in the global aid regime since the GFC (Mawdsley 2011; Harman and Williams 2014). Lacking any explicit global agreement or framework for this new regime, it is nonetheless apparent when one examines the remarkable consistency of policy shifts undertaken by right-of-centre donor governments in the wake of the crisis. The examples of the UK, Canada, New Zealand, the Netherlands Australia and, more recently, some of the multilateral agencies, reveal a pattern of change in aid policies. The broad elements of this new approach are as follows: • From poverty alleviation to sustainable economic growth: the mission statements of donor aid agencies have seen a shift from poverty as a central concern to the promotion of economic growth. In this, it echoes the core neoliberal assumption that economic growth is the most effective means of raising human welfare. • From welfare to infrastructure: aid budgets have seen a relative shift from funding education and health (especially at primary levels in recipient countries) to supporting the development of economic infrastructure (roads, energy, ports, etc.) and key economic sectors (agriculture, financial services, etc.). • Exporting stimulus: the GFC was tackled in Western economies by a return to Keynesian mechanisms of stimulating the economy through increased state spending (and in this case the bail out of failing companies). We contend elsewhere that this has been applied to the aid sector; programmes are now increasingly engaged in ‘public-private partnerships’ and the promotion of private sector activities. These often appeal to the rhetoric of building popular capitalism within recipient countries (small and medium enterprises, microfinance, etc.) but in practice involve support for relatively large companies from donor countries to conduct business in emerging markets (DFID 2011; Roy 2010; Murray and Overton forthcoming). • ‘Shared prosperity’: this has become the new mantra for international aid, one enthusiastically promoted by the World Bank, for example. Yet, given the above, it opens the way for aid to be justified if it leads to economic growth in both donor and recipient countries. It aligns well with much more explicit statements by donor governments that aid is but one of a number of foreign policy tools with the aim of promoting national selfinterest (rather than being focussed primarily on certain universal needs and concerns) (see Mawdsley et al. 2015).

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• From state security to securing the state?: one apparent sign of consistency in aid policies between this new regime and the former neostructural one is the seeming continued concern for building state capacity. Again, this is shaped by the need to deal with states that can oversee and manage aid funds in certain areas but also ensure political and economic stability and security. What may be happening however is a slowing of the statebuilding project as there is little enthusiasm to build ever-larger state institutions; rather, there is a need to maintain what is now in place and ensure they stay aligned with donors. What does one make of this new aid regime? There are clear parallels with the neoliberalism of the 1980s in the centrality of economic growth, globalisation and the private sector but also differences (Peck et al. 2010). It is clearly ‘liberal’ in an economic sense. Yet it is also markedly different in others. The reversion to Keynesian stimulus strategies and the active backing of private enterprises by the state harks back to an earlier age in the 1950s. The interest in infrastructure and the shaping of leading economic sectors also has much in common with modernisation theory of the 1950s, as does the open admission that aid is a foreign policy tool driven by self-interest. Thus, we suggest that this new era could be called a ‘retroliberal’ aid regime (Murray and Overton forthcoming). It owes as much to Keynes and Rostow as it does to Milton Friedman. Could this also be an era where the very idea of ‘aid’ is laid bare and even dismissed? Mawdsley et al. (2014) argue that the Busan forum on aid effectiveness in 2011 signalled what might become a ‘post-aid world’. At the Busan forum, the OECD donors made a number of changes to the Paris Declaration framework. There was a more explicit concern for development effectiveness (in terms of long-term outcomes) rather than just a focus on the efficiency of aid delivery and monitoring. Yet the main change at Busan was towards a more ‘inclusive’ approach to aid: meaning here an invitation to both the private sector and nontraditional donors (China, India, etc.) to join global governance mechanisms and institutions on how aid should be defined, monitored, delivered and negotiated. This attempt came about because of the very rapid rise of China as a significant aid donor, albeit one which operated in unique ways and the pressure by some donors to include large private enterprises in attempts to promote economic development through aid. China’s decision to participate but not be bound by the Busan Partnership was significant for it revealed that the former consensus among OECD donors had weakened (Eyben and Savage 2013). Western donors were less inclined to follow agreements that other donors would not adhere to. They also saw the success that China was having with its own approach to ‘south-south cooperation’, openly

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(and arguably more transparently than Western donors) using its own companies and contractors to build the infrastructure that it financed through soft loans to recipients (Mawdsley 2012; Abdenur and da Fonseca 2013). It was this approach that gave substance to the ‘shared prosperity’ concept that OECD donors soon adopted and mentioned previously. There are implications of this new retroliberal aid regime for geopolitics and security yet many of these will not be felt for some time. Retroliberalism seems to spell a retreat from the multilateral consensus on aid that was embodied in the MDGs and the Paris Declaration. Donor countries are now redrawing their aid policies so they fit their own national development priorities and perceived core concerns and resources rather than conform to global agreements and international development projects. There is still a strong concern for security in both the broad and military sense. Although retreats from Iraq and Afghanistan have followed military withdrawal, aid is still used to prop up states so that they can function effectively: the lessons of savage SAP cuts appear to have been learned. In addition, the retroliberal mission to develop infrastructure and economic growth is aimed at building stability through prosperity and global integration. However, the downgrading and sometimes outright dismissal of poverty reduction as a guiding principle for aid may have long-term implications for military security should inequality worsen, and health and education fail to ameliorate the effects of deprivation for large sections of a population.

5

Conclusions: Completing the Circle of Security Through Aid

We have traced the way aid regimes have changed fundamentally over the past 40 years and linked this to broad concepts of security. In some ways, it is tempting to see these as marked more by continuity than difference: that it is neoliberalism in different guises—a fundamental attempt to promote global capitalism—that has actually steered aid along a fairly consistent path. Whilst that underlying ‘global project’ (McMichael 2011) may well be consistent, we do see a rather more complex and fluid aid landscape, one that has been traversed by three major regimes, each marked by a turning point or restructuring crisis that has changed the nature and impacts of aid if not its fundamental economic and geopolitical objectives. Neoliberalism radically reconfigured the world’s economies, with development aid instrumental through SAPs and their conditionalities forcing states to downsize and turn over the control of their economies to private enterprise: donors wielded considerable influence over recipient countries. The neostructural period

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in many ways was a reaction to the excesses of ‘pure’ neoliberalism. It attempted to rebuild states so that they could function effectively and facilitate and protect capitalism and it attempted to address some of the more harmful effects of poverty and inequality. To a large extent it was remarkably successful, not only in achieving a high degree of global consensus over what ‘good aid’ should look like (if not operate in practice) but also in attracting considerably higher volumes of aid which were directed towards defined welfare goals. Coming to an end in 2015, the relative success at the global level of achieving many of the MDGs targets, though largely the result of the rapid growth of economies such as China, is also attributable in part to the concerted global neostructural project. Retroliberalism since the GFC has shifted (the geopolitics of ) aid towards more explicit support for donors’ own economic and strategic interests. Whereas the neostructural period saw attention focussed on places, especially in sub-Saharan Africa where the incidence of poverty was highest, or in the Middle East where the so-called War on Terror was waged, retroliberalism has led to more diffuse patterns. Greater emphasis on bilateral programmes has led to donors defining their own spheres of influence where their aid is concentrated. The contours of these spheres are drawn according to economic interests—places where the prospects for (shared) economic growth are greatest (not necessarily where the poverty-related development needs are most pressing)—or political assessments—where proximate security threats are greatest in fragile or failing states. To conclude, we might hypothesise that aid and security are intimately connected and cyclical. We require a rather broad view of security to understand this connection and its implications. There is certainly a close link between the manner in which aid follows military intervention: the toppling of a regime is inevitably followed by attempts to shore up its replacement through aid with the reconstruction of state institutions and a plethora of development projects ostensibly designed to address the pressing development needs of local populations. Development through aid thus tries to legitimise new states and, ultimately, the interventions that installed them. Aid is also critical, as in the neostructural period, in identifying and pre-empting potential political and social insecurity by providing basic development needs, crucially education, health, shelter and food, as well as income from widened economic opportunities and increased dynamism. Aid helps achieve social security, though the commitment of donors to these objectives has proved variable. Finally, security and insecurity are addressed in aid regimes in economic terms. Although sometimes framed in populist terms, following Amartya Sen, as the security of access to resources and the freedoms to engage in economic activities, we argue that an underlying intent of aid in the past 40 years and more has been in securing the environment for global capital to operate. It is maintaining

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this capitalist circle of security—military, social and legal has been the enduring and fundamental concern of aid donors, despite the twists and turns in the three major aid regimes identified above.

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Koeberle, S., and Z. Stavreski. 2006. Budget support: Concepts and issues. In Budget support as more effective aid, ed. S. Koeberle, Z. Stavreski, and J. Walliser, 3–27. Washington, DC: World Bank. Leiva, F. 2008. Toward a critique of Latin American neostructuralism. Latin American Politics and Society 50: 1–25. Marriage, Z. 2006. Not breaking the rules. Not playing the game. International assistance to countries at war. London: Hurst & Company. Martinussen, J. 2006. Society, state and market: A guide to competing theories of development. London: Zed Books. Mawdsley, E. 2011. The changing geographies of foreign aid and development cooperation: Contributions from gift theory. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 37(2): 256–272. Mawdsley, E. 2012. From recipients to donors. Emerging powers and the changing development landscape. London: Zed Books. Mawdsley, E., L. Savage, and S.-M. Kim. 2014. A “post-aid world”? Paradigm shift in foreign aid and development cooperation at the 2011 Busan High Level Forum. The Geographical Journal 180: 27–38. Mawdsley, E., W.E. Murray, J. Overton, R. Scheyvens, and G.A. Banks. 2015. Sharing prosperity? A comparative analysis of aid policy in New Zealand and the United Kingdom in the 2010s. NZADDS Working paper 15/1. Wellington: NZADDS. McMichael, P. 2011. Development and social change: A global perspective. London: Sage Publication. Murray, W.E., and J. Overton. 2011a. The inverse sovereignty effect: Aid, scale and neostructuralism in Oceania. Asia Pacific Viewpoint 52(3): 272–284. Murray, W.E., and J.D. Overton. 2011b. Neoliberalism is dead, long live neoliberalism. Neostructuralism and the new international aid regime of the 2000s. Progress in Development Studies 11(4): 307–19. Naim, M. 2000. Washington consensus or Washington confusion? Foreign Policy 118(Spring): 86–103. Oxfam International. 2007. Signing away the future. How trade and investment agreements between rich and poor countries undermine development. Oxfam Briefing Paper 101. Oxford: Oxfam International. Peck, J., N. Theodore, and N. Brenner. 2010. Postneoliberalism and its malcontents. Antipode 41(s1): 94–116. Pender, J. 2001. From “structural adjustment” to “comprehensive development framework”: Conditionality transformed. Third World Quarterly 22: 397–411. Poku, N., and J. Whitman. 2011. The millennium development goals: Challenges, prospects and opportunities. Third World Quarterly 32(1): 3–8. Porteous, T. 2005. British government policy in Sub‐Saharan Africa under New Labour. International Affairs 81(2): 281–297. Roy, A. 2010. Poverty capital: Microfinance and the making of development. London: Routledge. Sidaway, J. 2008. Subprime crisis: American crisis or human crisis? Environment and planning. D, Society and Space 26(2): 195.

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Stiglitz, J. 1998. More instruments and broader goals: Moving toward the post Washington Consensus, The 1998 WIDER Annual Lecture, Helsinki, 7 January. Global Policy Forum, http:///www.globalpolicy.org/component/content/article/209/4325.html. Date accessed 18 June 2010. Wallace, T., L.,Bornstein, and J. Chapman. 2007. The aid chain: coercion and commitment in development NGOs, Practical Action Pub. World Bank. 1997. World development report 1997: The state in a changing world. New York: Oxford University Press. Wrighton, N., and J.  Overton. 2012. Coping with participation in small island states: The case of aid in Tuvalu. Development in Practice 22(2): 244–255.

Part VI Rights, Activism and Citizenship

26 What do Human Rights Mean in Development? Paul Gready and Jonathan Ensor

1

Introduction

Human rights are now an established part of development discourse. Economic and social rights, in turn, are now part of the human rights mainstream. This chapter explores the origins and meanings of this multilayered convergence. It can be argued that what Dunne and Hanson (2009: 73) identified as the ‘slow weaving of human rights threads into the fabric of international politics’ continues apace. But the expansion of human rights, or the convergence understood in other ways, has also encountered resistance or scepticism. The changes described in the chapter are not linear or uniform, but rather uneven and contested. Some, for example, critique human rights on the grounds that it has fed an existing tendency to see development in a technical, individualised, and minimalist fashion. The ‘legal reflex’ (Gready and Ensor 2005: 9) within much human rights work, can serve these goals to the detriment of broader agendas such as distributive justice or participatory democracy. But elsewhere, subaltern actors structure their claims as rights, seeing rights as inseparable from enhancing agency, strengthening citizenship, and rendering power accountable. This chapter argues that concepts and framings in this field, like all concepts and framings, are open to diverse uses and understandings. This diversity sheds light on the role of power in development and international politics. Who gets to define what a concept or framing means? How are dominant

P. Gready ( ) • J. Ensor Centre for Applied Human Rights, University of York, UK © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 J. Grugel, D. Hammett (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of International Development, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-42724-3_26

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definitions contested? How does power inform the shift from ideals, laws, and policies to implementation and practice? This chapter draws on recent literature which explores the impacts of implementation and practice. In the sections which follow we explore the forms that convergence between the two fields has taken, followed by a discussion of the diverse paths to and implications of convergence. The chapter then examines remaining sources of tension between human rights and development. A concluding case study of rights-based approaches (RBA) to climate change adaptation identifies some ways of resolving these tensions.

2

Multilayered Convergence

In this section, the chapter introduces three approaches which combine human rights and development: economic and social rights, the right to development, and human rights-based approaches (HRBAs) to development as well as RBAs to development.

Economic and Social Rights The debate about economic and social rights has changed dramatically in recent years. Voices arguing that such rights are essentially different from civil and political rights (with the former being ‘positive’ rights, such as to food or to water, requiring action by the state, and the latter being ‘negative’ rights, such as freedom from torture, requiring only the absence of state actions), or that economic and social rights are non-justiciable (rights such as housing or education are a statement of a moral position or ideal not a legal declaration of enforceable rights (Christiansen 2007)), have been overtaken by events. Langford (2008), for example, argues that the debate has moved on from whether economic and social rights are justiciable, to look at issues of degree and methods. Global trends have fuelled these developments, such as the post-1990 third wave of democratisation accompanied by new constitutions that incorporate economic and social rights (perhaps most notably in South Africa), and the increased uptake of economic and social rights by international human rights NGOs. But beyond these global developments, what the literature on the new jurisprudence of economic and social rights demonstrates is the importance of seeing legal cases and court decisions in context—with context relating to both national particularities and factors beyond the law. For example, HIV/AIDs litigation has relied on social movements, to bring cases in the first place and to facilitate the implementation of judgments (Yamin 2011).

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The literature on economic and social rights litigation is still inconclusive as to whether, and in what circumstances, the law furthers social justice (see Yamin and Gloppen 2011)—in some circumstances, for example, it advances individual interests, and elites often have greater access to the law. That said, seeing the law in a broader context allows us to see the function of litigating socio-economic rights as greater than just the judgement—it can be an important avenue for bringing excluded voices into policy formulation, and opaque policymaking processes into the open. The court needs to be seen as a forum within and around which actors who are otherwise separated can be brought together, and power is to a degree equalised (but this is open to critique) by the process of evidence giving and information sharing. As such, economic and social rights litigation is progressive and enhances development to the extent that it is part of broader processes of mobilisation and the creation of ‘rights identities’, which challenge power relations and enhance participatory democracy. It is also worth spelling out what international human rights law actually says about state responsibilities in the field of economic and social rights. These insights take on particular importance in an era dominated by neo-liberal economic policies and cuts to state provision justified by austerity. States are required to ‘take steps’, ‘to the maximum of [their] available resources’, ‘with a view to achieving progressively’ the rights concerned (Article 2.1, CESCR). One set of core principles to operationalise these responsibilities involve the simultaneous application of core minimum obligations, progressive realisation, some obligations of immediate effect (such as non-discrimination), and non-regression (progress in one right cannot be made at the expense of another right). The focus here is clearly on securing minimum essentials and monitoring positive trends. A second set of tools, which applies to all rights, is the similarly simultaneous state obligation to respect (non-interference), protect (to prevent violations committed by third parties and non-state actors, such as corporations), and fulfil (broken down into the obligation to facilitate, promote, and provide). Further insights emerge from this second set of tools. For example, privatisation reconfigures rather than repudiates the state, and should increase its regulatory influence (Kinley 2009: 22).

Right to Development The Preamble to the Declaration on the Right to Development (1986) defines development as: ‘a comprehensive economic, social, cultural and political process, which aims at the constant improvement of the well-being of the entire population and of all individuals on the basis of their active, free and

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meaningful participation in development and in the fair distribution of benefits resulting therefrom’. This wide-ranging definition, and the articles which follow, make the task of defining the specific legal obligations of states, and other actors, rather difficult. States, for example, arguably have both duties to their citizens and rights to make claims on the international community. While little headway has been made in implementing the right to development, it does provide a prism on history and power in global development. The right to development has been used to emphasise responsibility for colonialism and neocolonialism, and as an instrument to argue for a New International Economic Order (an argument driven by former colonies as they gained independence in the 1970s). Its residual importance is as a corrective to the structural adjustment policies associated with the International Financial Institutions (World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF))—while structural adjustment (privatisation, subsidy cuts, deregulation of trade, etc.) places all the blame for economic problems on nation-state policies and none on neo-liberal global paradigms, the right to development serves as a reminder that history and the global economy also play a crucial role in determining development outcomes. More recently, the rhetoric of the right to development has been invoked in response to calls for developing countries to engage in actions to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions in response to the growing threat of climate change. Here, the historic link between emissions and economic development has enabled developing countries to argue that the responsibility for climate change mitigation lies with the countries of the North—and that the right to development means that developing countries have a right to emit or to have access to ‘green’ energy technologies (Orellana 2013). These debates point to an important tension in how human rights are deployed in relation to development. On the one hand, states and non-state actors may call for international oversight (via international legal regimes) that inevitably result in the erosion of state sovereignty. Yet, on the other hand, the linking of human rights to development is often implicated in attempts to support state sovereignty and champion national-level policymaking, the better to ward off international prescriptions.

Rights-Based Approaches to Development/Human Rights-Based Approaches to Development While there is no one definition of RBA, it can be distilled to five key elements. First, development outcomes are redefined as entitlements not charity—simply having enough of something is not sufficient, provision must

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be ‘socially [or legally] guaranteed’ (Shue in Uvin 2004: 53). This leads to a second element, a shift from service delivery to advocacy. While service delivery can be retained in RBA programmes, it is usually seen as entry point to develop trust and commitment (Kindornay et al. 2012), and as a shortterm measure contributing to the state ultimately assuming its obligations. In other words, rather than indefinitely substituting for, and arguably undermining, the state, RBA, as a third element, is a hand-over mechanism—building capacities of rights holders to claim rights and duty bearers, notably the state, to fulfil obligations. Fourth, RBA is characterised by key process principles, the PANEL principles (participation, accountability, non-discrimination, empowerment, human rights law). Finally, RBA repoliticises development by placing power and the need to address root causes rather than symptoms at its core. Poverty is understood to be structural rather than technical, emerging as a symptom of deep-rooted inequalities and unequal power relations, that is, as a state of powerlessness and rightlessness. It follows that the emphasis is on how rights claims are advanced by disenfranchised and marginalised groups to demand accountability from the state and private sector. These claims are often rooted in failures to acknowledge, respect, or protect economic and social rights, such as access to natural resources, at the local level (Newell and Wheeler 2006). In this vein, Jones (2005) argues that RBAs are much more than a narrow reading of individual legal rights. Rather, they rely on a political interpretation of rights that is translated into social action on the ground by communities and popular movements in many different contexts. RBAs of this sort are less about ‘doctrinal mandates, prescribing fixed rules for behavior’ (Miller 2010: 918), and more about a focus on power relations and rights claims by citizens, sometimes but not always referencing the normative obligations placed on the state by international law (Piron 2005; Uvin 2004). This framing of RBAs is intrinsically aspirational and generative, recognising rights to be continually under construction within social and political struggles (Gready and Ensor 2005:12). Yet a more legally orientated school of practice can also be identified, in which the normative and universal quality of human rights is emphasised, and adherence to standards defined in international law are the focus of development efforts. This distinction broadly divides (social, political, generative) RBAs and (legal, prescribed, normative) HRBAs, although the issue is better understood as one of emphasis rather than precise definitions (Miller 2010). There are, however, parallels with long-standing concerns with how power plays out in the discourse and orientation of development practice. While HRBAs can become implicated in top-down and donor-driven development prescriptions for reform

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(e.g., in the privatisation of natural resources, see Bakker 2007), RBAs resonate with alternative- or post-development discourses where the emphasis is on pluralist participation and the promotion of grass-roots movements for social change.

3

Paths to Convergence, Implications of Convergence

Given that there are multiple points of convergence, it is unsurprising that there are multiple accounts about how and why convergence has occurred. Table  26.1 sets out in summary a number of these accounts. One example, from Nelson and Dorsey (2008), is ‘new rights advocacy’. The authors argue that the post-1989 era heralded an opening of political space for developmental and human rights issues on the global stage, whereas the post-9/11 era brought about a contraction. In the former era, Nelson and Dorsey argue that locally based struggles over large-scale development projects in the 1980s and 1990s (such as the Narmada Dam in India), and the UN sponsored global conferences of the 1990s (Human Rights, Vienna 1993; Women, Beijing 1995) were drivers of change and opened up new political spaces for activism: ‘they brought together practitioners and activists in the local and international arenas, from the development, human rights, labour, and environment sectors, and from the global women’s movement and indigenous peoples’ movement, and they laid the foundation for the human rights and development convergence’ (2008: 29; see 29–32). At an organisational level, these developments led to various levels of collaboration: collaborative campaigns (blood diamonds, landmines, child soldiers, debt: organisations worked together but rarely altered their methods); convergent alliances (HIV/ AIDs, water privatisation: organisations learnt from each other’s methods and adopted tactics across sectors); and, finally, hybrid organisations (combining features of human rights and development work in a new generation of organisations) (2008: 125–64). This account illustrates the interaction between global and local developments, and argues that convergence is both substantive and organisational. The implications of convergence are also contested, as illustrated in Table 26.2. This comparison is interesting for a number of reasons. It addresses directly the role of politics and power in development, and contested framings of both human rights and development. De Feyter and Nlandu are from the human rights camp, whereas Uvin is a development specialist. From a simi-

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Table 26.1 Paths to convergence Arguments for convergence

Commentary

‘Progress’

Like human rights, development often assumes linear ideas of progress and a common destination—the basic trope is that ‘Europe shows the rest of the world the image of its own future’ (Crush 1995: 9) The argument that economic–social rights come before civil–political rights, for example, ‘full belly thesis’ (Howard-Hassmann 1983); ‘Asian values’ debate. The case is made that people will not be interested in civil and political freedoms if there is no food on the table. Conversely, once societies reach a certain level of development, and establish a strong middle class, there will be demands for civil and political freedoms and democracy Human rights is needed to save development from its calamitous failures. For example, in Aiding Violence, Uvin (1998) argues that prior to the genocide Rwanda was seen as a model developing country, but that aid agencies reproduced the official racism and a sociopolitical system based on exclusion (of Hutu) which amounted to ‘structural violence’. Uvin states that all aid is political and went on to write Human Rights and Development (2004) Relates to the rising amounts of aid spent on rule of law, governance, and in post-conflict settings on reconstructing courts, training judicial officials, and conflict resolution. Legal pluralism brings together development and human rights concerns: local justice practices may help deal with disputes about property and land but raise concerns about fair trials, women’s rights, and forms of punishment The strategic use of human rights at an operational level by, for example, faith-based or left-leaning agencies. Human rights are not formally adopted as part of the agency mandate, but rather rights issues and campaigns are engaged selectively and instrumentally to further existing agendas Change is rooted in a particular historical, political, and cultural context, yet this reality is overlooked in homogenised, expert-led reform, and modernisation agendas (Escobar 1995). Rights-based approaches resonate with this understanding, and were bolstered by Sen’s capabilities approach, in which the ends of development are seen in terms of situated capabilities—or ‘substantive freedoms’—and the agency required for people to take advantage of opportunities in context

Sequencing

Failure/catastrophe

‘Judicialisation of development’ (Oomen 2005)

Strategic framing (Miller 2010)

Alternative development and Sen’s capabilities approach

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Table 26.2 Hierarchies of convergence Level of convergence

De Feyter and Nlandu

Uvin

Lowest

Rhetorical use of human rights Rights-based approaches Extraterritorial obligations Right to development

Rhetorical incorporation Political conditionality Positive support Rights-based approaches

Highest

lar starting point, they diverge in understandings of how human rights and development converge, and what different levels of convergence mean. De Feyter and Nlandu (2014: 214–17) define the rhetorical use of rights as the weakest, least convincing level of convergence: the argument that development efforts automatically contribute to the realisation of human rights. At the next level, they argue that RBAs are pragmatic, taking the global development framework as a given while seeking to integrate human rights into the framework. They present the notion of extraterritorial obligations as more critical of, for example, donors, as it asserts that states and donors have obligations to people outside their territories, and are legally responsible when their acts and omissions lead to human rights violations elsewhere. Finally, the authors champion the right to development as the most progressive form of integration, for its focus on global inequality, and as it states that developed and developing countries have mutual obligations for the realisation of human rights. Uvin (2004: 47–166) starts similarly with what he terms ‘rhetorical incorporation’, which takes place when development actors simply redescribe what they are already doing as human rights work. Uvin places political conditionality, namely the threat to cut off aid to countries with a poor human rights record, at the second level of integration. He concentrates on democratic conditionality (which assumes links between human rights and democracy, and democracy and elections), and critiques the approach on four grounds: it is unethical, hurting the poor and vulnerable; it is never fully implemented; it does not work, as it attacks symptoms not causes, and there are means of evasion or tactical compliance; and it destroys what it seeks to achieve, by enhancing external accountability at the expense of internal accountability. At  the next level he presents positive support, in which human rights objectives are added to the goals of development programmes, and new projects seek to achieve specific human rights aims. Such work can include, for example, from support for justice and security sector reform. Positive support can include positive conditionality; for example, support is provided once specified targets are reached. And yet Uvin argues that the way development actors work— using universal templates, upwards rather than downwards accountability,

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technocratic and short term—makes success unlikely. Finally, he champions RBAs as the highest level of integration between the two fields, in which agency mandates are redefined in terms of human rights, and a fundamental rethink takes place of development process, ideology, aims, and so on. Uvin argues that RBA is different from other paradigms in two main ways: it creates claims not charity, and affects processes or the means of development. The two analyses agree only on the most superficial form of integration (the rhetorical). Beyond this, they prioritise different types of intervention (De Feyter and Nlandu refer to extraterritorial obligations and the right to development; Uvin to political conditionality and positive support), while their understandings of RBA differs significantly. For de Feyter and Nlandu, international obligations and solidarity are crucial, whereas for Uvin the focus is more on local politics and process. What the analysis to this point confirms is that human rights and development have converged through diverse routes, to varying degrees, and that the implications of convergence are highly contested.

4

Sources of Tension

The convergence between human rights and development has encountered resistance or scepticism. In this section, four sources of tension are discussed: the lack of a shared discourse or language; challenges relating to implementation; uncertainty about the scope of ambition; and disagreement about appropriate strategies (carrots or sticks) (Gready 2009).

Discourse: The Lack of a Shared Language or Sites for Dialogue The lack of a shared language stems from a divergent disciplinary and values base. Development practitioners are often economists, social scientists, and sectoral or technical specialists (food scientists or water engineers), while their human rights counterparts are frequently lawyers. The former are more forward looking, seek practical solutions, based on evidence; the latter start from a more explicit normative basis and a more retrospective outlook. Whether in universities, NGOs, or governmental and intergovernmental institutions, the professions often dine at different tables. Governments have separate Ministries for Development Cooperation and Foreign Affairs, while within the United Nations the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are not

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integrated into the treaty-based system (Alston 2005). Therefore, it is not surprising that the words and locations to sustain a conversation can often seem to be absent. To provide one example, Sarfaty (2009) assesses why the World Bank has not adopted a human rights policy or agenda. The author argues that there are legal obstacles to the adoption of a human rights framework. Specifically, the Bank Articles of Agreement which specify that it should not interfere in the political affairs of states, or be influenced by the political character of state (‘only economic considerations’) (IBRD 2012: Article 4, Section 10). Much analysis of the Banks’ resistance to engaging with human rights has focussed on its Articles of Agreement. But Sarfaty claims that a second set of obstacles is more important—institutional obstacles within the Bank, specifically competing normative frames and professional subcultures (economists, lawyers). Two strategies for reform are outlined which roughly map onto the two main disciplinary subcultures. An intrinsic framework makes reference to law and legal standards or morals, values and principles, while an instrumental framework is pragmatic, sees rights as a means to an end (effectiveness), and seeks to institutionally ‘vernacularise’ the rights discourse. What this second approach means is made clear in the most recent attempt to introduce a human rights framework at the World Bank, the Nordic Trust Fund. The Fund proceeded through a series of pilots, and used an economic framing of human rights (as a means to greater effectiveness, evidence based). The advantage of this approach is that it ‘speaks to’ economics; the dangers are that it instrumentalises human rights, reduces its leverage to secure change, and is vulnerable to co-option. Recently, some initiatives have sought to bridge the gap between economists and human rights practitioners (Balakrishnan and Elson 2011; Seymour and Pincus 2008). Arguably, economists need human rights to embed their analysis in a value base and enhance their understandings of exploitation and power, while human rights practitioners need a better understanding of economics to help them deal with complex choices and trade-offs.

Implementation: Human Rights are Prescriptive Rather than Operational The law declares, it proclaims—you have a right to x—rather than providing clear guidance for monitoring, programming, and interventions. Saying there is a right to food, tells us nothing about how this right might actually be secured. Jonsson (2005: 52), a prime driver of the RBA within UNICEF,

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states: ‘The simple fact is that programming cannot just be guided by standards and principles, because these are not precise enough to concretely inform the operations of programming.’ Given this shortcoming, it is not surprising that much recent work in the economic and social rights field, and in rights-based development, has been designed to bring rights down from the heights of abstract declaration to the front lines of application. But questions remain: can economic and social rights really be effectively monitored or guide policymaking and programming? Beyond programming, can human rights be used as a point of reference for other organisational activities, such as campaigning and fundraising?

Ambition: Human Rights Treats Symptoms Not Causes In discussions about human rights and development, the ambition of the project is unclear, or exaggerated. Firstly, human rights operates on the margins of real economic power. It barely features on the radar of the mandarins in Ministries of Finance, the IMF, World Bank, or World Trade Organisation. Secondly, if human rights have nothing to say about market economics and the global economic institutional infrastructure, per se, how likely is the new generation of human rights activism on economic and social rights and development to have far-reaching impacts? Thirdly, even the successes of this discourse—the Treatment Action Campaign in South Africa (Heywood 2009) or the right to food campaign in India (Mander 2012)—have not challenged the prevailing market-led economic model in either South Africa or India. The most hard-hitting criticism of human rights is that it is merely the latest means of providing an unjust economic system with a more human face, thereby sustaining and even legitimising the system. Legal judgements are seldom agenda setting: ‘courts are not being asked to make law or policy, but to review it against a set of criteria, in this case human rights’ (Langford 2008: 34). That said, two final points are worth making which point to the potential for a more radical human rights critique of the market. First, while human rights jurisprudence may not present a comprehensive alternative economic model (see the discussion of Economic and Social Rights above), it has begun to clarify a ‘clash of worldviews and conceptions of rights’: neoliberalism’s push toward commodification, commercialisation, and privatisation undermines both the concept and enjoyment of a right to health, in addition to other ESC rights… Neoliberal economic paradigms are closely linked to narrow liberal  – that is, libertarian  – conceptions of rights, which construe

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rights as negative shields against government interference and leave little space for positive claims on the government… In contrast, the erosion of distinctions between classes of rights lies at the heart of much of the ESC rights jurisprudence from the 1990s. (Yamin 2011: 341)

Second, other, less legally bound, forms of human rights work, such as interventions informed by RBA principles such as participation and nondiscrimination, arguably support local, bottom-up articulations of priorities which enable alternative economic models to be imagined, discussed, and experimented with.

Strategy: Carrots or Sticks? For many, human rights, through its association with naming and shaming methodologies and aid conditionality, is seen as unhelpfully confrontational and punitive. Often development practitioners are used to working closely with, and receiving funding from, governments. Positive conditionality—rewarding good behaviour—seems less punitive, if equally patronising. Hypocrisies and inconsistencies in the way human rights critiques and conditionalities are applied in the high politics where development and security interests meet, or in the low politics of North–South civil society partnerships, only add to the scepticism.

Resolving Tensions: RBAs and Climate Change Adaptation In development, these tensions are being resolved through modes of practice that look to respond to context while being guided by rights-based principles that enable practitioners to ‘take sides’ (Mander 2005) with the poorest. Rights-based practice aims to change the ‘balance of power within society and between state and society’ in favour of the marginalised (McGee and Gaventa 2011: 29). This approach recognises that entitlements (the goods and services that an individual can access) are secured or denied in a diversity of contexts, in which rules and norms are enforced by different (often overlapping) legal and administrative provisions, including through the power and authority of, for example, the state, traditional village chiefs, or customary practices and norms. Rights-based strategies may, then, seek to have entitlements recognised through contestation in social and political processes (such as villagelevel advocacy led by women’s solidarity organisations), or through appeal to legal or administrative systems (such as negotiation with traditional leaders or

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local government officials). This offers different entry points for development actions, summarised as, social, political, administrative, and legal. Rightsbased actions can be mapped to each entry point. This framing of RBAs has recently been developed in relation to climate change adaptation (Ensor et al. 2015). In this context, the inequitable distribution of entitlements underpins differences in the capacity to adapt within and between communities. Adaptive capacity is concerned with the potential for actors to respond to, shape, and create changes. As such, access to and control over resources are central, but outcomes are equally determined by access to and control in different decision-making processes, with consequences for distributive justice (who experiences harms or benefits) and procedural justice (who has a say in defining vulnerability and adaptation priorities) in adaptation actions. As the summary in Table 26.3 suggests, each RBA entry point has significance for adaptive capacity. Each encompasses norms and practices that shape behaviour, learning, and knowledge, and influences access to and control over the information, resources, and decision-making that enable adaptive actions. As a result, each plays a role in structuring opportunities to respond to, shape, or create change at the community level. Analysis of the four entry points in terms of the extent to which rights-based principles (transparency, accountability, equality, participation, and empowerment) are fulfilled gives rise to potential rightsbased development strategies, such as those illustrated in Table 26.3. These strategies are indicative of the diversity of rights-based development interventions, colletively illustrating how RBAs resolve the tensions between human rights and development through context-specific analysis of the processes of marginalisation and exclusion. Challenges of discourse are resolved by vernacularising human rights, with RBAs finding root in the language of local struggles rather than external frameworks or disciplines. In terms of implementation, the focus is on mounting claims for the recognition of entitlements, locally defined and in response to the institutional context, rather than seeking to prescribe outcomes a priori. The ambition is to empower local actors and alliances as they mount challenges to power in approaches that are more political than technical. The strategy, however, may be carrot or (and) stick, as the local political context will determine the balance of capacity building and social, legal, or political activism that is required to secure sustainable change. However, the consequences for development practice are profound: reflecting on the changes required in climate change adaptation, Ensor et al. conclude that a ‘politicisation occurs… an [RBA] explicitly engages with the underlying politics in development practice, showing how pre-existing inequalities yield deficits in adaptive capacity, and how they can be addressed’ (Ensor et al. 2015: 47).

Decision-making in Institutional and power institutions and relationships determine organisations and the participation in and the associated role of processes and norms through networks and actors which adaptation decisions in exercising authority are made and resources are secured

Political

Significance for adaptive capacity

Everyday interactions, Social relations mediate access encompassing a broad to material and non-material range of institutions, resources and services, and networks, influence how people interact organisations, and with each other and their actors (e.g., family, environment civil society, gender, ethnicity, customary norms)

Description

Social

Rights-based entry point

Human rights principles are articulated drawing on existing social and cultural norms and institutions, such as religion or traditional practices, which are used as the basis for change processes Building public knowledge in order to pressure for change, for example, in existing laws and policies, to reinforce human rights norms, as well as responsibilities of duty bearers in different settings Developing advocacy networks among communities, NGOs, social movements, associations, and community-based organisations to build voice, reduce risk, monitor state action, and secure a greater role for communities in decisionmaking and agenda setting

Change from within

Alliance building

Awareness raising

Context-specific empowerment processes can challenge particular aspects of social relations within communities, for instance gender norms that discourage participation of women in decision-making

Community empowerment

Example of rights-based strategies

Table 26.3 Rights-based analysis of and illustrative actions on adaptive capacity (Adapted from Ensor et al. 2015)

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Building effective working relationships between rights holders in communities and state duty bearers. (While ‘naming and shaming’ of the state is the traditional mainstay of human rights advocacy, it is used less frequently as a rights-based development strategy) Litigation may be pursued in anticipation of a successful court case, in particular, to hold the state accountable in their duties to respect, protect, and fulfil human rights obligations

Relationship building

Legal

Litigation Legal institutions and Legal regimes regulate access organisations, justice to and control over natural mechanisms, and actors resources, decision-making (including opportunities for accountability and redress), and material and non-material resources for adaptation Strategic use of law

The threat of litigation alone can be enough to secure political change. Alternatively, litigation may be pursued with the intention of bringing an issue or new information to public attention

Capacity building among communities to claim rights, to advocate for policy changes or policy implementation. Capacity building of state actors to enable them to recognise and fulfil their duties

Capacity building

State administrative functions Administrative Institutions and have the potential to deliver, organisations of the enable, regulate, or restrict state and related access to the resources and actors (e.g., services necessary to support government officers, adaptation (both material, policy processes, mechanisms of delivery, e.g., finance, and nonand oversight of public material, e.g., information services) and private actors)

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Conclusion

This chapter argues that concepts and framings related to the question of what human rights mean in development, like all concepts and framings, are diverse and contested. It asserts that that convergence between the two fields is not a fad or a one-dimensional process. Rather the ‘slow weaving’ of connecting threads is ongoing and dynamic, and sheds light on the politics of development. There are both multiple points of convergence at the macro or policy level and multiple contextualised struggles over the meanings and claiming of rights in particular settings. Human rights have their most profound impact on development when understood through context-based struggles and modes of practice, when they enable practitioners to ‘take sides’ with the poorest and challenge unequal power relations in collaboration with local actors, and when secured through both social and political processes and legal or administative systems.

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27 Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights Rosemary Morgan

1

Introduction

Health outcomes in all countries are intrinsically linked to sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR). Men and women, boys and girls, have specific sexual and reproductive health (SRH) needs; women and girls’ unique SRH needs, combined with their lack of power and lower socio-economic status, place them in a vulnerable position in many contexts (Sen and Govender 2015). The extent to which women and girls’ SRHR are respected, protected, and fulfilled both globally and nationally, in addition to whether or not a country’s health system is equipped to meet SRH needs, will determine whether and how these needs are met (Sen and Govender 2015: 228). Unfortunately, despite increased international and national commitments towards SRHR, many women and girls still lack access to essential SRH services, particularly in low-to-middle income countries (L-MICs), leading to preventable and unnecessary morbidity and mortality. Within the context of international development, recognising and fulfilling women and girls’ SRHR is an important development goal in and of itself. Women and girls have the right to make their own SRH health choices and decisions, from when to get married, when to have children, how many children to have, and to be protected from sexual or other forms of violence and discrimination. In terms of meeting broader global and national social

R. Morgan ( ) Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, USA © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 J. Grugel, D. Hammett (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of International Development, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-42724-3_27

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and economic development goals, improving women and girls’ SRH health has also been shown to be one of the most cost-effective development investments, ultimately decreasing maternal and child deaths, reducing poverty, improving economic growth, and encouraging gender equality (DFID 2004; Stenberg et al. 2014). It is therefore essential that women and girls’ SRHR are included within the international development agenda. The year 2015 is for SRHR and development. It is approximately 20 years after the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) in Cairo in 1994, which was the first time SRHR were given concentrated global attention, alongside a global agreement to realise SRH; and a review of the progress, gaps, and challenges to fulfilling the promises made at ICPD has recently been conducted (UN 2014). In addition, 2015 marks the end of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), and the beginning of post-2015 development agenda, which presents an important opportunity to ensure that critical international development issues, such as SRHR, are kept on the global agenda. Situating SRHR within the right to health, this chapter explores what SRHR are, how the commitment to SRHR has evolved over time, and what the role of the state is in realising SRHR. In addition, it explains why, despite some progress made, many women’s and girls’ SRH needs are still not being met, and how the future SRHR agenda is developing, including what it needed at the country level to ensure that SRHR are fully realised.

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Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights and the Right to Health

Health and human rights have been linked together since 1946, when the right to the highest attainable standard of health (‘the right to health’) was emphasised in the preface of the Constitution of the World Health Organization (WHO) as a fundamental human right (WHO 1946). The right to health has since been enshrined in international human rights law, including Article 12 of the UN International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) in 1966 (WHO 2002; Gruskin et al. 2007; Hunt 2007). An authoritative understanding of the right did not emerge until 2000, however, when General Comment 14 was adopted by the UN Committee on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (Hunt 2007). General Comment 14 recognised that the right to health, which included not only the right to access healthcare but also the underlying social determinants of health, such as the right to water and sanitation, food, and housing, was closely related to other

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human rights, such as the right to education, work, life, non-discrimination, and equality (Hunt 2007; WHO 2002). The right to health includes the right to SRH. However, prior to the 1990s there was little recognition of this right. A series of United Nations’ conferences held in the 1990s drew increased attention to sexual and reproductive rights, including the International Conference on Human Rights in Vienna in 1993, which recognised violence against women as a violation of women’s human rights (Sen and Govender 2015); the ICPD in Cairo in 1994, which shifted international rhetoric from one which focused on population control and demographic-centred policies to a focus on individual SRH needs and rights (Oronje et al. 2011; Sippel 2014); and the Fourth World Conference on Women held in Beijing in 1995, which reinforced the outcomes of the Vienna and Cairo conferences (Sen and Govender 2015). Of these, the ICPD is often seen as the most important in pushing the SRHR agenda forward. As a result of this conference, 179 countries and more than 1200 non-governmental organisations (NGOs) agreed upon a 20-year Programme of Action to realise SRHR (Glasier et al. 2006). The Programme of Action included a definition of reproductive health, which included sexual health (see Box  27.1), and identified a set of core SRH services, which include maternity care, safe abortion, contraception, and the prevention and treatment of sexually transmitted infections (STIs) and HIV (Germain et al. 2015). Definitions of reproductive health and rights, and sexual health and rights are included in Boxes 27.1 and 27.2. Box 27.1 ICPD Definitions of Reproductive Health and Reproductive Rights ‘Reproductive health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity, in all matters relating to the reproductive system and to its functions and processes. Reproductive health therefore implies that people are able to have a satisfying and safe sex life and that they have the capability to reproduce and the freedom to decide if, when and how often to do so. Implicit in this last condition are the right of men and women to be informed and to have access to safe, effective, affordable, and acceptable methods of family planning of their choice, as well as other methods of their choice for regulation of fertility which are not against the law, and the right of access to appropriate health-care services that will enable women to go safely through pregnancy and childbirth and provide couples with the best chance of having a healthy infant. In line with the above definition of reproductive health, reproductive health care is defined as the constellation of methods, techniques and services that contribute to reproductive health and wellbeing by preventing and solving reproductive health problems. It also includes sexual health, the purpose of which is the enhancement of life and personal relations, and not merely counselling and care related to reproduction and sexually transmitted diseases’ (UN 1995).

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‘Reproductive rights embrace certain human rights that are already recognised in national laws, international human rights documents and other consensus documents. These rights rest on the recognition of the basic right to all couples and individuals to decide freely and responsibly the number, spacing and timing of their children and to have the information and means to do so, and the right to attain the highest standard of sexual and reproductive health. It also includes their right to make decisions concerning reproduction free of discrimination, coercion and violence, as expressed in human rights documents’ (UN 1995: Paragraph 7.3).

Box 27.2 Definitions of Sexual Health and Sexual Rights ‘Sexual health is a state of physical, emotional, mental, and social wellbeing in relation to sexuality; it is not merely the absence of disease, dysfunction, or infirmity. Sexual health needs a positive and respectful approach to sexuality and sexual relationships, and the possibility of having pleasurable and safe sexual experiences that are free of coercion, discrimination, and violence. For sexual health to be attained and maintained, the sexual rights of all individuals must be respected, protected, and satisfied’ (Glasier et al. 2006: 1596). ‘Sexual rights embrace human rights that are already recognised in national laws, international human rights documents and other consensus statements. They include the right of all individuals, free of coercion, discrimination and violence, to: – the highest attainable standard of sexual health, including access to sexual and reproductive health care services; – seek, receive, and impart information related to sexuality; – sexuality education; – respect for bodily integrity; – choose their partner; – decide whether or not to be sexually active; – consensual sexual relations; – consensual marriage; – decide whether or not, and when, to have children; – pursue a satisfying, safe and pleasurable sexual life’ (Glasier et  al. 2006: 1596). ‘The above definitions of sexual health and rights are working definitions which were elaborated as a result of a WHO-convened international technical consultation on sexual health in January 2002, and subsequently revised by a group of experts from different parts of the world. These definitions do not represent an official WHO position, and should not be used or quoted as WHO definitions’ (Glasier et al. 2006: 1596).

The ICPD is praised for deepening the understanding of the right to health, recognising that it is not only about access to health services but also includes the ‘right to decision-making, control, autonomy, choice, bodily integrity and freedom from violence and fear of violence’, particularly for women and girls

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(Sen 2014: 601). Such rights include the right to exercise choice in sex and reproduction both within and outside of marriage (including access to contraception and family planning services), SRH services for adolescents, access to safe abortion services, choice of who to marry and when, access to antenatal, perinatal, post-partum, and newborn care, protection from violence and STIs, and cervical cancer (Glasier et al. 2006; Temmerman et al. 2014). The ICPD Programme of Action clearly outlined states’ responsibility to provide access to services, as well as to respect, protect, and fulfil women’s and girls’ SRHR within all spheres of society (Sen and Govender 2015). At the end of the conference, ‘governments agreed to provide “universal access” to reproductive health by 2015 as part of a package for improvement of people’s health and wellbeing’ (Glasier et al. 2006: 1596–1597). Since then the right to SRHR has been reinforced in a number of UN documents including General Comment 14 of the ICESCR in 2000, and General Recommendation 24 of the UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women, which stated that access to healthcare, including reproductive health, is a basic right and that countries are responsible for removing barriers to access (Sippel 2014).

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Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights and the Role of the State

The right to health is enshrined in international human rights law through the ICESCR and General Comment 14, which includes the right to SRH. As stated previously, General Comment 14 not only outlines the scope of the right to health but also outlines the obligations of states to fulfil this right (Hunt and De Mesquita n.d.). According to General Comment 14, states have the obligation to ‘respect, protect, and fulfil’ the right to health. States are obligated to ensure that they do not directly violate rights (e.g., through withholding medical care or forced sterilisation), to protect rights by preventing violations of rights by non-state actors (such as private health care providers) and offering redress when rights are violated, and to fulfil rights by taking all appropriate measures, including legislative, budgetary, administrative, and judicial (such as the development of laws and policies), towards the fulfilment of rights (Gruskin and Tarantola 2005). Part of this obligation includes ensuring that ‘quality services are available and accessible (including affordable) and acceptable to all’ (AAAQ), and governments are accountable for meeting these standards (Germain et al. 2015: 140). When governments are unable to immediately meet these standards due to resource constraints and/or weak health systems, they are obligated to have ‘specific policies and

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work plans for their eventual achievement, that is, for “progressive realisation” of the right to health’ (Germain et al. 2015: 140). The principle of progressive realisation of human rights also imposes an obligation to move as fast and effectively as possible, showing constant progress towards the full realisation of rights (Gruskin and Tarantola 2005). The right to health, and states’ obligation to respect, protect, and fulfil this right, encompasses both freedoms and entitlements. In the context of SRH, freedoms include the right to control one’s body and health, including freedom from sexual violence (such as rape), from non-consensual contraceptive methods (such as forced sterilisation or forced abortion), from female genital mutilation, and from forced marriage (Hunt and De Mesquita n.d.). Even in cases where countries encounter resource constraints which affect their ability to provide comprehensive SRH services, states have an immediate obligation to respect an individual’s freedom to control their body and health (Hunt and De Mesquita n.d.). The concept of progressive realisation therefore does not apply to the freedom components of SRH. Entitlements, in the context of SRH, include an entitlement to health protection, such as access to SRH health services and care, and protection from the underlying determinants of health, which help to provide equal opportunity for people to enjoy the right to health (Hunt and De Mesquita n.d.). States, therefore, also have an obligation to provide appropriate SRH services, in relation to the AAAQ principles discussed above, which includes information and education about SRH to all groups (Hunt and De Mesquita n.d.).

4

Progress in Realising Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights

As the deadline for the ICPD Programme of Action has recently passed, there has been a lot of attention on the progress made in the last 20 years. Since ICPD, there has been some noted progress and improvements in SRH outcomes (Germain et  al. 2015; Snow et  al. 2015), particularly in relation to family planning and a decrease in maternal deaths (Sippel 2014). In 1994, more than 500,000 women died each year from preventable causes related to pregnancy and childbirth, this dropped to approximately 289,000 deaths in 2013, and the maternal mortality ratio decreased by 45 % from 380 in 1990 to 210 in 2013 (Snow et al. 2015). These declines are associated with advances in clinical and social determinants, including increased use of antenatal care, skilled birth attendance and emergency obstetric care, improvements in female education, delays in first age of marriage and birth, and a decrease in

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abortion-related mortality (Snow et al. 2015). Box 27.3 highlights progresses made in family planning since ICPD.

Box 27.3 Spotlight on Family Planning Investments in family planning and the development of modern methods of contraception, coupled with improvements in child survival and expanding opportunities for women, particularly education, have led to a striking increase in overall contraception use, and a subsequent 23 % drop in global fertility between 1990 and 2010 (Snow et al. 2015; Glasier et al. 2006). Between 1994 and 2014, global contraceptive prevalence rates (CPRs) (the proportion of women using any method of contraception) increased by 8.5 %, from a median estimate of 58.7 % to 63.7 % (Snow et al. 2015). In the least developed countries, CPR increased by 87 % over the same period, from 20.7 % to 38.8 % (Snow et al. 2015). It is important to note that CPRs reflect data from married women between the ages of 15 and 49, excluding unmarried women. Despite the overall increases in CPR over the last two decades, within come regions, fertility decline has been much slower and CPR remains low, particularly for modern contraceptive methods. Within some countries in Africa, for example, the total fertility rate is almost twice as high as other regions, and in countries such as Chad, Guinea, and South Sudan, CPR remains below 10 % (Snow et al. 2015).

It is important to note that despite overall progress in meeting SRH needs, ‘aggregate gains in SRH outcomes mask substantial inequalities, and people’s ability to exercise their reproductive rights is neither universal nor equitable’ (Snow et al. 2015: 150). Evidence shows, for example, that large rich–poor disparities still remain, as does ‘pervasive human rights violations and social factors that put girls and women at a disadvantage in effectively accessing [SRH] services and claiming their rights’ (Germain 2004; Sen and Govender 2015: 229). As a result, despite progresses made, huge gaps and challenges in the realisation of SRHR continue to exist (Fathalla et al. 2006). Maternal mortality remains high in many parts of the world, particularly in L-MICs, where the risk of women dying of maternal causes in the least developed countries is 1 in 51, and in sub-Saharan Africa it is 1 in 38, while in industrialised countries it is 1  in 4000 (Snow et  al. 2015). Despite the maternal mortality rate falling by 45 % over the last 20 years, 800 women still die daily from causes related to pregnancy and childbirth. In addition, many women and girls still lack access to contraceptive services, HIV prevention, and safe abortion services (Sippel 2014). For example, although the use of modern contraceptives has risen by 10 % since ICPD, it is estimated that 25 % of women of reproductive age in Africa still lack access to contraception (Snow et al. 2015). And in relation to HIV prevention and mitigation,

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while antiretroviral drugs have averted around 5.2 million deaths, it is estimated that 65 % of HIV-positive people eligible for treatment still need care, while progress towards reducing HIV incidence has been very unequal with HIV incidence rising in countries in North Africa, the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia (Snow et al. 2015). The question therefore remains, despite the promises made at and since the ICPD, why do inequalities in SRH outcomes continue to exist?

5

The Politicisation of Sexual and Reproductive Health: Causes and Consequences

Although there is substantial evidence available highlighting the negative health consequences of strict SRH policies at the international and national level, issues pertinent to SRH remain controversial in many countries (Oronje et  al. 2011). Areas of contention include access to abortion, gender-based violence and marital rape, sexual activity outside of marriage, the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender individuals, sexual rights, child marriage, and adolescent SRH (Sippel 2014; Glasier et al. 2006; Oronje et al. 2011). Controversies arise due to contradictions with religious, cultural, and individual beliefs, values, and norms. As a result, efforts to change SRH policy is often met with strong opposition from religious, political, and community leaders, creating a ‘hostile’ environment for SRHR (Oronje et al. 2011; Girard 2014). Oronje et al. (2011: 2) note that as a result of this ‘hostile’ environment, many governments in Africa, for example, ‘either shy away from addressing these issues or take discriminatory approaches in policy-making and legislation’ (e.g., forced sterilisations or not recognising marital rape), which not only infringe upon women’s and girls’ SRHR but also cause compounded morbidity and mortality. These controversies were even evident at the ICPD, where consensus on the Programme of Action was reached through negotiation and compromise (Sippel 2014; RFSU 2004). The countries that expressed reservations were mainly Catholic-majority countries from Latin America, Muslim countries, and the Vatican (RFSU 2004) that were uncomfortable with certain wordings which they felt were in conflict with their national law, around such topics as abortion, family planning, gender equality in relation to inheritance rights, the right to life, and sexual rights and education (RFSU 2004). As a result, unresolved issues were set aside with the expectation that they would eventually

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be addressed (Sippel 2014). Regardless, the ICPD Programme of Action was significant in that it was the first time that the international community made a concerted commitment towards protecting the rights of women and girls and increasing access to SRH services (Kismödi et al. 2015; Snow et al. 2015). Over the past 20 years, however, as a result of the above contention, this commitment has seen a number of setbacks, which have had the collective outcome of undercutting the SRHR agenda (Sippel 2014). These setbacks include the subsequent politicisation of aid, a lack of recognition of SRH within the MDGs, and a lack of recognition of the integrated nature of SRH. In relation to the politicisation of aid, the best example is the Global Gag Rule, which was originally established in 1984 by the US government, one of the leading donors in SRH. The Global Gag Rule is an executive order that not only forbids US aid to fund abortion-related services, including abortion counselling, but also forbids US foreign aid to support organisations which provide abortion-related services with non-US funding (Sippel  2014; Crane and Dusenberry 2004; Yamin and Boulanger 2013). Since the policy was established in 1984 by Ronald Regan, it has become a political football, being repealed by each Democratic president and reinstated or continued by each Republican president (Sippel 2014). The policy has had a significant impact on family planning organisations by restricting the type of family planning information they are able to share, with some organisations choosing not to accept any US funding at all (Sippel 2014; Yamin and Boulanger 2013; Crane and Dusenberry 2004), as well as impacting women’s health by restricting access to abortion counselling and safe abortion services, in addition to other SRH services (Crane and Dusenberry 2004; Yamin and Boulanger 2013). Another setback was the lack of recognition of SRH within the MDGs, which were established in 2000, 6 years after ICPD (Germain 2004). While the MDGs brought increased attention to development and poverty alleviation, they failed to include a specific SRH goal, even though four of the eight goals related to SRH (goal 3: promote gender equality and empower women; goal 4: reduce child mortality; goal 5: improve maternal health; and goal 6: combat HIV/AIDS, malaria, and other diseases). As a result, unsafe abortions, family planning, and violence against women were omitted (Griffin  n.d.; Sippel 2014; Yamin and Boulanger 2013; Germain 2004). Due to strong opposition by international and national NGOs, and the increased recognition that the MDGs could not be achieved without SRH, the UN General Assembly incorporated the goal of universal access to SRH as a target of MDG 5 in 2006 (Griffin n.d.). Despite this, the sidelining of SRH within the MDG framework contributed to undercutting the SRHR agenda, exacerbating the

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impact of the compromises negotiated at ICPD which should have been addressed within the last 20 years (Sippel 2014). A consequence of the politicisation of aid, and initial lack of recognition of SRH and its relationship to four of the eight goals within the MDGs, has been a lack of recognition of the integrated nature of SRH issues and the importance of integrating SRH services. The importance of integrating SRH was recognised within the ICPD Programme of Action, which highlighted connections between the core components of SRHR, such as reproductive health and rights, sexual health, family planning, maternal health, and women’s empowerment (Sippel 2014). To highlight the importance of integration, consider an HIV-positive woman who becomes pregnant. Throughout her pregnancy, she would require access to prenatal services alongside prevention of mother-to-child-transmission services. However, if she wished to terminate the pregnancy, she would require access to safe abortion services and counselling. After her pregnancy, she would require access to family planning services to ensure that she does not fall pregnant again until she is ready, or enough time has passed to ensure safe spacing between births. She also requires sexual education and access to condoms if she is to prevent the transmission of HIV from her to her partner. SRH integration would ensure that all these were offered at the same location or through a series of referral processes (Sippel 2014). As these services are often provided in isolation from one another, with specific SRH issues (such as HIV and maternal health) being treated as topics with distinct targets and indicators, unconnected to issues such as family planning and safe abortion, it would be very difficult for this woman to access the SRH services she needs. A consequence of the lack of recognition of the integrated nature of SRH issues has been the creation of a global funding environment which directs aid towards individual projects and programmes, as opposed to initiatives which seek to support the integration of services through the strengthening of national health systems, thereby exacerbating women’s lack of access to comprehensive SRH services (Sippel 2014; Sen and Govender 2015). SRH programmes and services therefore often have to compete for restricted and limited resources when there should be an integrated and comprehensive approach (Sippel 2014). A striking example is that of HIV/AIDS funding. As a result of negotiations during ICPD, HIV funding was kept separate from reproductive health (e.g., maternal health, family planning, and abortion services). Huge amounts of funding have since been targeted at HIV/AIDS prevention and mitigation, part of which is the result of MDG targets, and substantial progress has been made in reducing the overall number of HIV/ AIDS-related incidence, prevalence, and mortality. HIV/AIDS, however,

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is closely linked to other SRH issues and is a gendered epidemic. Women currently make up over 50 % of those infected by HIV, and in sub-Saharan Africa 60 % of those infected are women (Sippel 2014; Germain 2004). HIV remains one of the leading causes of death of women of reproductive age, accounting for 60,000 deaths in 2008 (Sippel 2014). While some steps are now being taken to ‘include access to HIV prevention, care and treatment as a sexual and reproductive right, and as an integral part of family planning and maternal health’ (Sippel 2014: 623), would there have been an increased reduction of HIV infection and deaths among women if HIV services were integrated with SRH services from the outset? These sectors often remain segregated, with separate budgetary allocations, and many women still lack access to integrated SRH services, something which the post-2015 development agenda is trying to address.

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Sexual and Reproductive Rights and the Post-2015 Development Agenda

The year 2015 marks the convergence of a 20-year review of the ICPD Programme of Action, the end of the MDGs, and the beginning of the post2015 development agenda. The ‘post-2015 process’, which saw a number of reviews and debates over the next development agenda, and the development of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are seen by SRHR proponents and advocates as providing important opportunities to position SRHR as a central element of the post-2015 development agenda (Germain et al. 2015; Girard 2014). Twelve illustrative SDGs have been recommended by a highlevel panel appointed by the current Secretary General of the United Nations, Ban Ki-moon, which, if accepted, will shape international development over the next 15 years (Girard 2014). Two of the goals are directly related to SRHR:  goal 4 on ensuring healthy lives and goal 2 on gender equality (Germain et al. 2015; UN 2013); ensuring universal SRHR has been explicitly included as a target under goal 4 (UN 2013). Many see this as recognition of the importance of SRHR to improving health and well-being and its important relationship to other development objectives. There continues to be strong opposition towards particular components of SRHR, however, and as the post-2015 development agenda continues to be negotiated ‘particular attention is needed to ensure the inclusion of all the critical elements of the SRHR agenda, without cherry-picking only the easy or uncontroversial parts’ (Sen 2014: 602–603). Issues such as access to multiple methods of contraception for both girls and women, access to safe abortion

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services and post-abortion care, the prevention of harmful practices such as female genital mutilation or forced and early marriages, adolescent sexuality education, and the recognition of marital rape continue to be contentious (Sen 2014). While the negotiations and compromise that happened during ICPD and the subsequent development of the MDGs saw SRH issues get separated into distinct issues, the post-2015 development agenda represents a unique opportunity to ensure that the integrated nature of SRH is recognised, and that all SRH issues, including the most controversial, are included. In addition to making sure that SRHR remain on the post-2015 development agenda, in order to ensure that SRHR are fully realised, it is important to think about what is needed at the national level. Three things are particularly important: political will, health system strengthening, and the generation of demand. Firstly, political will and commitment towards the realisation of SRHR is essential, which subsequently needs to be translated into the development of appropriate laws and policies (Germain 2004; Fathalla et al. 2006). However, a change in policy or law itself is not enough; the policy or law must be implemented (Fathalla et  al. 2006). For example, while the legalisation of abortion is necessary if women are to have access to safe abortion services, it is an insufficient step to safeguard the health of women. In countries such as India and South Africa, while abortion is legal it can be difficult to access due to the lack of availability of quality low-cost services, and lack of information or knowledge about abortion legislation. As a result, women continue to access unsafe clandestine abortion services (Grimes et al. 2006; Jewkes et al. 2005). According to Kismodi et al. (2015: 258), ‘accumulated evidence on the impact of restrictive abortion laws on maternal mortality and morbidity shows that the removal of such restrictions results in reduction of maternal mortality due to unsafe abortion and that where abortion is legal on broad socioeconomic grounds and on a woman’s request, and where safe services are accessible, both unsafe abortion and abortion-related mortality and morbidity are reduced’. Over the last three decades, for reasons to do with health and human rights, more than 30 countries have liberalised or relaxed their laws to expand the number of grounds under which abortion can be provided (Kismödi et al. 2015). The development and implementation of progressive SRH laws and policies can therefore have a substantial impact on SRH outcomes. Secondly, in order to ensure that SRHR are fully realised, health system strengthening initiatives, including those that target the integration of comprehensive SRH services, are needed. Donor funding must no longer be siloed into separate funding pools for HIV/AIDS, maternal health, and family

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planning, often delivered through vertical NGO programmes instead of public health systems. Instead, national health systems need to be strengthened so that they can adequately provide comprehensive and integrated SRH services, which are of high quality, available, accessible, and acceptable to the communities in which they serve. An important addition to SDG 4 is the achievement of universal health coverage (UHC). As health systems are strengthened to reach this goal, political commitment and advocacy are needed to ensure that comprehensive and integrated SRH services are successfully incorporated into all UHC initiatives (Sen and Govender 2015). Thirdly, in addition to political commitment and health system strengthening, in order to ensure that SRH services are effectively delivered and utilised, demand for these services needs to be adequately generated. ‘Social, educational, and economic inequalities underlie the reasons why girls and women often do not use health services: they do not know about them, are not allowed by their families to use them, or do not have money to pay for them’ (Germain 2004: 66). Women and girls need to be empowered through education and other social means to enable them to effectively access information and services. For example, evidence shows that access to full and accurate information about sexuality and sexual health through comprehensive sexuality education, particularly for adolescents, can improve sexual health outcomes, ‘including delaying sexual debut and reducing unintended pregnancies and sexual risk-taking’ (Kismödi et al. 2015: 259). This is particularly relevant as the world now has the largest ever generation of adolescents—1.2 million between the ages of 10 and 19 years (Girard 2014; Santhya and Jejeebhoy 2015); understanding their demands and ensuring their access to comprehensive SRH education and services will be an important component of the post-2015 SRH development agenda.

Box 27.4 SRHR in Brazil 20 Years Post-ICPD Brazil has had a Comprehensive Women’s Health Programme (PAISM) since 1983, which expanded maternal and child health services to include such things as contraception and sexual health (Diniz and Araújo 2015). After ICPD, Brazil established the National Commission for Population and Development in 1995 in order to monitor implementation of the ICPD Programme of Action. As a result of advocacy from the women’s health movement and other activities, public policies were established at the municipal, state, and federal levels to increase women’s access to healthcare, including SRH services (Diniz and Araújo 2015). In 2004, a national Comprehensive Women’s Health Policy was established by the federal government to strengthen implementation of the PAISM agenda, as well as to ensure integration with programmes against domestic and sexual

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violence. According to Diniz and Araújob (2015: 1), ‘[a]s a result of these public policies, in addition to increased availability of contraceptive methods in the private sector, women’s education and employment, and urbanisation, contraceptive use reached 81 per cent among married women aged 15–49 years in 2006, and remain high in all income groups.’ As a result, in 2006 the total fertility rate was below replacement level at 1.8, and fell to 1.0 or less for women with 12 or more years of education. The highest declines in fertility were experienced in younger, black, and less-educated women, although overall racial, regional, and income inequalities continue to persist. And between 1991 and 2011, adolescent birth rates (women aged 15–19) declined from 89.5/1000 to 67.2/1000 (Diniz and Araújo 2015). Despite these gains, challenges still exist. For example, many issues still affect improvements in maternal health, such as a large number of preterm births and violence by health providers during childbirth. Abortion is still highly restricted and access to abortion services for those eligible under the law is difficult to impossible, while safe (illegal) abortion is only accessible to those with the ability to pay (Diniz and Araújo 2015). In addition, social and religious opposition to SRHR remains high and effort to expand contraceptive choice is needed (including female barrier methods and emergency contraception). As a result, in order to ensure that the PAISM agenda established in 1983 is implemented and that commitments made during ICPD are fulfilled, advocacy is still needed (Diniz and Araújo 2015).

While recognising and fulfilling women’s and girls’ SRHR is an important development goal in and of itself, improving women’s and girls’ SRH has also been shown to be one of the most cost-effective development investments. If broader social and development goals, such as poverty reduction, saving and improving lives, sustaining economic growth, and encouraging gender equality, are to be met, it is essential that women’s and girls’ SRHR are included within the international development agenda (see example in Box 27.4). While a lot of progress has been made in relation to SRH since the ICPD in 1994, much remains to be done. Many women and girls, particularly in L-MICs, are still unable to access SRH services, increasing their risk of morbidity and mortality. While governments are obligated to ensure that the SRHR of women and girls are respected, protected, and fulfilled, many will not do so without pressure and support from the international community. Ensuring SRHR at the country level will also require high levels of political will, health systems strengthening initiatives, and the generation of demand on the ground through education and other social means. Previous international development negotiations have seen critical SRH elements taken off the agenda in favour of the uncontroversial elements of SRH. In the past, the sidelining of important SRH issues has undercut the overall SRHR agenda, which seeks for the inclusion of comprehensive integrated SRH services within all health systems. If women’s and girls’ SRHR are to be fully realised,

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it is therefore important that not only are comprehensive SRHR kept on the post-2015 development agenda but also mechanisms are put in place at the country level to ensure the availability of comprehensive SRH services for all.

References Crane, B., and J. Dusenberry. 2004. Power and politics in international funding for reproductive health: The US global gag rule. Reproductive Health Matters 12(24): 128–137. DFID. 2004. Sexual and reproductive health and rights A position paper. Department for international development. http://www2.ohchr.org/english/issues/development/docs/rights_reproductive_health.pdf Diniz, S.G., and M.J. Araújo. 2015. Commentary: Reproductive health and rights in Brazil 20 years post-international conference on population and development. Global Public Health 10(2): 183–185. Fathalla, M.F., S.  Sinding, A.  Rosenfield, and M.M.  Fathalla. 2006. Sexual and reproductive health for all: A call for action. The Lancet 368(9552): 2095–2100. Germain, A. 2004. Reproductive health and human rights’. Lancet 363(9402): 65–66. Germain, A., G. Sen, C. Garcia-Moreno, and M. Shankar. 2015. Advancing sexual and reproductive health and rights in low- and middle-income countries: Implications for the post-2015 global development agenda’. Global Public Health 10(2): 137–148. Girard, F. 2014. Taking ICPD beyond 2015: Negotiating sexual and reproductive rights in the next development agenda. Global Public Health 9(6): 607–619. Glasier, A., A. Gülmezoglu, G.P. Schmid, C.G. Moreno, and P.F. van Look. 2006. Sexual and reproductive health: A matter of life and death. Lancet 368(9547): 1595–1607. Griffin, S. n.d. Literature review on sexual and reproductive health rights: Universal access to services, focussing on East and Southern Africa and South Asia. http:// www.realising-rights.org/docs/SRHLiterature review.pdf Grimes, D., J.  Benson, S.  Singh, M.  Romero, B.  Ganatra, F.  Okonofua, and I.H. Shah. 2006. Unsafe abortion: The preventable pandemic. Lancet 368(9550): 1908–1919. Gruskin, S., and D. Tarantola. 2005. Health and human rights. In Perspectives on health and human rights, ed. S. Gruskin et al. New York and London: Routledge. Gruskin, S., E.J. Mills, and D. Tarantola. 2007. History, principles, and practice of health and human rights. Lancet 370(9585): 449–455. Hunt, P. 2007. Right to the highest attainable standard of health. Lancet 370(9585): 369–371. Jewkes, R.K., T.  Gumede, M.S.  Westaway, K.  Dickson, H.  Brown, and H.  Rees. 2005. Why are women still aborting outside designated facilities in metropolitan South Africa? BJOG: An International Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology 112(9): 1236–1242.

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Kismödi, E., J. Cottingham, S. Gruskin, and A.M. Miller. 2015. Advancing sexual health through human rights: The role of the law. Global Public Health 10(2): 252–267. Oronje, R., J.  Crichton, S.  Theobald, N.O.  Lithur, and L.  Ibisomi. 2011. Operationalising sexual and reproductive health and rights in sub-Saharan Africa: Constraints, dilemmas and strategies. BMC International Health and Human Rights 11(Suppl 3): S8. RFSU. 2004. Breaking through: A guide to sexual and reproductive health and rights. Stockholm: The Swedish Association for Sexuality Education (RFSU). Santhya, K.G., and S.J. Jejeebhoy. 2015. Sexual and reproductive health and rights of adolescent girls: Evidence from low- and middle-income countries. Global Public Health 10(2): 189–221. Sen, G. 2014. Sexual and reproductive health and rights in the post-2015 development agenda. Global Public Health 9(6): 599–606. Sen, G., and V. Govender. 2015. Sexual and reproductive health and rights in changing health systems. Global Public Health 10(2): 228–242. Sippel, S. 2014. ICPD beyond 2014: Moving beyond missed opportunities and compromises in the fulfilment of sexual and reproductive health and rights. Global Public Health 9(6): 620–630. Snow, R., L. Laski, and M. Mutumba. 2015. Sexual and reproductive health: Progress and outstanding needs. Global Public Health 10(2): 149–173. Stenberg, K., H.  Axelson, P.  Sheehan, I.  Anderson, A.M.  Gülmezoglu, M. Temmerman, E. Mason, and F. Bustreo. 2014. Advancing social and economic development by investing in women’s and children’s health: A new Global Investment Framework. The Lancet 383(9925): 1333–1354. Temmerman, M., R. Khosla, and L. Say. 2014. Sexual and reproductive health and rights: A global development, health, and human rights priority. The Lancet 384(9941): e30–e31. UN. 1995. Report of the international conference on population and development. Cairo, 5–13 Sept 1994, New York. UN. 2013. A new global partnership: Eradicate poverty and transform economies through sustainable development - The Report of the High-Level Panel of Eminent Persons on the Post-2015 Development Agenda. New York. UN. 2014. Framework of actions for the follow-up to the programme of action of the international conference on population and development. http://icpdbeyond2014. org/uploads/browser/files/93632_unfpa_eng_web.pdf WHO. 1946. Constitution of the world health organization. adopted by the International Health Conference, New York, June 19–July 22, 1946, and signed on 22 July 1946 by the representatives of 61 States. WHO. 2002. 25 questions & answers on health & human rights. Geneva: World Health Organization (WHO). Yamin, A.E., and V.M. Boulanger. 2013. From transforming power to counting numbers: The evolution of sexual and reproductive health and rights in development; and where we want to go from here. http://fxb.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/ sites/5/2013/09/Yamin-and-Boulanger_final-WP-with-cover-sheet_92413.pdf

28 From Objects to Subjects? Children and Youth in Development Nicola Ansell

1

Introduction

Children frequently represent the face of international development in the visual imagery used in the media and by NGOs (Burman 2008; Wells 2013). Moreover, it is children and youth who most directly experience interventions in healthcare, education, and training. Yet development policy and practice has seldom theorised childhood or youth and their lives. Nonetheless, policy and thinking in relation to young people in the Global South is shaped by wider debates about development, children, and youth, by the institutionalisation of such ideas through, for example, the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), and by changing economic, social, and political contexts, both nationally and globally. Research relating to young people in the Global South has been dominated over the past 25 years by the ‘new social studies of childhood’ approach. Research in this tradition has embraced two key tenets: first, the social construction of childhood (the idea that assumptions and expectations concerning children and, relatedly, experiences of childhood, are contextually produced) and, second, children’s social agency (the notion that children are active social agents, rather than passive recipients of care and socialisation). Empirical research in the Global South has furnished valuable illustrations of both elements (Ansell 2015). Numerous studies have demonstrated how N. Ansell ( ) Department of Clinical Sciences, Brunel University, London © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 J. Grugel, D. Hammett (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of International Development, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-42724-3_28

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childhood is constructed very differently in different cultural and economic settings across the Global South (see Brown et al. 1995; Hollos 2002; ScheperHughes and Sargent 1998). Much research has also focussed on children who engage in economic activity, head households, or live relatively independently on the streets, who provide persuasive examples of the exercise of agency (see Evans 2011; Robson 2004; van Blerk 2005). Moreover, interest in children’s agency connects strongly with the emphasis of the CRC on children’s rights to participation, as well as to protection and provision. In this respect, research relating to young people chimes with broader shifts towards ‘participatory development’ in which poor people are seen as subjects rather than objects of development interventions. In recent years, however, there has been a groundswell of dissatisfaction with the new social studies of childhood as a theoretical basis for understanding the lives of children in the Global South (Hart 2006; Tisdall and Punch 2012). Development researchers have long critiqued the construction of a ‘global childhood’ by international agencies and NGOs: families living in poverty have different values and expectations concerning their children’s lives, and often lack the resources to ‘deliver’ the childhood experiences validated by middle-class European parents. Today, however, there is also growing criticism of the construction of childhood within childhood studies itself (Tisdall and Punch 2012). The focus on individual social agency and children’s rights, in particular, are seen as antithetical to cultural constructions of childhood in which children are viewed as fundamentally in relation to others, and where the need to sustain interdependent life is prioritised (Abebe and Tefera 2014). Moreover, ‘celebrating’ agency is problematic if it denies the structural constraints on children’s lives (Ansell 2009) or fails to recognise that their agency may be borne of desperate circumstances (Mizen and Ofosu-Kusi 2013). This chapter aims to further develop these critiques and point towards alternative framings for research into the lives of young people in the Global South. This chapter traces approaches to children and youth in the discourse and practice of international development over the past 35 years. Specifically, it engages in content analysis of two annually published reports: the World Bank’s World Development Report (WDR) and UNICEF’s State of the World’s Children (SOWC). These reports tell of change in the lives of young people globally. They also reveal something of the changing concerns of two international organisations that are highly influential in shaping the policies and interventions of both governments and non-governmental organisations. These concerns, and the reports themselves, reflect ideas circulating both within and beyond the World Bank and UNICEF; this is particularly apparent in the ever-extending reference lists documenting academic and

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other published sources. However, the reports do not merely reflect ideas; they are one of the mechanisms through which ideas circulate. Indeed, they constitute part of the development project itself, a means by which development actors speak about what the ‘problems’ are, what has been achieved and how to achieve further positive change (see Jolly et al. 2005; McNeill 2006). They contribute to the construction of dominant discourses, invoking taken-forgranted knowledges and structuring the way development practitioners think. The launch of the WDR and SOWC in the last quarter of the twentieth century can be seen in relation to the emergence of transnational governmental power. Governmental power is the form of power that Foucault (1980) associates with neoliberalism, the political doctrine that societies should be organised around self-regulating markets with minimal direct political interference. Governmental power operates in part through biopower, which is enacted through the regulation and management of both individual bodies and entire populations (Foucault 2008). Rather than using direct measures of enforcement (‘disciplinary power’), society is regulated through a variety of ‘technologies of power’ that include collecting and monitoring statistics (Murdoch and Ward 1997) and other forms of surveillance (Brooks 2008). These provide governments with knowledge of their populations, help them to understand the potential outcomes of policies, and also encourage populations and individuals to self-regulate, conforming to social norms with little need for enforcement. It is increasingly recognised that governmental power is not confined to the actions of national governments in relation to their populations. In promoting international development, global actors (donor agencies, international organisations) also monitor and manage the conduct of national governments (see Marandet 2012). Through calculative technologies, including the publication of statistical data, governments are driven to strive for particular outcomes. Ilcan and Phillips (2010) illustrate this by reference to the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). The WDR and SOWC, with their technocratic analysis and detailed statistical appendices, doubtless represent another such technology of surveillance, are read widely and influence thinking and shape policy and practice towards children and youth. The chapter begins by outlining the role and significance of the World Bank and UNICEF in relation to children, youth, and development, sketching the changing character of the two reports and describing how they were analysed. It then moves on to examine the roles children and youth play in development as indicated through the reports. It focusses in particular on the question of whether young people are represented as passive objects or active subjects, and concludes that while there has been a general shift from an almost exclusive

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focus on children’s education and health towards greater attention to children’s rights and participation, the object/subject dichotomy is not particularly useful. Instead, the chapter suggests that the roles in which young people are cast represent changing efforts to service an increasingly neoliberal economy. This supports an argument for framing international development concerns around young people in relation to global political economy.

2

Investigating Children and Youth in the Annual Reports of International Organisations

The WDR is the flagship annual publication of the World Bank. The World Bank’s role in setting development agendas is immense: as the major international organisation involved in financing development, it has great leverage, particularly in low-income countries, including in areas that directly impact on children and youth. It is the major funder of education globally, and in the 1990s accounted for 16 % of government education spending in Africa (Alexander 2001). It has been the key player in shaping initiatives like the ‘Education for All’ agenda (King 2007) as well as the MDGs. As one of the Bretton Woods institutions established in 1944, its focus has always been on economic growth and stability as means to reduce poverty and has been a key driver of the free-market ‘Washington Consensus’. The WDR has been published annually by the Bank since 1978. Each issue provides a narrative relating to aspects of global development and an appendix of development-related statistical data arranged country by country. According to the Bank’s website, ‘The World Bank’s annual World Development Report provides a wide international readership with an extraordinary window on development economics. Each year, the report focuses on a specific aspect of development’ (World Bank 2014). Over time, the WDR has grown longer and the narrative is wider ranging. As a vast amount of statistical data is now available online, the appendices now include a ‘Selected Indicators’ section related to the topic of the report and (up to 2012) ‘Selected World Development Indicators’ including data relating to countries’ progress towards the MDGs. The SOWC is published annually by UNICEF, the United Nations (UN) agency that focusses on children. The UN defines children as individuals under the age of 18. It is noteworthy that there is no equivalent agency for youth (defined by the UN as 15–24-year-olds), but only a Focal Point on Youth within the Department of Economic and Social Affairs that coordinates UN

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agencies’ youth-related activities. This distinction suggests the relative importance attached to the differing age groups by the UN and the international community more generally: younger children are seemingly viewed as more appealing and more worthy of attention. UNICEF was established in 1946 to assist children in Europe and China who were suffering as a result of the political dispute between the West and the USSR that followed World War II. These children were perceived as innocent victims who merited international action. UNICEF’s mandate to support ‘child health’ continued beyond the emergency, and extended worldwide in the 1950s when it was also made a permanent part of the UN. In the 1960s, UNICEF began to argue that children should be an integral consideration in all development policies and plans. It moved its focus beyond physical health and survival to support education and the familial and community contexts of children’s lives. In contrast to the World Bank’s concern with economic growth, UNICEF emphasises children’s welfare. Supporting children’s ‘basic needs’ in the 1970s, and returning to a narrow focus on improving survival rates in the 1980s, UNICEF was a late convert to the idea of children’s rights. Nonetheless, it embraced the CRC and since the 1990s this has framed much of its work. Today, young child survival and development still accounts for 53 % of UNICEF’s programme funding, with basic education and gender equality another 20 %. Only 12 % is devoted to child protection and to policy advocacy and partnerships for children’s rights (UNICEF 2013). With annual expenditure approaching $4 billion a year, and working with governments, NGOs and civil society (UNICEF 2013), UNICEF undoubtedly has significant influence. The SOWC has appeared annually since 1980. Like the WDR, it contains a narrative account of progress in relation to what it identifies as key areas of children’s lives, followed by an appendix of country-by-country statistical data. Since 1997, each report has adopted a different theme. Like the WDR, reports have generally become more detailed over time, although the most recent report (2014) has a lighter format. This chapter draws on a simple content analysis of all volumes of the WDR and SOWC. PDF versions of the reports were downloaded, and the advanced search facility used to count the occurrence of particular words and phrases. In the case of the WDR, the process involved counting the incidence of three sets of words related to children and youth: child/children/childhood, youth(s), and young people/young person(s). The context of each incidence of these words was then examined and notes taken of the types of issues being addressed and the way in which children/youth were represented. These issues were then explored further in the SOWC. With the SOWC reports, counts

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were made of the use of words relating to education, health, survival, child labour, rights and participation, as well as references to youth. One theme that was repeatedly associated with children in later volumes of the WDR was human capital, so use of this term was enumerated in both reports. Content analysis is a very straightforward way of gauging the degree of attention paid to different phenomena, allowing comparisons to be made between different sources. It is thus a useful means of tracking trends in levels of interest and emphasis over time. However, it does tend to convey a false impression of scientific accuracy. Many somewhat arbitrary decisions must be made. Counting words offers a rough approximation of the emphasis given to a topic in a report, but there are alternative ways of expressing phenomena which may not be captured (I did not, for instance, count references to girls or boys). Content analysis is also far from ideal as a way of capturing the nuances of how phenomena are discussed. Moreover, in the case of the WDR and SOWC, words may appear multiple times in the statistical appendices, but not be mentioned at all in the narrative. In the tables, the number of pages in each report is given (narrative part only), as a longer report might be expected to make more references to children than a short one; the word length of the entire report is less easy to calculate. Use of retro-digitised documents is also problematic: the quality of the PDFs of the mid-1990s SOWC is particularly poor, and word searches do not pick up all occurrences. However, the relative numbers of words relating to particular themes is probably broadly accurate. Finally, it should be noted that the reports are not the only influence on, nor a direct reflection of, policy concerns relating to children and youth. They are simply one lens on the phenomenon. Analysis of the WDR reports (Table 28.1) confirms that children have, since the 1970s, been part of the discourse of mainstream development. Since that time, the attention paid to (aspects of ) children’s lives has increased. Youth, on the other hand, have been relatively neglected throughout the period. Although WDRs have paid more attention to them in recent years, they remain marginalised, the one exception being the 2007 report on ‘Development and the Next Generation’. Attention to children differs greatly according to the aspect of development under consideration. They are mentioned frequently in reports relating to poverty, inequality, demography, health, education, service provision, and employment, but barely at all in reports focussing on macroeconomics or finance. Moreover, looking at the specific context of references to children, they are discussed mainly in relation to a very narrow range of themes (predominantly health and education). Youth are scarcely mentioned other than in relation to (un)employment, crime, conflict, and reproductive health.

28

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From Objects to Subjects? Children and Youth in Development

Table 28.1 Occurrence of keywords in World Development Report, 1978–2014

Year

Child, children, childhood, Youth, Pages childcare youths

Young people, young Human person capital

1978 1979 1980

73 115 104

1981 1982

1983

1984

1985 1986

1987

1988

1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994

Adjustment and growth in the 1980s; poverty and human development National and international 127 adjustment International development 98 trends; agriculture; and economic development 134 World economic recession and prospects for recovery; management in development Recovery or relapse in the 185 world economy? Population change and development International capital and 161 economic development 168 The hesitant recovery and prospects for sustained growth; trade and pricing policies in world agriculture Barriers to adjustment and 189 growth in the world economy; industrialisation and foreign trade 135.4 Opportunities and risks in managing the world economy; public finance in development Financial systems and development Poverty The challenge of development Development and the environment Investing in health Infrastructure for development

22 29 199

0 0 0

0 0 2

0 0 0

26

0

0

3

23

0

0

1

12

0

0

1

660

4

13

7

12

0

0

1

31

0

0

2

13

0

0

2

0.4

1.5

102.7

1.7

185

18

2

0

1

144

15

2

0

3

157 180

193 75

1 3

0 0

29 25

191

60

1

0

5

194

547

3

138

20

1

7

2

0

2

(continued)

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N. Ansell

Table 28.1 (continued)

Year 1995 1996 1997

Workers in an integrating world From plan to market The state in a changing world

1998/1999 Knowledge for development 1999/2000 Entering the twenty-first century 2000/2001 Attacking poverty 2002 Building institutions for markets 2003 Sustainable development in a dynamic world: transforming institutions, growth, and quality of life 2004 Making services work for poor people 2005 A better investment climate for everyone 2006 Equity and development 2007

2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014

Development and the next generation Agriculture for development Reshaping economic geography Development and climate change Conflict, security, and development Gender equality and development Jobs Risk and opportunity: managing risk for development

Child, children, childhood, Youth, Pages childcare youths

Young people, young Human person capital

142

157

9

1

63

170 193

53 37

3 1

0 0

15 12

0.8

15.7

169.4

117.5

2.6

177

153

2

1

30

211

107

1

1

23

266 228

244 11

2 0

1 0

28 39

231

36

1

0

30

248

341

2

2

5

242

35

8

7

26

273 234.5

464 173.9

7 2.9

3 1.9

75 32

270

629

1917

1103

161

238.4

224.4

215.6

124.2

46.3

318

104

13

3

33

329

41

3

0

68

374

53

1

1

6

334

85

67

17

9

379

752

28

4

71

336 292

218 135

268 7

51 7

66 29

337.4

198.3

55.3

11.9

40.3

28

From Objects to Subjects? Children and Youth in Development

495

The SOWC reports (Table 28.2) have focussed heavily on both health and education throughout the period since 1980. There has been something of a shift of emphasis from health and survival towards education. Child labour was not mentioned in reports prior to 1990, but is now addressed much more regularly. Rights and participation have emerged as themes since the 1990s. While early reports barely mentioned youth, the twenty-first century has witnessed growing attention, most notably in the 2011 ‘Adolescence’ report.

3

The Diverse and Changing Roles of Children and Youth in Development

The sections below identify and examine five roles that children and youth play in development, as suggested through the content analysis of the reports. They serve as indicators of a nation’s progress towards development, as illustrations of the ‘problem’ development seeks to address, as targets for policies and interventions, as a locus for investment in a nation’s future, and as actors who might play a part in securing development.

Children and Youth as Indicators The WDR frequently refers to children, and less frequently to youth, in order to illustrate or provide a measure of some aspect of development. Many of the development indicators that appear in the reports’ statistical appendices relate to children. The earliest 1978 report charts (changes in) the percentage of the population aged under 15, infant and child mortality rates and numbers enrolled in primary, secondary, and tertiary education as percentages of the appropriate respective age groups. Most of these indicators recur in almost every report. For a number of years, a table was dedicated to progress towards the MDGs. A significant proportion of these goals, and more significantly six of the eight published indicators, relate more or less directly to children (prevalence of child malnutrition, primary school completion rate, gender parity ratios in primary and secondary school, under-five mortality rate, maternal mortality ratio, births attended by skilled health staff). Data that describes children’s collective experiences in particular countries is used as a means to chart progress towards ‘development’. A reduction in the proportion of a population constituted by children is an indicator of progress along the demographic transition. Falling mortality and increasing education enrolment suggest development success as well as increasing human capital

Focus on nutrition

Education

1999

50th anniversary issue Focus on child labour

1998

1997

1988 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996

1980– 1981 1981– 1982 1982– 1983 1984 1985 1986 1987

Year

19

13 10 21 18

26.9

128

104 107 127 123

96.3

67

932

90

29.9

69.7

90

14

76

11 33 38 71 65 37 5 4 21

28

14

58 71 71 96 66 63 59 62 75

79

71

781

88

16.6

23

18 26 34 20 21 12 2 4 6

11.3

6 5 14 11

9

8

26

Pages Educationa Schoola

47

567

21.1

1

14 36 31 35 35 33 11 3 12

31.1

16 22 25 29

78

13

35

134

307

46.8

0

84 86 86 66 51 52 8 14 21

79.1

53 56 102 87

80

90

86

100

128

3.6

2

0 8 1 9 6 0 4 5 1

8.6

9 5 13 6

8

11

8

25

0

4.2

39

0 0 0 2 0 1 0 0 0

0

0 0 0 0

0

0

0

137

38

9

18

2 5 3 29 12 1 1 3 16

1

0 0 0 0

0

2

5

Child Nutrition Health Mortality labour Rights

Table 28.2 Occurrence of keywords in State of the World’s Children, 1980–2013

44

21

4.2

3

0 3 1 23 6 6 0 0 0

5.6

2 0 0 3

13

19

2

1

1

0.3

0

0 2 0 0 0 0 0 0 1

0.6

0 0 1 0

1

2

0

6

1

0.7

1

2 1 0 3 0 0 0 0 0

1.7

1 1 1 0

8

0

1

Human Participationa capital Youth

496 N. Ansell

2010

2008 2009

2007

2006

2005

2004

2001 2002 2003

2000

Year

Child survival 108 Maternal and 112 newborn health Celebrating 20 92 years of the convention on the rights of the child

84.9

A vision for the 65 twenty-first century Early childhood 66 Leadership 76 Child 72 participation Girls, education, 97 and development Childhood 102 under threat Excluded and 94 invisible Women and 97 children: the double dividend of gender equality

216

84 87

295.9

130

138 128

275.9

222

230

217

249

264

579

134 113 157

191

250

682

117 189 107

149

Pages Educationa Schoola

42

183 114

96.4

61

42

76

27

72 31 15

26

175

1436 1506

159.8

178

151

221

118

165 99 91

134

30

282 350

86.8

87

99

90

64

90 43 72

95

29

7 7

23.3

30

86

44

20

0 14 4

10

866

28 59

147.9

164

202

246

138

99 188 96

171

Child Nutrition Health Mortality labour Rights

138

70 33

68

122

50

77

54

24 49 217

22

1

1 0

0.8

0

2

4

0

0 0 0

0

From Objects to Subjects? Children and Youth in Development (continued)

24

9 8

18.9

2

16

17

11

0 69 50

17

Human Participationa capital Youth

28

497

a

36

156.1

83.4

270

153

20

92

80

187.9

146

264

230

279

73

16

46

73

37

577.4

82

206

345

292

155

112

93

112

106

18

14

11

24

34

203.7

40

138

126

169

Child Nutrition Health Mortality labour Rights

and related or derived terms, e.g. school, schooling, schooled

2014

2013

2012

247

80

2011

Adolescence: an age of opportunity Children in an urban world Children with disabilities Every child counts

Pages Educationa Schoola

Year

Table 28.2 (continued)

74.3

29

71

71

108

0.4

0

0

0

1

45.3

11

21

39

205

Human Participationa capital Youth

498 N. Ansell

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499

(see below for further discussion). As WDR 1979 (90) remarks: ‘Other measures of wellbeing such as … child death rates … provide further indications of social and economic progress.’ In many ways, this reflects a widespread portrayal of children as ‘canaries in the mine’ (Bunge 1977); they are the first to embody the effects of social change and are therefore viewed as indicators of the wider well-being of society. Indeed, societies are judged—and judge themselves—on their success in ensuring children’s well-being. The WDR and SOWC data provide a means for institutionalising this. The use of children-focussed indicators does not merely reflect a concern with children’s (and thus society’s) well-being; however, in line with the notion of biopower, it constructs the precise shape of that concern and in turn shapes policy and practice (see Ilcan and Phillips 2010; Wells 2011). Over the past 15 years, very considerable resources have been mobilised in support of achieving the MDGs. Doubtless national governments have long used the published indicators to support bids for donor support, and implemented policies aimed at demonstrating progress against the indicators, to win favour both with donors and with domestic audiences. A narrow focus on achieving improvements in indicators has, however, led to problematic outcomes, such as rapid increases in the numbers of children enrolling in school who learn very little (according to UNESCO 2012, 130 million children who have been in school for 4 years have not acquired basic literacy skills), and ultimately are frustrated by their inability to secure the employment they had been led to expect (Jeffrey 2010).

Children and Youth as Illustrations In a similar vein, children also appear frequently in the WDR as illustrations of the effects of poverty and of inequality. WDR 2006 (1) on Equity and Development, for example, begins by asking the reader to ‘Consider two South African children born on the same day in 2000. Nthabiseng is black, born to a poor family in a rural area in the Eastern Cape province, about 700 kilometers from Cape Town. Her mother had no formal schooling. Pieter is white, born to a wealthy family in Cape Town. His mother completed a college education at the nearby prestigious Stellenbosch University’. Using children to represent poverty and need has long been a common practice among development organisations. Development NGOs have been widely criticised for using (mainly visual) images of children to draw attention and raise funds. Typically, children are portrayed as alone and supplicant (Burman 2008; Dogra 2007). Their images are often mobilised to depoliticise the situations

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that produce poverty: they are seen as vulnerable, innocent, and outside of politics. Similarly, over the past decade the WDR has regularly used examples of children, real or imagined, to provide uncomplicated and depoliticised illustrations of the issues they seek to address (see Li 2007). The 2006 report reminds the reader: ‘These children cannot be blamed for the circumstances into which they are born’ (WDR 2006: xi). However, where children are presented in a way that is evacuated of political context, the (often-deliberate) suggestion is that situations may be resolved through charitable giving rather than by addressing the political processes underlying poverty and inequality (BOND 2011). Moreover, where children are used to depict a situation of poverty, the effect can be to infantilise the society they represent (Burman 2008). It is noteworthy that while the World Bank might deliberately use children to uncomplicate and depoliticise issues, UNICEF also uses children in illustrative ways but does so in part to raise support. Unlike the World Bank, which is funded through sales of bonds and assessed contributions from donors, all of UNICEF’s funding is voluntary, albeit mainly from governments. Those considering their contributions may consult the SOWC, seeking evidence of ‘effectiveness’ but also encountering imagery. Decisions concerning the portrayal of children in the SOWC doubtless take into account this dependency. As Manzo (2008: 632) points out: ‘The iconography of childhood expresses institutional ideals and the key humanitarian values of humanity, neutrality and impartiality, and solidarity.’ UNICEF perhaps has to represent children in a way that depoliticises their situations in order to achieve support.

Children and Youth as Objects of Policies and Interventions Thematically, WDRs devoted to poverty, inequality, demography, health, education, service provision, and employment have paid the most attention to children and youth. The WDRs present young people as passive recipients or beneficiaries of welfare services, particularly in the areas of health and education. It is development’s role to provide these services. UNICEF, too, focusses (both in the SOWC and in its spending) predominantly on children’s survival, nutrition, health, and education, domains that are deemed suitable for intervention and which are generally met by significant public spending and high profile public policy. The focus is on the delivery of services in order to achieve predetermined outcomes (often those expressed as indicators), with minimal attention given to children’s own experiences of health or education.

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Where youth are mentioned in the WDR (and very often in the SOWC), it is usually in connection with unemployment. Training schemes, apprenticeships, and job creation measures are discussed as policy solutions. Attention is also paid to teenage pregnancy, reproductive health, and AIDS prevention (WDR 1984, 1993). Again, these are presented as areas for development intervention. Failure to address unemployment, in particular, is represented as a recipe for youth involvement in crime and conflict. As in many popular representations of young people, they are portrayed as both troubled and troubling (Griffin 2001). One area that received considerable attention in early WDRs is demography, at a time when the World Bank was particularly concerned about population growth and minimising the number of children being born. High birth rates were represented in distinctly negative ways: ‘Even when parents seem to gain from large families, children may lose. This is obviously true when births are closely spaced; the resulting harm to the health and nutrition of mothers can cause low birth weight, early weaning, and poor health of children in the critical early years’ (WDR 1984: 53). Falling fertility rates globally have deflected attention from this, though WDRs return from time to time to the demographic transition (e.g., 2003) and especially teenage pregnancy. The relationship between women’s and children’s lives has also remained a regular preoccupation of WDRs, in particular between childbearing, childrearing, and women’s workforce participation. While reports have highlighted that childcare responsibilities often remove women from ‘productive’ economic participation (making an argument for improving childcare provision), they also emphasise the advantages of women’s empowerment, education, and income for children. There are tensions between everyday and generational social reproduction in which women are often expected to carry the burden of both (Ansell 2008). A dominant aspect of the approach to children in the WDR and many issues of SOWC, particularly in its earlier years, is a view that children are vulnerable. WDR 1993, for instance, has a section entitled ‘The vulnerable years’ and subsequently refers to ‘“vulnerable groups” such as children’ (p. 59). The idea that children are inherently vulnerable is part of a ‘Global model of childhood’, based on middle-class European ideals of the early twentieth century and exported around the world by missionaries, NGOs, and international institutions (Boyden and Ennew 1997). From this perspective, there is a natural and universal distinction between children and adults, based on takenfor-granted biological and psychological characteristics: children are smaller, weaker, and defined by things they cannot do, they are vulnerable, require protection, and their lives should be focussed on play and education. Their role in society is passive: as recipients of care and learning.

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A feature of both series of reports is that over time they have identified and examined an expanding range of young people’s vulnerabilities, identifying a proliferation of new areas for intervention. One term that has become increasingly prevalent is child labour. Child labour was mentioned in passing in the 1983 and 1990 WDRs, but the 1995 report on ‘Workers in an integrating world’ for the first time raised it as a significant problem. The 2013 report on ‘Jobs’ presents child labour as an urgent problem that requires intervention. Although it is poverty that propels children into work, the report suggests that waiting for poverty to be eliminated is not an appropriate solution. This report even advocates incorporating child labour regulations and sanctions into international trade agreements. In the twenty-first-century WDRs, many new areas of vulnerability have been highlighted. WDR 2000/2001 explores the effects of war, AIDS, and economic crisis. Particular groups of vulnerable children are considered: those experiencing custody (WDR 2000/2001), sold into slavery and prostitution (WDR 2003), trafficked children (2004), street children (WDR 2006), disabled children (WDR 2006), migrant children (WDR 2009), those living in conflict situations whose education and health is affected, are used as systematic weapons of war or as child soldiers (WDR 2011), and those experiencing ‘child marriages’ and early parenthood (WDR 2012). These situations have long received attention from children’s NGOs and in academic research, but only recently from the World Bank. While the perspectives of academic researchers vary, many have highlighted the problems that arise when children are viewed simply in relation to vulnerabilities, not least through policy interventions that deny children the opportunity to secure their own livelihoods or that undermine their capacities and strategies to deal with challenging situations. Montgomery (2001), for instance, addresses the situation of child sex workers in Thailand, Ennew (1994) offers critical insight into street children’s resilience, Boyden (2003) examines the resilience of children in conflict situations, and Bourdillon (2006) draws attention to the benefits and drawbacks for children of labour force participation. In early reports, measures to address young people’s vulnerabilities were largely confined to technocratic interventions in education and health policy. Referring to the National Programmes of Action (NPA) aimed at achieving the goals set by the Global Summit for Children, WDR 1993 remarks: ‘Because of their concentration on the welfare of children, NPAs are able to transcend political differences’ (p. 15). However, while development discourse rendered the problems technical and apolitical (Ferguson 1990; Li 2007), policy solutions included market-based approaches, consistent with the World Bank’s neoliberal philosophy. The emphasis given to public policy

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has varied somewhat over the decades. Despite an ongoing reluctance to advocate policies that might encourage welfare dependency, WDR 2004 ‘Making services work for the poor’ stresses the need for government involvement, not just economic growth, to achieve improvements in child mortality and primary enrolment. The more recent WDRs mention policy in the areas of, for instance, social work and child protection (WDR 2004) as well as health and education. Social protection policies and conditional cash transfer schemes that transfer money to poor households have received progressively more attention. Schemes such as Mexico’s ‘Progresa’ (discussed in WDR 2008) require children to attend health clinics and school regularly in order for their households to qualify. Some schemes further require mothers to undergo training for employment (Molyneux 2006), seeking to draw them, and their offspring, into the modern capitalist economy. In many respects, this differs little from earlier interventions: ‘Colombia's community childcare and nutrition program, for example, provides preschool care that includes meals and health monitoring. Participating children benefit from exposure to preschool learning activities, improved nutrition, and health care. Families—especially mothers—benefit from the opportunity to seek paid employment outside the home’ (WDR 1995: 47).

Children and Youth as Points of Social Investment Concern with young people’s health and education is not motivated entirely by their immediate welfare needs. Investment in these areas is seen as investment in the future—both of young people themselves and, perhaps more importantly, in the future of the nation (see Staeheli and Hammett 2013). As WDR 1995 puts it: ‘The highest priority should be placed on investing in children, because their health, nutrition, and basic education are the foundation of a nation's future’ (p. 40). The idea that young people are only of interest in relation to the future was heavily critiqued in childhood studies in the 1990s. James et al. (1998) argued that children are ‘human beings’ with important lives in the present, and not merely ‘human becomings’. While researchers have since suggested that young people’s lives are not static, but are lived in relation to past, present, and future contexts (Ansell et al. 2014; Uprichard 2008), an exclusive concern with future outcomes denies young people’s subjectivities; they have no meaningful existence in the present. It is not simply the emphasis on the future in this approach that is problematic but also the instrumental view of young people, and the interventions designed to shape their lives. Concern is less with the individual, or even

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young people collectively, than with the outcomes for society (youth unemployment is to be addressed because of its connection with crime) or, more specifically, the economy. WDR 1995 explains ‘better nutrition and health improve children’s capacity to learn while in school and increase their productivity at work when they are older’ (p. 47). Indeed the focus of the WDR is predominantly economic benefits. WDR 1993 for instance refers to ‘discussion of the education benefits of improved health and the related economic benefits of improved education’ (p. 177). In its economistic approach, the World Bank has increasingly conceptualised young people’s health, education, and skills development in terms of human capital. First mentioned in WDR 1981, it was in WDR 1990 that the concept gained prominence in repeated references to the need for ‘investment in the human capital of the poor’. WDR 1995 on ‘Workers in an integrating world’ very strongly emphasises human capital, defined as ‘The skills and capabilities embodied in an individual or a work force, in part acquired through improved health and nutrition, education, and training’ (p. viii). Foucault (2008) posits that the concept of human capital is another element of governmental power. It casts individuals as ‘entrepreneurs of the self ’ with resources of health and knowledge at their disposal, which they are individually responsible to employ to their own benefit (yet in practice in the interests of the neoliberal economy) (Lemke 2001). By contrast, the SOWC reports barely mention human capital, preferring to represent children as important in their own right and in the present. However, while they may reject the overt instrumentalism of a human capital approach, their embrace of the children’s rights agenda might arguably serve a similar purpose.

Children and Youth as Agents, Actors, Subjects While the early WDRs certainly represent young people as vulnerable and as objects to be acted upon via policies and interventions, they do not portray them as entirely passive. Rather, children are referred to in passing in ways that suggest they are seen as active participants in society and the economy. WDR 1980 refers to the recruitment of community health workers, suggesting that young people are often given this role because they have formal education; in practice, however, it reports that they are ill-suited to the work. WDR 1992 refers to actions of children that put them at risk, such as washing dishes in pools that are also used as latrines. WDR 1994 mentions that in rural areas ‘women and children often spend long hours fetching water’ (p. 1). This work is certainly not problematised as ‘child labour’, and the idea that children

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perform such roles appears to be taken for granted, much as the gendering of such activities is also taken for granted. During the 1980s and 1990s, pressure grew to view children more widely as rights bearers and social actors. This came in part from academic critiques of the ‘global model of childhood’ alluded to above. These critiques emerged in parallel with wider criticism of the passive portrayal of ‘the third world poor’ in development discourse. Children conventionally are viewed as the most passive in society (hence the use of imagery of childhood in NGO campaigns, as previously mentioned). More particularly, the pressure for change was associated with the growing acceptance by governments worldwide, as well as by development organisations, of children’s rights, as signalled in the ratification of the UN CRC in 1990. The only WDRs that give explicit attention to children’s rights are those from 2004 to 2007. The reports have, however, increasingly recognised young people’s potential roles as development actors: not merely social and economic actors but also taking responsibility for development. WDR 1998/1999, for instance, refers to young people as innovators in agriculture; WDR 2003 includes youth clubs among civil society development actors; WDR 2004 describes the role of ‘child mayors’ in the northeast Brazilian state of Ceará (p. 202); while WDR 2010 maps children’s role in addressing climate change (WDR 2010). Recent WDRs are also critical of young people’s (though not explicitly children’s) lack of voice in traditional structures (WDR 2011), and call for initiatives that enable young people be heard in ministries of agriculture and in local fora (WDR 2008), and involve them in dialogue to avert conflict (WDR 2011). This is seen as necessary to bring about change in the interests of development, and not merely to serve young people’s own interests. Despite UNICEF’s role in relation to the CRC, children’s rights also had a remarkably low profile in the SOWC prior to 1999. In the early reports, mentions of ‘rights’ seldom related to children and, even after the CRC had been ratified, there were SOWC reports in which children’s rights were barely mentioned. By the twenty-first century, however, children’s rights achieved a similar profile to health or education. While children may increasingly be recognised as rights-bearers, their rights do not necessarily afford them agency. Children’s rights as inscribed in the CRC include both ‘participation’ and ‘protection’ rights, and there is often a tension between the two. This is perhaps best exemplified in relation to child labour, which emerged as a development issue in the 1990s, even though international efforts to address children’s labour market participation date back nearly a century. While the complexities of addressing child labour are acknowledged (see WDR 2000/2001), there is a strong tendency

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to view it as a problem from which children should be protected. WDR 1995 refers to the need for government intervention in labour markets to ensure that ‘Children under fifteen may not be employed; the minimum age of work is eighteen if the work is hazardous to health, safety, or morals’ (p. 71). Children’s role as actors in the economy and their perspectives on work are viewed much less positively than their role as actors in other areas of life. Moreover, while there are some spheres in which young people’s agency is increasingly recognised, there are others (notably, health and education) where young people are still predominantly viewed as recipients of services or objects of interventions.

4

Conclusions

The WDR and SOWC reports deploy young people in similar ways. They use them as indicators and illustrations, present them as suitable targets for policies, establish them as objects of pity in the present or as threats or resources for the national future, and construct them as subjects who should take responsibility for development. There are some differences between the approaches, notably in the attention paid to human capital, which arguably reflects the World Bank’s concern with economic growth in contrast to UNICEF’s concern with children’s welfare. Both texts nonetheless represent constellations of knowledge and power that perform particular forms of work in today’s global economy. Their exercise of power may be uneven and incomplete, and even in some ways contradictory, but they are means through which global institutions shape policy and practice and in turn affect young people’s lives. Some of the roles served by children and youth in the reports appear to cast them as either objects or subjects, acted upon or (capable of ) acting in their own interests. To some degree, there has been a discernible trend towards emphasising children’s rights and representing them as subjects rather than objects. However, this trend is far from clear-cut. Some early reports represented young people as active in society and the economy, while the attention in later reports to children’s rights has not always suggested that they make meaningful social contributions. Indeed, discussions of child labour indicate a concern that they should be excluded from active economic roles. An alternative reading of the reports, drawing on theories of governmentality, suggests that young people in all five of the roles identified are deployed in instrumental ways. Their functions are concerned with shaping societies, and populations, in ways that service a changing global political economy. The societies produced through these ‘technologies of power’ are unlikely to

28

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transform the fundamental power relations that underlie the poverty in which many young people grow up; rather, they serve to reproduce those relations. This chapter is not the first to point to the limitations for research about young people in the Global South of a preoccupation with agency and rights. The emphasis on recovering children’s social agency—on representing and understanding children as subjects, not objects; rights-bearers and participants in development rather than passive recipients of welfare—has been subjected to increasingly critical assessment. Scholars have pointed to the potentially damaging effects of emphasising children’s rights. Research focussing on rights may, for instance, treat children as a separate and distinct category, drawing attention away from the relationships that shape their lives (White 2002). Emphasising individual autonomy can also lead to neglect of the relationships that sustain young lives, as well as suggesting that individual and family practices rather than entrenched poverty determine their fortunes (Abebe and Tefera 2014). In place of impoverished families, NGOs are upheld as ‘second guardian’ to children, infantilising both families and nations that lack the resources to deliver Western-style childhoods (Valentin and Meinert 2009). Macroeconomic and foreign policy strongly affect children’s welfare and equity, but are not responsive to interventions focussed on individual agency and rights (White 2002). Indeed, children’s rights enshrined in international law have very limited purchase on the provision of welfare by states and international organisations, and cannot transform the global political economy (Grugel 2013). Beyond the fact that a focus on young people’s agency has little effect on the structural processes that impoverish them, attention to individual autonomy arguably serves neoliberalism. A number of scholars have pointed to an association between efforts to enhance children’s agency and neoliberal agendas in both education and development policy (Ansell 2010; Kaščák and Pupala 2013; Vandenbroeck and Bouverne-De Bie 2006). Neoliberalism aspires to the production of autonomous individuals who will function as producers and consumers in the globalising knowledge economy, taking responsibility for their own ‘development’. If viewing children as subjects of development means that the burden of responsibility for development is transferred onto young people, the implications are clearly not wholly positive. While numerous scholars have problematised children’s agency and rights, fewer have proposed alternative conceptualisations. Indeed, the development of more useful theoretical framings for understanding young lives in the context of international development remains a work in progress (see Tisdall and Punch 2012). Any approach needs to be more attentive to global political economy, and to the ways in which development institutions and interventions

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connect with and may strengthen economic structures that ultimately fail the young people that development purportedly serves, and concepts of transnational governmentality and biopower seem particularly productive here (see Ansell 2015; Wells 2011). Research needs to be more attentive to the multiplicity of power structures that frame children’s lives. A social justice lens may illuminate the contextually situated processes through which young people are systematically oppressed (see Ansell 2014). Young (1990) suggests injustice is produced through exploitation, marginalisation, powerlessness, cultural imperialism, and violence. These processes impinge on children’s lives in diverse ways, but all are inherently political and suggest a need for systemic change.

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29 Disability and Development: Critical (Dis)Connections Shaun Grech

1

Introduction

The recent World Report on Disability (WRD) (WHO and World Bank 2011) estimates that around 15 % of the world’s population are disabled people, that is, close to 1 billion people. It goes on to state that the majority of these, approximately 80 %, are located in the Global South, many living in rural areas in conditions of poverty. The relationship between disability and development has only recently been acknowledged. One reason used to justify this connectedness has been the reference to a strong bind between disability and poverty, one framed as a cycle (see Groce et al. 2011). Poverty provides multiple conditions for the creation and maintenance of impairments: the numbers of disabled people in the Global South continue to rise due to poverty, hunger and malnutrition, inaccessible health care and rehabilitation, violence and conflict, unsafe transport, unsanitary living conditions, and accidents. Despite the absence of precise numbers and statistics, it would come as no surprise that the bulk of the world’s disabled people may well be located in the world’s poorest countries. Though it would be erroneous to generalise and homogenise, disabled people often encounter inordinate barriers in these socio-economic, political, physical, and cultural spheres. Many are caught in complex and tough intersections of disadvantage with the result that poverty may be intense and

S. Grech ( ) The Critical Institute, Malta, UK © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 J. Grugel, D. Hammett (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of International Development, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-42724-3_29

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chronic: one in five of the world’s poorest are disabled people (WHO and World Bank 2011). That disability and development should be linked in discourse and practice would seem obvious. If disabled people are among the poorest of the poor then it will be difficult to achieve poverty reduction, a key development priority, if this population is excluded. Relatedly, disabled people constitute a substantial proportion of every population labelled ‘vulnerable’: those susceptible to poverty, discrimination, and/or violations of rights. These may be children, women or ethnic minorities, or those in conflict situations. They are also those encountering some of the harshest barriers in key development areas; health, education, social protection, infrastructure, or employability. Disability is not only a major outcome of conflict and wars but disabled people are those confronting the harshest difficulties when it comes to fleeing and reconstructing their lives elsewhere (Pisani and Grech 2015). Despite these linkages and the criticality of disability in development, the sector has been slow to acknowledge the presence of disabled people, and to engage with disability in its theory and practice. Disability remained virtually excluded from development discourse and practice until the late 1990s and was absent from the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). This was a serious concern (see Groce et al. 2011), given these goals guided development policy, practice and funding for 15 years, perpetuating a cycle of policy and programmatic exclusion, and epistemological and ontological disengagement. Much of the belated attention was in fact stimulated by parties outside development, from global health and disability-specific international organisations lobbying for disability to be included in development policy and practice (see Axellson 2009): the most recent efforts are those at including disability in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Unfortunately, this lobbying was required because disability was, and often remains, outside or on the fringes of mainstream development policy and research (Grech 2009). Much of this exclusion relates to how dominant development approaches have been constructed and how disability has been framed in the process. From the 1950s model of development as economic growth (see Sumner 2003) through to theories of modernisation (Rostow 1960), the brief but peripheral appearance of ‘dependency theory’ (Gunder Frank 1966), the basic needs approach (see Leys 1982), and more contemporary and hegemonic notions of development as neoliberal globalisation, disability has been either invisible, marginal, or constructed as problematic or even inimical to development. Where economic growth (premised on strong individualised bodies) may be prioritised, where resources are allocated

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to realise predetermined development goals quickly, or where development means quick results for undifferentiated large populations, it is not hard to see how disabled bodies and minds may be overlooked. Those who may be seen to be too ‘slow’, ‘unproductive’, or a ‘burden’, possibly (re)constructed as ‘undeveloping’, continue to fall outside an able-bodied heteronormative development agenda (Grech 2011). In the process, the development field and those working within it continue to lack contact with disabled people, have limited knowledge of disability, meaning inclusion is slow, and systems and programmes remain unadapted. The complexity and heterogeneity of disability, too, is rarely understood with the due importance and critical diligence it deserves. While approaches such as the capabilities approach (Sen 1997) have left an indelible mark on development discourse (some have even used this to theorise disability, see Riddle 2014), it is unsurprising that in a development sector often guided by numbers, subjective non-economic dimensions may be sacrificed. However, disability is about to be included in the SDGs, this means that disability will not only be heard more in development corridors but in policies and programmes which follow money—as does research. Nevertheless, as organisations and donors publish grey documents about how disability may be linked to development, why it is necessary to include disabled people, and why ‘inclusive development’ is good, these are not statements of intent. They are also not a commitment to change ideologies and practices, to accommodate disabled people on their own terms, or to question ‘development’ itself. There is also far less reflection within development on deeper conceptual and epistemological issues around disability. This situation is aggravated by the fact that those working in ‘disability and development’ too often generalise and simplify, and are too often atheoretical, uncritical, and monodisciplinary. This field, as I argue elsewhere (Grech 2009), includes little critical reflection on how development interacts with disability, and whether it is beneficial to disabled people. This chapter draws from Critical Disability Studies and Postcolonial perspectives to explore the connections between disability and development in an effort to critically discuss some issues in the disability/development nexus and gaps arising when articulating a debate around disability in the Global South. These are far from comprehensive but are instead subjective, partial, and fragmented, and as will become clear, I raise more questions than I can answer. Still, I hope that these can serve to generate much needed debate and questioning, especially by those working within development.

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Why Disability Is Considered a Development Issue

The lobbying to include disability in development has emerged from outside development studies: a project embraced by disability organisations and academics, notably those working in fields such as global health. Inspired by gender mainstreaming, many took this lobbying seriously in the early 2000s, calling for ‘disability mainstreaming’—promoting the idea that disability needed to be infused within all aspects and processes of development (see  Albert 2006). Over the past seven or so years, much of the discourse seeking to create linkages between disability and development has capitalised on and promoted the idea of ‘inclusive development’. In this discourse, development should not exclude anyone, and is an approach borne out of the fact that economic development continues to exclude and leave many behind, especially the poorest and most marginalised it is supposed to serve (see Kanbur and Rauniyar 2009). Others adapted this discourse further, orienting it more specifically towards disability, with ‘new’ concepts such as that of ‘disability-inclusive development’ (DID) gaining ground in the last couple of years (see van Veen 2014). Motivated by the need to render disability more visible to the development sector, the hope is to see a development that is completely planned, implemented, and evaluated with disability in mind: thus, disability traverses all aspects of development. Article 32 of the groundbreaking UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) provides for issues concerning development cooperation, suggesting the need to make development inclusive by providing a comprehensive framework for governments. The WRD also devotes a whole section to disability and development, emphasising how ‘disability is a development issue, because of its bidirectional link to poverty’ concluding that ‘disability should be a part of all development strategies and action plans’ (WHO and World Bank 2011: 11, 265). It also rearticulates the call for disability mainstreaming, defining it as the ‘process by which governments and other stakeholders ensure that persons with disabilities participate equally with others in any activity and service intended for the general public’, a process which ‘requires effective planning, adequate human resources, and sufficient financial investment’ (WHO and World Bank 2011: 264, 265). It is interesting to note that there is little guidance on what this would entail. Furthermore, while concepts such as ‘gender mainstreaming’ have been strongly criticised within development (see Palmary and Nunez 2009; True 2010), disability mainstreaming continues to be uncritically celebrated.

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Policy and other support for including disability on the development agenda have been seen. References to disability emerged in grey documents and even internal disability policies by donors and organisations such as the World Bank, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), and the Department for International Development (DFID) (see EC 2003; GTZ 2006; Lord et al. 2010), with some producing guidelines on how they intend to include or mainstream disability in their development work, while others are ambitiously suggesting how to go about measuring disability-inclusive practices (see Wissenbach 2014). The arguments of those lobbying to create connections between disability and development have been reasonably consistent. The exclusion of disability from the MDGs has been used as a platform to argue that disability needs to be included as a cross-cutting concern: if disability is not addressed, it will compromise the achievement of every goal (see Groce 2009). These arguments re-emerged in the formulation of the SDGs. Others resorted to the broader move towards a rights-based approach (RBA) in development as a point of entry for disability (see Albert and Hurst 2005). Poverty in the case of RBA is no longer an issue of charity but the denial of rights. This, in turn, supports the idea that fundamental changes to systems and structures, including legal ones, are required. Attention therefore shifts from solely focusing on prevention and rehabilitation towards equal rights and participation in all spheres of life. This approach bears strong similarities to that espoused by the disability movement (see Oliver 1990).

Disability and Poverty The most common argument for mainstreaming disability in development has been reference to a disability and poverty relationship, depicted as a mutually reinforcing relationship (see Groce et al. 2011). It has been estimated that some 50 % of impairments are preventable and a direct result of poverty (DFID 2000). Consequently, those who are disabled are said to be more exposed to poverty or experience a deeper and more intense poverty. Disabled people encounter barriers in a number of spheres such as social protection, even when these are supposed to be targeted (see Mitra 2010). This is a serious concern when as many as 80–90 % of disabled people in the Global South are estimated to be unemployed (Berman Bieler 2006), especially disabled women, those residing in rural areas, young people, and those with intellectual impairment. Disabled people experience complex barriers in other areas, including architectural hurdles, such as on roads and the built environment

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(including government services). Schooling is severely constrained for those with congenital impairments, or interrupted for those with acquired ones. Around 90 % of disabled children, the bulk from indigenous and rural areas, do not attend school in the Global South (UNESCO 2012). Most of these children are disabled girls. Obstacles to schooling are many, including accessibility, lack or absence of financial assets, unadapted and unaffordable transportation, untrained teachers, lack of or no teaching materials (e.g. Braille), negative attitudes (including by teachers), and crowded classrooms (see Grech 2014a). These are common challenges, particularly in rural areas, but are experienced more intensely by disabled children as they meet other disability-specific barriers. This is especially the case when it comes to generic as well as specialised health care and rehabilitation. It is estimated that less than 2 % of disabled people in the Global South have access to adequate and timely health care and rehabilitation (WHO and World Bank 2011). Constrained access to consistent medication is a serious problem, especially for those with chronic conditions. Disabled people also struggle to obtain and maintain assistive devices, impacting not only health but also mobility. Service provision, including public services, are not only seriously constrained for disabled people but also unadapted in terms of both bureaucracy and inaccessible buildings (see Grech 2015) and inalertness to the fact that disabled people, like many of the poor, work in the informal sector. Anthropological and other research (see Ingstad and Whyte 2007) also highlight other complexities, including beliefs (religious and spiritual) which frame disability within certain contexts, sometimes constructing it as a problematic or a sin, resulting in social exclusion, stigma, and marginalisation. Disability is not only an individual concern but also a family concern, and elsewhere (see Grech 2015) I argue that we should be speaking about disabled families and how we need to be looking at family impoverishment. In contexts with no means of social protection, families are the only source of support and survival and disability impacts household income (especially when the disabled person is the household head), consumption, labouring patterns, and livelihoods. These barriers often intensify along various interacting dimensions such as type of impairment, gender, class, ethnicity, and location, making some populations—such as disabled women—more vulnerable to poverty and violence (see Frohmader et al. 2015). While research on disabled people with intellectual impairments and mental health problems in the Global South remains particularly scarce, basic evidence suggests the presence of abuse, violence, and neglect, especially in some institutions (for instance, in the infamous Federico Mora psychiatric hospital in Guatemala). Disability has serious repercussions

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on other spheres of life, including labouring, a critical problem when many key livelihood and survival activities of the poor are predicated on physical strength (for agricultural or construction work). This challenges the dichotomisation of impairment and disability in the materialist social model of disability (see Oliver 1990) relegating the body outside the realm of theorisation and ‘intervention’ (see Grech 2009).1 Instead, what is required is a sociology of impairment (Hughes and Paterson 1997), where embodiment and pain can never slip out of focus, to analyse how bodies traverse, live, resist, and survive the spaces of poverty. These are only some of the multiple barriers experienced by disabled people, but which contribute to a deep, often chronic, and intergenerational impoverishment. It is estimated that 20 % of the world’s poorest are disabled people (WHO/World Bank 2011). But while disability and poverty are drawn together to support arguments for including disability in development, key questions are rarely addressed: how can development contribute to poverty reduction among disabled people if it continues to exclude other very poor people, including women and ethnic minorities (legitimate development subjects)? Is this at all possible when inequality continues to rise, pushing further to the margins those disproportionately disadvantaged, those already ‘outside’ development? Is mainstreaming at all possible without commitment, resources, a coordinated strategy, and a development sector educated in disability? Can this education be at all possible without contact with disabled people, especially those living in extreme poverty in rural areas? Will their narratives continue to be drowned by those of the so-called ‘experts’ and professionals in the Global North (but also including privileged urban Disabled People’s Organisations (DPOs) in the Global South) claiming to represent all disabled voices, often unknowing of these micro realities? And critically, the most difficult question: is development necessarily good for disabled people? Similar arguments have been raised by feminist and other scholars including those working in or around critical gender and development issues (see Mohanty 2003; Comaroff and Comaroff 2012).

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Drawing from a social constructionist perspective, this social model as it came to be known (Oliver 1996), removes impairment (the biological condition) from the disability equation. Instead, it politicises disability as ‘an expression of wider socio-economic, political and cultural formations of…the exclusion of people with impairments’ (Goodley 2007: 5). Breaking away from the monopolistic throes of medicalisation, the problem is no longer seen as an individual one located in one’s body, but one triggered by a disabling society erecting attitudinal, physical, and institutional barriers.

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From Rhetoric to Practice

It is no secret that disability remains marginalised in development, at research, policy, and programme levels (Grech 2011). The disability/development disjuncture has many foundations, not least the fact that much of the lobbying for disability mainstreaming has not come from within development. Development has been slow to acknowledge disability as a development concern, perpetually relegating it as a specialised (medical) concern in which development workers felt they had little or no training. There are, though, extraneous factors sustaining this situation. Disability studies, a Global North field, has and continues to remain disinterested and disengaged from the subject of disability in the Global South, even when the bulk of its constituents are located in these geopolitical spaces (e.g. Oliver 1996). This small but burgeoning area of study is dominated by White, Western, middle-class academics and theorists whose focus are the same postindustrialist urban Global North spaces it emanates from (the UK and the USA), a disability studies imbued with ideological, theoretical, cultural, and historical assumptions and specificities (Grech 2009, 2011). This resulted in little pressure on fields such as development studies to include disability as a core area of concern: interactions between disability and development studies remain sadly lacking despite the presence of poverty, livelihoods, politics, gender, and many other related themes cross-cutting both disciplines. While the situation may be slowly changing, development journals, textbooks, and courses continue to be lacking in disability content, perhaps reflecting the notion that disability is still not seen as a completely legitimate development thematic at a par with gender, childhood, or ethnicity. It is noteworthy that the few writings that do appear in development journals and books are largely written by those outside development studies. More broadly, disability appears irrelevant to humanitarian issues, governance, poverty, education, conflict, environmental degradation, and climate change. As one world report is published after another (on humanitarian issues, migration, the MDGs, human development, childhood, etc.), disabled people seemed to fade into the background, inexistent in crises such as wars and environmental disasters or limited to a token mention. This is despite the fact that these same wars are a major cause of impairment, and disabled people are those most disadvantaged (see Berghs 2012). The various intersectionalities that arise are left unexplored, including the lives and situations confronting disabled refugees, women, children, and ethnic minorities, left in ontological shadows even when disability cross-cuts multiple and interacting

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key development areas including bodies, gender, discourse, governmentality, geopolitics, history, and economics. On occasion, disabled people are placed (overtly or covertly) in the faceless category of the ‘vulnerable’, those unnamed who do not ‘fit’ but are somehow assumed to be in there when anyone questions their absence. Development studies needs a major overhaul if it is to stop ‘developing’ without disability in mind. If not, it will continue to feed back into a development sector sidelining disability as someone else’s research and practice concern—a scenario well known in the development non-governmental organization (NGO) sector (see Jammulamadaka and Varman 2010).

Policy Exclusions Much of this scenario is critically linked to the fact that disability lingers on the fringes of development policy. Disability is not a priority area for donors, an exclusion cascading down to policymakers, practitioners, and others when these follow the money rather than social justice and transformation. Policy exclusions are critically manifest in the frequent elimination of disability from the Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs). Evidence from a range of countries and continents (see Dube 2005; Griffiths et  al. 2009) highlights how despite years of lobbying for inclusion, disabled people have rarely been mentioned in, and much less, influenced the PRSP process. Reasons are various including the fact that DPOs often lack technical expertise and resources to participate in the PRSP process. Furthermore, in a development approach guided by neoliberal globalisation (see Harvey 2014), the exclusive focus remains on economic growth in individualising capitalist markets rather than equity, rights, inclusion, and people. The demands of these organisations are frequently silenced or ignored if they contradict prescribed International Monetary Fund (IMF) priorities. Overall, this scenario is not surprising, considering that even gender has not been adequately accommodated in the PRSP process (see Whitehead 2003). And more questions arise here: how positive is it to include disabled people in a PRSP process that many contend works against the needs and demands of the poor, often oppressing and impoverishing, and against which other populations continue to resist and protest (see Gould 2006)? How can disability be included in or benefit from the PRSP process if the ableist neoliberal rules of the game do not change? Neoliberal globalisation strengthens economic growth as the ultimate means and end of the development enterprise, emanating from a development predicated on normalised able-bodiedness, necessitating docile able bodies and minds to function and produce and to correct or remove those that do not

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(see Foucault 1977; Harvey 2014). Within this scenario, disabled bodies will incessantly be reframed as those who do not fit, those who are problematic, almost antithetical to development. Will disabled bodies ever be considered ‘development subjects’ capable of ‘developing’?

Development Programmes and Disability: Disassociations Disability continues to be marginalised from mainstream development programmes, including those aimed at poverty reduction. This exclusion is compounded, and often reinforced, by the assumption that disabled people may be indirectly targeted by mainstream poverty reduction programmes or population-specific projects such as those addressing women and children. Development organisations bypass disabled people, the latter positioned discursively and strategically as a specialist issue. Organisations sometimes feel they lack expertise in the area and/or that disability may be irrelevant, one of many competing priorities and/or too costly to address (see Mwendwa et  al. 2009; Grech 2011). Local and national governments in the Global South, just like international organisations, often regard disability as an issue to be dealt with by civil society and charitable institutions aided by funds and donations, an approach some contend (see Ingstad 2001) was imported by colonial powers and their missionaries. Riddell (2010) contends that less than 5 % of all Overseas Development Assistance (ODA) is allocated to disability projects and programmes. Disabled people are regularly bypassed in a range of programmes such as microcredit, income generation (e.g. public works programmes), disaster relief, and other programmes with a poverty alleviation component in most of the Global South (see IFRC 2007; Cramm and Finkenflugel 2008). Those with intellectual impairments, mental health problems and those with serious, multiple, and chronic impairments are practically left out: they are non-development subjects or beneficiaries. These exclusions are critical when many programmes could readily accommodate disabled people too, for example, by lowering water pumps to make them useable by wheelchair users. Recognising that not all donors are the same, many are more concerned with quick, effective, and visible results by circulating funds rapidly. As a result, attention will likely continue to be directed towards populations closer to the poverty line and easier to ‘pull’ out of poverty. High-visibility infrastructural projects, for example, the building of a school, take precedence over long-term programmes such as those of helping existing schools with training, equipment, and resources to include disabled children and provide quality

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and transformative education as opposed to a token inclusion (e.g. through quota systems) into a fractured system incapable or unwilling to accommodate them. Disabled people and others living in chronic poverty who require extended time and resources, fundamental organisational changes (including ideological ones), flexibility, and who may not produce immediately visible and quantifiable results over the short term, will most likely continue to be (re)constructed as the problem, responsible for their own predicament, and even unreceptive and resistant to development efforts, indeed as they have been over the past decades (see Grech 2011). Excluded from mainstream programmes and projects, the limited engagement with disability that does occur is often through disability-specific organisations. In recent years, international organisations such as CBM, Handicap International, and Sightsavers have grown exponentially. At national levels, small-scale disability-specific projects do exist but are often run in isolation and biased towards urban areas (see McConkey 2007). Critically, most are spurred by the agendas of outsiders rather than poor locals, especially rural, disabled people, and their families. Activities are also often limited, for example, to prevention, special education, or the charitable giving of used assistive devices (e.g. wheelchairs) to disabled people. The emphasis on prevention, while not unimportant (see e.g. the recent successes in virtually eliminating polio), may deflect attention away from those who are already living with a disability. Prevention may also be a limited enterprise when separated from tangible attempts at tackling the underlying structural and other causes of impairment, including conflict, displacement, environmental degradation, poverty, and inequality, which development itself may have more than a cursory responsibility for. These are geopolitical concerns with a long colonial history and in neocolonial times are inconvenient topics for those designing and ‘doing’ development in the thriving development and humanitarian industry, the industry of empire (see Hardt and Negri 2000). Similarly, Soldatic and Grech (2014) argue how even the CRPD, in its exclusive focus on disability (abandoning impairment and the bodily experience) marginalises the experiences of ‘groups engaging in repertories of action within the logos of impairment’ because ‘transnational claims for disability justice…naturalise impairment and negate the production of impairment under global structural processes of violence’. Disabled bodies can therefore be repositioned as neocolonised subjects, or better still neocolonised bodies, the bodies positioned at the anxious intersection of the economic, the cultural and political, the global, and the local (Grech 2014b). These are the docile bodies ruled over indefinitely by virtue of and through their specific geopolitical, historical, and ontological location.

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As we contemplate if/how disability may be included in development, many issues remain, not least because development, as recent history has taught us, may be unlikely to change its neoliberal ideologies, toolkits, and practices any time soon (see Escobar 1995). Those lobbying for this need to urgently expand the debate, and to start questioning how ‘inclusive development’ can ensure that disabled people are not harmed by a development not always ‘developed’ in its priorities.

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Disability and Development: From Imaginary Fields to Critical Gaps

Despite these exclusions and fissures, debates on the ‘condition’ of disability in the Global South continue to develop, often under the auspices of an unofficial field of thought and practice called ‘disability and development’. Dominated by hegemonic areas such as global health, this output combines with a growing mass of grey literature and lacks theoretical development, rather recycling statements and debates based on hearsay. Empirical work on disability in the Global South remains scarce and the voices and perspectives of disabled poor people are seldom heard. Disabled poor people continue to be spoken for, unable to contest the discourse, methods, and strategies that we propose about them. Much of this global disability field is monopolised by Global North urban academics and researchers in Global North institutions, with discourse, debates, methods, and ‘strategies’ emanating from these same spaces premised on Western values (including the language of rights and ethics). Despite the dearth in empirical research on disability in the Global South, these discourses, framed as ‘knowledge’ are perpetually repositioned as legitimate and authoritative and exported ‘from the West to the rest’ (Hall 2007). As Global North metanarratives such as Community Based Rehabilitation (CBR) are created by the WHO and shipped off, these quick-fix one-size-fits-all ‘solutions’ meet a Global South that is as complex as it is heterogeneous, chaotic, and uncontrollable—epistemologically and ontologically. Importantly, it defies and resists attempts at simplification and control: Emma Stone (1999) has noted how even in the international disability movement, Western views, perceptions, and experiences dominate the disability debate. This is familiar in a development terrain that continues to be dominated by the Global North (see Escobar 1995; Easterly 2014). Theorising around the ‘condition’ of disability in the Global South continues to be weak, subjected to a discourse of myths, generalisations, and simplifications in the bid to contain disability (Grech 2009). In the broader

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disability and development discourse, many issues are left unaddressed as critical perspectives, including from the Global South, are too often excluded or resisted, especially ones that challenge hegemonic perspectives. These include how disability rights pan out in practice (and if they do have any impact on disabled people), geopolitical asymmetries and the production of impairment, colonialism and neocolonialism, and a critique of development and its implications for disabled people (see e.g. Ghai 2002; Grech 2011; Meekosha 2011; Soldatic and Grech 2014). As disability ‘meets’ development (or otherwise), some very serious but seldom debated issues persevere as epistemological but also practical concerns.

Defining Disability Cross Cultures Beyond the Simplicity of Models The first and perhaps most obvious issue that arises as we look at disability is its definition, not least because this determines who is targeted and who is not, and because we somehow assume we know who we are actually talking about. Disability theorists and activists have long reacted to the medicalisation of disability and medical labels that not only disable but also confer indefinite power to those producing them, leaving disabled people victims of the medical hegemony and their practices (see Oliver 1990). The definition of disability becomes increasingly difficult, if not impossible as one moves across cultures and contexts: disability means different things to different people. The definition of disability remains controversial: there is no one single definition despite the efforts of parties such as the WHO (see WHO 2001). The category ‘disability’ is itself a Western construct that emerged in particular historical circumstances in Europe, and has only recently penetrated the Global South through ‘surveys, research projects, rehabilitation programs and government policy’ (Whyte and Ingstad 1995: 7). Overall, a homogenous category called ‘disabled’ does not exist, and the meanings of disability (and also ‘non-disability’) vary among disabled people. For example, many of the definitions emanating from the Global North emerge from spaces with other formal safety nets, which is rarely the case in poor rural areas in the Global South. This means that the need to labour is a consistent preoccupation among disabled people, which also reframes how disability is understood. Any attempt to understand what disability means in specific spaces, involves first engaging with what is valued in these same social, political, economic, cultural, and ontological locations, or rather personhood (Grech 2012). It is against this background that the meaning of disability is shaped, lived, and experienced.

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Disability takes shape in the context of the hegemony of the norm or ‘normality’. In close-knit communities, the collective, belonging and social obligations may take precedence over individual will and priorities as ‘full personhood’, positioning the understanding of disability in terms of how it impacts and repositions the ability to maintain these relationships and obligations. It also pushes us to prioritise the perspectives and voices of families and communities, including how they themselves understand and frame disability, not least because disability is often experienced collectively and impacts impoverished households, contributing to what Grech (2012) calls ‘disabled families’. But circumstances as well as contexts are varied and hybrid. Many rural areas, for example, blend multiple traditions and modernities (GarciaCanclini 2005), a hybridity that challenges quests for purity, authenticity, and representations, including of the disability experience (see Bhabha 2004). This includes, for example, the involvement of the rural poor in dual economies and the Maya in Guatemala incorporating modern technology sustaining their efforts at resistance, including the protection of their identity (see Grandin et al. 2011). A few questions arise: can ignoring hybridity be dangerous when it is within the hybrid that communities renew themselves, when it is within the local that the global is processed and experienced, and within and through which meaning (e.g. of disability and poverty) develops, and strategies for survival negotiated? How do these hybrid post/neocolonial spaces connect with the disabled body, itself hybrid and cyborg (Haraway 1985: 69) that refutes dominant ontologies, epistemologies, and discourse? Contexts and circumstances are not only hybrid. They are also dynamic, which means that the meaning of disability too is fluid, dynamic and shifting, constantly (re)negotiated. Disability across cultures can therefore hardly be encapsulated in all embracing models, whether the medical or social model of disability or even the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health, the biopsychosocial framework produced by the WHO. Instead, disability can only be understood over time, an understanding constantly renegotiated. Listening to disabled people, openly and prioritising their voices is the critical starting point, even when these definitions may go against our own interpretations and subjectivities.

The Complexity and Heterogeneity of Disability A host of literature, including feminist writings within disability studies, has emerged in recent years emphasising that disabled people and their experiences are far from homogeneous. Rather, disability needs to be recognised as

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heterogeneous, mediated by and varying alongside a host of gender, racial, locational, personal, socio-economic, cultural, psychoemotional, and many other variables, themselves dynamic and changing (see Garland-Thomson 2010; Shakespeare 2013; Reeve 2014). Despite this heterogeneity, attempts at encapsulating disability conceptually and experientially have not been shortcoming. Disability studies tenets from the Global North, such as the social model of disability, have become hegemonic notions in the disability debate, emphasising how the real issue is the oppression and marginalisation of disabled people. This discourse has gained substantial ground in disability and development debates in recent years, with activists, supported by a segment of disability studies, all too keen to export/impose their tools everywhere (see Alatas 2000; Barnes and Sheldon 2010). Recent critiques have included the charge of epistemic neocolonisation (see Grech 2009; 2011; Meekosha 2011). These discourses of assumed oppression meet a host of myths and generalisations about disabled people in a homogenised Global South, who said to be oppressed, hidden, ill-treated, and even killed in these spaces one is almost expected to demonise, even through discursive representations (see Said 1993). In turn, there is little or no alertness to context, cultures, ideologies, and circumstances and how these interact with, construct, and frame disability and disability experiences, renegotiated and reframed, meeting a plethora of responses. Anthropological and other evidence in fact highlights how disabled people confront a range of attitudes and responses, from positive to negative along a fluid continuum (see Ingstad and Whyte 1995), that change over space and time. Understanding differential attitudes and behaviours on the ground, again necessitates an understanding of the meaning of full personhood, how the disabled person relates to this, and how this experience is impacted and/or mediated by aspects such as the type of impairment and gender. It is highly unlikely, for example, that a person with dyslexia would be oppressed in a community where livelihoods involve agricultural labour and/or construction. On the other hand, growing evidence shows how disabled women continue to experience high rates of violence, including sexual violence and rape (see Chouinard 2012). It is important though to emphasise that not all societies consider the same attitudes and behaviours to be discriminatory and/or oppressive in the same way, and depicting a person as oppressed if he/she does not consider himself/ herself to be, may be little more than singling him/her out as a ‘special’ case, and subjecting him/her to the controlling and disabling gaze and intervention, this time of individual rights (Grech 2009). Critically, discourses assuming this homogenised oppression in the Global South distract from or occult the oppression of disabled people in the Global North. This oppression does

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exist, is intense and ongoing—see the onslaught on disabled people in current times of austerity in countries such as the UK as well as hate speech and hate crime (see Roulstone and Prideaux 2012). These discourses serve to reposition the Global North, its conceptualisations and treatment of disability as positive, civilised, and civilising, perpetually opening a space for intervention, legitimising its power to dominate, resulting in practices of thinking and acting—beneficial and even civilising. Escobar (1995: 54) notes how development too ‘relies on the perpetual recognition and disavowal of difference’. In turn, the native is repositioned as the one ‘outside the normative subject of Western modernity’ (Cutajar 2008: 29), in need and even desiring this intervention. This does not mean that ill treatment and oppression of disabled people does not exist in the Global South. But to suggest that ill treatment is all that faces disabled people in majority world countries, neglects and overshadows the agency, resilience, love, and care of families, their efforts often constrained only by the extreme poverty lived rather than lack of concern and/or negative attitudes.

Religion Matters Secularism has and continues to permeate fields such as disability and development studies, reflective more of Global North yearnings than of the realities they are supposed to be examining. Tomalin (2006: 95) highlights how development is built on the ‘modernist assumption that religion will disappear once people become economically advanced, and a new-found rationality supersedes “primitive superstition” and “backward” religious worldviews’. But in practice, religion and faith more than matter: they remain important constituents of people’s economic, political, social, and embodied realities. Religions remain critical sources of meaning influencing people’s views about the world and their role within it. Disability is thoroughly immersed in this meaning system and poverty contexts intensify it even further. While the emphasis on the body and embodied reality is multiple and strong, the constant reminder of how easily the body is impaired and dies, in the narratives of some religions, may also deflect focus from this temporary vehicle of life, this material, and discursive repository (see Siebers 2010). Beliefs can also be a critical source of resilience and resistance (even psychological). Grech (2015), for example, highlights the breadth of this support provided by religious congregations in rural Guatemala, support ranging from money and food handouts to emotional support offered to

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disabled people and their families especially in times of crises. Belief and faith also impact the attitudes and behaviours of others: religious congregations may strengthen the communities of support upon which poor people depend. But religion and beliefs can also have negative impacts and are conditional, not least because benefits are often based on membership, with the implication that those who do not belong, are excluded, even on the basis of these same beliefs. Ghai (2002) also recounts how disability in India is seen as an individual condition, where impairment has to be endured as payback for sins committed in the past. Much research is needed looking into these beliefs and the interactions between disability and religion, including how religion constructs disability, and may even demonise, disable, and subjectify (see Betcher 2004).

5

Discussion

This chapter has briefly traversed the complex terrain that is disability and development, a terrain of multiple, heterogeneous, political, and politicised concerns, intersecting and dynamic. There are far too many issues to be tackled here, but I hope this chapter encourages others within development to start considering disability as a legitimate development topic of research and practice. This is real transformational practice, this is real justice, this is real ‘development’! The only way that disability and development can come closer together is if development studies engages with disability as not an adjunct or a token theme (or chapter) but one that cross-cuts development. There is much disability theory which could provide solid ground for exploring ‘legitimate’ development themes, including poverty, gender, race, childhood, governance, and rights. It also offers spaces for exploring and remaining critically aware of the various intersectionalities in our work, drifting away from purist approaches in a world that is as complex as it is chaotic. This chapter began by emphasising how disability and development as a field of theory and practice, and is still in its infancy, is often monodisciplinary and uncritical. Bringing disability and development together does not mean absorbing disability into development, but also does not mean simply including development tenets in existing disability frameworks and discourse. Elsewhere (see Grech 2012), I highlight how we urgently need to decolonise the disability and Global South/development debate through a Critical Global Disability Studies, an approach to theory and practice that is (self )reflexive, emphasises uncertainty, contingency, and that encourages a great deal of critical questioning (e.g. of development practices and ideologies), learning, and the challenging of fixities (epistemological and ontological). We need a

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critical global disability studies, that is not only interdisciplinary, but transdisciplinary and critical. Before doing that, however, we need to decolonise debates to make ‘present and credible, suppressed, marginalised and disaccredited knowledges’ (Santos 2007: 16), especially those produced by critical Southern thinkers and activists, especially disabled people themselves. This is an approach that is alert to and that promotes alternative epistemologies and ways of knowing, especially the epistemologies of the South (see Santos 2012). Importantly, we need to learn about the contexts, from the most micro level to the macro, historical, and geopolitical, how these interact, and frame and construct disability over space and time. We need to prioritise and support the articulation of the voices of disabled people and their families. But, first of all, we need to decolonise thought, our own dominant epistemologies, our minds, and to open a space where dialogue transcends disciplinary, geopolitical, epistemological, and other boundaries. Decolonisation and the process of ‘decolonising’ are not simply discursive rhetoric, far from a smooth process, and also continuous, because it remains forever incomplete. Instead, decolonisation is a political and violent ‘programme of complete disorder’ (Fanon 1963).

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30 Mental Health and the Mindset of Development China Mills

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Introduction: ‘Mental Disorder’ as Missing from International Development ‘Psychosocial disability is one of the most pressing development issues of our time’. (FundamentalSDG 2014: 1) ‘It is paradoxical that people with mental health conditions have been largely excluded from the development agenda’. (WHO 2010a: vii)

Increasingly, the World Health Organization (WHO) is calling attention to the fact that people with mental health problems have been ‘overlooked as a target for development work’, and ‘excluded from development opportunities’ (WHO 2010a: xxiv, 34). This exclusion is seen as constituting ‘a significant impediment to the achievement of national and international development goals’ (WHO 2013: 8). Thus, mental health is an ‘invisible problem in international development’ (Chambers 2010), in part because people with mental health problems are sometimes explicitly excluded from development initiatives, for example, those that require recipients to be ‘mentally and physically sound’ to qualify for assistance (WHO 2010a: 3), and because mental illness is conceived of as a barrier to the achievement of development goals due to its high contribution to the global burden of disease.

C. Mills ( ) School of Education, University of Sheffield, UK © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 J. Grugel, D. Hammett (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of International Development, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-42724-3_30

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The concern that mental health is both absent within development agendas and an ‘obstacle’ to the achievement of development goals lies at the heart of current advocacy calling to ‘Mainstream mental health interventions into health, poverty reduction, development policies, strategies and interventions’ (WHO 2013: 13; WHO 2010a), and to include mental health within the post-2015 development agenda’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This advocacy occurs alongside calls to scale up access to mental health services in low- and middle-income countries (Lancet Global Mental Health Group 2007) and the development of national mental health policies within countries of the Global South. This chapter explores some of the ways in which mental health is framed as a ‘problem’ for national and international development agendas. Specifically, it addresses the need for more nuanced understandings of both development and mental health that move beyond sometimes simplistic assumptions that mental health is a ‘problem’ for development, and development is a ‘solution’ for mental health. Drawing upon literature within the field of global mental health, alongside fieldwork by the author in India (in 2011), this chapter will argue that the problematisation of both mental health and development is increasingly occurring through ever more psychological and psychiatric registers that appear to enable clinical, therapeutic, and pharmaceutical approaches to development. Concern is raised that this potentially diverts attention from (a) structural contributors to distress; (b) the politics of psychiatric diagnosis; and (c) the potentially detrimental effects of some development initiatives on well-being.

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Global Burden

A key discourse constructed and drawn upon by groups advocating for the inclusion of mental health within the development agenda centres around pointing out that as a group, mental, neurological, and substance-use disorders account for 13 % of the global burden of disease (WHO 2013), and are predicted to become the second largest cause of ‘disease burden’ by 2030 (Mathers and Loncar 2005, 2006). Depression, alone, accounts for 4.3 % of the global burden of disease and is among ‘the largest single causes of disability worldwide [11 % of all years lived with disability globally]’ (WHO 2013: 8). The WHO make the argument that depression represents almost as large a burden as malaria and accounts for twice the burden of HIV/AIDS (5.1 %  compared to 2.6 % of total disease burden respectively) (WHO  2010a: 34), yet spending on mental health tends to be tiny or nonexistent compared to spending on physical diseases.

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There is the further issue that those who experience certain physical health conditions, such as HIV/AIDS, and/or those have been found to be ‘vulnerable’ due, for example, to poverty or disability, have been found to be more likely to also experience mental health problems (WHO 2010a). Furthermore, alongside disease burden, mental health problems are associated with higher mortality rates, due to both untreated physical health conditions and suicide (WHO 2010a; 2013). Thus, Thornicroft (2014) says that ‘Mental illnesses are killer diseases. They need to take their place among the other killer dieases for investment and priority’ (cited in APPG 2014: 5). Yet mental health problems are missing from most countries’ national development strategies (WHO 2010a). In response to this, an initiative, FundaMentalSDG, has been formed advocating for ‘a specific mental health target in the post-2015 SDG agenda’, based on the assertion that ‘there can be no health without mental health, and no sustainable development without including mental health into the post-2015 SDG agenda’ (2014: 3). Specifically, advocates are calling to insert within the post-2015 SDG Health Goal, the following target: ‘The provision of mental and physical health and social care services for people with mental disorders, in parity with resources for services addressing physical health’ (FundamentalSDG 2014: 2). The All Party Parliamentary Group’s (APPG) report on Mental Health and Sustainable Development (2014: 5), which outlines cross-political party responses to what the UK Government can do in relation to increasing access to, and improving services for, mental health globally, outlines three central reasons why ‘mental health matters globally and why development activity will not be truly successful without tackling mental health issues’: the health case; the human rights case; and the social and economic case. Alongside this, the WHO (2010a: xxv) emphasise two development paradigms that should be considered ‘to ensure people with mental health conditions are included in development programmes’—these are ‘the need to improve aid effectiveness’, and a human rights approach. The message that mental health should be taken more seriously is an important one. However, mental health and development mean different things in different social and cultural contexts. Furthermore, what might be broadly conceptualised as ‘mental health problems’ are categorised and labelled differently within the literature. Thus, it is worth taking a moment to unpack some terms in order to grasp how groups advocating for the inclusion of mental health in the development agenda conceive of and define (a) mental health, (b) development, and (c) the relationship between mental health and development.

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Definitions: Mental Health

The language available within a culture provides the conceptual tools with which to name, understand and act on our experiences, and is thus central to discussions of what comes under the rubric of psychological or emotional well-being. For example, if sadness is understood to be a ‘symptom’ of a ‘mental illness’ and linked to the brain, then this may result in a different set of actions than if sadness was thought to be a result of harsh living conditions, or of spiritual possession. Therefore, how we name an experience has material effects on how we and others act. The WHO have produced a number of reports that are significant for discussion here, including: Mental Health and Development (2010a), the Mental Health Gap Action Programme (2008), the mhGAP intervention guide (2010b), and the Comprehensive Mental Health Action Plan 2013–2020 (2013). In these reports, mental, neurological, and substance-use disorders are subsumed into one category, which includes ‘Moderate–Severe Depression, Psychosis, Bipolar Disorder, Epilepsy/Seizures, Developmental Disorders, Behavioural Disorders, Dementia, Alcohol Use and Alcohol Use Disorders, Drug Use and Drug Use Disorders, Self-harm/Suicide, and “Other Significant Emotional or Medically Unexplained Complaints”’ (WHO 2010a: iii, 2010b: 2). However, the reports differ in the label they give this list of diverse experiences: the WHO Mental Health and Development (2010a) report calls them ‘mental health conditions’, whereas the mhGAP (WHO 2010b) calls them ‘neuropsychiatric disorders’. The Comprehensive Mental Health Action Plan 2013–2020 and the APPG report (2014) use the terms ‘mental health problems’, ‘mental illness’, and ‘mental disorders’ interchangeably (and does not use the term ‘neuropsychiatric disorders’) and loosely define these as: ‘a set of medical conditions that affect a person’s thinking, feeling, mood, ability to relate to others, and daily functioning’ (APPG 2014: 8). In the above reports what might be called distress is spoken about as a ‘problem’ or ‘disorder’, while the term ‘neuropsychiatric’ disorder firmly locates this ‘problem’ within the brain. Such groupings conflate experiences that have no known organic ‘cause’ (Moncrieff 2009), such as depression and suicide, with ‘disorders’ that have a known neurological base, such as dementia and epilepsy. Despite lack of evidence, and no current physical or biological diagnostic tests for mental health problems, the WHO clearly states that ‘mental disorders…have a physical basis in the brain…[and] can affect everyone, everywhere’ (WHO 2001: x). This claim allows the WHO and those who advocate for Global Mental Health, to call ‘to scale up the coverage of services for mental disorders in all countries, but especially in low-income and

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middle-income countries’ (Lancet Global Mental Health Group 2007: 87), and thus, to transpose diagnostic categories that originate from specific countries of the Global North onto countries that may have very different knowledge systems and world views. Writing from Palestine, Rabaia, Saleh, and Giacaman (2014: 179) explain that, ‘In mental health, what is understood in some cultures has no meaning in others. This is not an issue of finding the right word in translation, or semantics, it is about a way of being, of living, of reacting to stress and trauma linked to a mindset where meaning, culture and context are of the essence.’ That different parts of the world may name and understand their experiences of distress not in allopathic ‘western’ psychiatric terms ought to be a central concern when thinking about the implications of scaling up access to mental health services globally. However, this issue is often overlooked. Antonovsky (1979, 1987) argues that the available meanings that people in difficult or distressing circumstances give to their lived realities shapes their sense of coherence, which then impacts on ability to cope. This means that those who promote a ‘standard approach’ to mental health (Patel et al. 2011: 1442), globally, risk overlooking or discrediting different ways of understanding distress that have coherence in vernacular spaces. Thus, as Fernando and Weerackody (2009: 196) point out, ‘Developing mental health services in South Asia or other non-western settings is not a simple matter of transferring established strategies and systems commonly used in high-income countries of the west.’ Mainstreaming largely ‘western’ and biological understandings of mental into development policy is also problematic when we consider that despite arguments to the contrary, biological and brain-based explanations (of mental distress as an ‘illness like any other’) have been found to increase the stigmatisation of those who experience distress, compared to explanations that emphasise social or psychological factors (Angermeyer and Matschinger 2005; Read et al. 2006). This may in part explain why many people who identify as psychosocially disabled, as mad positive, as users of mental health services, or as ‘survivors’ of psychiatry, tend to explicitly reject the framing of their experiences within an illness model, instead situating people’s experiences within their personal life history and mobilising around the discursive ensemble of ‘trauma/abuse/distress’ (Cresswell and Spandler 2009: 138). Such disputes largely remain absent from the mainstream literature promoting the global scale up of mental health. Yet the models of mental health currently being mainstreamed within development may be problematic for a number of reasons. These models have been critiqued because what are currently called ‘mental disorders’ (a) have not always historically been seen as such, (b) are the products of specific social, cultural, economic, and historical

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trajectories and thus are not necessarily understood as pathological worldwide (Fernando 2014), (c) many mental health diagnoses have not been found to have an organic cause, and there are currently no biological diagnostic tests— meaning that the diagnosis of most ‘mental disorder’ remains highly subjective (Timimi and Radcliffe 2005), and (d) the medications that dominate treatment options are highly disputed and critiqued, in large part because little is known about the mechanisms by which they work, they may lead to a multitude of unpleasant side effects, and there is evidence that they can cause harm and increased mortality, especially when taken long term (Bracken et al. 2012; Breggin 2008; Jureidini et al. 2004; LeFrançois et al. 2013; Moncrieff 2009). More widely, the globalisation of psychiatry is critiqued as exporting Western ways of being a person and concepts of distress that are alien to many cultures (Summerfield 2008), that are imposed from the ‘top down’, that reassert colonial assumptions about Western expertise and superiority, and that are used to discredit and make ‘disappear’ local, religious, or indigenous forms of healing (Davar 2014; Watters 2010). (For a more detailed critique of the sometimes problematic evidence base of advocacy around global mental health, see Ingleby 2014; Mills and Fernando 2014; White and Sashidharan 2014a, 2014b.) It is important to state that to recognise the issues above is not to completely reject the biomedical psychiatry that underlies many mental health services in the Global North (and currently being scaled up in the Global South). However, this criticality enables an understanding that biomedicine might be useful, at times, as a partial frame, ‘but incomplete and inadequate for much of what we want to accomplish’ (McGruder 2001: 77).

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Definitions: Development

Like mental health, development means different things in different contexts. Yet much of the global mental health literature refers to international development and yet does not explicitly define it. For example, neither the APPG (2014) nor the WHO (2010a) provides a definition of ‘development’, although the latter does mention two different development paradigms: improving aid effectiveness and human rights. This means that development remains under-theorised and largely unproblematised within global mental health literature (except where programmes are seen as excluding people with mental health problems) (WHO 2010a). Yet, as with bio-psychiatry, development projects have been widely criticised for promoting free market ideals of limitless growth and privatisation

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of resources, for ushering in capitalism to countries of the Global South, and operating as a form of (neo)colonialism: enabling ‘the production and reiteration of the colonial mindset’ (Chakrabarti and Dhar 2009: 35; Escobar 1995/2012). Such critiques, alongside questioning what counts as development and who development is for, seem largely absent from global mental health literature. It thus seems important to read calls to mainstream mental health into development programmes against wider critiques of development and critiques of mental health services (dominated in the Global North by bio-psychiatry). A more nuanced reading of the relationship between mental health and development may thus allow recognition not only of the ways that development projects exclude those with mental health problems but furthermore, how some forms of development may contribute to poor mental health. Furthermore, throughout much of the literature on global mental health and development there is a general subsuming of poverty and development— reducing development initiatives to forms of poverty management. For example, the WHO Ministerial Round Tables (2001: 6) draw attention to the link between mental health and development, saying that ‘mental health is not only essential for individual well-being, but also essential for enhancing human development including economic growth and poverty reduction’, and thus, ‘there is no development without health and no health without mental health’. As is evident here, the argument for the inclusion of mental health onto the development agenda seems to hinge around two lenses: the relationship between mental health problems and poverty, and mental health as an economic burden.

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The Mental Health-Poverty Nexus and the Economic Imaginary By treating many of the debilitating mental disorders and by promoting mental health, people will … be able to work and rise out of poverty, provide their children with the right social and emotional environment to flourish … contribute to the economy of their country. (WHO 2008, cited in Titchkosky and Aubrecht 2015: 11)

The positive association between poverty and mental health problems is ‘one of the most well established in all of psychiatric epidemiology’ (Belle 1990: 385). It is this relationship that seems to provide justification for increasingly targeting people diagnosed with mental health problems within development programmes. Yet there is little conclusive, and sometimes conflicting,

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evidence about the nature, direction, and mechanisms of the mental health– poverty nexus (Mills 2015), with it usually being conceptualised as a vicious cycle (Patel and Kleinman 2003). Participatory research that asks people living in poverty about the lived realities of their experiences has shown that many people talk about despair, pain, being driven mad, and losing the desire to live: expressions of immense distress at their living conditions (ATD Fourth World 2012; Narayan et al. 2000a, 2000b). But how useful is it to understand the distress people speak of as constituting something called a ‘mental illness’? Is this distress pathological and in need of psychiatric and/or pharmacological treatments, or might we understand it as a ‘normal’ expression of sadness at living in a harsh environment? Ascertaining why people are distressed, that is, what people feel causes or contributes to their distress, is important because this carries implications for the kinds of action that can be taken—from individual treatment to wider structural change. This matters because while it may seem common sense that living in conditions of grinding poverty may lead to a depressed state, if we diagnose this state as ‘depression’, then this has implications for action. A common response to depression is forms of treatment that usually include either counselling or medication; these responses may well be useful to some living in poverty—but it is arguable whether such treatments should be prioritised over addressing the systemic causes of poverty that initially led to distress. Horwitz and Wakefield argue that such an approach enables a ‘massive pathologization of normal sadness’ (2007: 103), presents people’s experiences of poverty as ‘discreet and apolitical’ psychiatric diagnoses (McGibbon and MacPherson 2013: 74), assumes people to be in need of ‘western’ professional expertise, and obscures the source of, or contributing factors to, distress, allowing the political–economic forces that produce and sustain poverty and economic marginalisation to persist, if not worsen (Rabaia et al. 2014; Skovdal 2012). In the quote from the WHO (2008, cited Titchkosky and Aubrecht 2015: 11) that begins this section, mental health treatment is seen as enabling people to move out of poverty, and thus better contribute to the economy. Similarly, on the cover page of the APPG report on Mental Health and Sustainable Development (2014), it says: ‘Mental illnesses disable millions, disrupt and destroy lives, cause early deaths, lead to human rights abuses, [and] damage the economy’ (cover page). Here ‘mental disorder’ enters the economic and econometric imaginary, with the cost of the burden of mental disorders calculated at $2.5 trillion per year, while the amount invested in treatment is less than 2 % of health spending in most low- and middle-income countries (APPG 2014: 5). Here ‘mental ill-health is problematized at the level of the

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economy and productivity’ (Howell 2011: 93), and part of a wider neoliberal landscape of economism that relates health to economic productivity and reduces all explanations, existences, and subjectivities to economic processes (Chakrabarti and Dhar 2009).

6

Mental Disorder as an Obstacle to, and a ‘Brake’ on, Development

Within the above economic logic, mental health problems and poverty are framed as individual pathologies that both act as a ‘brake’ on development. Howell (2011: 20) notes this when she writes about how for agencies, such as the WHO, ‘mental illness has been deemed an obstacle to development’, resulting in psy interventions (mental health services, such as increased access to medication and/or forms of counselling) being positioned as ‘(technical and medical) solutions to (political) problems’. In this way, mental health is largely conceptualised as an obstacle to development, ‘Mental health problems are a brake on development as they cause (and are caused by) poverty. This fuels social failures including poor parenting and school failure, domestic violence, and toxic stress, preventing people with problems and their families from earning a living’ (APPG 2013: 5). While this quote states that poverty may cause mental disorder, the onus here seems to remain on the effects of mental health problems on individuals—linking to social failure. The APPG report does allude to the potentially detrimental effects of the economy on people’s health albeit briefly when it states the importance of ‘Improving social and economic environments as part of sustainable development so that mental health problems are less likely to occur’ (APPG 2014: 6). However, throughout the report and the wider literature, focus largely remains on increasing access to treatment (often medication), and there is little discussion of the role that mental health professionals can or could play in improving social and economic environments. Overall, the report concludes that, ‘The simple message…is that progress in development will not be made without improvements in mental health…Improving mental health is therefore a vital part of a successful development programme… Yet mental health is generally given a very low priority—and often neglected altogether—in both national and international policy’ (APPG 2014: 4). Pointing out the neglect of mental health within policy is laudable. Yet here it is mental health, that is, constructed as central to development (there will be no progress in development without progress in mental health), preventing the question being asked about how different development strategies may affect

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mental health. What remains obscured within such logic is twofold: (a) the reverse relationship of how the economy and its capitalist basis may negatively affect mental well-being, and (b) how economic logics may conceal analysis of the politics of diagnosis, that is, how the problematisation of those living in poverty and those deemed ‘underdeveloped’ tends to occur at the level of individual psychology and behaviour rather than on the structural landscapes that produce and sustain poverty. This psychologisation or psychiatrisation of poverty tends to imply that treating mental health problems will reduce poverty, rather than advocating that eradication of poverty would reduce mental health problems. Such a framework overlooks critiques of development initiatives as producing (whether intentionally or not) forms of impoverishment and destitution linked to capitalist expansion, which may occur even as such programmes are tasked with alleviating poverty (Chakrabarti and Dhar 2009). Thus, the economic determinants of poor (mental) health remain obscured, despite research finding that poor health outcomes and increases in suicide are highly correlated economic decision-making, for example, to the politics of austerity put into force in many countries of the Global North in response to the financial recession (Stuckler and Basu 2013). While the WHO conceptualises mental health as missing from the development agenda and as an obstacle to development, nowhere is there mention of the sometimes problematic nature of development. Here development remains an unquestioned good. Yet, these assumptions prevent us from exploring whether it may be that development itself (led by a logic of limitless growth often enforced by multilateral agencies with allegiances to high-income countries and industry) is sometimes detrimental to mental health. It also prevents us from examining whether the diagnostic categories that label distress as ‘mental disorder’, and the treatments used, may at times be detrimental to the well-being of people and communities, globally. Thus, we are prevented from understanding how development may be an obstacle to, and a ‘brake’ on, well-being. Here development discourse can be seen to draw upon two related yet seemingly opposing frameworks; ‘growth through capitalism-induced industrialization, that is, aggressive and ruthless and poverty management that is, as if, benevolent’ (Chakrabarti and Dhar 2009: 41). Thus, the psychiatrisation of development may be understood as operating ‘benevolently’ to ‘offset’ and foreclose analysis of the logic of developmental discourse (be it individual, national, economic, and global) that some argue is underwritten by the structural and symbolic violence of expropriation and appropriation (Chakrabarti and Dhar 2009). Thus, laudable attempts to explore the relationship between poverty and mental health often take recourse to using and reifying psychiatric diagnostic

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categories that individualise distress and work to psychiatrically reconfigure ‘symptoms’ of oppression, poverty, and inequality as ‘symptoms’ of ‘neuropsychiatric disorder’, rather than understanding them as products of structural inequalities (McGibbon and MacPherson 2013). The (re)configuration of structural inequalities and conditions of poverty into individual deficiencies then enables (inter)national focus to hinge on changing individual mentalities and behaviour (Schram 2000), creating the possibility for development to become increasingly pharmaceutical: tied to access to and increasing compliance with psychotropic medications.

7

The Pharmaceuticalisation of Development Programmes

The availability of psychiatric medications in some countries, and the overall dominance of bio-psychiatry within global mental health, is a concern raised by Fernando and Weerackody from their work in Sri Lanka, where they point out that the WHO Regional Office for South East Asia (2008) strategy for mental health shows ‘signs of the uncritical acceptance of the dominance of biological and pharmaceutical approaches to mental health’, evident in the fact that ‘the only therapies mentioned as “essential” are “medications” (that is, drugs from pharmaceutical companies)’ (2009: 197). Others have raised concerns that biological psychiatry dominates much psychiatric practice in India, including community care (Jain and Jadhav 2009). My own research in India, with a number of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) working in the area of mental health pointed to a similar pharmaceuticalisation of community mental health work (Mills 2014). This started to emerge when speaking with Sarbani Das Roy, the founder of Iswar Sankalpa, an NGO working with homeless women in distress in Kolkata, she explained to me, ‘Pharmaceutical companies have been a great help to us. They, right from the day one, we have not bought a single medicine. Till date. All our medicines are being supplied by different pharmaceutical companies. The relationships were pretty easy to establish, one of the things is that … most of our board members are psychiatrists. So the pharmaceutical industry are very eager to help us. Its only general medicines that we have to buy. I would say that with the pharmaceutical industry that with time they have seen the change that has happened and I think their commitment towards the work has grown now, it’s not so much because of the psychiatrists now’ (Sarbani Das Roy, Iswar Sankalpa, Kolkata). Thus, many NGOs may act as distribution channels for psychiatric medications within some countries of the Global South; with such NGOs

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benefiting from pharmaceutical companies’ desire to market their products through provision of free samples. While this may make medication available to some who may benefit from it but who would have been unable to afford it, it may also come to dominate approaches to treatment by some NGOs, raising important issues of consent. For example, when speaking to a psychiatrist about the provision and use of medication in his work at an NGO in India, he told me, ‘We do not force them [to take psychiatric medicines]… but at the same time the person is not willing to take medicines, taking the medicines in a formal fashion…we mix the medicines with food. And once they start improving they start taking medicines by themselves. So that block, that block that they have regarding medicines … can be broken and that person feels that he or she is improving after taking medicines, the person starts taking medicines by themselves’ (Psychiatrist, at an NGO in South India). Consent is key here—both an individual’s consent to being given potentially harmful medication, and community consent as the introduction of psychiatry into some Asian countries has discredited alternative healing sources, yet provided little to replace them and appropriated many of the resources made available for mental health in poor countries (Higginbotham and Marsella 1988). Many NGOs recognise the importance of psychosocial forms of support, and some proponents of global mental health suggest the need, for example, for radical community banks as being key to alleviating the debt that may contribute to many people’s distress (Patel and Kleinman 2003). Yet, because medications are cheaper and can be distributed quickly and widely (with some NGOs in India posting regular supplies to families in rural areas), the reality seems to be that bio-psychiatric approaches to distress come to dominate much of the mental health support provided by NGOs in countries of the Global South. Some NGOs explicitly seek to link mental health and development in their work. A notable example is BasicNeeds, which (as of 2011) operated its community-based integrated Mental Health and Development model, an approach that aims to deal with the issue of mental health in the context of development, in 11 countries (BasicNeeds 2008; Raja et al. 2012). This approach aims to create sustainable livelihood programmes to help people to start earning a living after being given access to community-based treatment. Basic Needs has played a key part in reducing institutionalisation in some of the areas it works (e.g., in Karnataka, India). However, while perhaps preferable to institutionalisation, in those countries where community care has been enacted in the Global North, it has not always been particularly successful, and has, in the UK, led to different forms of control and coercion within the community, including forced medicating

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(Bracken and Thomas 2005). Thus, great care must be taken in developing community forms of support for mental health—that they do not become dominated by medication, despite the best of intentions. On visiting an NGO outpatient clinic in Chennai, India, the psychiatrist in charge explained to me that he had hoped that the clinic would be a community resource centre, but he felt it had never really developed beyond being a drug dispensary. In fact, claims of a ‘treatment gap’ (between need and availability of medicines) for mental health within the Global South have been found to be tenuous, with ethnographic research, for example, in India, suggesting that overuse of some drugs may be more of a reality in some areas—with psychotropic medicines easily available and largely unregulated (Ecks and Basu 2009).

8

Burdens and Markets

Medications may be helpful for some, and indeed there is surely a case for equality of access in such cases. However, the issue of regulation, as well as of preventing psychotropic medications from dominating the mental health landscape, the research agenda, and the public imaginary, not to mention replacing diverse and plural frameworks and practices in relation to well-being, all remain of the utmost concern (Mills and Fernando 2014). In addition, the extent to which an over-reliance on pharmacological interventions may divert focus and resources away from researching and promoting existing and alternative forms of support needs to be highlighted. While the WHO conceive of ‘mental disorder’ as a burden, for those pharmaceutical companies who manufacture psychotropic medications, high prevalence of ‘mental disorder’ in the Global South constitutes an emerging market (Fernando 2011; Mills 2014; Thomas et al. 2005). The huge financial incentive to frame distress as ‘mental disorder’, that is, treatable by medications, has led some pharmaceutical companies that manufacture psychotropic medications to engage in a variety of unethical practices, including concealing adverse and harmful effects of drugs found in clinical trials and testing potentially harmful new products on people living in poverty (Goldacre 2012; Healy 2012; Shah 2006). This is not solely an issue of concern for mental health, and occurs within a global discourse on health dominated by transnational corporations with their agendas of deregulation and privatisation; tensions over prices of drugs linked to intellectual property; and the exploitation of indigenous resources and knowledge (Soldatic and Biyanwila 2010; Shiva 2012). This raises the need to grapple with the widely documented unethical practices of an industry that also has a huge financial incentive

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in pushing specific understandings of, and ‘solutions’ to, ‘mental disorder’, marking a central area of contention for calls to mainstream mental health within development.

9

Post-Development and Post-Psychiatry

While the mainstream global mental health literature does make mention of including users of mental health services in its agenda setting, detail on how this is to be achieved is often absent, with a discourse of ‘educating’ populations of the Global South in ‘western’ and often biological knowledge of mental health dominating the agenda. However, there is resistance worldwide to such dominant biological and technological ‘solutions’. Some articulate this as a project of post-psychiatry that aims to think ‘beyond the current technological paradigm’ in order to engage more meaningfully with the user/survivor movement (Bracken et al. 2012: 430), reduce international, professional, and individual reliance on psychopharmaceuticals, question psychiatry’s continuous expansion, and search for more ethical and sustainable ways to respond to distress (Bracken and Thomas 2005: 260). This project has parallels to ‘postdevelopment’ thinking within international development that sought to (a) open up a discursive space to alternatives, (b) displace development’s centrality in the public and professional imaginary, and (c) transform the ‘political economy of truth’ about development (Escobar 1995/2012: xiii). That there should be similar movements that resist mainstream development and psychiatry is perhaps not surprising when we consider that both the ‘treatments’ of psychiatric technology and the technocratic and economic problematisation of poverty is disembedded from local lived realities, that further strip poor people from tapping into a pluralism of locally available resources. The South Africa-based Pan African Network of People with Psychosocial Disabilities (PANUSP) make clear that ‘no medicines, treatments or sophisticated western medical technology can eradicate human rights violations and restore dignity’ (2012: 7). Thus, PANUSP state that ‘[s]ervices and support must be delivered in non-paternalistic and non-patriarchal frameworks with choices available outside of the medical framework’, and furthermore, ‘[c]hoices must be available in the community and this includes the choice not to use western medical “solutions”’ (PANUSP 2012: 2–3). Thus, while the WHO rightly pushes for the right to health, it seems to overlook people’s right to self-determination, to refuse treatment, and to choose between viable alternatives. While there may be global inequality in access to many psychiatric medications and while medication may be helpful for some people, they

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may also be harmful when taken long term, and such treatment can be associated with coercive approaches, sometimes making compliance with medication mandatory, even when this is against a person’s wishes.

10

Development: All in the Mind?

Situated against the backdrop of wider critiques of development, this chapter has explored what currently seems to constitute a reconfiguration of poverty and development from being analysed at the level of political economy to be being understood and intervened upon at the level of individual mentality and psyches. If ‘mental disorder’ is problematised at the level of the economy, and seen as ‘problem’ for development, then the insertion into the post-2015 SDGs of a target based on global provision of mental health services in parity with physical health services is posed as being the ‘solution’. This is based on the argument that mental health is a global priority; that ‘Psychosocial disability is one of the most pressing development issues of our time’ (FundamentalSDG 2014: 1).1 While mental health may indeed be important, it is questionable whether all countries globally would understand mental health as a pressing priority, and thus such claims appear to overlook national and regional variations in people’s realities, affecting both sociopolitical, and mental health, priorities. Drawing upon global mental health literature and fieldwork carried out by the author in India, this chapter has explored how the increasing reconfiguration of development within psychological and psychiatric registers may be paving the way for increasingly clinical, therapeutic, and pharmaceutical approaches to development which potentially divert attention from (a) structural contributors to distress, (b) the politics of diagnosis, and (c) the potentially detrimental effects of some development initiatives on well-being. This may mean that one of the main effects of the psychiatrisation of development is that ‘development has increasingly become a problem of the mind’ (Howell 2011: 98), reconfigured at the level of the psyche, and increasingly intervened upon through the brain.

1

FundamentalSDG (2014). Call to Action: The Need to Include Mental Health Target and Indicators in the Post-2015 Sustainable Development Goals. Online. (Accessed 10.01.14) http://www.cbm.org/article/downloads/118014/Policy_briefing_paper_on_Mental_health_target_in_SDG_sept_2014.pdf

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References Angermeyer, M., and H. Matschinger. 2005. Causal beliefs and attitudes to people with schizophrenia: Trend analysis based on data from two population surveys in Germany. British Journal of Psychiatry 186: 331–334. Antonovsky, A. 1979. Health, stress and coping. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Antonovsky, A. 1987. Unravelling the mystery of health: How people manage stress and stay well. London: Jossey-Bass. APPG. 2014. Mental health and sustainable development. London: Mental Health Innovation Network and APPG. ATD Fourth World. 2012. Extreme poverty is violence. Breaking the silence, searching for peace. A participatory research-action project about the relationship between extreme poverty, violence and peace. France: Vaureal. BasicNeeds. 2008. Mental health and development: A model in practice. Leamington Spa: BasicNeeds. Belle, D. 1990. Poverty and women’s mental health. American Psychologist 45(3): 385–389. Bracken, P., and P. Thomas. 2005. Postpsychiatry: Mental health in a postmodern world. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bracken, P., P.  Thomas, S.  Timimi, E.  Asen, G.  Behr, C.  Beuster, S.  Bhunnoo, I.  Browne, N.  Chhina, D.  Double, S.  Downer, C.  Evans, S.  Fernando, M.R. Garland, W. Hopkins, R. Huws, B. Johnson, B. Martindale, H. Middleton, D. Moldavsky, J. Moncrieff, S. Mullins, J. Nelki, M. Pizzo, J. Rodger, M. Smyth, D. Summerfield, J. Wallace, and D. Yeomans. 2012. Psychiatry beyond the current paradigm. British Journal of Psychiatry 201: 430–434. Breggin, P. 2008. Brain-disabling treatments: Drugs, electroshock, and the psychopharmaceutical complex. New York: Springer. Chakrabarti, A., and A.  Dhar. 2009. Dislocation and resettlement in development. Abingdon and New York: Routledge. Chambers, A. 2010. Mental illness and the developing world. 10 May. http://www. guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/may/10/mental-illness-developing-world. Accessed 15 Oct 2010. Cresswell, M., and H. Spandler. 2009. Psychopolitics: Peter Sedgwick’s legacy for the politics of mental health. Social Theory & Health 7(2): 129–147. Davar, B. 2014. Globalizing psychiatry and the case of ‘vanishing’ alternatives in a neo-colonial state. Disability and the Global South 1(2): 266–284. Ecks, S., and S. Basu. 2009. How wide is the “treatment gap” for antidepressants in India? Ethnographic insights in private industry marketing strategies. Journal of Health Studies II: 68–80. Escobar, A. 1995. Encountering development: The making and unmaking of the third world. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Fernando, S. 2011. A ‘global’ mental health programme or markets for big pharma? OpenMind 168: 22.

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Fernando, S. 2014. Mental health worldwide: Culture, globalization and development. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Fernando, S., and C. Weerackody. 2009. Challenges in developing community mental health services in Sri Lanka. Journal of Health Management 11(1): 195–208. FundamentalSDG. 2014. Call to action: The need to include mental health target and indicators in the post-2015 sustainable development goals. http://www.cbm.org/ article/downloads/118014/Policy_briefing_paper_on_Mental_health_target_in_ SDG_sept_2014.pdf. Accessed 10 Jan 14. Goldacre, B. 2012. Bad pharma: How drug companies mislead doctors and harm patients. London: Fourth Estate. Healy, D. 2012. Pharmageddon. Berkeley, LA: University of California Press. Higginbotham, N., and A.  Marsella. 1988. International consultation and the homogenization of psychiatry in Southeast Asia. Social Science and Medicine 27(5): 553–561. Horwitz, A., and J. Wakefield. 2007. Loss of sadness: How psychiatry transformed normal sorrow into depressive disorder. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Howell, A. 2011. Madness in international relations: Psychology, security and the global governance of mental health. London and New York: Routledge. Ingleby, D. 2014. How ‘evidence-based’ is the movement for global mental health? Disability and the Global South 1(2): 203–226. Jain, S., and S.  Jadhav. 2009. Pills that swallow policy: Clinical ethnography of a community mental health program in northern India. Transcultural Psychiatry 46(1): 60–85. Jureidini, J., C. Doecke, P. Mansfield, M. Haby, D. Menkes, and A. Tonkin. 2004. Efficacy and safety of antidepressants for children and adolescents. British Medical Journal 328: 879–883. Lancet Mental Health Group. 2007. Scale up services for mental disorders: A call for action. The Lancet 970(9594): 1241–1252. LeFrançois, B., R.  Menzies, and G.  Reaume (eds.). 2013. Mad matters: A critical reader in Canadian Mad studies. Toronto: Canadian Scholars Press. Mathers, C., and D. Loncar. 2005. Updated projections of global mortality and burden of disease, 2002–2030: Data sources, methods and results. Geneva: World Health Organization. Mathers, C., and D.  Loncar. 2006. Projections of global mortality and burden of disease from 2002 to 2030. Public Library of Science Medicine 3: e442. McGibbon, E., and C. MacPherson. 2013. Stress, oppression and women’s mental health: A discussion of the health consequences of injustice. Women’s Health and Urban Life 12(2): 63–81. McGruder, J. 2001. Life experience is not a disease or why medicializing madness is counterproductive to recovery. Occupational Therapy in Mental Health 17: 59–80. Mills, C. 2014. Decolonizing global mental health: The psychiatrization of the majority world. London: Routledge.

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Mills, C. 2015. The psychiatrization of poverty: Rethinking the mental healthpoverty nexus. Social and Personality Psychology Compass (forthcoming). Mills, C., and S.  Fernando. 2014. Globalising mental health or pathologising the global South? Mapping the ethics, theory and practice of global mental health. Disability and the Global South 1(2): 188–202. Moncrieff, J. 2009. The myth of the chemical cure. A critique of psychiatric drug treatment. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Narayan, D., R. Chambers, M. Shah, and P. Petesch. 2000a. Voices of the poor: Crying out for change. New York: Oxford University Press for the World Bank. Narayan, D., R.  Patel, K.  Schafft, A.  Rademacher, and S.  Koch-Schulte. 2000b. Voices of the poor: Can anyone hear us. Voices from 47 countries. Washington: World Bank. PANUSP. 2012. Press package. http://www.panusp.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/ 10/Press-Release-WHO-Launch-Toolkit-28-June-2012.pdf. Accessed 12 July 2012. Patel, V., and A. Kleinman. 2003. Poverty and common mental disorders in developing countries. Bulletin of the World Health Organization 81(8): 609–615. Patel, V., N. Boyce, P. Collins, S. Saxena, and R. Horton. 2011. A renewed agenda for GMH. The Lancet 378: 1441–1442. Rabaia, Y., M. Saleh, and R. Giacaman. 2014. Sick or sad? Supporting Palestinian children living in conditions of chronic political violence. Children and Society 28: 172–181. Raja, S., C. Underhill, P. Shrestha, U. Sunder, S. Mannarath, S. Wood, and V. Patel. 2012. Integrating mental health and development: A case study of the basic needs model in Nepal. PLoS Medicine 9(7): e1001261. Read, J., N. Haslam, L. Sayce, and E. Davies. 2006. Prejudice and schizophrenia: A review of the ‘mental illness is an illness like any other’ approach. Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica 114: 303–318. Schram, S. 2000. In the clinic: The medicalization of welfare. Social Text 18(1): 81–107. Shah, S. 2006. The body hunters; Testing new drugs on the world’s poorest patients. New York and London: The New Press. Shiva, V. 2012. Biopiracy: The plunder of nature and knowledge. New Delhi: Natraj. Skovdal, M. 2012. Pathologising healthy children? A review of the literature exploring the mental health of HIV-affected children in sub-Saharan Africa. Transcultural Psychiatry 49(3–4): 461–491. Soldatic, K., and J.  Biyanwila. 2010. Tsunami and the construction of disabled southern body. Sephis E Magazine 6(3): 75–84. Stuckler, D., and S.  Basu. 2013. The Body economic: Why Austerity kills. London: Allen Lane. Summerfield, D. 2008. How scientifically valid is the knowledge base of GMH? British Medical Journal 336: 992–994. Thomas, P., P.  Bracken, P.  Cutler, R.  Hayward, R.  May, and S.  Yasmeen. 2005. Challenging the globalisation of biomedical psychiatry. Journal of Public Mental Health 4(3): 23–32.

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31 Invented Spaces of Activism: Gezi Park and Performative Practices of Citizenship Deniz Ay and Faranak Miraftab

1

Introduction

A relatively small public protest in the form of an Occupy movement against the replacement of Gezi Park with a shopping mall in the central district of Istanbul triggered wide-ranging public demonstrations in Turkey in summer 2013. The main goal of the Gezi movement was to preserve the park and halt the government’s plan to replace public green space with profit-generating private space. Although the immediate goal was to defend the park and to protect it from demolition, the movement transformed into weeks-long mass demonstrations against the government’s undemocratic practices at local and national levels.1 The protests spread all over the country, and Gezi protestors faced violence and brutality from police, who arrested and detained a total of 4900 people nationwide.2 For the first time in modern Turkey’s history, groups 1

According to the survey conducted among the Gezi Park protesters, 58.1 % of the protesters were at the site in defence of their liberties, 37.2 % were there to protest the government, and 30.3 % were there to protest the prime minister’s attitude and statements. Only 20.4 % mentioned the protection of the park as their primary reason to join the protests (KONDA 2014). Thus, a significant portion of the Gezi Park protesters declared restrictions on liberties, government interference in their personal/daily lives, and the prime minister’s authoritarian rule as their reason for joining the protests (Taştan 2013). 2 Ministry of the Interior, cited by the Human Right Foundation of Turkey (http://arsiv1.tihv.org/index. php?gezi-park-eylemleri-bilgi-notu-5-temmuz-2013)

D. Ay () • F. Miraftab () Department of Urban and Regional Planning, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 J. Grugel, D. Hammett (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of International Development, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-42724-3_31

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that had previously been hostile or suspicious of each other stood together against the authoritarian governance. In this process, Gezi Park functioned as the physical and the political space of activism where citizens collectively defended the public against the private interests of government-sponsored capital. In the end, the Occupy movement and protests in the park achieved the immediate goal: the Taksim Square project, including the proposed transformation of the Gezi Park area, was halted. The outburst of urban inhabitants over a redevelopment project in downtown Istanbul (Taksim Square and Gezi Park) has inspired numerous academic publications on contemporary political and social struggles over the urban space (Atay 2013; Kuyumlu 2013; Taştan 2013; Göle 2013; Dağtas  2013; Tuğal 2013). Here, our focus is on the innovative strategies that citizens employed in this movement, responding to the anti-democratic planning processes that govern and develop the city and claiming their right to the city and its public spaces. Along with other critical scholars of urban citizenship, we interpret citizenship as tangible practices that involve claiming and redefining substantive rights of citizens to the city—to produce, inhabit, and appropriate space they inhabit (Merrifield 2014; Harvey 2012; Mayer 2009; Miraftab 2009; Irazabal 2008; Holston and Appadurai 1999; Purcell 2003). This formulation of citizenship from below and through citizens’ practices departs radically from the conventional understanding of citizenship as an intangible collection of rights, duties, and liabilities defined under a legal framework of membership in the nation state (e.g., Marshall 1950). The Gezi movement needs to be understood as citizens’ practices of urban citizenship launched in response to neoliberal aggression and the assault on the public sphere and public spaces: a response to a form of economic, political, and spatial violence that the legal procedures and market-driven planning principles are implicated in. To combat the onslaught of neoliberal capitalism on people’s lives and livelihoods, we argue that government- and market-sanctioned channels for citizen participation are not sufficient. As seen in the Gezi case, these are invited spaces of participation created and/or sanctioned by authorities, often to contain public interest and energy. To be heard and taken into account as citizens, people in Istanbul instead moved beyond invited spaces to invent new spaces and forms of action. Spanning invited and invented spaces of participation and forms of activism, these insurgent practices of citizenship help citizens to tangibly claim and access their substantive right to the city and its public spaces (see Miraftab and Wills 2005; Miraftab 2006). Insurgent practices of citizenship are ‘counter-hegemonic in that they destabilise the normalised order of things; they transgress time and place by locating historical

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memory and transnational consciousness at the heart of their practices. They are imaginative in promoting … a different world as being … both possible and necessary’ (Miraftab 2009: 46). In this chapter, we highlight the symbolic and performative aspects of insurgent citizenship practices as creative spatial practices that help to destabilise what is considered common sense in urban development and expand the realms of possibility and imagination for (re)development of urban spaces. We define performativity after Judith Butler, as elaborated by Gillian Rose and Nicky Gregson in the following terms: ‘Performance is subsumed within and must always be connected to performativity’; performativity consists of ‘practices which produce and subvert discourse and knowledge, and which at the same time enable and discipline subjects and their performances’ (Gregson and Rose 2000: 433). Our intervention here is to use Butler’s representations of performance and performativity as the starting point for thinking about the critical potential of those tools in the struggle over urban space and urban development/redevelopment/undevelopment. These performative and innovative acts of citizenship register the discontent to a broader public by symbolic disruption and transgressions in and of public space. Pointing to three examples of invented spatial practices in Gezi movement, we highlight the performativity of these forms of action as effective insurgent practices of citizenship with a clear (although not guaranteed) urban development outcome—be it through proposition of alternative urban development scenarios or simply the defence of existing urban spaces against the onslaught of aggressive neoliberal development projects. The remainder of this chapter is organised into three sections. In the first section, we introduce the broader urban dynamics within which the Gezi movement was shaped to contest redevelopment of Taksim Square. We discuss the forces and ideas that urged rebranding Istanbul as a global city and its urban transformation through a series of redevelopment projects. This section then focuses on the Taksim Square redevelopment project, specifically the processes and forces that motivate its development and citizens’ resistance to it. We then turn to urban contestations against this redevelopment, and how people’s opposition against the redevelopment plans moved from invited spaces of participation and citizens’ input through consultation to forms of participation and input that people invented through collective and individual acts to protect their public space against private developers and real estate capital. For that, we introduce the broader Occupy movement in the park during the first two weeks of the Gezi Uprising, referred to as Taksim Gezi Commune. The next section pays special attention to the performative/symbolic practices of insurgency mobilised to protect this public space. We  elaborate on three specific examples: the Resisting Piano, Standing Man, and Table on Earth. These actions

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will be discussed as performative acts of citizenship that politicise the public space by disrupting the symbolic order of the city. We conclude the chapter by highlighting how these innovative forms of action redefine and refine citizens’ claims to their city and its public space and public sphere.

2

Broader Context of the Gezi Movement

Istanbul: Emerging Global City The background of the Gezi Uprising comprises the ongoing neoliberal urbanisation policies and practices employed in the city. Istanbul has been going through a rapid integration into transnational finance networks and markets since the early 1980s, motivated by the goal of attracting global finance (Keyder 2005). In this era of neoliberal globalisation, the ability to accommodate global financial capital within the physical space of an urban environment is seen as the key to success in attaining global competitiveness among other cities (Sassen 2001). Joint efforts are made by the transnational corporations, policy networks, and international development organisations (i.e., World Bank, European Investment Bank, and so on) co-sponsored by real estate capital and facilitated by the government of Turkey. Marketing Istanbul as an emerging global city (see Genis 2007a, 2007b) can be interpreted as a part of a broader trend in which megacities ‘of the global South become the marketable commodity, under the guidance of global development’ (Goldman 2014: 60). Enhancing the integration of Istanbul into the global economic system has been a national goal since the early 1980s, when the Turkish economy shifted from a ‘nationalist’ focus to a ‘liberal’ outlook following the right-wing military coup in 1980. Istanbul became the physical space to absorb the largescale investment in built environment based on its historical and geopolitical convenience as an intercontinental cultural, social, and economic hub. This enthusiastic effort of rebranding Istanbul by both the state and private sector is linked with the national and local urbanisation agenda shaped by the fundamentals of neoliberal urbanism (Brenner and Theodore 2002). Success in the world and national hierarchies as a global city entails capacity for innovation and marketing of the urban space through the narrative of urban entrepreneurship (Jessop 1998). Current local and national economic development policy is focused on the popular view of increasing Istanbul’s global competitiveness. Investment is largely clustered around infrastructure developments in the form of megaprojects, which fuel the national economy through increased construction. The major megaprojects of Istanbul are the Marmaray Tunnel Project, $3.7 billion (ongo-

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ing); the Third Bosphorus Bridge, $2.08 billion (ongoing); Canal Istanbul, $5.5 billion (planning stage); and the Third International Airport, $13.5 billion (planning stage) (Megaprojects of Istanbul 2014). Many of the dedicated efforts to market Istanbul as a global city are also closely related with the growing retail sector. New segments of the population (e.g., bankers, young professionals) acquire globalised consumption habits and lifestyles at increasing numbers of upscale shopping malls (Keyder 2005). According to recent retail sector reports, there are 105 active shopping malls with 3.7 million square miles of gross leasable area (GLA) and over 30 centres under construction, adding 1.3 million square miles GLA in Istanbul. Shopping centre development in Turkey is the most active market in Europe (CBRE 2013; Jones Lang LaSalle 2014), and Istanbul is one of the most active shopping centre development markets globally after booming Chinese cities (Moss 2012; Mayer 2009). The dynamics involved in the Gezi insurgency are closely related with the transformation of Istanbul from a megacity of the Global South to a global financial centre, driven by efforts of the neoliberal Islamist national government led by the Justice and Development Party (AKP) (Karaman 2013a). The political agenda set by the national government is facilitated by a coalition with the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality (IMM) and national and multinational private development companies. The insatiable demand for new spaces of consumption created by these entities explains the objectives shaping the Taksim Square redevelopment project.

Taksim Square Redevelopment Project: History, Plans, and Actors Taksim Square and its neighbourhood constitute the main leisure and touristic district in Istanbul. Taksim has been the public transportation hub for the growing metro lines and public buses. The square is home to the city’s largest luxury hotels, and the area surrounding the square is very densely populated by restaurants, bars, shops, and hotels. All these elements make the Taksim neighbourhood a critical destination for both the local population and visitors to Istanbul. Taksim Square also has historic significance for the modern Republic of Turkey and its predecessor, the Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman era stone reservoir from the mid-eighteenth century, still standing on the edge of the Taksim Square, is the oldest architectural development in the area. The area’s historical significance was enhanced by the Artillery Barracks, built in the early nineteenth century, near the present Gezi Park. It was used by military services until the collapse of the Ottoman Empire at the begin-

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ning of the twentieth century. Accompanied by the changes in the political atmosphere and the state structure, the function of the Artillery Barracks changed over time. First, the open space inside the barracks was transformed into a stadium during the early days of the modern Republic of Turkey starting from 1923. Because the area was reconsidered as part of the master plan for Istanbul by popular French urban planner and architect Henri Prost, the Artillery Barracks were demolished in 1940 and the area became a public park: Taksim Gezi Park, which ultimately became the only park area in central Istanbul for the Taksim area (see Fig. 31.1). Attempts to redevelop in Taksim Square date to 2007, when the IMM first announced the pedestrianisation project for the square (IMM 2007). At this stage, the redevelopment project involved underground tunnels for motor vehicle traffic: pedestrianisation was seen as the only way to integrate Gezi Park with the rest of the square (IMM 2007). However, in 2011, the Conservation Board (operating under the government of the AKP, in office since 2002) approved a revision in the conservation plan for Taksim Square.3 These changes, conducted in harmony between the national and local gov-

Fig. 31.1 Taksim area: Gezi Park, Taksim Square, Istiklal Avenue, and Ataturk Cultural Centre (AKM) (Source: OpenStreetMap)

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Istanbul Cultural and Natural Heritage Preservation Regional Board Decision [Istanbul II Numarali Kultur ve Tabiat Varliklarini Koruma Bolge Kurulu karari] (http://www.mimarist.org/images/pdfler/ EK_2_09Subat2011_II_Nolu_Kurul.jpg)

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ernments, resulted in the redevelopment plan for Taksim Square. This new plan included the Gezi Park area and approved reconstruction of the historic barracks where the park is located. In April 2013 (a month before the Gezi Uprising started), the prime minister announced that the barracks were to be used as a shopping mall complex (Hurriyet Daily News 2013). This public announcement, made by the head of the national government, proposed significant change to the status of the Gezi Park area and marked the start of an active political struggle. The Taksim Square redevelopment plan is twofold: the first part involves the pedestrianisation of the square by constructing the traffic tunnels proposed in 2007. The square was envisioned as a big concrete block reserved for pedestrian use and integrated with Gezi Park. The second part, introduced in 2011, involves significant alteration in the function of the Gezi Park area. The Artillery Barracks are to be reconstructed and used as a shopping mall complex that also contains luxury residences, office spaces, and a convention centre. This implied the removal of the Gezi Park public space in favour of new spaces of consumption. In other words, the Taksim Square project evolved from a pedestrianisation project into a massive redevelopment project involving Gezi Park in 4 years. Besides the public opposition following the plan revision made in 2011, several legal appeals were put forward by professional groups under the Union of Chambers of Architects and Engineers to halt the redevelopment project in defence of the public benefit. Despite the ongoing legal appeal process, construction for the pedestrianisation component started in October 2012. A series of formal attempts involving practices of formal citizenship through the invited spaces of state bureaucracy (legal appeals by organised civil society) was ineffective. Practices of substantive citizenship in the context of Taksim redevelopment were not in play until the construction involving Gezi Park started. There was no physical action taken in terms of starting the redevelopment involving Gezi Park until the end of May 2013, the start of Gezi Uprising. From a policy point of view, the planning process of the Taksim Square redevelopment project is a representative case of authoritarian, undemocratic, and exclusionary urban policymaking. In Istanbul, several urban renewal projects have been conducted and are still being planned in a similarly topdown fashion (Karaman 2013b). The Taksim Square project is an example of how policymakers make adjustments to the urban space in favour of the circuits of capital to gain competitive advantage among other cities at both national and international levels. The ‘actually existing neoliberalism’ (Brenner and Theodore 2002), represented in national and local governments in Turkey, operates through authoritarian practices when it comes to urban redevelopment (Zunino 2006). In the case of Gezi Park, the public green

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space is undervalued by the market because it does not directly contribute to profitability or economic rents generated by built environment. The political will to replace the park with a shopping mall summarises the practices in neoliberal urbanisation at a theoretic as well as a practical level.

3

Insurgent Practices of Citizenship to Protect Gezi as a Public Space

From Invited Spaces to the Invented Spaces of Gezi The Gezi movement arose from a series of actions taken by organised civil society and concerned citizens gathering around these groups. These efforts to organise turned into broader networks of solidarity representing the Taksim Gezi Commune.4 Initial acts of protests to raise public awareness of and popular support against the Taksim Square redevelopment project consisted of a series of festivals in Gezi Park.5 However, organised civil society efforts were limited by the formal channels provided by the state to its citizens to express their discontent. These efforts took the form of running public awareness campaigns and organising public meetings about the details and consequences of the redevelopment project and filing lawsuits against the plan revisions. Organised civil society’s actions started to transform when developers attempted to destroy trees in the park. This attempt was accompanied by the police state’s excessive use of tear gas against the small group of protesters at the park. Taksim Solidarity6 made a public call to occupy Gezi Park and denounced the police violence targeting peaceful protesters. This call resonated with the anger and frustration of the masses in the city of Istanbul. After the start of the occupation (with its permanent and temporary residents), Gezi Uprising moved beyond the invited channels into a range of 4

Taksim Platform was initially formed by academics in the field of urban planning, architecture, and civil engineering in 2011, and later it became part of a larger civil society platform called the Taksim Solidarity. 5 These park festivals were organised by a small group of young, progressive students of architecture called Architecture for All. There were ten Gezi Park Festivals organised between March 2012 and September 2012, with rapidly increasing popular support (Architecture for All [Herkes icin Mimarlik] 2012). Gezi Park Festivals provided the initial political platform for concerned citizens (both organised and unorganised), physical space for collective action, and ground for dialogue on defence of the public green space of Gezi. They also provided a new meaning and identity to the park. People who had not been actively using the park began to spend time there and claim ownership by ‘being there’ (Ekmekci 2014). 6 The civil society network formed with the participation of 118 groups, including trade unions, political parties, numerous progressive civil initiatives, student organisations, and professional groups of doctors, lawyers, engineers, architects, and planners (Taksim Solidarity 2013).

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invented spaces of protests to be heard. At the core of these innovative actions were performative acts that symbolically asserted protesters’ rights to the city and urban space. In the next two sections, we focus on the symbolic and performative practices of the ‘people of Gezi’. The ‘people of Gezi’ are a combination of individuals and civic organisations fed up with neoliberal aggressions on people’s life spaces; they take part in actions that are collective or non-collective (after Bayat 2010), but are always against privatisation of the city. First, we look at the Taksim Gezi Commune, which is the Occupy movement that took place within the park’s boundaries. Second, we present three examples of performative practices taking place in Gezi and the area around it: the Resisting Piano, the Standing Man, and the Table on Earth. We discuss these actions based on their constitutive principles of insurgency: they are counter-hegemonic, transgressive, and imaginative (see Miraftab 2009). We highlight how the performative aspects of these insurgent practices allowed them to spread spatially and temporally and become not only a part of collective memory but also a potent force that helped to stop the redevelopment project of Taksim. We suggest these might deserve to be seen as practices of development—development of public spaces by undoing specific elitist planning projects.

Taksim Commune Gezi Park naturally became the core location for the invented spaces of the Gezi movement for two weeks, until the riot police forced its evacuation. The decision to ‘occupy’ the park was a practical solution to avoid raids and defend the park against the construction teams ready to destroy the park. The Occupy movement in Gezi was carried on by permanent residents who lived within the park territory the whole time and temporary residents paying regular visits to the community in the park. The main demand of the protesters occupying the park was obvious: Gezi Park was to remain as a park, not to be redeveloped as a part of the Taksim Square redevelopment project. Later, Taksim Solidarity declared the full set of demands of the citizens occupying Gezi Park (Reclaim Istanbul 2013). The immediate demands involved the resignation of officials enforcing violent repression, prohibition of tear gas bombs, release of detained citizens (in the course of Gezi protests), and abolition of ‘all the meeting and demonstration bans affecting all squares and public areas’. Taksim Solidarity also declared that the content of the rising reaction involved ‘reaction to the pillaging of ecological heritage with plans and practices’, including a third

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Fig. 31.2 (a) Views from the Taksim Gezi Commune tent area (left), (b) Street view from the park with a banner at night (right)

bridge over Bosporus, a third airport in Istanbul, Canal Istanbul, demolition of Ataturk Forest Farm in Ankara, and hydroelectric power plants across the country. Also, ‘rightful demands of the victims of urban transformation’ and ‘the demand for the removal of all barriers between the citizens and their right to education and health service’ were mentioned as underlying reasons behind the public reaction under the cause of Gezi (Reclaim Istanbul 2013) (Fig. 31.2).7 The Occupy movement in Gezi Park referred to itself as the Taksim Gezi Commune from the first days of its residency in the park. People of the commune met all their needs within the park’s boundaries: eating, sleeping, cleaning, healthcare, entertainment, and so on. All these services were provided at no monetary cost; people were expected to contribute to the commune based on their capabilities. Exchange was conducted through goods and services rather than money. As a physical space, Gezi Park also accommodated a range of activities of collective character, including a public library for sharing books; public gardens; a performance stage for concerts, theatre, and ballet; provision of childcare; and spaces for group prayers and yoga groups in designated areas of the park. All sorts of material, public, and social needs were met within the park by the residents of the park in exchange for contributions from others. Hence, the settlement in the park was rightfully referred to as Taksim Gezi Commune (Fig. 31.3). Gezi Park Commune, with its permanent and temporary residents in its two-week presence, can be interpreted as a solid declaration of willingness to live collectively with diversity rather than homogenising or individualis7

The list declared by the Taksim Solidarity as the reasons giving rise to the Gezi movement is longer and broader than represented here. We mention only the ones that are immediately relevant to the framework of right to the city. The complete list can be reached at Reclaim Istanbul’s website (http://reclaimistanbul. com/2013/06/07/demands-of-occupygezi-movement/)

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Fig. 31.3 (a) Views from the Taksim Gezi Commune: community garden (left), (b) Taksim Gezi Commune public library (right)

ing any groups represented in the park. Decisions regarding daily operations within the park commune and the demands of the movement were all made through park forums, sparking the experience of direct democracy within the commune. In the diverse community of Gezi Commune, impoverished, disempowered, pious, secular, LGBTT, and working youth were among the groups represented. The political manifestation of the commune, through its invented space with its shared facilities and communal practices in the absence of state authority, represented ‘the demand to be counted, named, and recognised, and performatively staged by those “that do not count”’ (Swyngedouw 2015: xx). When the commune was destroyed by the violent police attack with water cannons and tear gas on 15 June 2013, the experience of Taksim Gezi Commune was carried on at several park forums held in other neighbourhoods. The first forum after the evacuation of Gezi Commune was held in the neighbourhood of Taksim as a replacement for the Gezi forum. This was followed by neighbourhoods in other parts of Istanbul, and within two days, neighbourhood park forums had spread across the country. In this regard, the short-lived experience of direct democracy in the Taksim Gezi Commune spread across the country. The government’s attack on Gezi triggered the decentralisation and localisation of activism at the neighbourhood in various parts of Turkey. In the context of the Gezi movement, spread of activism is an example of proliferation of insurgencies, which we interpret as a reflection of ‘a sign of the return of universal ideas of freedom, solidarity, equality and emancipation’ (Badiou 2012; Swyngedouw 2015: xx). Through the adoption of Gezi Commune’s performative acts of substantive citizenship by other neighbourhoods, the political ideals of Gezi movement intensify, contract, and localise.

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Performative Acts in Invented Spaces of Gezi Movement

The Resisting Piano On 13 June, two days before the Taksim Gezi Commune was attacked and destroyed, a German pianist, Davide Martello, started an open-air recital at the centre of Taksim Square (Fig.  31.4). Residents of Gezi Commune and people passing by the square, many wearing helmets to protect against a potential police attack, enjoyed the piano recital music for 14 hours (Guardian 2013). The event later turned into an open mic with participation of other musicians, performance artists, and audience members. The ‘guerilla pianist’ played on the following day on the same spot, at the centre of the Taksim Square. Despite its short presence, the piano surrounded by the people quickly became a powerful symbol of the transnational solidarity generated around Gezi Park. Unfortunately, the piano was later confiscated by the police following the raid on Gezi at the prime minister’s order. Following the detention of the piano, the incident of musical occupation in the Taksim Square received even greater popular support. Shortly after the confiscation, people started to refer to it as the ‘resisting piano’ of Gezi.

Fig. 31.4 Taksim Square and the ‘Resisting Piano’ recital

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The piano recital on the square was the first incident of a transgressive act that extended the performative act of citizenship in Gezi beyond the park’s boundaries. The piano performance on Taksim Square should be considered as a part of Gezi politics that ‘emerges where it is not supposed to be’ (Swyngedouw 2015: xx). The performativity of the urban insurgent practices is precisely their transgression of ‘symbolic order’. They are transgressive because their occurrences disrupt the symbolic order and the ‘symbolic framing’ (Swyngedouw 2015: xx). Resisting piano of Gezi is a case of place-based tactic that symbolically and performatively resists the redevelopment in Taksim because it reinvents the square and gives it a new meaning through its imaginative use of public space. It also spurs the transnational networks of solidarity temporally and spatially. The ‘guerilla pianist’ of Gezi returned to Turkey in May 2014 to perform in memory of the Soma mining massacre,8 again using the public space in different cities in Turkey, including the town of Soma and Taksim Square. Performative acts of citizenship in imaginative forms find a place in the collective memory of solidarity—temporally, spatially, and transnationally. This individual action, taken by a German pianist to express solidarity with the ideals of Gezi, shows the global frustration with authoritarian neoliberal market-based politics. These performative acts of political contestations are simultaneous and imaginative, but these characteristics do not imply transiency, as seen in the case of the resisting piano.

Standing Man On 18 June 2013, a young man9 started an unorthodox form of protest: standing still (Fig.  31.5). He stood still for eight consecutive hours on Taksim Square facing the Ataturk Cultural Centre (AKM),10 which bore the wall-sized image of Ataturk, the father of the nation and its modern state in Turkey, with the national flags of the country on each side. The act 8

The Soma mining massacre took place on 13 May 2014, in western Turkey. It cost over 300 lives of mining workers. It is considered a massacre because of neoliberal labour policies that undervalue the security of the working class for the sake of higher corporate profits. The broader issue is Turkey’s faulty record of worker security (Sandal 2014). 9 Erdem Gunduz, a performance artist based in Istanbul. 10 AKM building is also a part of the dispute over the Taksim Square redevelopment. It is home to multiple stages for performance arts, concert halls, and galleries. Besides its functional value, it has great symbolic value for Istanbul since it is associated with the modernisation project led by Ataturk. Prime Minister Erdogan also declared his plans for demolishing AKM and replacing it with a ‘baroque’ opera house.

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Fig. 31.5 Standing men and women. People joining the Standing Man in Taksim Square, facing the Ataturk Cultural Centre (AKM) (Photo Credit: Yagiz Karahan)

of standing while facing these figures provoked a collective memory of the foundations of modern Turkey that resonated with many among the opposition to the national government. In just the first hour, hundreds of people joined the Standing Man. In a few hours, the news about the Standing Man of Taksim spread across the country through social media, and copycat protests cropped up all over the country in solidarity with the man, who literally stood up for the ideals of the Gezi movement. The public sphere, thus, became the ‘space of appearance’ for the people of Gezi (see Butler and Athanasiou 2013). Standing Man challenged the police state’s codes for what constitutes acts of resistance, and bewildered police forces on how to handle the supposedly passive protests of masses ‘just standing’. The bodily presence of people in the

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public domain, as Butler and Athanasiou also assert, generates a certain performative force through the ‘We are here’ message that should also be reread as ‘We are still here’ despite the dedicated efforts of dispossession and oppression (2013: 196). Here, ‘the collective assembling of bodies is an exercise of the popular will, and a way of asserting, in bodily form, one of the most basic presuppositions of democracy, namely … of social and political existence’ (196). When urban citizens are excluded from urban development projects as disposable populations deprived of their basic rights of existence and dignified lives and livelihoods in cities, then surely the collective assemblies of their bodies in one place is not only an expression of rage but also refusal to be disposed of—‘persisting, insisting on their continuing and collective “thereness”’, as Butler and Athanasiou (2013: 197) articulate. Clearly, the political effectiveness of a form of protest lies in the meaning it produces in a specific context (see Scott 1985). The Standing Man protest became an innovative act of citizenship practice precisely because of the political, spatial, and historical context in which it took place.

Table on Earth On 9 July 2013, after more than a month had passed since the start of Gezi movement, people of Gezi gathered around Table on Earth. It was the first day of Ramadan, and many expected the nature of Ramadan would inevitably end the Gezi Park protests. Instead, people of Gezi reinvented the space of the most popular street in Istanbul (Istiklal), blending the ideals of the Gezi movement and the rituals of Ramadan. Following the public call made jointly by the two pious groups in Gezi Commune (Anti-capitalist Muslims and Revolutionary Muslims), people occupied the light railroad passing across Istiklal Avenue to break their fast. The function of the railroad was reinterpreted as a form of a dinner table, hosting hundreds of people sharing their food with one another. Gathered around the Table on Earth, as they named it, some were breaking their fast while others were only there to show their solidarity with the pious groups. This innovative act of using the tramway probably formed the longest and most diverse dinner tables ever set, in the middle of the most vibrant neighbourhood of the city and surrounded by high-end luxury restaurants. Gezi’s collectively formed dining table is a case in which people appropriated the (social) space and reproduced their own (social) space (see Lefebvre 1991). People sitting along the Table on Earth occupied the tramway and disrupted the urban flow on Istiklal Avenue, which is a key location for capital

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flows in the city of Istanbul. By disrupting business as usual, people of Gezi created an alternative use for the space. This practice of Table on Earth is a complex social construction based on collectively shared meanings and values. Thus, the significance of the social space created with the appropriation of the street is socially produced. Producing new spaces for resistance and solidarity, people claim and practice their right to the city, a ‘right to change [them] selves by changing the city’; this ‘transformation inevitably depends upon the exercise of a collective power to reshape the process of urbanization’ (Harvey 2008: 23) (Fig. 31.6). Like other innovative acts of citizenship practices of Gezi, the reinvented space of the railroad on Istiklal Avenue persists in the collective public memory. In May 2014, in the aftermath of the mining disaster in Soma, thousands gathered to protest and denounce the negligence of the mining company and the government’s misconduct leading to the killings of the workers. The physical space of the light railroad, this time in the Kadikoy neighbourhood, was reinvented as thousands gathered for mourning the workers. Occupying the road makes a statement about halting the flow of things considered as ordinary in the city, such as light rail traffic. It is in essence shaped collectively and based on the idea of being equal on the very same platform, sharing and having access to the same goods under the same conditions—equally. This symbolic act can also be seen as an effort to experience the idea of real democracy; as Rancière (1999) puts it, it begins from the assumption of equality (Purcell 2015). In that respect, the insurgent practices of Gezi in general and Table on Earth specifically can be interpreted as a ‘path of democracy’ in which equality is a starting point.

5

Conclusion

Taking the recent Occupy movement in Istanbul’s Taksim Gezi Park as a point of observation, we highlight specific spatial practices and place-based tactics and strategies that activists use to resist exclusionary and aggressively market-based urban development projects in the contemporary neoliberal city. Inhabitants of Istanbul do have the legal right to live in Istanbul, but the real estate capital interests, through the state and private developers, uproot them from the city by eradicating the public spaces they use. When sanctioned channels for citizen participation in decisions that matter to them ignore their interests and rights to inhabit this city and enjoy its public spaces, people fight back, inventing their own spaces and forms of participation to assert their right to

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Fig. 31.6 (a) Table on Earth, Istiklal Avenue, July 2013 (Photo Credit: Yagiz Karahan), (b) Soma Protests, Kadikoy, May 2014 (Photo Credit: Sendika.org)

urban spaces. Through invented spaces and forms of participation, they can ultimately assert their kind of urban development—one that is not elitist and does not exclude them from urban public space. Studying the creative practices in urban contestations around Gezi Park redevelopment, we stress that beyond the invited spaces of participation—those that are routinised, provisioned, and recognised through the status quo channels—we need to take seriously the power of invented spaces of activism—those imagined outside the conventional frameworks of political participation or contestation. Innovative acts of citizenship performed in public space, we show, disrupt the ‘urban business as usual’ in symbolic and pragmatic terms to assert citizens’ right to the city and bring counter-development against exclusionary urban development projects and processes. Through creative practices by which citizens express, communicate, symbolise, and perform their right to exist in the city, inhabitants of Istanbul assert their right to the city outside the formal legal process. The performative acts of protest we document in the case of the Gezi movement provide empirical evidence about the power of people to develop a public sphere and public space from below. When the public space of Gezi Park was threatened by the forces of neoliberal dispossession and expropriation, people

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were able to reclaim a public square and its use against the state and private developers’ interest. These were acts performed individually and collectively to expand the uses of the very urban space that capital aims to limit to those with greater economic resources—excluding the public in favour of enhancing private benefits. We interpret these insurgent acts as practices of development— unorthodox and innovative, yet concrete in their spatial outcome and gain.

References Architecture for all [Herkes Icin Mimarlik]. 2012. http://herkesicinmimarlik.org/ portfolio/gezi-parki/. Date accessed 31 Aug 2014. Atay, T. 2013. The clash of “nations” in Turkey: Reflections on the Gezi Park incident. Insight Turkey 15(3): 39–44. Badiou, A. 2012. The rebirth of history: Times of riots and uprisings. London: Verso. Bayat, A. 2010. Life as politics. How ordinary people change the Middle East. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Brenner, N., and N. Theodore. 2002. Cities and the geographies of “actually existing neoliberalism”. Antipode 34(3): 349–379. Butler, J., and A. Athanasiou. 2013. Dispossession: The performative in the political. John Wiley & Sons. CBRE. 2013. European shopping centre development grows 50% in 2013. http://www. cbre.co.uk/uk_en/news_events/news_detail?p_id=15351&title=European_ Shopping_Centre_Development_Grows_50_In_2013. Date accessed 29 Aug 2014. Dağtas, S. 2013. The politics of humor and humor as politics during Turkey’s Gezi Park protests. Fieldsights - Hot Spots, Cultural Anthropology Online. http://www. culanth.org/fieldsights/397-the-politics-of-humor-and-humor-as-politics-duringturkey-s-gezi-park-protests Ekmekci, O. 2014. Contesting neo-liberal urbanism in Istanbul: The case of Taksim Square and beyond. Claiming the City Civil Society Mobilisation by the Urban Poor 139. Genis, S. 2007a. Globalization of cities : Towards conceptualizing a new politics of place-making in a transnational era. University of Gaziantep Journal of Social Sciences 6(1): 59–77. Genis, S. 2007b. Producing elite localities: The rise of gated communities in Istanbul. Urban Studies 44: 771–798. Goldman, M. 2014. Development and the city. In Cities of the global south reader, ed. F. Miraftab and N. Kudva. Routledge urban reader series. Göle, N. 2013. Gezi-Anatomy of a public square movement. Insight Turkey 15(3): 7–14. Gregson, N., and G. Rose. 2000. Taking Butler elsewhere: Performativities, spatialities and subjectivities. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 1: 433–452.

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Guardian. 2013. Turkish police confiscate piano used to serenade Taksim Square protestors. http://www.theguardian.com/music/2013/jun/17/turkish-police-pianotaksim-square-protesters. Date accessed 1 Oct 2014. Harvey, D. 2008. The right to the city. New Left Review 53, September–October 2008. Harvey, D. 2012. Rebel cities: from the right to the city to the urban revolution (Verso Books). Holston, J., and A. Appadurai. 1999. Cities and citizenship’. In Cities and citizenship, ed. J. Holston, 1–19. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Hurriyet Daily News. 2013. Turkish prime minister promises mall, residence in heart of Istanbul. http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/turkish-prime-minister-promisesmall-residence-in-heart-ofistanbul.aspx?pageID=238&nID=45859&NewsCa tID=341. Date accessed 31 Aug 2014. IMM. 2007. Taksim Square is coming to stage [Taksim Meydani meydana cikiyor]. Metropolitan Municipality [Istanbul Buyuksehir Belediyesi] http://www.ibb.gov. tr/tr-TR/Haberler/Pages/Haber.aspx?NewsID=14903. Date accessed 31 Aug 2014. Irazabal, C. 2008. Citizenship, democracy and public space in Latin America. In Ordinary places/extraordinary events: Citizenship, democracy and public space in Latin America, ed. C. Irazabal, 11–34. New York: Routledge. Jessop, B. 1998. The narrative of enterprise and the enterprise of narrative: place marketing and the entrepreneurial city. The Entrepreneurial City: Geographies of Politics, Regime and Representation, 77–99. Jones Lang LaSalle. 2014. Turkey real estate market report February 2014 [Turkiye Gayrimenkul Pazari Gorunumu Subat 2014]. http://www.jll.com/turkey/tr-tr/ Research/TGP_Gorunumu2014.pdf Karaman, O. 2013a. Urban neoliberalism with Islamic characteristics. Urban Studies 51: 865–867. Karaman, O. 2013b. Urban renewal in Istanbul: Reconfigured spaces, robotic lives. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 37(2): 715–733. Keyder, C. 2005. Globalization and social exclusion in Istanbul’. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 29(March): 124–135. KONDA. 2014. Gezi report: Public perception of the “Gezi protests” Who were the people at Gezi Park? June 2014. http://www.konda.com.tr/en/raporlar/KONDA_ Gezi_Report.pdf. Date accessed 2 Oct 2014. Kuymulu, M.B. 2013. Reclaiming the right to the city: Reflections on the urban uprisings in Turkey. City 17(3): 274–278. Lefebvre, H. 1991. The production of space, vol. 142. Oxford: Blackwell. Marshall, T.H. 1950. Citizenship and social class and other essays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mayer, M. 2009. The “right to the city” in the context of shifting mottos of urban social movements. City 13(2–3): 362–374. Megaprojects of Istanbul [Istanbul’un Megaprojeleri]. http://www.megaprojeleristanbul.com. Date accessed 29 Aug 2014.

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Merrifield, A. 2014. The new urban question. London: Pluto Press. Miraftab, F. 2006. Feminist praxis, citizenship and informal politics: Reflections on South Africa’s anti-eviction campaign. International Feminist Journal of Politics 8(2): 194–218. Miraftab, F. 2009. Insurgent planning: Situating radical planning in the global south. Planning Theory 8(1): 32–50. Miraftab, F., and S.  Wills. 2005. Insurgency and spaces of active citizenship: The story of the western cape anti-eviction campaign in South Africa. Journal of Planning Education and Research 25(2): 200–217. Moss, N. 2012. Global viewpoint: Shopping centre development - The most active global cities. CBRE. http://www.cbre.com/AssetLibrary/Global%20Shopping%20 Centre%20Development%20-%20Final.pdf. Date accessed 29 Aug 2014. Purcell, M. 2003. Citizenship and the right to the global city: Reimagining the capitalist world order. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 27(3): 564–590. Purcell. 2015. Equality at the beginning: Rancière and democracy today. In Cities and inequalities in a global and neoliberal world, ed. F. Miraftab, D. Wilson, and K. Salo. New York: Routledge. Rancière, J., 1999. Disagreement. University of Minnesota Press: Mineapolis. Reclaim Istanbul. 2013. http://reclaimistanbul.com/2013/06/07/demands-ofoccupygezi-movement/. Date accessed 31 Aug 2014. Sandal, N. 2014. No death is ordinary: Soma work Massacre in Turkey. Huffington Post. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nukhet-a-sandal/no-death-is-ordinary-soma_ b_5326688.html. Date accessed 31 Aug 2014. Sassen, S. (2001). The global city. Princeton, NJ: Princeton, University Press. Scott, J. 1985. Weapons of the weak - Everyday forms of peasant resistance. New Haven: Yale University Press. Swyngedouw, E. (2015). “Urban Insurgencies and the Re-POliticization of the Unequal City” in F. Miraftab, D. Taksim solidarity [Taksim Dayanisma]. 2013. http://taksimdayanisma.org/bilesenler. Date accessed 31 Aug 2014. Taştan, C. 2013. The Gezi Park protests in Turkey: A qualitative field research. Insight Turkey 15(3): 27–38. Tuğal, C. 2013. “R The Gezi revolt in global perspective esistance everywhere”: The Gezi revolt in global perspective. New Perspectives on Turkey 49: 157–172. Wilson and K. Salo Cities and Inequalities in a GLobal and Neoliberal World. New York: Routledge. Zunino, H.M. 2006. Power relations in urban decision-making: Neo-liberalism, “techno-politicians” and authoritarian redevelopment in Santiago, Chile. Urban Studies 43(10): 1825–1846.

Part VII Science, Technology and Innovation

32 New Social Media Practices: Potential for Development, Democracy, and Anti-democratic Practices Matthew Adeiza and Philip N. Howard

1

Introduction

Social media have become a huge part of discourses on the political economy of development in sub-Saharan Africa and elsewhere around the world, but the impact is difficult to evaluate (Pruett and Deane 2009). Depending on the country, social media are used for civic engagement, fighting corruption, following important news stories, and staying engaged with politics when national figures disappoint (Mpofu 2013; Mudhai et al. 2009). This process has been sped up by the phenomenal spread of internet and mobile phone use in Africa and much of the developing world over the past decade. Internet use in urban areas is over 50 % in many African countries, and in several others, national penetration rates are over 25 %. The penetration of mobile phones stands at 63 % on the subcontinent (Sanou 2013). Though many Africans access internet via mobile, they increasingly use devices with broadband capability (Smith 2014). We focus our analysis specifically on the situation in sub-Saharan Africa in order to show how a region with some of the most limited socio-economic infrastructure in the world has adopted and utilised social media for democratic and economic development. While we are aware of various definitions and arguments over the meaning and application of ‘development’ as

M. Adeiza ( ) • P.N. Howard Department of Communication, University of Washington in Seattle, USA © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 J. Grugel, D. Hammett (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of International Development, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-42724-3_32

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a concept (Lipset 1959; Huntington 2006; Easterly 2006), we use it here to mean an improvement in the general well-being of people in a particular society. In this regard, development is not limited to such macro measurements as GDP and GDP per capita, it also encompasses micro issues like people’s ready access to finance, their ability to easily access information about healthcare, and other daily needs. We also use social media to mean interactive platforms beyond popular platforms like Facebook and Twitter. In the following sections, we discuss two social platforms that have become embedded in experiences of financial transactions and elections—Ushahidi and MPesa. Though both were developed in Kenya, they have taken a life of their own, and have become widely used across Africa and around the world. The next section demonstrates how the mapping of Kibera, a huge slum in Kenya, drew attention to its problems and encouraged national attention. We then turn to Nigeria where social media-aided protests in 2012 have bolstered a feeling of efficacy among young people that is keeping them engaged with the country’s democratic processes. We acknowledge from examples of social media-fuelled violence in post-election violence in Kenya and Ethiopian government’s monitoring of its citizens that serious challenges exist. The examples illustrate the various ways information and communication technologies, especially social media, have become a part of life in different countries with varied outcomes as the political systems in those countries.

2

Platforms for Democracy and Development

A few platforms have come to stand out as commonly used tools for democracy promotion, and in some cases, violence prevention. In the heat of the December 2007 post-election violence in Kenya, a group of developers and activists sought ways of visually documenting incidents of violence in the country. The initiative was started by Kenyan activist blogger, Ory Okolloh, who, in a 3 January 2008 post on her blog, Kenyan Pundit, invited ‘techies’ to join her in developing something more meaningful than Google Earth to crowdsource reports on the violence. She noted that ‘For the reconciliation process to occur at the local level the truth of what happened will first have to come out’ (Okolloh 2008). In the next few days, Ushahidi software was developed by a collaboration of local developers and bloggers including Ory Okolloh, Erik Hersman, David Kobia, and Juliana Rotich. It proved very useful for both international observers and local actors as people submitted incidents in their neighbourhoods. The software has since evolved to include complex capabilities for integrating social media submissions, SMS

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text messages, online posts, which are then presented in a timeline or map view. The utility of the software has encouraged its use in different parts of the world for election monitoring, natural disaster response coordination, and crisis management (Jeffery 2011). Another useful social tool besides Ushahidi is FrontlineSMS, an open source platform, developed by Ken Banks, a mobile anthropologist. He wanted to leverage on ‘the ubiquity of mobile phones and familiarity of text messaging’ (FrontlineSMS 2011) to allow for group communication by rural dwellers, aid workers, and civil society activists to easily and effectively communicate even where internet is minimal or nonexistent. This open source software has been used for election and disaster management in several countries (Sharath Srinivasan 2014). A major innovation of the software is that it requires minimal internet use once downloaded and set up, and it enables civil society activists to reach target populations via SMS that people are already familiar with. The learning curve needed to use it is very small compared to many other available tools. More recently, FrontlineSMS has been transformed into a new technology company, Social Impact Lab. On the economic front, MPesa is probably the most widely known tool developed for financial transaction in Africa in the past decade. Mobile phone operator Vodafone launched MPesa in March 2007 for its affiliate Safaricom in Kenya. MPesa’s original goal was to enable people pay microfinance loans by phone, which reduced the cost of transaction and the interest rate. Within 1 year of launch, two million people had signed up, rising to 17 million as of February 2013. It now handles over 25 % of Kenya’s GNP (Mas and Radcliffe 2010; Safaricom 2013; The Economist 2013). It has expanded its service offerings to include school fees, bill and rent payments, and a savings and withdrawal service. People pay to one of Safaricom’s over 40,000 agents in the country and can withdraw or send money from any agent in any part of the country once credit balance has been confirmed by the agent. MPesa has a higher coverage of Kenyans than the mainstream banking financial sector, a fact underscoring its importance to the Kenyan economy. It enables people in rural communities with no access to mainstream financial services to easily conduct financial transactions. For those in urban centres, it has become easy to send money to relatives in different parts of the country without having to be physically present or go through the hassles of opening an account. MPesa’s success has been attributed to trust in Safaricom as a brand even though people had limited trust in the local agents (Morawczynski and Miscione 2008), a latent financial need not met by the local banking industry (Hughes and Lonie 2007), and the ease of transaction (Mas and Morawczynski 2009).

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Its success has led to mobile operators in other countries in Africa, Asia, and Eastern Europe experimenting with it as a model to serve poor people and alleviate poverty. Easy financial transactions free people’s time and other resources, which can improve productivity: users are reported to experience an income increase of 5–30 % (Gilpin 2014). Newer start-ups built around the mobile transaction affordances that MPesa enables have continued to spring up in Kenya, with the potential to improve general quality of life in the country (The Economist 2012). These cases show that information and communication technology (ICT) tools have become a part of life in many African countries. While they are not necessarily revolutionary (Ling and Horst 2011), they have become go-to tools that people use when challenges arise, and there are indications that they may be improving the quality of life by making previously cumbersome processes easy and accessible to ordinary citizens. Even though some of these tools are low tech compared to similar products in the developed world, they have proved useful for the specific needs of some people in sub-Saharan Africa, and resolve problems that people otherwise find difficult to tackle. Moreover, people make personal sacrifices to gain access to the technology needed to participate in the new technological arrangements. iHUB research found that people would forgo meat if it would save enough funds to allow them to make a call or to send a text message that might eventually result in some economic return (Howard 2013). Some scholars continue to debate the role these tools play in economic and democratic development, especially in poor developing countries. Some argue that these tools potentially improve people’s quality of life (Munyua and Adera 2009), others contend that there has been no measurable impact in many countries (Bollou and Ngwenyama 2008), while others note that digital divide between and within countries remains a major barrier to possible benefits (Polikanov and Abramova 2003). However, a recent MacKinsey report shows that the ‘African middle class’ is on the rise and is increasingly using digital tools in high numbers (Hattingh et al. 2012). There is no clear indication yet whether people are using ICT tools because they are better off or they are better off because they use the tools. Whatever the case, what is clear is that people are better off in many African countries compared to 20 years, and more open elections have been held in several countries recently compared to the first decade following the spread of Third Wave of democracy (Huntington 1991) to the continent in the early 1990s. We argue that rather focusing on the impact of these technologies, it is more useful to explore how people are actually using them for their daily needs. Such exploration would lead scholars to find, describe, and overtime explain the evolving relationship between people in sub-Saharan Africa and the social digital tools they use.

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In the following sections, we examine some examples that best illustrate how these processes have played out in the past decade. While there is no singular causal mechanism at work, we argue that in the context of sub-Saharan Africa, the current trends are largely positive. With the rising high rate of digital media penetration in many countries, it is conceivable that more and more people will involve digital media—especially mobile phones—in their cultural consumption, political decisions, and economic choices. The examples are discussed under the role social media play in development, democracy, and anti-democratic practices on the continent. We conclude by speculating on the future of social media relationship with the various processes.

3

Social Media and Development

There are several good examples of how social media can be used, especially through crowdsourcing or crowdseeding, to improve the quality of life in a community. The Map Kibera project in Nairobi, Kenya, is one example of how this process helped a marginalised community figure out its strengths and understand its needs. The act of citizen mapping has made invisible communities visible, and demonstrates how the internet of things is helping people bring stability to one of the most marginalised places in the world. Kibera is a place where hundreds of thousands of people live. But for decades it has been politically invisible because no public map recognised the boundaries of the community, and national leaders did not pay much attention to its needs. Some people call it Africa’s largest slum, while many call it home. This was not the first time a slum had been mapped by local people (Joshi et al. 2002) yet what is unique about Kibera is the extensive use of new digital tools. Estimates vary about how many people actually live there, from 170,000 to upwards of a million (Ekdale 2010). Whatever the real number is, it is a large area of land that was a blank spot on the map until 2009. In fact, many government maps actually identify Kibera as a forest, not because they did not have a map of the area but because they decided to hide its existence (Hagen 2011). Even Google Maps reveals few details for one of the most crowded and impoverished slums on the planet. Nairobi has some 200 slums, few of which are on maps. When the mapping project began, it was essentially invisible to people without direct personal knowledge of the place. Gathering a group of volunteer ‘trackers’, equipped with some basic consumer electronics, including cheap GPS devices and mobile phones, the project’s organisers ‘found’ Kibera.

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They found 200 schools and 35 pharmacies. They found hip bars with latenight dancing, and they found quiet corners where people go to die. They geotagged the sewers, most of which are open, and created layers of data. People from the community were involved in designing the online interface, and doing the data collection. Four very basic needs emerged: they needed more toilets; the bad roads were causing too many accidents; children had no playgrounds; the sewer lines were broken. The government saw Kibera as a forest. But the maps demonstrate that it is a community, and organising information in an actionable format empowered citizens to act. Focusing on priorities made it easier to act. Within a few weeks, journalists were covering these problems, small groups of neighbours were working on specific issues, and politicians were alerted. Not only did the community leaders put Kibera on the map but they also helped the community to find itself. Social media lowered the cost of collaboration to a point where resource-constrained actors—like Kibera’s inhabitants—could agree to solve their problems. Not everybody was happy about this, of course. Elders and district officers would ask for bribes. The police did not like having an organised way of tracking community life that was independent of their authority. Conflicts would come, especially at election time, when the police claimed that crime was under control. One of the lessons of these mapping projects is that they never just produce maps. Social media make such maps organic, dependent on their contributors for life and able to expose trends and problems that contributors do not even anticipate. They now have great maps of the problems. The project organisers have clearly mapped the contours of the community and the needs of its people. The next challenge is linking the people in need to the people who can help. When we asked him about the impact of the project, the founder argued that, ‘It’s not about the dots on the map,’ he said. ‘It’s about the social capital and ties that come because of the mapping and after the mapping’ (Howard 2015: 106). In other words, the map was the deliverable. But the volunteer network, civic awareness, and political literacy were the outcome. Not only did the map make Kibera visible on the national map, it also created an awareness among dwellers about concrete needs they could continue to address; it had turned formerly detached dwellers into citizen reporters for the various media outlets created to tell the story behind the map (Kovačič and Lundine 2013). The team behind the map has been invited to, and has engaged in, mapping at least two other slums around Nairobi—Mathare and Mukuru, and in a few other countries. Projects like this never really end, they evolve because software gets repurposed. People build skills and take those skills to new projects. Some poor

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districts of the world’s megacities become what Bob Neuwirth calls ‘marquee slums’ (Neuwirth 2005): they attract all the big non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and charity projects. These projects go a long way towards helping people generate information about themselves. This way, digital media not only bypasses the state but also bypasses Western NGOs. While a few social media projects have captured the attention of policymakers and civil society leaders interested in development issues, many projects fail or do not work as planned. Most of the Congo is unpoliced, and the government cannot track the movement of local militias. In the absence of the institutions, the Voix de Kivus network documents sexual assaults, reports on the kidnapping of child soldiers, and monitors local conflicts (van der Windt 2013). The United Nations Organization for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, local NGOs, philanthropists, and the US Agency for International Development study the reports. In this case, the organisers admit that there is little evidence of a governance system taking root. Reports of conflict are now credibly sourced and appear in real time, but nobody acts on the knowledge. In order to have serious impact, most social media projects need to work in concert with governments (Howard 2014). These two cases show the two unique ways different communities use social media tools for development purposes and the varied outcomes of the initiatives. We believe that while these processes might not have transformed the communities in dramatic ways often portrayed in the media, they possess the potential for long-term impact on people-centred, grassroots initiated projects. A common critique of development programmes in sub-Saharan Africa in the 1990s is that they were mainly top-down initiatives from foreign ‘experts’ who had no real understanding of what could actually work in the specific context of local communities. Social media improve the level of contact between development programme officers and communities they hope to help. In some cases, having these good communication channels open has helped win over local stakeholders and powerbrokers.

4

Social Media and Democracy

Initiatives on civic journalism, election monitoring, and political participation are on the rise across the sub-Saharan Africa. While projects have sprung up in many countries, mobilisation for collective action and election monitoring have become two important ways social media are contributing to deepening democracy. Though no event on the scale of the Arab Spring has been recorded on the subcontinent, citizens are increasingly bold in using

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social media to challenge their governments and demand a more accountable stewardship from leaders. One good example of how this is playing out is the Occupy Nigeria Movement of January 2012. It began in early January after government suddenly removed subsidy on petrol on New Year’s Day. For over a year, the price of fuel was around $0.40 per litre, and it quickly rose to $0.87 per litre after government announced removal of subsidies. This led to concomitant rises in the prices of goods and services, leaving many people stranded in their villages as they could not afford the cost of transport fares back to their places of residence in the cities. Many Nigerians travel to their villagers during Christmas break to celebrate with extended family members who would have come from different parts of the country for the same purpose. As the pain of the sudden rise in the cost of living sank in, Nigerians took to the streets to protest and call for a reversal, with the activists organising online around the hashtag #OccupyNigeria. The Movement’s name was appropriated from the global Occupy Movement that sought to question global economic injustices, which keeps the door of wealth closed against 99 % of humanity. Over the next 2 weeks, major cities across the country were grounded to a halt, and many speculated that a revolution was in the making. With labour unions led by the Nigeria Labour Congress joining the protests on 9 January 2012, and other unions threatening to join, the government backtracked, restoring partial subsidy and bringing the price down to $0.60 cents a litre (Ezeamalu and Emmanuel 2013). The protests by many accounts were the biggest in the country in 20 years, and they were largely coordinated via social media (Ogunlesi 2012). As the protests took off spontaneously across the country, some youth groups became actively involved, one of the most prominent being Lagos-based youth coalition ‘Enough is Enough’. The groups called on Nigerian youth to express their anger and force the government to account for the proceeds from petroleum dollars the country had earned for the past decades. Times and dates of protest meetings were announced on Twitter and Facebook, and the publicity generated online won the sympathy of the rest of the world, drawing support protests in major cities around the world including New York, London, and Brussels. Importantly, cases of police mistreatment were also documented on mobile phones and shared widely on social media, which may have deterred some overzealous security forces from harming more protesters. A movement born over a specific issue of fuel subsidies became concerned with a larger issue of government waste of oil income over decades. They questioned why fuel would be so expensive when Nigeria produces so much petroleum. The immediate outcome of the protests was the partial restoration

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of fuel subsidy and setting up of a series of probe committees that summited various recommendations that were never implemented. Nigeria’s anti-corruption agency, the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, commenced the prosecution of a number of oil marketers that were identified as having illegally benefited from the waste in fuel subsidy administration. None of the cases was concluded or anyone convicted but it was significant that some untouchables were even publicly identified in the first place. The protests also created new social networks among activists from different parts of the country who probably never thought of working together before. The new networks may have allowed better exchanges of ideas between youth from the north and south of the country who normally do not have many opportunities for communication. Such connections could potentially create the synergy to challenge politicians who depend on regional divides to continue looting the country while avoiding any form of accountability. The government became more aware of online discussions of its activities and sought ways of countering the growing threat of bloggers and activists who regularly exposed wrongdoing. On two occasions, the government tried to introduce laws to ‘regulate’ social media or install equipment to monitor people online. In both cases, outcry from online campaigns terminated the plans. Perhaps the most important effect of the protests is that people became more confident about their ability to influence government—or external political efficacy—which may explain why they quickly took to Twitter to force government to do more to rescue over 300 girls who were kidnapped in the north of Nigeria in March 2014. The campaign #BringBackOurGirls became a global phenomenon, drawing support from such figures as US President and First Lady Barack and Michelle Obama, British Prime Minister David Cameron, among others (Rastello 2014). Political efficacy has a long history of scholarship (Clarke and Acock 1989; Pollock III 1983) though it is inconclusive if more efficacy leads to engagement with government or vice versa. Some recent digital media research on efficacy do not point to strong causal relationships (Kenski and Stroud 2006). However, in interviews1 many youth groups including Enough is Enough and Youth Initiative for Advocacy, Growth, and Advancement (YIAGA) who participated in the #OccupyNigeria and #BringBackOurGirls movements expressed strong beliefs in their ability to influence government. While they were careful to point that social media have limitations, most interviewees believed that social media present them new platforms to engage and influence governance. Any keen observer of Nigerian politics would 1

The interviews were conducted by one of the authors in Lagos and Abuja in April 2012 and September 2014.

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have seen this confidence playing out in the build-up to the 2015 general elections—many of the activists have adopted and are actively campaigning for candidates, and the level of youth engagement in the election is one of the highest the country has ever witnessed. While engagement is not equal to automatic power, the process of engagement in itself provides a powerful learning experience for young people that could potentially yield positive effects in the near future. People are not only interested in protesting bad governance. They want to influence who gets elected in the first place, and want the process of electing leaders to be transparent, free, and fair. Elections are important because they determine who occupies what positions, which invariably affects what policies get made and implemented. Scholars and activists have devoted time and efforts to developing tools to make elections in sub-Saharan Africa free and fair (Marchant 2013). One innovation currently being tried in elections across different countries is the Social Media Tracking Center (SMTC). The SMTC was first launched to monitor the 2011 general elections in Nigeria with the collaboration of Nigerian civil society organisations, US universities, and the Yar’Adua Foundation in Abuja. Since being used in the Nigerian elections, similar centres have been deployed in Liberia and Ghana for elections in those countries. In Ghana’s 2012 election, with the help of international partners and under the coordination of the African Elections Project, the SMTC was deployed to monitor the election and offer feedback to relevant stakeholders like the Election Commission and security force to promptly deal with cases reported by citizens. The African Elections Project used three teams to identify and monitor several keywords associated with the election, using the Aggie social media monitoring software developed at Georgia Tech. Aggie helped the team identify and verify incidents of election irregularities, security breaches, or other incidents of importance, which were then transmitted to relevant stakeholders in the police, election observers, media, and election commission for appropriate action. The SMTC received over 250,000 reports and verified over 350 incidents. The real-time nature of the reports may have helped the stakeholders involved deal with the issues before they got out of control (AEP Editor 2012; Amartey-Tagoe 2012; Macha 2012). The software has now been deployed in Nigeria, Liberia, Ghana, and South Africa, and there are plans to use it in elections in other sub-Saharan countries in the near future. While it does not completely solve the problems associated with organising elections in the subregion, it does provide a new opportunity for citizen involvement in improving the quality of

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elections in their countries, and could potentially transform the way elections are conducted, bearing in mind that mobile phone use is very high in the region. The SMTC project leader has already indicated that his team are working on overhauling the software to make it more robust for future elections (Cutcher 2013). These two cases illustrate social media’s interaction with political processes in sub-Saharan Africa. Other cases abound of ordinary citizens using these tools, especially SMS, to expose wrongdoing in creative ways that ultimately improve the democratic experience or open new spaces for discussion about government practices. While these efforts may not have completely transformed democracy, they are necessary first steps with potential multiplying effects in the evolving relationships between state and citizens, as many of these countries are still young democracies.

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Social Media and Anti-democratic Practices

Though social media have been used to promote democracy, there are instances where their affordances of anonymity and instantaneous two-way communication have been deployed to undemocratic effects by political actors. Two patterns are particularly observable in many countries: rumour-mongering to incite violence and/or ethnic hatred, and direct government monitoring and intervention to undermine dissenting voices. One example that stands out in the past decade is the role social media and SMS played in post-election violence in Kenya in 2007–2008. Rumours, mostly untrue, ignited and sustained the post-election ethnic violence that claimed over 1000 lives and displaced many more. Some details of the events leading up to and following the elections have been documented by Mudhai (2011); Osborn (2008) and Zuckerman (2008). While the authors acknowledged that rumours are traditionally a part of politics in many parts of the world, they noted that social media bring a capacity for spreading them that was previously impossible. In the lead up to the election, rumours of the intention of then President Mwai Kibaki to rig the election in his main challenger Raila Odinga’s parliamentary constituency was rife in Kibera where Osborn (2008) did her ethnographic research. The vacuum of communication created in the delay in releasing the election result by the Election Commission of Kenya was filled with rumours of result manipulation and impending ethnic attacks. Kibera is a predominantly Luo slum which supported the candidate of the Orange Democratic Movement, Raila Odinga, who is also Luo.

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Osborn notes that the most defining role of social media as tensions rose was the ‘pace and range’ they enabled for spreading rumours. Just as social media have been used for real-time monitoring of elections in some other African countries, they were also being used to misinform and incite people to violence. Over the few days following the official announcement of results, people tended to follow specific instructions calling for attacks on Kibaki’s Kikuyu ethnic group. The revenge attacks by the Kikuyus were also fuelled by hate SMS and social media messages being forwarded by unsuspecting people around the country. At some point, government had to completely ban bulk SMS and issue a warning to prosecute anyone who forwarded a hate SMS (Jeffery 2011; Marchant 2013; Zuckerman 2008). What is clear from Kenya’s election violence experience is that the affordances of social media could be appropriated by different groups in society for parochial interests at odds with public good, to devastating consequences for society In some cases, the state promotes policies and laws aimed at stifling public discourse or even monitoring and controlling citizens. Ethiopia serves as an example of a country where social media and mobile phones have become tools for monitoring and oppressing political opposition. Though Ethiopia has an internet penetration rate of less than 2 %, the government has been actively using different means to monitor or control what people do online. A recent report by Freedom House documents how the government uses hardware from China and software from the UK to monitor online conversation while blocking contents it considers undesirable (Freedom House 2014). Online censorship by Ethiopian government has been well known for a long time, and the country makes no pretence about its willingness to censor contents and their writers with laws such as the 2004 Criminal Code, the 2009 Anti-Terrorism Proclamation, and 2012 Telecom Fraud Offences Law being introduced to punish online dissent (Clayton 2014). Since the Ethiopian government controls the telecommunication industry through Ethio Telecom, the only telecom service provider in the country, it has been able to use people’s text messages and, in some cases, social media messages and emails as evidence in convicting them of terrorism. In 2013, Manyazewal Eshetu, a student of Addis Ababa University, was arrested and detained without trial for criticising a local university in the country. Like him, several journalists and activists have been detained with some getting prison sentences for their activities on social media. The government’s efforts to control online communication has drawn international condemnation (Freedom House 2014) In the aftermath of protests against government handling of the 2005 elections, which saw protests being coordinated via social media, government tightened control over online communication with a special focus on online

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spaces that allow public discussion. Initially, blogs were targeted and banned without any explanations from the state, and subsequently, Facebook and Twitter became targets. Gagliardone (2014) argues that government’s interest in controlling content on social media despite their limited use among the population stems from the creative ways people spread online information offline, for example, by printing and distributing them as handbills, or publishing them in newspapers. This could pose a much bigger threat to government control than the number of people who internet would suggest. Gagliardone (2014) notes that government motivation for cracking down on online expression is part of its strategies for achieving a ‘developmental state’ and a ‘developmental media system’ where new media work to support ‘nation-building’ efforts rather than being ‘adversarial’. He speculates that the government’s ability to perform economically (the country’s GDP growth is over 5 % per annum) would probably remain a bargaining advantage in securing international donations while continuing its limitations on civil rights. The two cases show how different actors could act to undermine the positive benefits of social media for their own interests. Whether it is non-state or state actors, the challenges they pose to people’s use of social media remain potent and deserve better attention. While the Kenyan government stepped in to fight hate speech online during the 2013 election, there is no indication that the Ethiopian government will relax its hold.

6

Conclusion

The examples discussed in this chapter show the diversity of uses social media have been put to in sub-Saharan African in the past decade. We observe a few trends that are common across the different regions and countries on the continent. First, social media use has become very popular and though the level of penetration is still low compared to the rest of the world, it is rising very fast. This can be explained by phenomenal rise of middle-class consumers who have more money to spend on internet bandwidth. Second, most internet access on the continent is via mobile phones, and increasingly, smart phones. Though various reports indicate that smart phones may not overtake mobile phones anytime soon, a critical number of young people now use them, and this could be good for the future of the internet on the continent. Third, most social tools developed on the continent are mobile-oriented because most people access the internet via mobile phones, and developers realise that any successful tool must be easily accessible on mobile. PayPal recently launched its service in Nigeria after many years of delay, explaining that it wanted to

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optimise its Nigerian site for mobile (Auchard 2014). Fourth, besides popular social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, Africans have become adept at developing context-specific social media tools to solve local problems. While many of these tools may not necessarily fit into the popular definitions of ‘social media’, they are participatory and allow the same logic of interaction associated with conventional social media. From Ushahidi to Voix de Kivus to the SMTCs, these tools enable a level of citizen participation in telling their own stories that was previously unimaginable. Fifth, social media have made financial and business transactions much easier, released more time for other productive activities, and enhanced communication in the workplace. While the specific effects of these processes have not been researched, we can speculate that they may be allowing people to undertake more economically beneficial activities though the limited features of mobile phones could also constrain how much people gain from such activities. The interaction of social media with democratic development is less clear. Projects like Ushahidi and the SMTC have become a feature of election monitoring and management in recent elections in Nigeria, Liberia, and Ghana, and may have contributed to the relative quality and credibility of the elections, yet their overall impact on democracy quality is not known. The Mo Ibrahim Index of African Governance—probably the most comprehensive effort to measure governance on the continent—indicates that the quality of democracy in some of the most tech savvy countries like Kenya and Nigeria has been declining or stagnated. Social media campaigns across the continent, like the #OccupyNigeria, #Kony2012, and #BringBackOurGirls, have yielded very limited measurable effects in policy changes or government attitudes. However, the increasing eagerness of African youth to take on their governments, an indication of external efficacy, could have a longer-term positive effect on citizen engagement and good governance. Despite the few undemocratic practices discussed earlier, the vast majority of countries exercise very little control over citizens’ use of digital tools. Government attempt to introduce monitoring software in Nigeria, for example, was rebuffed by activists, at least for now. So what role can social media play in the development process? Social media have made it easier for government and development agencies to receive more direct feedback from people they are trying to help. With the ubiquitous availability of mobile phones with internet access, it has become easier now than ever before to overcome a longstanding criticism of development efforts—being detached from local realities. Besides, Africans are better equipped now, more than ever before, to use these digital tools to address their own problems and extend help to others as we have seen with Ushahidi

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and Mapping Kibera Project. On the democratic front, if current patterns continue, there is room to be hopeful that it will become increasingly more difficult for leaders to manipulate election results and perpetuate themselves in power. More projects like the SMTC will emerge and citizens will be more involved in the process of electing their leaders and holding them accountable when they do wrong. This is not to deny that authoritarian governments like Ethiopia can (and may continue to) constrain citizens’ freedom and participation in governance; or that societal divisions fuelled by ethnicity, religion, and regional politics will not present serious challenges. However, current trends suggest that there is likely to be more citizen engagement than apathy—and the longer-term effect of this would be positive. Ultimately, local realities will continue to define use and the most successful initiatives will be those that incorporate context into design and deployment—treating people as the locus of agency with digital media helping them solve local problems. Finally, it can be easy to identify the best examples of how social media has contributed to good, project-specific outcomes, or to identify cases of undemocratic practices. It is much more challenging to speak conclusively about impact across whole sectors or countries. Even in cases with positive outcomes, we cannot argue conclusively yet that social media are responsible for all changes observed. However, we speculate that as internet and mobile phones become more prevalent across the subregion, social media are likely to play a role in how society is organised. That merits more scholarly attention than it currently gets.

References AEP Editor. 2012. African elections project successfully deploys SMTC for Ghana elections. http://www.africanelections.org/ghana/news_detail.php?nws=7149&t= African%20Elections%20Project%20successfully%20deploys%20SMTC%20 for%20Ghana%20Elections Amartey-Tagoe, E. 2012. #GhanaDecides: The apps and websites that mattered. Africa on the blog. http://www.africaontheblog.com/ghanadecides-the-apps-andwebsites-that-mattered Auchard, E. 2014. PayPal expands payment services to Nigeria, 9 other markets. UK Reuters. http://uk.reuters.com/article/2014/06/16/us-internet-paypalidUKKBN0ER1ML20140616 Bollou, F., and O. Ngwenyama. 2008. Are ICT investments paying off in Africa? An analysis of total factor productivity in six West African countries from 1995 to 2002. Information Technology for Development 14(4): 294–307.

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Clarke, H.D., and A.C. Acock. 1989. National elections and political attitudes: The case of political efficacy. British Journal of Political Science 19(4): 551–562. Clayton, M. 2014. With new chinese cyber-tools, Ethiopia more easily spies on its people. Christian Science Monitor. http://www.csmonitor.com/World/SecurityWatch/Cyber-Conflict-Monitor/2014/0325/With-new-Chinese-cybertools-Ethiopia-more-easily-spies-on-its-people Cutcher, R. 2013. African election social media monitoring to get upgrade. HumanIPO. http://www.humanipo.com/news/37905/african-election-social-mediamonitoring-to-get-upgrade/ Easterly, W. 2006. Reliving the 1950s: The big push, poverty traps, and takeoffs in economic development. Journal of Economic Growth 11(4): 289–318. Ekdale, B. 2010. Slum tourism in Kibera: Education or exploitation? http://www. brianekdale.com/slum-tourism-in-kibera-education-or-exploitation/ Ezeamalu, B., and O. Emmanuel. 2013. #OccupyNigeria: One year later, the gains, the losses. Premium Times Nigeria. http://www.premiumtimesng.com/ news/114890-occupynigeria-one-year-later-the-gains-the-losses.html Freedom House. 2014. Ethiopia: Freedom in the world 2014. Annual Report, Freedom in the World. https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world/2014/ ethiopia FrontlineSMS. 2011. FrontlineSMS 2011 curry stone design prize winners. FrontlineSMS, 4 Oct. http://www.frontlinesms.com/2011/10/04/frontlinesms2011-curry-stone-design-prize-winners/ Gagliardone, I.,2014. New media and the developmental state in Ethiopia. African Affairs, 113 (451): 279–299. Gilpin, L. 2014. The world’s unlikely leader in mobile payments: Kenya. TechRepublic. http://www.techrepublic.com/article/the-worlds-unlikely-leader-inmobile-payments-kenya/ Hagen, E. 2011. Mapping change: Community information empowerment in Kibera (Innovations case narrative: Map Kibera). Innovations: Technology, Governance, Globalization 6(1): 69–94. Hattingh, D., B. Russo, A. Sun-Basorun, and A. Van Wamelen. 2012. The rise of the African consumer. McKinsey South Africa. http://www.mckinsey.com/global_locations/africa/south_africa/en/rise_of_the_african_consumer Howard, Philip N. 2013. “If Your Government Fails, Can You Create a New One With Your Phone?” The Atlantic http://www.theatlantic.com/international/ archive/2013/.07if-your-government-fails-can-you-create-a-new-one-withyourphone/278216/ Howard, P. 2014. The Internet of Things. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Howard, P. 2015. Pax technica: How the internet of things may set us free or lock us up. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Hughes, N., and S. Lonie. 2007. M-PESA: Mobile money for the “Unbanked” turning cellphones into 24-hour tellers in Kenya. Innovations: Technology, Governance, Globalization 2(1–2): 63–81.

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Huntington, S. 1991. The third wave: Democratization in the late 20th century. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Huntington, S. 2006. Political order in changing societies. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Jeffery, S. 2011. Ushahidi: Crowdmapping collective that exposed Kenyan election killings. The Guardian. http://www.theguardian.com/news/blog/2011/apr/07/ ushahidi-crowdmap-kenya-violence-hague Joshi, P., S.  Sen, and J.  Hobson. 2002. Experiences with surveying and mapping Pune and Sangli Slums on a Geographical Information System (GIS). Environment and Urbanization 14(2): 225–240. Kenski, K., and N.  Jomini Stroud. 2006. Connections between internet use and political efficacy, knowledge, and participation. Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media 50(2): 173–192. Kovačič, P., and J. Lundine. 2013. Mapping Kibera: Empowering slum residents by ICT’. In Bits and atoms: Information and communication technology in areas of limited statehood, ed. S. Livingston and G. Walter-Drop. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ling, R., and H.A. Horst. 2011. Mobile communication in the global south. New Media & Society, March. Lipset, S.M. 1959. Some social requisites of democracy: Economic development and political legitimacy. Bobbs-Merrill. Macha, N. 2012. New technologies monitor Ghana elections 2012. Global Voices. http://globalvoicesonline.org/2012/12/06/new-technologies-to-monitorghana-elections-2012/ Marchant, E. 2013. Kenya 2013: Experiments in the technologies of an election year. The Center for Global Communication Studies. http://cgcsblog.asc.upenn.edu/2013/03/19/ kenya-2013-experiments-in-the-technologies-of-an-election-year/ Mas, I., and D. Radcliffe. 2010. Mobile payments go viral: M‐PESA in Kenya. The Worldbank. http://go.worldbank.org/XSGEPAIMO0 Mas, I., and O. Morawczynski. 2009. Designing mobile money services lessons from M-PESA. Innovations: Technology, Governance, Globalization 4(2): 77–91. Morawczynski, O., and G.  Miscione. 2008. Examining trust in mobile banking transactions: The case of M-PESA in Kenya. In Social dimensions of information and communication technology policy, ed. C. Aygerou, M.L. Smith, and P. van der Besselaar, 287–298, IFIP International Federation for Information Processing, 282. New York: Springer. doi:10.1007/978-0-387-84822-8_19 Mpofu, S. 2013. New media, old news: Journalism and democracy in the digital age. Ecquid Novi: African Journalism Studies 34(3): 161–63. Mudhai, O.F., W.J. Tettey, and F. Banda. 2009. African media and the digital public sphere. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Mudhai, O.F., 2011. Immediacy and open ness in a digital Africa: Networkedconvergent journalisms in Kenya. Journalism, 12(6), pp.674–691. Munyua, H., and E. Adera. 2009. Emerging ICTs and their potential in revitalzing small-scale agriculture. Agricultural Information Worldwide 2(1): 3–9.

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33 The Role of Transport and Communication Infrastructure in Realising Development Outcomes Jean-Paul Rodrigue

1

Transport, Communication and Development

Why Transportation Matters for Development? Development is a process related at improving the welfare of a society through appropriate social, political and economic conditions. The expected outcomes are quantitative and qualitative improvements in human capital (e.g., income and education levels) as well as physical capital and infrastructure (utilities, transport, telecommunications). In earlier decades, development policies and strategies tended to focus on physical capital; however, recent years have seen a better balance by including human capital issues (UNDP 2009). Irrespective of the relative importance of physical versus human capital, development cannot occur without both: infrastructures cannot remain effective without proper operations and maintenance, while economic and social activities cannot take place without an infrastructural base. With globalisation, the issue of international development is getting more complex as economic and social interactions are increasing and corporate strategies are driving (trans)national investments. Interpreting international development from a conventional North/South perspective is fallacious

J.-P. Rodrigue ( ) Department of Global Studies and Geography, Hofstra Univeristy, USA © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 J. Grugel, D. Hammett (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of International Development, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-42724-3_33

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and counterproductive: these dichotomies do not provide an effective interpretation of the continuum of development levels nor that development occurs at different paces and waves. Development is neither static nor the exclusive realm of ‘developing economies’, but is a process as important to ‘developed’ nations. While development gaps between some nations can widen, many Asian economies have demonstrated that such gaps can also be narrowed and even removed. As the global economy becomes increasingly integrated, the focus is on competitiveness and the development of capabilities reinforcing this competitiveness, a process taking place across multiple geographies (WEF-GACFM 2014). Due to its intensive use of infrastructures, the transport sector is an important component of the economy and a common tool used for development (Button and Reggiani 2011; McKinnon et  al. 2008). However, history underlines acute disparities in the setting of transport infrastructures and the relations they support. Transport infrastructures were associated with significant economic development processes, mainly with the industrialisation of developed economies. The process in developing economies is much more ambivalent. During the colonial era, many transport infrastructures such as ports and railways were constructed to enable access to resources and markets, rather than to service national interests (Hilling 1996). Such strategies continued to influence transport infrastructure developments in the decades following decolonisation. Developing countries have systematically been characterised by a lack of transport infrastructure investments and capacity, managerial deficiencies, a lack of coordination between modes and challenges in supporting national and international distribution imperatives (Hilling 1996). However, globalisation has spurred a new momentum where economic opportunities are increasingly related to the mobility of people, goods and information. A relation between the quantity and quality of transport infrastructure and the level of economic development is apparent: high-density transport infrastructure and highly connected networks are commonly associated with high levels of development. When transport systems are efficient, they provide economic and social opportunities and benefits that result in positive multipliers effects such as better accessibility to markets, employment and additional investments. When transport systems are deficient in terms of capacity or reliability, they can have an economic cost such as reduced or missed opportunities and lower quality of life. At the aggregate level, efficient transportation reduces costs in many economic sectors, while inefficient transportation increases these costs. In addition, the impacts of transportation are not always intended and can have

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unforeseen or unintended consequences, such as congestion is arising from the provision of free or low-cost transport infrastructure. Transport also carries an important social and environmental load, as seen prominently in rapidly developing economies such as China and India where the rise in car ownership has led to acute congestion, high accident rates and quality of life issues such as noise and pollution (UN-HABITAT 2013).

Types of Transport Economic Impacts Assessing the economic importance of transportation requires a categorisation of the types of impacts it conveys. These involve core (the physical characteristics of transportation), operational and geographical dimensions (Fig. 33.1): • Core. The physical capacity to convey passengers and goods and the associated costs to support this mobility. This involves the setting of routes enabling new or existing interactions between economic entities. An economy has greater capacity to move passengers and freight, which conveys economies of scale.

Fig. 33.1

Economic impacts of transportation infrastructure

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• Operational. Improvement in the time performance, notably in terms of reliability, as well as reduced loss or damage. This implies a better utilisation of existing transportation assets benefiting its users as passengers and freight are conveyed more rapidly and with less delays. • Geographical. Access to a wider market base where economies of scale in production, distribution and consumption can be improved. Increases in productivity from the access to a larger and more diverse base of inputs (raw materials, parts, energy or labour) and broader markets for diverse outputs (intermediate and finished goods). Another important geographical impact concerns the influence of transport on the location of activities. In the era of globalisation, ports, airports and even intermodal rail terminals are associated with the co-location of manufacturing and distributing facilities taking advantage of the wider accessibility such terminals entail. The economic importance of the transportation industry can thus be assessed from a macroeconomic and microeconomic perspective. At the macroeconomic level (the importance of transportation for a whole economy), transportation and the mobility it confers are linked to a level of output, employment and income within a national economy. In many developed countries, transportation accounts for between 6 % and 12 % of GDP. At the microeconomic level (the importance of transportation for specific parts of the economy), transportation is linked to producer, consumer and production costs. The importance of specific transport activities and infrastructure can thus be assessed for each sector of the economy. Transportation accounts for, on average, between 10 % and 15 % of household expenditures, and around 4 % of the costs of each unit of output in manufacturing (ITF 2014).

The Importance of Mobility Mobility is one of the most fundamental and important characteristics of economic activity as it satisfies the basic need of going from one location to the other, a need shared by passengers, freight and information. All economies and regions do not share the same level of mobility as they are in different stages of their mobility transition towards motorised forms of transport. Economies that possess greater mobility are often those with better opportunities to develop than those with scarce mobility (UNDP 2009). Reduced mobility impedes development while greater mobility is a

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catalyst for development. Mobility is thus a reliable indicator of development. Providing mobility is an industry that offers services to its customers, employs people and disburses wages, invests capital, generates income and provides taxation revenue. Economic development, which usually involves a transition from a rural to an industrial to a post-industrial society, is also linked with transitions in passenger mobility; from non-motorised (mainly walking) to motorised forms of transportation (World Bank 2002). Figure 33.2 represents a generic model of this transition in terms of the respective share of collective versus individual mobility and non-motorised versus motorised mobility. The initial stage involves the development of collective forms of transportation (tramways, subways, buses) while individual forms of transportation (mainly the automobile) become prevalent at a later stage of economic development. As societies become wealthier, they undertake a motorisation transition and the number of vehicles per capita significantly increases. This is particularly linked with the growth of individual incomes which results in individual motorised mobility becoming affordable to a large share of the population. While in developed countries (e.g., North American and Western Europe) this transition took place over several decades, if not a century, many developing countries are experiencing a fast mobility transition, which is placing pressures on their transport systems. It remains to be seen how the balance between individual and collective, as well as motorised and non-motorised, transport will pan out

Fig. 33.2 Passengers mobility transition

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in the future. It is however expected that collective and non-motorised forms of mobility will play a greater role in an increasingly urbanised world where sustainability issues are more prevalent (UN-HABITAT 2013).

Direct, Indirect and Induced Effects The added value and employment effects of transport services usually extend beyond employment and added value generated by that activity; indirect effects are salient. For instance, transportation companies purchase a part of their inputs (fuel, supplies, maintenance) from local suppliers. The production of these inputs generates additional value added and employment in the local economy. Suppliers in turn purchase goods and services from other local firms. There are further rounds of local re-spending which generate additional value added and employment. Similarly, households that receive income from employment in transport activities spend some of their income on local goods and services. These purchases result in additional local jobs and added value. Some of the household income from these additional jobs is in turn spent on local goods and services, thereby creating further jobs and income for local households. As a result of these successive rounds of re-spending in the framework of local purchases, the overall impact on the economy exceeds the initial round of output, income and employment generated by passenger and freight transport activities. Thus, from a general standpoint the economic impacts of transportation can be direct, indirect and induced (see Fig. 33.3) (Vickerman 2012): • Direct impacts. The outcome of improved capacity and efficiency where transport provides employment, added value, larger markets as well as time and costs improvements. • Indirect impacts. The outcome of improved accessibility and economies of scale. Indirect value added and jobs are the result of local purchases by companies directly dependent upon transport activity. Transport activities are responsible for a wide range of indirect value-added and employment effects through the linkages of transport with other economic sectors (e.g., office supply firms, equipment and parts suppliers, maintenance and repair services, insurance companies, consulting and other business services). • Induced impacts. The outcome of the economic multiplier effects where the price of commodities, goods or services drop and/or their variety increases. For instance, the steel industry requires cost-efficient import of iron ore

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Fig. 33.3

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Socioeconomic benefits of transportation

and coal for the blast furnaces and export activities for finished products such as steel booms and coils. Manufacturers and retail outlets and distribution centres handling imported containerised cargo rely on efficient transport and seaport operations. Transportation links together the factors of production in a complex web of relationships between producers and consumers. The outcome is commonly a more efficient division of production by an exploitation of geographical comparative advantages, as well as the means to develop economies of scale and scope. The productivity of space, capital and labour is thus enhanced with the efficiency of distribution and personal mobility. Economic growth is increasingly linked not only with transport developments, namely infrastructures, but also with managerial expertise, which is crucial for logistics. Thus, although transportation is an infrastructure-intensive activity, hard assets must be supported by an array of soft assets, namely management and information systems. Decisions have to be made about how to use and operate transportation systems in a manner that optimise benefits and minimise costs and inconvenience. In many developing countries, the mechanisms discussed above are at play, but in many cases the lack of transport infrastructures make the socio-economic benefits more tenuous, particularly when the level of economic development is low. It is when intermediate levels of development are

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reached that investment in transport infrastructure appears to have the most benefits, particularly if the political and institutional conditions are supportive (Banister and Berechman 2000).

2

Transport Infrastructures: The Generation of Economic Opportunities

Waves of Transport Developments Transportation developments have occurred since the beginning of the industrial revolution, linked to growing economic opportunities. At each stage of societal development, a particular transport technology has been developed or adapted with an array of impacts. Five major waves of economic development where a specific transport technology created new economic, market and social opportunities can be suggested. Seaports Seaports were linked with the early stages of European expansion from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, commonly known as the age of exploration. They supported the early development of international trade through colonial empires, but were constrained by limited inland access. For many developing countries, the seaport became the nexus of colonialism from which political and economic influence was exerted. With decolonisation, the role of seaports in many developing countries did not change much and many remained export platforms for commodities. Containerisation in the later part of the twentieth century offered opportunities for many ports in developing countries to become true commercial platforms supporting national economic development. China is the country that has benefited the most from this momentum, and now account for 7 of the top 15 largest container ports in the world. Using ports as a national economic development tool has become common in almost all developing countries having maritime access. Rivers and Canals The first stage of the industrial revolution in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was linked with the development of canal systems in Western Europe and North America, mainly to transport heavy goods. This permitted the development of rudimentary and constrained inland distribution systems. With a few exceptions, river transportation has remained rudimentary in many developing countries, but active flows are observed such as along the Yangtze in China and the Amazon in Brazil.

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Railways The second stage of industrial revolution in the nineteenth century was linked with the development and implementation of rail systems enabling more flexible and high-capacity inland transportation systems. This opened up substantial economic and social opportunities through the extraction of resources, settlement of regions, growing mobility of freight and passengers and setting of large manufacturing centres. In developing countries, rail networks tend to be rudimentary and structured as penetration lines going from ports to inland markets and resources and are usually not suitable for intermodal operations as many lines link a specific port to a single customer. Rail was developed as a tool for trade, rather than regional development. India and China have well connected networks and the most extensive found in developing countries, but both having challenges to support freight transport demands with reliable services. While high-speed rail systems have been built in many developed countries, the only developing country to undergo such an infrastructure project has been China, which has built the world’s most extensive high-speed rail system with more than 19,300 km as of 2014. This high-speed rail system was developed in order to decongest the existing rail system, improve the interurban connectivity and promote regional development in more remote parts of the country (Feigenbaum 2013; Ollivier 2014). Roads The twentieth century saw the rapid development of comprehensive road transportation systems, such as national highway systems, and of automobile manufacturing as a major economic sector. Individual transportation became widely available to middle-income social classes, particularly after the Second World War. This was associated with significant economic opportunities to service industrial and commercial markets with reliable door-to-door deliveries. The automobile also permitted new forms of social opportunities, particularly with suburbanisation. Motorisation is catching rapidly in developing economies, with road and highway development projects in common. Growing GDP has a clear relationship with the growth of motor vehicles, particularly when GDP per capita exceeds US$2000 (Carruthers 2003). The provision of road infrastructure has however not been able to keep up, leaving many metropolitan areas with acute congestion problems. As such, roads remain the sector receiving the majority of investments, about 60–65 % of World Bank lending, as they are perceived to be one of the highest sources of economic and social returns on investments. Airways and Information Technologies The second half of the twentieth century saw the development of global air and telecommunication networks in conjunction with economic globalisation. New organisational and managerial

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forms became possible, especially in the rapidly developing realm of logistics and supply chain management. Although maritime transportation is the physical lynchpin of globalisation, air transportation and IT support the accelerated mobility of passengers, specialised cargoes and their associated information flows. Although up to the last decade, air transportation in developing economies was a rather marginal component of the industry, important changes have recently taken place. For instance, the low-cost air carrier model is particularly suitable for the national markets of developing countries with frequent services between cities within an hour of flight time (Schlumberger and Weisskopf 2014). This provides much needed capacity to generally poor intercity transport services. The structure of air transportation networks is also shifting in developing economies, with the setting of national networks as well as the emergence of major air transportation hubs: the combination of a favourable location connecting Asian, African and European air markets has enabled Dubai to rapidly become one of the world’s most important airports. A similar process has taken place in Panama, which is becoming an important hub connecting the Americas. Further, Brazil and China have become important players in the aerospace industry through the manufacturing of parts and, in the case of Brazil, complete commercial aircrafts. For the telecommunication sector, mobile technologies have enabled significant strides in developing economies. In addition to provide ubiquitous communication, there are growing uses of mobile micropayment systems and even observed improvements in literacy (UNESCO 2014).

Cumulative Modal Contribution No single transport mode has been solely responsible for economic growth. Instead, modes have been linked with the economic functions they support and the geography in which growth occurred. The first trade routes established a rudimentary system of distribution and transactions that were later expanded by long distance maritime shipping networks and the setting of the first multinational corporations managing these flows. Major flows of international migration since the eighteenth century were linked with the expansion of international and continental transport systems that radically shaped emerging economies such as in North America and Australia. Transport played a catalytic role in these migrations, transforming the economic and social geography of many nations. Transportation, particularly air transport, remains an enabler for international migration. Transportation has been a tool of territorial control and exploitation, particularly during the colonial era where resource-based transport systems

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supported the extraction of commodities in the developing world and forwarded them to the industrialising nations of the time. Capturing resource and market opportunities was a strong impetus in the setting and structure of transport networks. More recently, port development, particularly container ports, has been of strategic interest as a tool of integration to the global economy. There is a direct relation between foreign trade and container port volumes, so container port development is commonly seen as a tool to capture the opportunities brought by globalisation. Still, port development in developing countries is subject to many challenges. For instance, in the case of sub-Saharan Africa, limited draft, lack of port equipment, low port performance levels, limited capital, political instability and regulatory impediments (e.g., customs procedures) are among the most common impediments behind the operation and development of port infrastructure (Rodrigue et al. 2014).

Mismatches and Discrepancies Due to demographic pressures and increasing urbanisation, developing economies are characterised by a mismatch between limited supply and growing demand for transport infrastructure. While some regions benefit from the development of transport systems, others are often marginalised by a set of conditions in which inadequate transportation plays a role. Transport by itself is not a sufficient condition for development. However, the lack of transport infrastructures can be seen as a constraining factor on development. In developing economies, the lack of transportation infrastructures and regulatory impediments are jointly impacting economic development by conferring higher transport costs, but also delays rendering supply chain management unreliable. Poor transport services can negatively affect the competitiveness of regions and corporations and thus have a negative impact on the regional added value and employment. In 2007, the World Bank published its first ever report which ranked nations according to their logistics capabilities based on the Logistics Performance Index (LPI) (World Bank 2014). The LPI is a good proxy for the involvement of each country transport and trade capabilities: according to the LPI, Germany and Singapore rank first. Germany is a major manufacturer and exporter of high added value goods while Singapore is a major hub in global trade. At the other extreme are low-income countries, particularly landlocked in Africa and Central Asia. Transport investments also tend to have declining marginal returns. While initial infrastructure investments tend to have a high return since they provide an entirely new range of mobility options, the more the system is developed

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the more likely additional investment would result in lower returns. At some point, the marginal returns can be close to zero or even negative, implying a shift of transport investments from wealth producing to wealth consuming. A common fallacy is assuming that additional transport investments will have a similar multiplying effect than the initial investments had, which can lead to capital misallocation. The most common reasons for the declining marginal returns of transport investments are: • High accumulation of existing infrastructure. In a context of high level of accessibility and transportation networks that are already extensive, further investments usually result in marginal improvements. This means that the economic impacts of transport investments tend to be significant when infrastructures were previously lacking and tend to be marginal when an extensive network is already present. Additional investments can thus have limited impact outside convenience. The situation is reflective of many developed countries that are facing the burden of maintaining an extensive existing infrastructure base. • Economic changes. As economies develop, their function tends to shift from the primary (resource extraction) and secondary (manufacturing) sectors towards advanced manufacturing, distribution and services. These sectors rely on different transport systems and capabilities. While an economy depending on manufacturing will rely on road, rail and port infrastructures, a service economy is more oriented towards the efficiency of logistics and urban transportation. In all cases transport infrastructure are important, but their relative importance in supporting the economy may shift. • Clustering. Due to clustering and agglomeration, several locations develop advantages that cannot be readily reversed through improvements in accessibility. Transportation can be a factor of concentration and dispersion depending on the context. Less accessible regions thus do not necessarily benefit from transport investments if they are embedded in a system of unequal relations. Therefore, each transport development project must be considered independently and contextually. Since transport infrastructures are capitalintensive fixed assets, they are particularly vulnerable to misallocations and malinvestments. The standard assumption is that transportation investments tend to be more wealth producing as opposed to wealth-consuming investments such as services. However, several transportation investments can be wealth consuming if they merely provide convenience, such as parking and

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sidewalks, or service a market size below any possible economic return, such as ‘bridges to nowhere’ projects. In such a context, transport investment projects can be counterproductive by draining the resources of an economy instead creating wealth and additional opportunities. Unfortunately, developing economies have been particularly prone to misallocations of transport infrastructure investments (Henckel and McKibbin 2010). Efficient and sustainable transport markets and systems play a key role in regional development although the causality between transport and wealth generation is not always clear.

3

Transport Infrastructure Impacts

Transportation Economies A standard economic benefit of transport relates to various economies effects. Activities involved in production (manufacturing), distribution (transportation) and consumption (retail) are constantly seeking economies to improve their competitiveness and increase their market share. Six main economies effects are observed for transportation (Table 33.1). Economies of transportation relate to the benefits that lower transport costs, may grant to specific activity sectors and are derived from a locational choice. It can involve the management of transport chains to reduce total transport costs (modal and intermodal). Some are elements of transport costs in production while others are elements of transport costs in consumption. Economies of transportation in consumption can be derived from economies in distribution as well as accessibility (proximity) to customers. Economies of scale involve unit costs reduction derived from larger transport modes, terminals and distribution centres, the massification of transportation. For instance, maritime transportation has substantially benefited from Table 33.1 Main transportation economies Economy

Impact

Economies of transportation Economies of scale

Lower unit distribution costs through transport chains management Lower unit transport costs through larger modes and terminals Lower transport costs with bundling of different loads Lower input costs with clustering of distribution activities

Economies of scope Economies of agglomeration Economies of density

Lower unit distribution costs with higher densities

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using larger ships that were able to reduce unit costs and at the same time increasing capacity. This concept is also implying that diseconomies of scale can be reached after a certain size, particularly through growing complexity and management costs. Economies of scope relate to the benefits derived by expanding the range of transport goods and services. They are commonly achieved when a transporter is able to bundle several different loads into fewer loads. For instance, a containership is able to bundle the loads (and offer economies of scale) for several customers in completely different sectors of activity that are simply sharing a similar origin and destination. Economies of scale and economies of scope are highly related. Agglomeration economies are benefits deriving from locating in proximity to other activities, even if the location is suboptimal. Often referred to as the clustering effect, it involves the sharing of common infrastructures such as roads and utilities (Porter 2000). Logistics activities tend to cluster and often co-locate next to an intermodal terminal and the setting of logistics zones has been an active strategy used to foster economic development at the regional level. Economies of density derive from the increasing density of features on the costs of accessing them. Higher market densities reduce distribution costs as shorter distances service the same number of customers and the same freight volume. High densities can also lead to diseconomies, particularly with congestion.

Transport: Leading or Lagging Development? The relationship between transportation and economic development is difficult to formally establish and has been debated for many years (Lakshmanan 2011). In some circumstances, transport investments appear to be a catalyst for economic growth while in others, economic growth puts pressures on existing transport infrastructures and incite additional investments. In a number of regions around the world, transport markets and related transport infrastructure networks are seen as key drivers in the promotion of a more balanced and sustainable development, particularly by improving accessibility and the opportunities of less developed regions or disadvantaged social groups. There are different impacts on the transport providers (transport companies) and the transport users. There are several layers of activity that transportation can valorise, from a suitable location that experiences the development of its accessibility through infrastructure investment to a better usage of

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existing transport assets through more efficient management. This is further nuanced by the nature, scale and scope of possible impacts: • Timing of the development. The impacts of transportation can precede (lead), occur during (concomitantly) or take place after (lag) economic development. The lag, concomitant and lead impacts make it difficult to separate the specific contributions of transport to development. Each case appears to be specific to a set of timing circumstances that are difficult to replicate elsewhere. • Types of impacts. They vary considerably as the spectrum ranges from the positive to the negative. Usually transportation investments promote economic development while in rarer cases they may hinder a region by draining its resources in unproductive transportation projects. In a lead effect, the presence of infrastructures triggers economic growth for a region, namely the expansion of production and consumption. This process commonly takes place when new infrastructures are built to access resources or new markets, which then triggers a wave of investments. In a lagging effect, the development of transport infrastructures follows economic development. A good example would be fast-paced growth, as seen in Pacific Asia (notably China), where investments in transport infrastructure do not keep up with the substantial growth of the traffic generated by rising mobility and new globally linked manufacturing functions. Such a situation could eventually impair future growth prospects as the existing infrastructure is no longer able to satisfy the demand.

Transportation Development Phases Cycles of economic development provide a revealing conceptual perspective about how transport systems evolve as they include the timing and nature of the transport impact on economic development. This perspective underlines that after a phase of introduction and growth, a transport system will eventually reach a phase of maturity through geographical and market saturation. There is also the risk of overinvestment, particularly when economic growth is credit-driven, which can lead to significant misallocations of capital. The outcome is a surplus capacity in infrastructures and modes creating deflationary pressures that undermines profitability. In periods of recession that commonly follow periods of expansion, transportation activities may experiment a setback, namely in terms of lower demand and a scarcity of capital investment.

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Transport, as a technology, typically follows a path of experimentation, introduction, adoption and diffusion and, finally, obsolescence, each of which has an impact on the rate of economic development. The most significant benefits and productivity gains are realised in the early- to mid-diffusion phases while later phases are facing diminishing returns. Containerisation exemplifies such diffusion behaviour as its productivity benefits were mostly derived in the 1990s and 2000s when economic globalisation was accelerating. Many technologies go through what can be called a ‘hype phase’ with unrealistic expectations about their potential and benefits and many are eventually abandoned as the technology proves ineffective at addressing market or operational requirements, or is simply too expensive for the benefits it conveys. Since transportation is capital-intensive, operators tend to be cautious before committing to new technologies and the significant investments they require. This is particularly the case in developing economies where investments are judged to be more risky and often require capital provision by international organisations such as development banks. In addition, transport modes and infrastructures are depreciating assets that constantly require maintenance and upgrades. The lifespan of a transport asset is the approximate number of years in which it is expected to perform under normal operating conditions while receiving regular maintenance (average lifespan). Because of the various construction materials, the techniques used and operating conditions, the lifespan is an approximate figure since higher engineering requirements may extend the lifespan further (optimum lifespan, see Fig.  33.4). For complex transport infrastructure, such as a port or an airport, lifespan considerations are nuanced by the respective lifespans of components such as piers, runways, crane equipment and individual buildings. All of these facilities can be maintained and upgraded separately, although at some point their useful lifespan is exceeded and the vehicle must be retired or the infrastructure rebuilt. Among the major transport assets, the automobile has the shortest lifespan: 8–10 years depending on the level of usage and the operating environment (although this lifespan is increasing due to technical improvements). A properly maintained jet plane can easily last 20 years, with some lasting beyond 30 years. Rail lines can last for decades, if not a century and a half (depending on the construction materials used), but require constant and capital-intensive maintenance. A common issue in developing economies is that lack of maintenance for transport infrastructure, coupled with heavy use. This leads to shorter lifespans and a paradoxical situation

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Fig. 33.4 Lifespan of main transport assets (Source: Living planet report 2006 and summary result of second Eurostat questionnaire on CFC on public infrastructure, DOC.CFC 15, Eurostat 2003)

where a similar infrastructure could be more costly in a developing than in a developed country, further underlining the higher risk of such capital investments.

Transportation as an Economic Factor Transportation provides market accessibility by linking producers and consumers so that transactions can take place. A common fallacy in assessing the importance and impact of transportation on the economy is to focus only on transportation costs, which tend to be relatively low; in the range of 5–10 % of the value of a product. Transportation is an economic factor of production of goods and services, implying that it is fundamental in their generation, even if it accounts for a small share of input costs. This implies that, irrespective of the cost, an activity cannot take place without transportation. Thus, relatively small changes in transport cost, capacity and performance can have substantial impacts on dependent economic activities. As such, transportation costs in developing economies are consistently higher implying that consumers tend to pay higher prices for imported goods than in developed countries. In subSaharan Africa, there is evidence that more than 40 % of the total logistics costs

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are indirect costs due to delays that include additional and inventory demurrage costs, but also bribes paid at a wide variety of police ‘checkpoints’ and weighting stations (CPCS 2010). An efficient transport system with modern infrastructures favours many economic changes, most of them positive. Geographic Specialisation Improvements in transportation and communication favour a process of geographical specialisation that increases productivity and spatial interactions. An economic entity tends to produce goods and services with the most appropriate combination of capital, labour and raw materials. A region will thus tend to specialise in the production of goods and services for which it has the greatest advantages (or the least disadvantages) compared to other regions as long as appropriate transport is available for trade. Through geographic specialisation supported by efficient transportation, economic productivity is promoted, a process known as comparative advantages (and one which has substantially benefited countries such as China). Large Scale Production An efficient transport system offering cost, time and reliability advantages enables goods to be transported over longer distances. This facilitates mass production through economies of scale because larger markets can be accessed. The concept of ‘just-in-time’ supply chain management has conferred benefits such as lower inventory levels and better responses to shifting market conditions. Thus, the more efficient transportation becomes, the larger the markets that can be serviced and the larger the scale of production. This results in lower unit costs. Increased Competition When transport is efficient, the potential market for a given product (or service) increases, and so does competition. A wider array of goods and services becomes available to consumers through competition, which tends to reduce costs and promote quality and innovation. Globalisation has clearly been associated with a competitive environment that spans the world and enables consumers to have access to a wider range of goods and services. Increased Land Value Land which is adjacent or serviced by good transport services generally has greater value due to the utility it confers to many activities. Consumers can have access to a wider range of services and retail goods while residents can have better accessibility to employment, services and social networks, all of which transcribes in higher land value. In some cases, transportation activities can lower land value, particularly for residential activities. Land located near airports and highways, near noise and pollution sources, will experience corresponding diminishing land value.

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613

Conclusion: Outcomes are Relative

Since the industrial revolution and particularly with globalisation, there were always expectations about fostering development through the setting and expansion of transport infrastructures. Each wave of economic development was associated with specific transport technologies and their mobility, from the first transit systems of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century to the global air and maritime transport networks of the twenty-first century. As transportation infrastructure continues to be an active tool to foster economic development, globalisation underlined that transport relies on new types of infrastructure, particularly those related to containerisation and air travel. Economic and social development and the level of transport infrastructure are therefore closely related. Where there is transport density, capacity and efficiency, there is mobility and opportunity. The matter remains about the appropriate level of infrastructure as there is no ‘one fits it all’ approach to the development of transport infrastructure. Impacts are contingent upon the existing level of development and the existing quality and efficiency of infrastructure. High impacts can be expected in situations where levels of economic development are moderate as infrastructure investments will create significant multiplying effects. Much lower, if any, relevant impacts can occur when transport infrastructure is already adequate, as investments are required to maintain the efficiency of a large set of existing infrastructure. The outcomes of transport infrastructure on development are relative to the social, economic and geographical context in which they take place. Much higher impacts from transport infrastructure investments can be expected when they take place in economies where existing infrastructures are lacking. With the setting of global transport systems involving maritime transport, air transport and telecommunications, many of which are now better servicing developing economies, further positive economic impacts are likely to occur. The question remains to what extent transportation investments will enable a range of developing economies to close the development gap, or further extend this gap between developing economies.

References Banister, D., and J.  Berechman. 2000. Transport investment and economic development. London: Routledge. Button, K., and A. Reggiani (eds.). 2011. Transportation and economic development challenges. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing.

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Carruthers, R. 2003. The impacts of motorization and what can be done to mitigate them. Washington: The World Bank. Feigenbaum, B. 2013. High-speed rail in Europe and Asia: Lessons for the United States, Reason Foundation. Policy Study 418. Henckel, T., and W. McKibbin. 2010. The economics of Infrastructure in a globalized world: Issues, lessons and future challenges. Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution. Hilling, D. 1996. Transport and developing countries. London: Routledge. Lakshmanan, T.R. 2011. The broader economic consequences of transport infrastructure investments. Journal of Transport Geography 19(1): 1–12. MacKinnon, D., G. Pine, and M. Gather. 2008. Transport and economic development. In Transport geographies: Mobilities, flows and spaces, ed. R. Knowles, J. Shaw, and I. Docherty, 10–28. Oxford: Blackwell. Porter, M. 2000. Location, competition and economic development: Local clusters in a global economy. Economic Development Quarterly 14(1): 15–34. Rodrigue, J-P, J. Cooper, and O. Merk 2014. The competitiveness of ports in emerging markets: The case of Durban, South Africa. International Transportation Forum, Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Schlumberger, C., and N. Weisskopf. 2014. Ready for takeoff? The potential for lowcost carriers in developing countries. Washington, DC: World Bank Group. UNDP. 2009. Human development report 2009: Overcoming barriers: Human mobility and development. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. UNESCO. 2014. Reading in the mobile era: A study of mobile reading in developing countries. Paris: UNESCO. UN-HABITAT. 2013. Planning and design for sustainable urban mobility: Global report on human settlements 2013. London: Earthscan. Vickerman, R. 2012. Recent developments in the economics of transport. London: Edward Elgar Publishing. World Bank. 2002. Cities on the move: A world bank urban transport strategy review. Washington: The International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/World Bank. World Bank. 2014. The practice of responsible investment principles in larger-scale agricultural investments. implications for corporate performance and impact on local communities, Report No 86175-GLB. Washington, DC: World Bank.

34 Smart City: Neoliberal Discourse or Urban Development Tool? Nancy Odendaal

1

Introduction

The relationship between technology and development is closely aligned with notions of progress and modernisation. Economic production and globalisation have been largely enabled through the digital revolution, raising questions about the distribution of resultant benefits and who are the winners and losers within a global economic context. A common question regarding development and technology therefore is whether technological progress is necessarily supportive of social development. The information technology for development (ICT4D) movement is indicative of the need to harness progress for broader benefits, with associated literature providing a range of interpretations of what this relationship could be and examples of technologically enabled development (Heeks 2008; Burrell and Toyama 2009). However, this chapter focusses on the ‘smart city’ phenomenon and its interface with notions of social and economic development. This emphasis addresses the lack of literature on smart cities in the Global South, and provides insights into the smart city discourses with regards to the role of cities in development and the limitations of such interventions for social development. The notion of the smart city is enjoying a rebirth since the explorations of digital and intelligent cities early in the 2000s (Aurigi 2005; Graham 2002; N. Odendaal () School of Architecture. Planning and Geomatics, University of Cape Town, South Africa © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 J. Grugel, D. Hammett (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of International Development, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-42724-3_34

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Hardey 2007), while remaining a slippery concept, open to abuse and varied translations (Hollands 2008). Exploring the notion of the smart city in relation to developmental objectives, this chapter examines instances where this concept could have more empowering prospects beyond the city marketing or e-governance agendas that tend to typify such initiatives. Furthermore, it considers how the discourse of ‘smart’ can be used to further exclude and divide. Prefacing these discussions, the relationship between technology and development is discussed before the various definitions and conceptions of the smart city idea are explored. Examples from the Global South are then used to show the variation in technology applications that give some indication of smart cities ‘from the bottom up’ in contrast to more conventional interpretations, with an example from Cape Town, South Africa illustrating the potentials and pitfalls of a smart city initiative ‘from the bottom up’.

2

Technology, Development and Cities Science and technology were regarded as the reason for the superiority of the North and the guarantee of the promise of development. (Ullrich 1992: 275)

Technology adoption is a dominant feature of development discourses. Early emphasis was on broadcasting, with the educational potential of radio recognised given the affordability, reach and flexibility of the medium (Schech 2002). Technical advantages enabled radio to reach the illiterate in great numbers and ensure mass coverage, ‘habituating even the farthest tribe to the approaching tide before it reaches them’ (Flinn 1968: 55). The proliferation of radios in Africa provides an example of differentiation in technology appropriation across geographic boundaries and social strata. Mytton (2000: 2) estimates that the millions of radio sets in Africa in the mid-twentieth century increased to approximately 100 million by 2000 as cheap, portable and battery-operated transistor radios became available, making individual access possible in remote locations. Community and amateur stations, with access to inexpensive shortto medium-term bandwidths and low production costs, broadened listenership while allowing for growth in specific sectors such as university campuses and churches. In Cape Town, South Africa, radio continues to play an important role in soliciting opinion on public issues (Bosch 2011) and forging gay identities (Bosch 2007). In Uganda, although new media is emerging as a tool for social organisation (Javuru 2013), radio remains a core part of political mobilisation (Mwesige 2009). A dominant ‘techno-orientalist’ spatial imagination often accompanies technological export, assuming that technologies will spread everywhere with

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the same impact regardless of context (Thrift 1996). This approach fails to recognise how technological innovation and appropriation are not linear processes but closely tied to livelihoods and lifestyles (Odendaal 2011b), used alongside existing media and deployed as a repertoire of practices. It could be argued that a blind belief in the transformative power of technology has endured. Within the urban context, e-governance agendas promote digital connectivity as a democracy enabler and tool for decentralising government. New communication technologies are promoted as facilitating the non-hierarchical organisational structures of market-led, decentralised development in keeping with the trajectories of the World Bank and other development agencies (Schech 2002). Neoliberal expectations of technological diffusion influence access and policy implementation in both onand offline worlds (Kleine 2009: 181). Furthermore, ICTs are recognised as enabling information transfer and economic productivity—with proponents arguing this provides an opportunity for developing countries to compete internationally as part of the ‘Global Village’ (Davison in Kleine 2009) and to ‘leapfrog’ development through accessing the knowledge economy without the industrialisation prerequisite for economic maturation experienced in the North. These beliefs illustrate how ICT4D has roots in modernisation theory: that technology enables a progression away from more traditional forms of communication and media, progressing towards more sophisticated and complex structures. Underpinning this approach is the assumption of a linear path for development, the Northern-driven global agenda and the hegemony of the Western developmental model (Schech 2002). It also speaks to a temporal linearity that is inevitable, where developing countries cannot afford to be ‘left behind’ (Graham 2008). Anti-developmentalists warn against the tendency to impose ICT projects without consideration of context and local cultures (Graham 2008), noting the Northern dominance of online content and embodiment of Western knowledge and capitalism (Escobar 1995; Obijiofor 2008; Schech 2002). Much like radio was used by the Portuguese to capture the minds of Mozambicans (Schech cites Power 2000 in this regard), the Internet distributes a particular brand of knowledge mediated by language preference and content. The reverse also holds. Much like Frelimo invaded the offices of the radio station in Mozambique in 1975 to broadcast indigenous history and culture, the Internet has been appropriated for advocacy of local issues to a global audience through which subaltern groups use technology to ‘foster new practices of being, knowing and doing’ (Schech 2002: 21). As seen in the Arab Spring, social media and contemporary technology tools can contribute to profound political changes. In Egypt and Tunisia, social

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media played an important role in influencing key debates before both uprisings, and assisted in spreading democratic ideas beyond the countries’ borders, during and after demonstrations (Howard et al. 2011). The use of ICT formed part of broader, heterogeneous communication networks that built upon existing social and kinship capital to challenge official (state-backed) discourses (Allagui and Kuebler 2011). In Egypt and Tunisia, the profile of the core groups of instigators were underemployed, young, educated, urban dwellers that formed a strategic minority in a context where only 10–20 % of people can easily gain access to the Internet (Howard and Hussain 2011). In the hands of a few strategic actors, technology was tied into broader social and media networks with profound impacts. Social media are not a revolutionary development panacea despite technological determinist arguments that equate ICT access with social and economic progress (see Cherlet 2014). Indeed, the Arab Spring examples indicate a multilayered series of technology-mediated exchanges subject to context, differentiated access and existing social networks. The relationship between meaningful social change and technology access is neither linear nor straightforward. Increased connectivity, enhanced government services and information access is welcomed as beneficial, but unease remains with regard to the discourses that inform policy and implementation: ICT4D is informed by the ideological and policy objectives of development agencies and governments. A more contextually appropriate approach is needed in moving from a supplydriven model to more demand-centred approaches, seeing the poor as potential innovators and producers, not just passive consumers (Heeks 2008). Enabling a broadening of the knowledge economy does speak to neoliberal objectives, and assumptions that ‘a shrinking of the digital divide can bring increased commerce and wealth to the previously disconnected’ (Graham 2008: 781). Despite developmental efforts, global unevenness with regard to bandwidth access and hardware costs remains. Broadband access can cost 1000 times that of people’s monthly income in many parts of Africa, resulting in fewer than 20 % of Africans accessing the Internet (Shah and Jaisinghani 2014). Overall figures for Internet access are impressive; however, there are now 200 million Internet users in Latin America, 120 million in Africa, and almost a billion in Asia (Graham 2014). Despite this spread, online content and associated knowledge is overwhelmingly produced by the Global North, reflecting highly uneven Internet content geographies (Graham 2014). Some would argue that the geographic distribution of high technology across the globe in terms of high-technology exports, computer power and Internet hosts follows the hierarchical pattern of the core-periphery system explored by dependency theorists (Guellen and Suarez 2005). However, current unevenness in ICT

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access can entrench internal core-periphery relationships, following and perpetuating other indicators of inequality—locally and globally (Donner 2007; Wahl in Kleine 2009)—and lead to new forms of dependency (Everett in Guellen and Suarez 2005). The complexity of technology access and complexion of the digital divide are critical to a nuanced understanding of the relationship between development and ICT.

3

The Digital Divide ‘I’m illiterate’, says one fisherman. ‘I don’t know how to use a computer, and I have to fish all day.” (The Economist 2005)

The developmental potential of ICT is frustrated by the mundane: physical and socio-economic barriers such as lack of training, time scarcity, resource prioritisation and poverty, literacy, hardware access and infrastructural limitations. Early studies of digital divides have tended to focus on physical and educational barriers that separate the information ‘haves’ from the ‘have-nots’ (Kling 1998; Norris 2001). Latter work departs from the determinist notion that technology is enough and capable of addressing complex social issues (Servon 2002), exploring factors that influence the digital divide, such as demographic factors, language, poverty indicators and perceptions of technology, to contribute to a more rounded reading of digital access and use (Crang et al. 2006; Keniston and Kumar 2004; Selwyn and Facer 2007). Race, age, income, gender and education are important informants; the majority of Internet users in South Africa, for example, are younger than 50, have a tertiary education and are white and male (Langa et al. 2006), while a study of computer use in schools shows that pupils in middle-high-income schools are more open to using the Internet and e-mail whilst those surveyed in ‘township’ schools (in formerly designated ‘black’ neighbourhoods) see ICT as an opportunity to enter guaranteed careers that pay well (Bovee et  al. 2007). Differential access is influenced by perceptions of the usefulness, fears and suspicions of ICT meaning availability does not equate to utilisation (Bridges. org 2002; Crang et al. 2006; Obijiofor 2008). Servon (2002) examines a number of myths concerning the digital divide, mainly from an American perspective but certainly worth noting in this context. The first is that providing computers, hardware and access to the Internet will eliminate the digital divide. Access is not sufficient: training is required and content needs to be relevant for people of diverse backgrounds. The second myth, according to Servon (2002) is the determinist notion that

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throwing technology at social problems will help solve them. ‘Technology, then, is one tool, not “the” answer’ (Servon 2002: 225). ICT does not necessarily overcome spatial inequalities; the opposite is in fact true. Drawing on Graham and Marvin’s ‘Splintering Urbanism’ thesis (2001), Servon (2002: 226) argues that ‘IT is deeply rooted in geography’. Despite the ability of ICT to transcend space, it remains a core factor in considering digital access: a study in Durban, South Africa, found that access to the Internet, cell phones and landlines reflect Apartheid geographies and subsequent post-Apartheid investment patterns (Odendaal 2011a). Spatial constraints do not simply disappear with broadened technology access but coexist with cyberspace in a hybrid form (Graham 2008) that is more relational than Cartesian (Odendaal 2014). The location of Internet cafés and mobile phones in Africa reflects access differentiation, and also the creation of new places for social and economic relations (Obijiofor 2008). Where individual contact is constrained by income and bandwidth, public and private Internet cafés become important access points. Telecentres are in many cases the result of private entrepreneurial activity in urban centres that offer connectivity and a suite of services that include photocopying, faxing as well as computer and Internet access. In some cases they provide telephony (that relies on cellular technology) and have compensated for low landline availability, providing services for small businesses in many cases (Henten et al., 2004). A study of 32 Internet cafes in inner city Johannesburg, South Africa, found that these facilities are used for gathering information on study and job opportunities and compiling CVs, but also as a tool for organising social events and staying in touch with friends and family (Hobbs and Bristow 2007). A study in Uganda found that Internet café users represent a cyber elite: typically urban, male, young and educated (Mwesige 2004), and that ‘[a] cquiring technology is still a dream for the majority of Africans who do not live in the capital cities and are not part of the elite’ (Jensen 2000: 218). Connectivity is best in major cities, and is expensive and often unreliable leading to many academics in Kenya and Nigeria using telecentres for Internet access rather than university or household connections (Mbarika et al. 2005; Oyelaran-Oyeyinka and Nyaki Adeya 2004). In the 1970s, Lewis Mumford (1973) explored the notion of ‘expression through the machine’; the development of new aesthetics, language, feeling and quality of materials that evolve from the interchange between engineer and machine. The aesthetic imagination of the machine is captured in modernist architecture and minimalist design and is discernible throughout art and architecture history. Appropriation of technology can be highly personal

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and creative, with different technologies taking on different social meanings in particular cultural contexts (Thrift 1996). This can be both related to personal identity and style—as seen amongst the youth of marginalised communities in Cape Town it is a personalised and symbolic connection to the world (Hammett 2009)—as well other technological innovations and spatialities that are informed by creativity, culture, socio-economic context and access constraints. New spatial modalities of ICT use in developing countries mitigate cost restrictions: container telecentres and informal phone shops on sidewalks are examples (Donner 2007). The ways through which innovations are mediated by culture and social norms are illustrated by the notion of ‘beeping’ (making missed calls) as intentional, implicit communication code that is indicative of particular social network arrangements and in which beeping ‘joins a repertoire of voiceless conversations, text messages, image-exchanging, emailing, and even purely visual “display”’ (Donner 2008: 17; Donner 2005). The accessibility and convenience of the mobile phone has made cell phone banking an emerging trend. Whilst Internet banking has grown (of the four million South Africans that have access to the Internet, 2.4 million bank online (Naidu 2008)), the cell phone surpasses online demand due to its flexibility (Goldstuck in Naidu 2008). A much-lauded East African example is M-Pesa, a mobile money transfer service pioneered by Kenyan operator Safaricom, initially intended for the unbanked population. Its low transfer charges and broad availability (especially to the rural population) has made it the most popular and convenient money transfer service with nine million subscribers in Kenya. M-Pesa services have, since inception in 2007, extended to online payment for flights, payment of utilities and cash withdrawals at kiosks (Jack and Suri 2009). How then do such bottom-up initiatives relate to an overall trend in the relationship between social development, technology and cities? The notion of the smart city provides an intriguing interface in this regard.

4

The Smart City

In its various forms over the years, the notion of the smart city has alternated between an overwhelming emphasis on city marketing to more developmental goals. A comparison between Durban (South Africa) and Brisbane (Australia) in 2002 found a number of commonalities regarding these two very different contexts. In both cases, the primary aim was to further the strategic objectives of city government, including: city marketing and promotion, encour-

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aging local ICT skills development and enabling access through a range of infrastructure options (Odendaal 2003). Policy objectives that inform implementation of the digital city concept reflect larger city strategies to attract investment, promote place and ensure more effective governance and decision-makers’ perceptions and priorities (Cohen and Nijkamp 2002). The e-governance dimension was an important emphasis in the early 2000s, part of a broader public administration literature. Creating a 24-hour city by providing and sharing information electronically and enabling municipal transactions online is considered essential to contemporary urban life (Odendaal 2003; Aurigi 2005). In some cases, particularly in the Global North, e-government interventions have created virtual spaces for dialogue and feedback as well as web portals for dissemination of information, policy dialogue and online tracking of queries and complaints (see Aurigi 2005: 12). There are, however, more substantive dimensions to e-governance initiatives. Outcomes such as fostering local economic development by providing opportunities for small ICT firms or reinforcing city marketing strategies are key elements of ‘smart city’ strategies in diverse contexts (Odendaal 2003). Despite democratic impulses, some would argue that the emergence of e-governance coincides with New Public Management reforms intended to make city governments more efficient and performance oriented (Odendaal 2003). In the rest of Africa, e-governance had become closely aligned with decentralisation agendas as bilateral agencies saw potential for greater local government autonomy in the absence of central state support (Misuraca 2007). The practical limitations to achieving e-governance relate to the digital divide and obstinate organisational cultures that resist digitisation. As Bovaird and Loffler (2002: 13) indicate: ‘all public agencies are also confronted with the “digital divide” dilemma, having to balance equity and cost implications of traditional versus electronic service delivery and communication policies.’ In South Africa, the City of Cape Town’s Digital Divide Assessment (Bridges. org. 2002) identified a number of constraints to achieving ‘smart city’ status, ranging from physical access to technology, affordability, the availability of appropriate technology, capacity and training as well as sociocultural factors such as ease with computing, age, gender dynamics and general cultural exposure. Work on Brisbane and Durban revealed an inward focus on the efficiency of city government with two dimensions; technology as input and outcome (Odendaal 2003). Using technology to enable more efficient interdepartmental coordination, better communication and more effective billing systems remains a core part of the smart agenda. Measuring and encouraging the

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presence of the ICT industry, attracting such skills and incubating associated enterprise in the creative sector, for example, relates to outcomes within the city. Both dimensions use city government as the starting point; municipalities becoming smart to be more effective and govern a more prosperous city. The terms digital, intelligent and smart city are used almost interchangeably. However, a more critical perspective is necessary in order to uncover the discourses that sit beneath the term ‘smart’ and its relationship to neoliberal urban political economies. In their study of smart cities in Europe, Caragliu, Del Bo and Nijkamp (2011) provide a rounded definition that includes characteristics that go beyond promoting wired cities. Using Hollands’ (2008) critique of the selfpromoting aspects of such claims, the authors strike a balance between the neoliberal energies that inform an emphasis on business-led development together with the promotion of high-tech and creative industries, and the need for social inclusion combined with enabling socio-economic development. However, this broadening of the term could become so broad that it loses value, especially when considering the following definition: ‘We believe a city to be smart when investments in human and social capital and traditional (transport) and modern (ICT) infrastructure fuel sustainable economic growth and a high quality of life, with a wise management of natural resources, through a participated governance’ (Caragliu et al. 2011: 6). While such debates are well developed in relation to the Global North, literature on smart cities in developing countries is virtually non-existent despite recent developmental initiatives. In India, the new Modi regime plans on creating 100 smart cities in India in 10 years; they are defined as ‘cities that leverage data gathered from smart sensors through a smart grid to create a city that is liveable, workable and sustainable’ (Business Standard 2014). Private companies such as IBM and Cisco are touted to invest in smart grid infrastructure while the government of Singapore is claimed to be interested in supporting the construction of 10 smart cities on the Delhi-Mumbai industrial corridor (Seth 2014). The link to social development is a tenuous one and reminiscent of the earlier determinist language. The IBM’s Smarter Cities programme makes three connections that apply to the context of the Global South; a celebration of how the last 20 years technology has enabled improved quality of life, an emphasis on climate change and vulnerability, and the need for improved governance with technology as the answer through promoting the integration of services, disaster management and joined-up governance while increasing competitiveness through improved quality of life and a vibrant economic climate (www.ibm.com).

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One of IBM’s most visible success stories, in terms of its own definition of what the smart city should deliver, is the central operations centre in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Following a flash flood in 2007 that took the city by surprise, the mayor was a key actor in driving a citywide, integrated disaster response and monitoring system that integrated 32 agencies and services and relies on 400 active cameras in the city for continuous surveillance. IBM used previous experience in developing of crime control centres for Madrid and New York City, and a traffic congestion fee system for Stockholm, in developing Rio’s control centre. Cisco provided network infrastructure and the videoconferencing system that links the operations centre to the mayor’s house (www. ibm.com). Critics locate this development as linked to the preparations and contestations around the 2014 FIFA World Cup and the 2016 Olympic Games and highlight concerns is that only well-off neighbourhoods benefit, that it is an interim measure that detracts from real infrastructural problems, as well as raising concerns with privacy and surveillance (Singer 2012). Regardless of contextual concerns, the Rio control centre is a remarkable technical achievement and a milestone in IBM’s expansion into the local government market. Rapid urbanisation in the Global South is seen as an opportunity for technology multinationals with an anticipate market value expected to be a $1.5 trillion by 2020 (Frost and Sullivan 2014). Contemporary smart city discourses reflect a stronger engagement with urbanity, with the social and cultural coordinates of life in the city. Natural sustainability emerges as an important substantive theme. The acknowledgement of other infrastructure services is also more explicit with reference to technology-enabled management of services and digital innovations such as smart grids which focusses on the interrelationship between utility parts. In late 2011, the Swedish company Siemens conducted a ‘Sustainable Cities Tour’ with the intention of showcasing their technologies for sustainable infrastructure management. Interestingly, the company cites many historical examples of its involvement in the City of Cape Town in South Africa: construction of the first telegraph line between the city and Simonstown in 1860 and the first electric cable car in 1927. The tour culminated in a substantial presence at COP 17 in Durban in December 2011 (Ladner 2011). The particular emphasis of the tour was showcasing the company’s renewable energy technology. Reference is made to the City’s Climate Smart Cape Town program, mainly focussed on an online resource and discussion space on climate change. The tour was followed up with a Smart City Summit in mid-2012, organised by the City of Cape Town and the Swedish Embassy. The Siemens-Cape Town partnership is in its infancy, but what is notable is the language of the smart city and its codification as so much more; sustainable urban planning, service delivery, corruption control and climate change

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mitigation. The smart growth idea, the smart city ideal and the goal of sustainability have merged to signify the new holy grail of city management, social development and clever marketing.

5

Smart Cities from the Bottom-Up?

The engagement with a broader urbanity could perhaps be seen as crucial in determining whether the smart city initiatives go beyond integrated city government and place marketing. The reciprocal relationship between content provided and consumer - of ongoing interactive exchange-is mentioned but it is worth considering whether this can be truly empowering. The predominance of social media signifies a shift to a more decentralised form of e-governance where citizens could contribute content as well as new forms of oppositional politics. To this end, it is worth exploring a small case study of digital activism in Cape Town, South Africa. Cape Town is the second largest city in South Africa with a population of just over 3.7 million (Stats SA 2015). Its regional GDP per capital compares to that of Mexico City and Naples, with a value of US$15,250 per capita, 40 % more than the national average (OECD 2008). Only 76 % of the labour force is employed, with just over a third (35.7 %) of households earning an income of less than US$300 per month (City of Cape Town 2015). The telecommunications profile of the city shows high access to mobile telephony (93 %), but very low computer access (37.9 %) and even lower rate of access to telephone landlines (34 %). Just over 50 % of the city’s population has no access to the Internet. The city’s population has increased by almost 30 % since 2001, with a large number of internal in-migrants living in informal settlements on its southeastern fringes. Service access is highly differentiated spatially. In Khayalitcha, home to 391,749 people in the south-east of the city, only 45 % of households live in formal dwellings, 62 % have access to piped water in their dwelling or inside their yard, and 72 % have access to a flush toilet connected to the public sewer system (City of Cape Town SDI and GIS 2013). The Social Justice Coalition Cape Town (SJC-CT) civil society organisation based in Khayalitcha was formed as a response to perceived institutional failure and political action during xenophobic attacks in 2008. One of the organisation’s priorities is the lack of safe, operational and accessible toilets in Khayalitcha. The lack of maintenance, limited numbers of facilities and high number of attacks on women at night in communal sanitation areas, together with the fact that many of the toilets provided do not have doors, have caused great embarrassment to the city administration. In the relatively

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short period that the organisation has been in operation, the SJC-CT has grown to 11 active branches and 40 partner organisations (www.sjc.org). The main focus of the SJC is education, policy engagement and community mobilisation through its on-site presence in Khayalicha and other locations, but also through social media (956 followers on Twitter, 2000+ followers on Facebook). In a recent op-ed piece Robins (2014) provides a nuanced uncovering of the organisation’s approach: data-driven activism where information is used to empower locals in order to confront city government on service delivery. The organisation’s social audit of four informal settlements in Khayalitcha revealed that the city administration’s janitorial system was not working (SJC 2014), and they made the report available online, with an associated YouTube version. The City of Cape Town’s response to the report was defensive, and included a claim that SJC was using social media platforms to embarrass the city administration (Robins 2014). The SJC responded online, supported by relevant data. The transparency of such exchanges, and the painstaking attention to operational detail and meticulous description of data collection practices, speak to community insight and data literacy, a form of empowerment that reveals what Robins (2014) calls a ‘governance from below’, and has resulted in the revising of service agreements between the City of Cape Town and contractors (Mitchell 2014). An important point to probe is what function online activity serves and whether it has a broader mobilisation role. Mitchell (2014) found that online content tended to be one-directional, functioning as an information portal and also serving as an information resource in placing pressure on the municipality to maintain toilet services. As a mobilisation strategy, more broadly, SJC’s online activity is constrained by limited Internet penetration in Khayalitcha, the cost of smart phones and entrenched preferences for faceto-face and verbal contact, meaning radio use and the local ‘MixIt’ app (a well-established South African forerunner to ‘WhatsApp’) is used for two-way communication (Mitchell 2014). The overall aim is to increase monitoring of public spending and accountability. The organisation’s website includes online petitions, responses to public press releases and links to news articles. One of the drop-down menus is entitled ‘Imali Yethu’ (a Xhosa phrase for ‘our money’) and contains details of service delivery contracts for sanitation, refuse removal and policing, including the expected frequency and scope of maintenance tasks, the contact person and detail of the company contracted. The aim is to empower communities with the necessary facts to monitor and share information on service delivery, public spending and accountability. Twitter and Facebook are used for real

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time updates as on the ground information is shared in amongst press monitoring and meeting announcements. The efficacy of the SJC is seemingly due to its ability to respond quickly to issues using social media and its physical proximity to communities in need. Another feature is mobilisation through partnerships. A third is the engagement with citywide issues in a considered and informed way. This can be illustrated in a forum organised together with the University of Cape Town-based African Centre for Cities interrogating the potential for design to become an instrument of social justice and urban inclusion in anticipation of the designation of the city as World Design Capital in 2014. The event included inputs from academics, designers and activists at various sites around the city. Its symbolic value as an online and on-site space to interrogate the creative city discourse provided a meaningful counter to the usual notions of innovation. Essentially, SJC’s social media and online campaigns do represent a ‘smart city from the bottom-up’, but mainly as a challenge to city discourses and more importantly, as a monitoring strategy. These are important functions that have practical impacts, but with limited mobilisation effects due to seemingly mundane but important constraints that speak to larger digital divide issues. As part of the organisation’s ‘quiet activism’ (Robins 2014) that represents an alternative to the corporate smart city discourse. The SJC’s efforts are aimed at holding local government to its promise of service provision and creating dignified places. The use of social media is part of a larger data-driven strategy that uses information to negotiate with the City of Cape Town and enable it to fulfil its constitutional mandate. As Mitchell (2014) found, the two-way flow of information that would lead to broader mobilisation is lacking, yet the networks enabled through online tools and social media ties the organisation into a larger chain of connections beyond Khayalitcha. Whilst confrontational at times, the ongoing monitoring role played by the SJC has had some practical outcomes with regard to service delivery. Harnessing social and human capital in addition to hard infrastructure is increasingly essential to urban performance (Caragliu et al. 2011). The relationships between SJC and associated organisations, the use of various ICT infrastructures to enable to delivery of another, reflect a heterogeneous network of relations. Blindly assuming evenness in technology use ignores the complexity of relations between the material elements of infrastructure and the many factors that influence choice. The fact that many members of SJCassociated communities do not have equal access to online tools does not necessary place them at a disadvantage however, since they are tied into a

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network of actors and tools that enables them to be part of the governance conversation around sanitation maintenance. Choice and appropriation of ICT elements is informed by access and need and changes over time. Moving away from a determinist perspective towards a more relational lens also then acknowledges the dynamics of such processes. What technology has enabled is the ability of social justice movements such as SJC to access, process and use data in real time and influence decision-making. As new documentation processes evolve (the organisation is working on a community mapping project at present), relations could shift again and readjust. This play between human agency and technology is good news for cities of the Global South, since it could lead to a more finely grained form of governance that is more inclusive.

6

Conclusion

The unevenness of Internet access in the Global South, the growth in the smart phone market and proliferation of cell phones raises questions with regard to smart city audiences and the range in technology appropriation. Where Internet access is low, assuming such as part of a smart democracy push would be foolish. Appropriation or depth of use could have as much to do with socio-economic barriers as it does with cultural factors. A broader emphasis on smart cities signifies an engagement with how livelihoods interface with appropriation. Technology is more than a value-add to the machinations of city governance. It creates interests groups, divides and unifies, interfaces with cultures in various ways and essentially performs its own urban dance when combined with human agency (Bolay and Kern 2011). Innovation and appropriation coexist with broader objectives of social justice and the networks and relations that have always been there. The consideration of smart cities provides an entry point into the actors that currently play a role in the interface between technology, cities and development and the agendas that shape those relationships. The interface between technology and development has determinist beginnings. Resonances with the modernisation paradigm are discernible in the emphasis on technology as enabler, developer and change agent. Debates around the digital divide and technology access has become more sophisticated as social and cultural parameters are considered part of the equation. Case study literature shows a textured relationship between technology and empowerment as people appropriate technology to suit livelihood strategies and enable income generation. The use of the mobile phone is particularly significant here. Thus, the relationship between development and technology is not a simple linear

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trajectory of continuous innovation. It is a dance between appropriation and scientific capacity, informed by context. The resurgence of the smart city discourse as a private sector led response to rapid urbanisation, climate change and disaster management is interesting, potentially creative but also troubling. There are examples of governance innovation and imperative disaster management systems, such as in Rio, of course, but it comes with a determinist discourse that speaks to a financial bottom line. Concerns that it could add to current divides in cities of the Global South are not unfounded. Assuming a sociotechnical lens in understanding the relationship between city governance, technology use and livelihoods is not only more interesting conceptually than the usual determinism that imbues smart city strategies, but may also lead to better policy. Rutherford captures the nuances of such an approach when he argues: ‘it is about exploring the nature, function, and implications of the urbanity of urban networks, and how, for example, different urban actors create and use (to varying extents) digital technologies and networks to sustain/refine/modify their more or less spatially stretched communications and exchanges with others.’ (2011: 24). The example of Cape Town’s Social Justice Coalition provides a microcosmic example of an activist response to lack of service delivery in a city that has smart aspirations. Systems developed by Cisco and IBM have the capacity to integrate city departments and units, enabling centralisation and control. However, the same technology capacity as mediated through smart phones and the Internet can enable networking and grass-roots activism. This broadening of the actors involved in the relationship between technology and development will no doubt contribute to a textured and layered urban reality, since the presence of technology alone cannot assume social development.

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35 Crowdsourcing Development: From Funding to Reporting Johan Hellström

1

Introduction

Long before the neologism crowdsourcing was coined, management literature discussed information and communication technology’s (ICT) capability to connect a large group of people to perform specific tasks and problem-solving activities (Lévy 1997) utilising the wisdom of crowds (Surowiecki 2004). This practice was later referred to as ‘crowdsourcing’, defined by Howe (2006) as ‘the act of a company or institution taking a function once performed by employees and outsourcing it to an undefined (and generally large) network of people in the form of an open call’. Crowdsourcing is a relatively new concept and many distinct definitions exist (Pedersen et al. 2013). Indeed, Estellés-Arolas and González-Ladrón-de-Guevara (2012: 11), found 40 original definitions of crowdsourcing while analysing 209 crowdsourcing articles and observed a ‘lack of consensus and a certain semantic confusion’. The idea of outsourcing a specific task, utilising collective intelligence through the use of a centralised platform for distributed interaction (Donner 2010), has recently started being exploited systematically within the context of international development. There is a growing body of evidence showing that crowdsourcing, and variations thereof, can be helpful in achieving socio-economic impact in various sectors. Crowdsourcing is being applied

J. Hellström ( ) Institution of Computer Science (DSV), Stockholm University, Sweden © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 J. Grugel, D. Hammett (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of International Development, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-42724-3_35

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in multiple ways; it is used for election monitoring and for citizens to report election irregularities, to share observations during natural disasters, to help in various anti-corruption efforts, to track and report human rights abuses and violence, aid constitution drafting processes, to monitor government and public service delivery, raise funds, and so on. The evolution of crowdsourcing, as well as the application to development, is an increasingly broad and complex subject. Despite widespread development practitioner support for crowdsourcing projects, academic attention has been limited—particularly in international development, although Bott and Young (2012) outline several theoretical justifications, key features, and structures of crowdsourcing by examining a few crowdsourcing interventions (focussing on interactive mapping as well as monitoring and evaluation) in international development. This chapter exposes the reader to the main thrust of crowdsourcing for and in development, including a brief history of crowdsourcing in development work, various areas in which the tool has been adopted, and the strength and limitations in doing so. Two sample cases are provided to illustrate opportunities and constraints in using crowdsourcing for and in development. The first case used to illustrate the possibilities and limitations of crowdsourcing is UgandaWatch, a citizen-reporting platform used during the Ugandan General Elections in 2011 in order to monitor incidences of electoral offence. The other case is Not In My Country (NIMC), a crowdsourcing platform used to record, report, and publicise corruption within Kenyan and Ugandan universities.

2

Conceptual Foundations of Crowdsourcing

A way to understand crowdsourcing in a development context is to outline the elements and characteristics of a crowdsourcing initiative. Through the analysis of 40 crowdsourcing definitions, Estellés-Arolas and GonzálezLadrón-de-Guevara (2012) identified three elements (the crowd, the initiator, and the process) and eight characteristics common to any given crowdsourcing initiative. Three characteristics fall under the first element— the crowd: (a) who forms it, (b) what it has to do, and (c) what it gets in return. The second element, the initiator or crowdsourcer, has two characteristics: (d) who it is and (e) what they get in return for the work of the crowd. The third element is about the process and consists of three characteristics: (f ) the type of process it is, (g) the type of call used, and (h) the medium used.

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The Crowd The crowd is usually profiled as a large group of individuals who are interested in the task at hand and responsible for generating the content. Because most crowdsourcing involves Internet connectivity or access to the mobile network, certain characteristics can be inferred about members of the crowd: that they have access and capacity (e.g., money and ICT literacy) to use these tools. The number of people with Internet and/or mobile access in developing countries is ever increasing but there is still a bias towards young, urban men. It is therefore important to work on the message sent out and broadcast it through the right outlets to attract the desired users. A big crowd in terms of number of individuals (quantity) is often desired. An active crowd is preferred and it is important to understand what motivates users to contribute, both initially and on a continuing basis (quality).

The Initiator The initiator of a crowdsourcing initiative can be an individual, a local or international NGO, a human rights group, an international development organisation, or a company—anyone with an interest and capacity to set up and/or run a platform, and thereby benefit, directly or indirectly, from the crowd’s wisdom. The technical aspects of running an initiative are not the main challenge. A report by Internews (Bailard et al. 2012) reveals that 93 % of almost 13,000 Crowdmaps (a version of Ushahidi) analysed had fewer than ten reports while 61 % had no activity beyond installation. The results from this report raise a number of questions referring to output (creation of a crowdsourcing platform) and outcome (impact). A platform where there is a clear, intentional aim to create better development outcomes, created for a specific purpose with a relevant and specific topic for the crowd, where the interaction is distributed but yet controlled by the initiator, stands a far better chance to sustain the effort.

The Process Howe (2008) describes the four primary types of crowdsourcing; crowd wisdom, crowd creation, crowd voting, and crowdfunding. Crowdsourcing projects can also use a combination of these four approaches. There are various types of processes and multiple approaches to crowdsourcing. First, the type of call used can either open, bounded, or through

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a combination of both (Avila et  al. 2010; Joyce 2010). It is the initiator’s decision to open the platform to the public (open or unbounded crowdsourcing) or not (bounded crowdsourcing). Open crowdsourcing is informal, citizen-generated data where anyone, with no intentional constraints, is allowed to participate and submit information. Big numbers are expected and often needed. This approach of crowdsourcing is in line with Howe’s (2006) definition where a task is outsourced in the form of an open call and usually the type of crowdsourcing referred to in international development. Although open crowdsourcing potentially increases the overall reporting, the information generated is often criticised for lack of reliability. False or biased information may be submitted from unknown sources. In The Net Delusion, Morozov (2011) argues that projects that rely on crowdsourced data during natural disasters produce trustworthy data since these events are apolitical and there are no user incentives to manipulate it (Morozov 2011). However, using open crowdsourcing for other (political) purposes such as monitoring elections can be problematic because there might be incentives for certain citizens to manipulate data and ‘the accuracy of such reports is impossible to verify’ (Morozov 2011: 271). Bounded crowdsourcing on the other hand is a more systematic and organised method where trusted and trained volunteers, observers, or group of experts send reports in a more structured way. Contributors are found through a selection process. It may also be that the intervention starts with a small number of selected users who invite additional users who they fully trust to join the project. The method is analogues to snowball sampling. Bounded crowdsourcing allows for verified information already at submission but does not have the same potential reach as open calls. To combine the two strategies of reliable and unreliable sources, increase the potential overall reporting while making it easier to validate reports from unknown sources, that is, the unspecified crowd. The medium used depends on the context. Crowdsourcing allows regular citizens to submit information via online and/or mobile technology (e.g., instant messages, Twitter, email, SMS, voice) to a centralised server. The data generated is thereafter (often) published online. The Internet is an integral part of almost every crowdsourcing initiative, even in regions where Internet connectivity is limited. A main rationale to use crowdsourcing is to make it possible for as many as possible to participate and to offer various channels to contribute is one option. With low Internet access rates and high mobile subscriptions numbers, the best way to strengthen the public sphere and help keep crowdsourcing initiatives open to all is allow mobile phones and its voice and/or SMS function as a channel to submit reports.

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Crowdsourcing in Development

ICT approaches and innovative, smart solutions are recognised as critical to solving development challenges, including using ICT tools to leverage the power of collective intelligence and knowledge. Crowdsourcing has become a buzzword in the development and humanitarian sector (Poblet 2011). It was made popular in development circles through the open source Ushahidi platform first used for post-election monitoring of violent acts in Kenya 2007–2008 (Meier 2011). Ushahidi was not the first crowdsourcing initiative though. There were several early ICT initiatives that utilised the crowd, including for example United Nations Volunteers online volunteer programme launched in 2000, which connects people who commit their time and skills over the Internet to help development organisations address development challenges. Soon after the use of the Ushahidi platform in Kenya in early 2008, the Ushahidi code was shared and used in South Africa in May 2008 to map incidents of xenophobic violence. The code spread and became viral: it was used to map incidents of violence in the DR Congo in 2008, Al Jazeera picked it up during the War on Gaza in 2008–2009, and it was used in Pakistan through ‘Pak Voices’ in 2009. More implementations followed and the tool started to be used to map natural disasters, visualise drug shortages, report corruption, and to monitor elections. Citizen reporting by crowdsourcing during elections became particularly popular. ‘Vote Report India’ used Ushahidi during the General Elections in 2009 and in sub-Saharan African, election monitoring and citizen reporting through open and/or bounded crowdsourcing has taken place in a number of countries, including implementations in Benin (2011), Burundi (2010), Kenya (2010, 2013), Ghana (2012), Nigeria (2011), Sudan (2010), and Zimbabwe (2008). There are many perceived advantages and opportunities using crowdsourcing in and for development. It is considered a cost-effective way to reach many in rural as well as urban areas in real time. It may result in increased aid transparency as well as improved relations with the public and greater accountability (Bott and Young 2012; Sasaki 2010). There is a wealth of research on crowdsourcing success factors (Bott and Young 2012; Pedersen et  al. 2013; Sharma 2010; Walter and Back 2011; Warner 2011). Sharma (2010) identifies a number of peripheral factors (vision and strategy of the crowdsourcing initiative; linkages and trust; external environment; infrastructure; and human capital) which all affect the key factor ‘motive alignment’ in an intervention’s success or failure. Success, according to Sharma (2010), largely depends on mass participation and is

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measured quantitatively. This since the crux of crowdsourcing is the crowd’s wisdom (Surowiecki 2004) and collective intelligence (Lévy 1997). Pedersen et al. (2013) suggests that attracting and retaining individual participants is a key to successful crowdsourcing. This requires an understanding of the people who use the initiative (that is the crowd) and their needs and motivations to use the service initially as well as on a continuous basis (Pedersen et al. 2013). Appropriate incentives for participation in the initiative remain an important consideration throughout the process (Bott and Young 2012). Warner (2011) found that most critical to crowdsourcing success is the feeling by crowd participants that their efforts were considered and that results came from the initiative. Other scholars have discussed crowdsourcing’s real impact, including risks and challenges (Joyce 2010; Currion 2010; Poblet 2010). The crowdsourcing risks identified include information overload caused by unverified data; that users lack trust in the system; and threats to citizens’ privacy and security when reporting. Crowdsourcing and its side effects ‘need to be addressed to avoid the consequences of technological misuse and subsequent risks for citizens’ (Poblet 2010: 215). When describing the Ushahidi-based crowdsourcing platform, Huduma in Kenya, Bott and Young (2012) notes that a major challenge with open crowdsourcing relates to lack of organisational capacity to follow up. The system permits citizens to submit reports on infrastructure needs, public service delivery, and other problems with government conduct. The authors found that out of more than 3000 reports submitted by citizens, only 12 were categorised and none had been resolved. When following up on the case end of 2013 (see Hellström and Tedre forthcoming), it became clear that the service never picked up; it failed because focus was too much on the technology at hand, the implementing organisation lacked capacity and resources to follow up on reported cases, and that the initiator showed an unwillingness to cooperate with other key stakeholders. Also, since the content in the 3000 received reports were more or less ignored, the crowd consequently lost interest in the initiative. Crowdfunding in international development usually involves an open call through the Internet and/or social media for the provision of financial resources to support initiatives for specific development purposes. The basic idea is to raise funds from a large audience where each individual provides a small amount instead of raising the money from a small group of sophisticated investors (Belleflamme et al. 2013). A successful crowdfunding project is one where the funds raised are more than funds targeted. There are typically three

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types of actors involved in a crowdfunding project: the initiator who pitches the idea, the crowd consisting of individuals or groups who support the idea financially, and finally the intermediate platform and organisation that connects the other two actors. Worth noting is that the crowd that funds is usually different from the crowd that benefits from the service. Crowdfunding can either be in the form of donations without reward (e.g., GlobalGiving), debt with or without interest functioning as a microcredit programme (e.g., Kiva.org), or in exchange for some form of recognition, reward, voting rights, and so on. The individual crowd member can, on top of giving monetary support, play the role of a donor and provide help and expertise. An identified challenge with crowdfunding is that many projects are just paper products (merely an idea or concept) at the time when funds are asked for. Risk is therefore high and failures are to be considered normal.

4

Two Crowdsourcing Initiatives

In order to further explore the characteristics of crowdsourcing interventions in international development, two crowdsourcing initiatives were analysed further. The two cases were chosen because they differ quite a lot. UgandaWatch was a one-time campaign, where anyone with access to a mobile phone could join (Hellström and Karefelt 2012; Hellström 2015). NIMC, meanwhile, is an example of bounded crowdsourcing with a user verification process (Hellström and Brooke 2013), designed for Internet users only and is a continuous intervention. For the first case, UgandaWatch, quantitative data was collected through a SMS questionnaire sent to a random sample of 1800 users of the crowdsourcing initiative, resulting in a total of 2543 relevant answers from 486 unique phone numbers (27 % response rate). Respondents to the SMS questionnaire were invited to participate in focus groups, resulting in 30 fully anonymous focus group discussions of between 3 and 11 participants in each group. Finally, a descriptive analysis of all the incoming citizen reports sent to the UgandaWatch platform (totalling 10,511 SMS) was carried out. Data from NIMC was gathered in a similar procedure. Users were initially identified via their Facebook page (‘likers’ or ‘posters’), an online questionnaire was sent through a private Facebook messages containing a link to the survey, and focus group participants were finally recruited from the group of survey respondents. This resulted in ten focus group discussions consisting of between two to twelve participants in each group.

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UgandaWatch During the Ugandan General Elections in 2011, an open crowdsourcing platform named UgandaWatch was set up to monitor incidences of electoral offence. It was covering the electoral process from the starting point of voter registration in June 2010 to the General Elections in February 2011, as well as post-election activities in March and April 2011. It was announced in a press release with a lot of enthusiasm and hope: ‘For the first time, citizens have the ability to report any problems they face with the election process in a simple and easy way—by sending an SMS to us on 6090. […] It’s about getting citizens to be active and participating in democracy’ (DEMGroup 2010). A national marketing campaign followed where radio jingles, newspaper advertisements, T-shirts, and flyers urged citizen with access to a mobile phone to monitor and report via SMS incidences of electoral offence. In total, more than 10,000 reports were sent, covering various issues such as voter buying, registration hiccups, inappropriate campaign conduct, cases of violence or just general complaints or positive feedback. Citizens observing irregularities were encouraged to write an SMS reporting the incident; indicating what, when, and where the incident happened. These reports were then manually verified, geotagged, categorised, and published by a team of ‘taggers’ volunteering for the initiator DEMGroup, the NGO who managed UgandaWatch. The descriptive analysis shows that the most frequently addressed topics in the SMS’s submitted to UgandaWatch platform concerned general complaints and comments regarding the electoral process (polling stations not opening on time, material coming too late, issues with the voter registry, destruction and falsification of election ballots), cases of bribery and buying off votes and instances of intimidation. Results from both the SMS survey and the focus groups show that the concerns that the users have in respect of using mobile phones and crowdsourcing platforms in the participation process relates to costs, trust, and safety. The promise that personal information was to be kept confidential has been enough for citizens. Affordability of the service is another important factor, especially in a country like Uganda with high poverty levels. As suggested by focus group participants, UgandaWatch would most likely have received more reports if the service were toll free. The initiative, despite the relatively generous marketing budget, only generated 2307 published reports and out of these, about half carried useful, qualitative data. A reason to why only 25 % of the incoming reports were published online is the verification and geotagging process that was a very

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resource-consuming exercise. To give a message a meaning and to show a message’s context is hard and to determine one message’s accuracy just by reading it is almost unmanageable. In the end, only 223 messages were verified, raising questions regarding the capacity of DEMGroup. The usefulness of crowdsourced information is a question concerning what happens with the information once it is provided and publically published online—what actions are taken? Regardless of whether incident reports would affect the final result of the election, the institutions in charge seem to have largely ignored the reports. The website with the published reports was accessible by anyone with an Internet connection. To know what others did with this publically open information is hard to find out as well as what results came from the initiative. DEMGroup forwarded some reports to responsible instances but only used information from the crowdsourced data in one election-day press release. DEMGroup’s use of citizen’s reports and the aggregated information generated by the platform was in other words very limited.

Not in My Country NIMC targets the corruption faced by university students in Kenya and Uganda. It uses a bounded crowdsourcing platform to record, report, and publicise corruption in Ugandan universities. The secured website enables students to report acts of corruption by individuals at universities anonymously through two distinct channels. First, it allows students to rate and rank the performance of their professors and lecturers. This channel, which can be seen as crowd voting, targets quiet corruption (incompetence, inefficiency, etc.) among university employees. The second channel is a system for confidential reports on specific incidents of hard corruption (bribery, favours, etc.) within the universities. Any registered user of the system can submit these reports, anonymously or not. Through a viral marketing campaign using social media and collaborating with local hip-hop artists, NIMC tried to reach out to many university students to get accurate reports regarding corruption within universities in Kenya and Uganda. In contrast to many anti-corruption efforts using top-down methods focussing on systemic change through repairing institutions, NIMC have a bottom-up approach focussing on the individuals within academic institutions. This naming and shaming approach was motivated by the opinion that individuals should take more responsibility for their actions. NIMC is further forming partnerships with private lawyers and file lawsuits based on particularly information-rich reports. NIMC received initial support from

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the Swedish NGO Spider, but also run a crowdfunding campaign to build a fund to support whistleblowers in Kenya who have submitted hard evidence of corruption via the platform. Through GlobalGiving, they managed to raise almost US$6000 from 83 donors. At the time of writing, the platform has profile pages for almost more than 10,000 individuals from 71 universities in Kenya and Uganda. However, while students liked the idea and stood behind the aim of the initiative, many focus group participants said that they still would not use the platform but rather use other modes of communication to complain and fight corruption. Quite a few were indifferent about the whole thing and did not believe that their reports would bring any change. This can also be seen in the number of ratings submitted to the platform and number of corruption reports received. The low participation can partly be attributed to peripheral factors such as limited access to Internet, a non-intuitive platform, and students’ fears of government surveillance. However, even when students have overcome the peripheral challenges and are committed to NIMC’s mission (as seen as in their engagement with NIMC’s Facebook page), they still do not rate lecturers and report corruption. Reasons to why the platform is not being used are many. Reporting on corruption is generally low across the East African region. According to the East African Bribery Index 2013, less than 10 % of respondents who encountered corruption filed a report. Same study indicates that people in Kenya and Uganda did not report since they knew no action would be taken even if they did so (Transparency International Kenya 2013). Crowdsourcing will not change that kind of perception per se. Indeed, Zinnbauer (2014), observes that establishing a mechanism for crowdsourcing corruption is extremely difficult in contexts where civil society organisations are not particularly strong and professional. Data from the focus groups further indicates that the answer lies in the elements of ‘motive alignment’ (see Sharma 2010). While NIMC’s longterm goal of reducing corruption within East African universities were shared, students did recognise some benefits of corrupt practices for themselves and their peers. This contradiction complicates students’ motivation to publicly condemn individual lecturers, even when these same students might believe that corruption is wrong in general. Students failed to engage with initiative as its initiator intended speaks to the complexity of crowdsourcing.

Lessons Learned and Future Direction There are still some critical gaps in the knowledge about crowdsourcing for and in development regarding what really works, why, and in what circumstances. As seen in the two cases outlined above, and despite acknowledging identified

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best practices, there are some profound challenges in using crowdsourcing as a means to achieve the goals. Closing the Feedback Loop Crowdsourcing should be more interactive and future initiatives needs to make sure that all users can access aggregated data, even if they do not have access to the Internet. As summarised by Warner (2011), a critical factor to crowdsourcing success is the feeling by crowd participants that their efforts were considered. If the crowd consists of mobile (only) users, will they see the bigger picture of the intervention and will they then continue to feed future crowdsourcing platforms with information? Crowdsourcing should further open up for comments to increase participation and interaction. A simple questionnaire to collect direct data feedback and information from users (while respecting user privacy and rights) could be added as an extra function to learn more about the crowd. Not only is there a need to increase the interaction between the initiator and the crowd it is also needed between peers. To find out how individuals of the crowd can interact more with each other in a secure, simple, and easy way is a challenge, especially when the users only have access via mobile phones. Mandate A good cause, technical know-how, and initial funding is not enough. If organisational resources are lacking and if there is no mandate to act upon the information generated, should an organisation then implement the platform? The initiator should use the crowdsourced information more wisely: document, analyse, and understand it. There is a need to follow up, respond to complex dynamics, share results, and give back to the crowd. Otherwise, it will be hard to show impact. Cost Access and interaction are two crucial concepts to achieve participation. Related to access and interaction is affordability. Users of both the crowdsourcing initiatives outlined above indicate that the cost of using the service restricted interaction and thereby participation. In the case of UgandaWatch, participants said they had sent fewer SMSs than they otherwise would have due to the costs involved. What this implies is that given mobile access and awareness of the service, users could still not participate to the extent they wanted. Users of NIMC said that their restricted access to Internet, and the cost involved in accessing, made them prioritise other things online, for example, social media or research. Crowdsourcing is not a silver bullet for international development. The different crowdsourcing approaches that exist for utilising the crowd’s collective intelligence, opinions and in the case of crowdfunding—willingness to contribute financially—are complementary to other efforts and not

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incompatible. Crowdsourcing only represents one of many different possible approaches that can add transparency and accountability in government processes, public service delivery, and even in development work itself. Diverse methods, approaches, and platforms are needed in order to spur development. This especially since crowdsourcing interventions, as many other online and digital communities, often focuses on a single issue. That said, the use of crowdsourcing in and for development has just seen its beginning. It is an interactive tool that can open up positions and obtain feedback directly from citizens and development programme beneficiaries. Crowdsourcing can thus serve as a participatory monitoring and evaluation tool for development and humanitarian programmes. To get people involved, increase citizen participation, and inspire collective action, becomes key. For this to happen, technology and the process needs to be kept simple, the right crowd needs to be addressed, the right incentives offered, the right analysis carried out, and communities needs to get something back. As crowdsourcing harnesses the power of ICT to liberate the potential that exists in large groups of people, it already constitutes an interesting complement with the likelihood to slowly shift the way development work is carried out.

References Avila, R., H. Feigenblatt, R. Heacock, and N. Heller. 2010. Global mapping of technology for transparency and accountability. London: Transparency & accountability initiative. In Digital activism decoded: The new mechanics of change, ed. Joyce, M.C. New York: IDEA. Bailard, C., R. Baker, M. Hindman, M. Livingston, and P. Meier. 2012. Mapping the maps: A meta-level analysis of Ushahidi and Crowdmap. Washington, DC: Internews Center for Innovation & Learning. Belleflamme, P., T. Lambert, and A. Schwienbacher. 2013. Crowdfunding: Tapping the right crowd. Journal of Business Venturing 29(5): 585–609. Bott, M., and G. Young. 2012. The role of crowdsourcing for better governance in international development. PRAXIS. The Fletcher Journal of Human Security 27. Donner, J. 2010. Framing M4D: The utility of continuity and the dual heritage of mobiles and development. The Electronic Journal of Information Systems in Developing Countries 44(3): 1–16. Currion, P. 2010. If all you have is a hammer-how useful is humanitarian crowdsourcing. 14 Nov 2011. DEMGroup. 2010. Press release 2 June 2010: Launch of UgandaWatch 2011, Uganda, Kampala. Estellés-Arolas, E., and F.  González-Ladrón-de-Guevara. 2012. Towards an integrated crowdsourcing definition. Journal of Information science 38(2): 189–200.

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Hellström, J. 2015. Crowdsourcing as a tool for political participation? – The case of UgandaWatch. International Journal of Public Information Systems. Hellström, J., and M. Tedre. Failing forward – mobile services in East Africa, Working title (forthcoming). Hellström, J., and A. Karefelt. 2012. Mobile participation? Crowdsourcing during the 2011 Uganda general elections. In Proceedings of M4D2012 28–29 February, 2012, New Delhi, India, ed. V. Kumar and J. Sevensson. Karlstadt: Karlstadt University Press. Hellström, J., and B. Brooke. 2013. Many “likers” do not constitute a crowd: The case of Uganda’s Not In My Country. In ICT for anti-corruption, democracy and education in East Africa, ed. K. Sarajeva. Spider ICT4D Series No. 6. Howe, J. 2006. Crowdsourcing: A definition. Crowdsourcing Blog, 2 June 2006. Howe, J. 2008. Crowdsourcing: Why the power of the crowd is driving the future of business. New York: Crown Publishing Group. Lévy, P. 1997. Collective intelligence: Mankind’s emerging world in cyberspace. New York: Plenum. Meier, P. 2011. Do ‘liberation technologies’ change the balance of power between repressive states and civil society? Doctoral Dissertation, Faculty of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. Morozov, E. 2011. The net delusion: The dark side of internet freedom. New  York: Public Affairs. Pedersen, J., D. Kocsis, A. Tripathi, A. Tarrell, A. Weerakoon, N. Tahmasbi, and G.J. de Vreede. 2013. Conceptual foundations of crowdsourcing: A review of IS research. System Sciences (HICSS), 2013 46th Hawaii International Conference, 579–588, IEEE. Poblet, M. 2010. Mobile governance: Empowering citizens to enhance democratic processes. Proceedings of I-KNOW 2010, 1–3 Sept 2010, Graz, Austria. Poblet, M. (ed.). 2011. Mobile technologies for conflict management: Online dispute resolution, governance, participation. London: Springer. Sasaki, D. (Ed.). 2010. Technology for transparency - The role of technology and citizen media in promoting transparency, accountability and civic participation, Technology for Transparency Network. Sharma, A. 2010. Crowdsourcing critical success factor model. Strategies to harness the collective intelligence of the crowd, Working Paper 1. Surowiecki, J. 2004. The wisdom of crowds: Why the many are smarter than the few. London: Abacus. Transparency international Kenya. 2013. The East African bribery index 2013, Nairobi. Walter, T., and A. Back. 2011. Towards measuring crowdsourcing success: An empirical study on effects of external factors in online idea contest. In Proceedings from the 6th Mediterranean Conference on Information Systems (MCIS), 1–12. Warner, J. 2011. Next steps in e-government crowdsourcing. In Proceedings of the 12th Annual International Digital Government Research Conference: Digital Government Innovation in Challenging Times, 177–181. Zinnbauer, D. 2014. Crowd-sourcing corruption – some challenges, some possible futures, Paper for Internet, Politics, Policy 2014: Crowdsourcing for Politics and Policy.

36 The Problematic of Biofuels for Development Kate J. Neville and Peter Dauvergne

1

Introduction

Is fuel from plants and plant oils a critical solution to climate change? A cause of higher food prices and world hunger? A much-needed boost to farmers in the world’s poorest regions? Or a thinly veiled excuse by multinational corporations and Northern governments to appropriate land in the Global South? Since the early 2000s, a fierce debate has raged over the value and consequences of biofuels. At the beginning of the 2000s, a wide range of actors, including environmental and social justice organisations, were introducing— and advocating for—biofuels as a technological fix to a complex set of energy, economic, and development challenges. Enthusiasm soon waned, however, as concerns arose over the environmental consequences, carbon footprints, and unintended spillovers. Views fractured further as large-scale agricultural and energy companies began to show increasing interest in producing biofuels. Shifting narratives, uneven and fluctuating policies, and activist campaigns for and against biofuels have caused deep financial and territorial uncertainties and complexities across the world. Today, the variety of socio-economic,

K.J. Neville ( ) Nicholas School of the Environment, Duke University, USA P. Dauvergne ( ) Department of Political Science, University of British Columbia, Canada © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 J. Grugel, D. Hammett (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of International Development, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-42724-3_36

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ecological, and political landscapes for biofuels borders on bewildering: from established oil palm plantations in Indonesia and Malaysia to experimental Jatropha fields in Kenya and India, and from staple crops of canola in Europe to sugarcane in Brazil to corn in the USA. How do development scholars make sense of this landscape? What frameworks can we use to unpack the politics of a commodity—or more accurately a set of commodities—that multiple producers make in multiple ways? Where do we begin when inquiring into commodities that span already-controversial energy and agricultural sectors, are implicated in increasingly abstract financial markets, have uneven and difficult-to-track consequences, and are sweeping the globe? Why do the perspectives of academics, policymakers, media, environmental advocates, and investors differ so widely? This chapter answers these questions, aiming to clarify what we see as the specific challenges of biofuels for development. We organise our analysis of biofuels in the context of development around three broad areas: (1) distributional equity in biofuels production, (2) invisibility and legibility of power in investment and production chains, and (3) the impacts of narrative volatility on all actors in the debates over these fuels. Each has wide-ranging consequences for the global governance of biofuels. The first considers the distribution of the social and environmental costs and benefits of biofuels, with a focus on the impacts of biofuel production on marginalised populations. The second considers the distribution of power in decision-making forums and in production systems, noting the difficulty in identifying actors in long and complex commodity chains as well as the importance of information access in enabling stakeholder participation. The third area reflects on the challenge for development scholarship of a constantly shifting debate—from a silver bullet solution to a global food security threat to a global land grab—and where a single term encompasses a multiplicity of things, with both bioethanol and biodiesel made from various feedstock in a variety of ways. The array of arguments on the potential development value and environmental consequences of biofuels can seem confusing. We suggest, however, that these can be understood in a few general (albeit overlapping) groupings of approaches and assumptions—and, importantly, that these groups reflect different theoretical lenses for understanding the value of biofuels for development. As with other environmental and social debates, the very questions asked about biofuels depend, in part, on the ‘worldview’ of the analyst (as outlined by Clapp and Dauvergne 2011), whether, for instance, economic growth is a meaningful measure of development, or whether technological solutions can ever adequately address the causes of environmental degradation and social inequality.

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To illuminate the main debates over biofuels we organise the array of scholarly work on biofuels into four categories: science, technology, and environment; agriculture, food systems, and hunger; land rights, colonialism, and territoriality; and policy and governance. We begin by looking at the meaning of development, with an emphasis on questions of sustainability, and then further explain the three aspects of the biofuel problematic for development. Next, we delineate the four categories of biofuels scholarship, highlighting how each offers insights as well as suggests certain kinds of analyses and interventions. We conclude by reflecting on the future of global biofuel production, and the ongoing relevance of debates over energy, agriculture, new markets, and resource control for marginalised people worldwide.

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Development, the Global South, and the Biofuels Problematic

Sustainable Development and the Global South For us, ‘development’ involves a range of multi-scalar, multi-actor, and multiinstitutional processes of change—including economic, political, social, and environmental—that influence power structures and interactions within and across communities, societies, and nations. As the journal World Development states, ‘Development processes occur in different ways and at all levels: inside the family, the firm and the farm; locally, provincially, nationally, and globally’ (http://www.journals.elsevier.com/world-development). Thus, the issues at stake range widely, from global aid and trade, to demographics and gender, to rural–urban interactions and migrations, to the causes and consequences of poverty, to cultural change in a globalising world. With scholars of development encompassing neoliberal economists and feminist–Marxist theorists, among others, in disciplines spanning history, anthropology, politics, sociology, economics, and geography, the field includes a wide range of oftenconflicting views, theories, methods, and findings. Many development scholars focus on relations between developing and developed states, with varying terminology, such as the ‘Third’ and ‘First World’, ‘industrialising’ and ‘industrialised nations’, ‘emerging’ and ‘advanced economies’, and the ‘global South’ and ‘global North’ (for a history of these debates, see Ma 1998; Chant and McIlwaine 2009). In our work, the guiding focus has been the role of North–South and South–South relations in financing, trade, and commodity markets (e.g., Dauvergne and Neville 2009, 2010). Further, for us, the realm of development studies with particular relevance to assessing biofuels is ‘sustainable’ development. One of the central reasons

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that biofuels took off so quickly and prominently in the global arena was the promise that these fuels held for furthering economic growth, mobility, and production while improving rural livelihoods and reducing carbon footprints (see Bastos Lima and Gupta 2013: 49–53). The language of sustainable development, and the question of whether biofuels are indeed furthering environmental or social sustainability, has been central to debates over these fuels. Sustainable development as defined by the World Commission on Environment and Development (1987: 43) refers to ‘development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’. The three pillars of sustainability, for the United Nations and much of the global community, are economic, social, and environmental concerns. Since the Commission’s report in 1987 (and even before), though, the meaning of sustainability has been hotly contested and corporations have taken on new power in defining the scope and context of this term (see Clémençon 2012: 312; Dauvergne and Lister 2013a; Williams and Millington 2004: 99). As Dauvergne and Lister (2013b) state, ‘accelerating market competition to go “green” is not, as brand executives and even some NGOs are telling us, fundamentally about ensuring the sustainability of the global environment. Rather, it is a competition to turn the concept of sustainability into a business tool to enhance market control, profits, and above all, business growth.’ The justification for biofuels as a tool of sustainable development, then, has been contested from the very beginning, and sets the stage for understanding the three-part problematic of biofuels for development.

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Further Elaborating the Problematic of Biofuels for Development

Development studies brings up a particular understanding of the biofuels problematic given its focus on questions of the allocation of economic opportunities and technologies across nations, societies, and communities, along with the impacts of societal changes on quality of life, human–environment interactions, and the trajectories of social organisation and institutions. Questions of justice take on particular import for development scholars.

Distributional Equity One justification for promoting biofuels was their anticipated benefits for rural smallholders, particularly in developing countries. Claims abounded that biofuels could, concurrently mitigate climate change (which has a

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disproportionate impact on the poor), provide energy security to rural, energy-poor communities, and open up new agricultural markets to farmers in developing countries. However, it appears that the poorest and most marginalised rural people bear many of the negative consequences of biofuel production (see ArizaMontobbio et  al. 2010). For those without legal land tenure, the push to expand the production of biofuel feedstock, especially through plantations, can displace people from traditional lands and livelihoods. Displacement may be direct, as when tenants are relocated from lands they previously cultivated. Yet, as some scholars argue, the scale of direct expulsions from agricultural land negotiations and transfers is often small, instead, ‘incorporation of peasants, rural labourers and indigenous peoples into the emerging commercial farms, commodity chains, and industrial plantations are more common’ (Borras et al. 2012: 847). Indirect effects from biofuel production may involve pastoralists losing access to seasonal grazing lands and routes to water sources, or downstream communities losing reliable water access because of reduced flows and compromised water quality as witnessed in coastal Kenya from several proposed biofuels projects (Duvail et al. 2012). Identifying, addressing, and reconciling these questions of distributional equity remains a problem for scholars of development.

Invisibility and Legibility The growing complexity of production, including the increase in distance between nodes in supply chains, from investors to producers to retailers to consumers, makes it difficult to identify and govern actors within these chains. While many scholars have highlighted the importance of distance in commodity chains, including Friedmann (1994) Princen (1997, 2002), and Conca (2001), the inclusion of upstream investors in more abstract commodity markets is more recent. For instance, Clapp (2012, 2014) examines the agrifood sector, revealing that ‘financial investments, in turn, affect food prices and provide the capital for firms to make investments in the productive sector, often resulting in negative side effects, including higher and more volatile food prices as well as a host of environmental and social problems associated with large-scale farmland acquisitions. But distancing associated with financialisation means that the role that financial actors play in fuelling those problems is not always transparent’ (Clapp 2014). Further, Clapp’s (2014) work illuminates that actors wielding control over production chains may not always be aware of that power, noting, for instance, the role of third-party investors such as institutional investment funds. Those contribut-

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ing money to pension and mutual funds, for example, may have little to no information on what their money is supporting. Simultaneously, and paradoxically, as commodity chains and investment products become more difficult to track, the growing reach of spatial information and mapping technologies means that distant landscapes and populations become less difficult to monitor and control from afar. Using satellite imagery, global information systems, greater macro-scale data on surface and subsurface ecologies and geologies, and cell phone and Internet technologies, states and corporations are gaining more information more quickly about places far from hubs of political and economic power. The increasing legibility of distant and hard-to-access territories and communities has uneven consequences, with some scholars arguing this is further strengthening the power of the state and corporations, and disempowering local actors—although some, including Scott (1998: 344), caution that large-scale state efforts to map and control societies ‘from above’ have largely been ‘undone by a host of contingencies beyond the planners’ grasp… [t]he wild cards in their deck, however, were the human and natural events outside their models—droughts, wars, revolts, epidemics, interest rates, world consumer prices, oil embargoes. They could and did, of course, attempt to adjust and improvise in the face of these contingencies. But the magnitude of their initial intervention was so great that many of their missteps could not be righted.’ The consequent challenge posed by biofuels for development studies scholars is how to develop analytical tools that decipher the growing invisibility of some actors, particularly as investors develop abstract financial products such as energy derivatives and agricultural futures, as well as address the role of greater legibility in facilitating and impeding community access and participation in some land-use decisions.

Narrative Volatility Third, those approaching biofuels from a development angle must grapple with the volatility of these commodities, not only in terms of prices and commodity market rules, but also the discourse around these fuels. Studying and governing these fuels requires unpacking conflicting and overlapping narratives. Media, government, corporate, and activist narratives about biofuels have had powerful effects on the governance of these fuels, and on the policies that governments enact. Our own research on biofuels has underscored three narratives: ‘silver bullet’ solutions to environmental challenges, ‘food versus

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fuel’ standoffs, and neo-colonial ‘land grab’ accusations. Our aim has been to understand the ways in which discourses and framing intersect with global political economy trends, and how these have altered the processes of production and consequences of biofuels. Development studies inform much of our work, especially our analysis of the consequences of the changing geopolitics of trade for North–South and South–South relations. We find, for instance, that partnerships and alliances that have emerged around biofuels ‘reflect new patterns in the international political economy, where trade relationships among developing countries are strengthening, and where economic lines between developed and developing countries are blurring’ (Dauvergne and Neville 2009: 1087). In other work, Neville (2015) finds that a land-use dispute in rural Kenya gained attention beyond the region, with local actors engaging international allies, by linking the local case to global debates over biofuels, using narratives such as food security, land tenure, and sovereignty.

Addressing the Problematic Taking these three components of the problematic of biofuels in concert, we turn next to sets of literatures that engage with biofuels from a range of perspectives. For readers newly engaging with the problematic of biofuels for development, this is helpful for navigating the array of articles and arguments about these fuels. For readers with more experience in either international development research or biofuels research, we trust a review of the literature, and a novel look at the assumptions that accompany various approaches to analysis, will prove useful to furthering these debates.

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Categorising Biofuels Scholarship: Four Lenses on the Problematic

In this section, we introduce four categories of biofuels research, parsing them apart to show the range of theoretical frameworks, empirical cases, journals, and scholars working on these questions. We recognise that separating work on biofuels into distinct categories risks obscuring many of the productive overlaps that exist across perspectives and approaches. There remains a tradeoff between the utility of clearly differentiating analytical categories (for mapping out a field and identifying the accompanying assumptions and consequences), and the value of revealing the complexity and blurriness of many of these categories (for reflecting the actual messy nature of these issues). We

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opt for the former, with the hope that delineating analytical differences in focus and approach across different sets of scholarship will provide some clarity and give a starting point to development studies scholars for their own work on biofuel-related questions. We caution readers, though, that these are neither mutually exclusive nor clearly bounded categories. In different ways, literature from all four sections helps us understand the problematic of biofuels for development.

Science, Technology, and Environment Biofuels leapt onto the global stage in the early 2000s as, initially, a climatefriendly alternative to fossil fuels. The alignment of the interests of industrial actors (such as agricultural firms) and non-governmental organisations (notably climate change activists) created a strong initial cross-sectoral lobby for these fuels, leading to the adoption by many countries, including the EU and USA, of policies to develop biofuels (see e.g., Dauvergne and Neville 2009: 1089–1090). Yet enthusiasm shifted to scepticism, when debates over environmental impacts, food security, and land rights reversed much of the initial optimism about bioethanol and biodiesel derived from agricultural crops. Even with these growing doubts, many actors retain hope about technological developments that could change the equation. Some scientists, policymakers, and activists suggested second generation biofuels from non-food crops and crop waste would supplant first generation fuels from food crops such as sugarcane and corn, and, then, that ‘next generation’ biofuels derived from algae would take over, bringing the hoped-for benefits without the costs. Consequently, among the sets of work on biofuels is a large body of literature on science, technology, and environmental studies. Natural scientists and engineers are involved (and invested) in much of this literature. So, too, are economic modellers, global information systems analysts, and interdisciplinary scholars with environmental science backgrounds. A wide range of journals feature debates over the ecological impacts of biofuel crops, the carbon footprints of fuels from various feedstocks, and the impacts of technological developments—including Bulletin of Science, Technology, Society, Conservation Biology, Environmental Research Letters, European Molecular Biology Organization, Nature, and Science. Some of the scientific work focuses on the impacts of biofuels on greenhouse gas emissions. Danielsen et al. (2009), for example, consider the impact of converting forests to oil palm biofuel plantations, comparing carbon savings from biofuels and carbon emissions from deforestation. These kinds

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of studies offer support or pose challenges to those claiming biofuels provide environmental benefits. Others have tried to model the land-use requirements for various scenarios of biofuel production (Gurgel et al. 2007), land availability in various parts of the Global South (in Tanzania, Haugen 2010), the price effects of biofuels on other energy markets (on crude oil, Hochman et al. 2010), and water requirements for expanding biofuel production (King et al. 2008). Some studies focus less on the impacts of existing and commercially available biofuels, turning instead to the potential of future technologies to mitigate environmental and social concerns. A number of these studies suggest that these fuels do have transformative potential, and what is needed is support for advances in areas such as biochemistry, biotechnology, and engineering; Ragauskas et al. (2006: 484), for instance, state ‘the integration of agroenergy crops and biorefinery manufacturing technologies offer the potential for the development of sustainable biopower and biomaterials that will lead to a new manufacturing paradigm.’ While general discussions take ‘biofuels’ as a single energy source, numerous scientific studies reveal the variety of impacts and outcomes from different locations, biofuel feedstock, and production methods. Thamsiriroj and Murphy (2009), Börjesson (2009), Searchinger et al. (2008), and Taheripour et al. (2010), for instance, find significant differences in greenhouse gas emissions from, among other things, different crops, land-use changes, and byproduct options. The differences among fuels points to the need for qualified policies and specific analyses, rather than general policies and prescriptions. Many of the studies we consider in the science, technology, and environment category indirectly address the question of distributional equity in the biofuel problematic: if the negative impacts of biofuels can be mitigated or eliminated, many of the concerns about who bears the brunt of the costs are negated. Alternately, if the anticipated climate and environmental benefits are, in fact, unrealised, the burden of costs is exacerbated, thus distributional equity issues may take on increased significance. Yet political ecologists, among others, have criticised many of these studies, arguing that technological advances will not address the underlying causes of environmental degradation and social inequality, and certainly will not change the patterns of distributional inequity resulting from historical inequalities, structural barriers of global trade, and socio-economic vulnerability. These studies provide the foundation for much of the social and ecological debate over emissions and biodiversity impacts, land availability and land-use change implications, and economic consequences of this new energy sector; however, more critical approaches tend to emerge from scholars researching food sys-

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tems, the global political economy, and agrarian societies. We turn next to food systems and financialisation, and the role of the associated literature in understanding the invisibility dimension of the biofuel problematic.

Agriculture, Food Systems, and Hunger ‘Food versus fuel’ became a cry of biofuels critics around 2007 as food price spikes coincided with the rise of biofuels on the global stage. Along with concerns about hunger and food prices—seen by some as the economic consequences of diverting grains and staple crops into energy commodity chains— debates over biofuels also intensified already-existing agricultural and food system conflicts. The literature on food systems and prices, financialisation of commodities, agricultural biotechnologies, and global patterns of production and consumption, in journals including Food Security, Global Environmental Politics, Global Environmental Change, Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy, Review of Agricultural Economics, and Environmental Politics, addresses the economic and social dynamics of food production, land-use changes, and capital accumulation that reveals increasing invisibility in production chains. This work further illuminates the challenges of distributional equity in biofuels and associated markets, including the fundamental questions of what land is used, by whom, and for what. These latter questions are echoed in the following category of literature on land acquisitions, resource access, and territorial control. As noted already, development opportunities for small-scale, rural farmers was one of the stated motivations for biofuels promotion; yet, with staple grains providing feedstock for biofuels, many of the world’s largest agricultural producers and traders were implicated in, and often in control of, these fuel-production commodity chains. Whether for food or fuel, grain futures and other financial indices and products are traded in international financial markets, involving agricultural commodity traders such as Archer Daniel Midlands and Cargill; similarly, the production of these crops, regardless of final product destination, involves chemical companies such as Dow Chemicals and farm machinery from companies such as John Deere. As Ariza-Montobbio et al. (2010) demonstrate through a case study from Tamil Nadu, India, the cultivation of Jatropha curcas for biodiesel tends to advantage ‘resource-rich farmers, while possibly reinforcing existing processes of marginalisation of small and marginal farmers’ (Ariza-Montobbio et al. 2010: 875).

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Further, the justification that biofuels help small-scale farmers becomes questionable if marginalised households are priced out of food markets, leaving already-vulnerable populations hungry. As food prices soared, and protests surged (see Dauvergne and Neville 2010: 636 for a discussion of global demonstrations linked with food and fuel prices), numerous analysts attempted to identify the causes of rising food prices. The role of biofuels in price spikes remains uncertain: the influence of biofuels on food prices ranged from a low of 2–3 % to a high of 75 % (Dauvergne and Neville 2010: 637), with little consensus across economists, development banks, governments, and food systems scholars. Numerous scholars have investigated the links between biofuels and food security. Among them, Boddiger (2007) reviews cases of biofuels leading to diverted maize crops, competition with non-food crops for food and water, and changes in food surpluses and distribution structures; Conceição and Mendoza (2009) assess possible drivers of what they considered the 2008 food crisis, including the direct and indirect role of biofuels as a competitor for food; Colbran (2011) investigates the impact of the financialisation of agricultural commodity futures trading on what she identified as the global food crisis of 2006–2008; and Henn (2011) considers the determinants of market prices for food, noting, among other things, debates over the role in price spikes of financial speculation in futures and the moral and regulatory issues this raises. These widely varying estimates, and other associated challenges of determining the actual effects of biofuels on global hunger, reveal one of the dimensions of the biofuels problematic: invisibility. The complexity of increasingly globalised agricultural and energy commodity chains, and their investment flows, make it difficult to track the impacts of different pressures and markets on overall prices and access. Political economists who analyse financialisation in commodity markets, including Helleiner (2011) on private global financial markets and Clapp (2014) on finance in the global food system, provide some insights on these investment and resource flows. These abstract, physically disconnected financial products have tangible repercussions for many agrarian communities, and so for scholars of development, this category of scholarship may help to reveal otherwise obscure relationships in biofuel chains. The tools of global political economy can uncover the material and social outcomes resulting from exchanges in abstract financial markets. Additionally, the literature on food systems encompasses a critical sociological and historical perspective on agriculture and development. This literature both questions some of the technological solutions proposed by scholars of science and technology, and overlaps with scholars of land rights

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and territoriality (our third category). McMichael (2000), for example, argues that the ‘crisis of development,’ where industrialisation has degraded the natural and cultural base of agriculture, has led to the redefinition of development, enabling the use of biotechnology as a solution to food security and the simultaneous rise of countermovements to challenge market-based food solutions proposed by corporate, state, and global institutions. In other work, McMichael (2010, 2012) considers specifically the role of ‘agrofuels’—an alternate term for biofuels from social movement critics, aimed at recognising the environmental and social consequences of these commodities—in the food regime, seeing the enthusiasm for agrofuels as an indication of ‘capitalism’s subjection of food to the commodity form… at the continuing expense of the environment’ (McMichael 2010: 609). Here, the invisibility aspect of the problematic of biofuels for development does not refer only to the distant and sometimes-unwitting actors within production chains, but also to the hidden role of capitalism in defining the structures and terms of socio-economic relationships. McMichael’s (2012) work on corporate food regimes and ‘the land grab’ also offers a bridge to the next category of literature, focussed on land rights and appropriation, colonial histories and neo-colonial perspectives, and changes to the enclosures and access points for land and resources.

Land Rights, Colonialism, and Territoriality Although debates over food and fuel did not disappear, starting in 2009 much of the focus shifted to accusations that biofuels were instruments of a global ‘land grab.’ Alternately called a land grab, land rush, land deal, and large-scale land acquisitions (depending on the perspective of the analyst or institution), the interest in land use for biofuels joined a surge of other projects competing for land across the globe. The justification for biofuels as development and agricultural opportunities for small-scale farmers in many countries in the Global South, particularly in Africa, was, argued some, a thinly veiled excuse for the latest colonial project of land appropriation. Scholarship in this vein tends to be informed by agrarian political economy, rural sociology, political ecology, and global environmental politics, and includes work in journals such as Rural Sociology, Journal of Rural Social Sciences, Ecology and Society, Society and Natural Resources, and Agriculture and Human Values. Borras et al. (2010) introduce a special issue of the Journal of Peasant Studies on biofuels with questions from agrarian political economy, which revolve around distributional equity and justice, control, and power, including

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investigating the use of surplus wealth generated by this production. Further, Borras and colleagues consider the interaction between politics and dynamic ecologies, which brings in perspectives of political ecologists. A range of historically informed work belongs to this category, including: Alden Wily (2012) locating modern involuntary land loss in the context of earlier ‘land rushes’, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa; Borras et al. (2011) challenging the perception of the availability of marginal lands, noting its origins in the denial of traditional livelihood activities; and Benjaminsen and Bryceson (2012) critiquing certain conservation efforts as part of a strategy of ‘accumulation by dispossession’. Scholars in this line of research also investigate issues involving, among other things, the conditioning of the effects of land deals and acquisitions based on social structures such as gender (Behrman et al. 2012), and the ‘grabbing’ of other resources, notably water (Mehta et al. 2012; Duvail et  al. 2012) and conservation sites (‘green grabbing,’ Corson and MacDonald 2012; Fairhead et al. 2012). Here, questions of colonial legacies, histories of social and political exclusion, and patterns of contestation over land rights are explanatory factors for the power and instability of particular narratives around biofuels. The work pays particular attention to disputes over land control and access to the paradoxical roles of maps, land titles and deeds, spatial monitoring technology, and geographic boundaries. For instance, as Nalepa and Bauer (2012) argue, remote sensing technology is used to help characterise certain lands as marginal, which helps justify the appropriation of that land for new production activities. Direct appropriation, though, does not tell the full story of control and dispossession. As work on food systems demonstrates, corporate control over complex financial products and power over production decisions through supply chain incentives and disincentives adds to the monitoring and mapping technologies that empower actors outside the physical location of production processes. Amanor (2012: 733) recalls that ‘control and expropriation can occur at different levels from land to marketing institutions, inputs, knowledge and intellectual property rights, and quality control (as in standards and grading systems). Thus, access to land in itself does not guarantee security for smallholders, and control over land is merely one resource among many though which transnational agriculture can control production and accumulation’. Notably, resistance is equally part of the story of biofuel developments and the legibility of landscapes. Gerber (2011), for example, tracks conflict cases linked with industrial tree plantations (including biofuel feedstock trees) in the Global South, finding strategies of resistance ranging ‘from dialogue to

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direct confrontation and from local to international,’ naming actions that span legal and bureaucratic channels as well as civil disobedience measures, including demonstrations, lawsuits, road blockades, and tree uprooting. Similarly, in our work on biofuel negotiations in coastal Tanzania, we argue that the politics of large-scale land acquisitions ‘would seem to be better understood in terms of cycles of contentious politics, as an ongoing process in which movements and counter-movements vie for control through the strategic use of images, maps, and discourse’ instead of as the simple exploitation of communities by corporations (Neville and Dauvergne 2012). We do not intend to suggest that power is equal across these groups; however, we contend that communities are not passive recipients of the authority and domination of corporations and governments, and that the process of land transfers is more complex than a simple colonial ‘land grab’ narrative suggests.

Policy and Governance Much of the work in the previous three categories overlaps with this final set of literature on policy and governance; parsing this apart, though, adds some analytic value by providing an additional understanding of the narrative volatility of biofuels. Scholars tracking financialisation are highly attuned to the volatility of commodity markets and price fluctuations; running through all the literature, though, is another form of volatility: that of the discourse surrounding biofuels. Scholars of policy and governance, publishing in policy journals including Energy Policy, European Journal of Political Research, Water Policy, and Review of Policy Research, and development journals such as Journal of Environment and Development, World Development, IDS Bulletin, and Third World Quarterly, address a range of issues for biofuels, everything from certification standards and systems (Partzsch 2011; Fortin 2013) to national and regional climate and energy policy formation (Duffield and Collins 2006; Fernandes et al. 2010) to whether there is a ‘biofuel regime’ emerging in the global arena (Bastos Lima and Gupta 2013). On certification systems, Silva-Castaneda (2012), for example, investigates third-party audits conducted for the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil, arguing that certification can aggravate disparities in power and knowledge as the auditing process tends to invalidate local and community-based ‘forms of proof ’. In a policy tool assessment, Thompson et al. (2011) consider the effects of biofuel use mandates in the USA, noting their removal could have mixed effects on greenhouse gas emissions given

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a number of uncertainties, including the effects of US biofuel trade on biofuel consumption in other countries, price responses of other energy supplies, and elasticities of international supply and demand. Fundamental to many of these analyses is the language to describe biofuels: that is, how the object of analysis and governance is defined. This proves a difficult thing to do, given the range of fuels, feedstocks, production practices, supply chains, and consumers that exists for these commodities, and the fluid, shifting nature of the language of both proponents and opponents. The rapidly shifting positions in biofuel debates and the overlapping and flexible discourses of media, activists, governments, and corporations are difficult to map, and continue to fluctuate. Scholars, though, have begun to track these narratives and framing efforts, and offer useful insights into emerging patterns. Among these, Sengers et al. (2010) analyse shifts in media discourse from 2000 to 2008 to understand resistance to sustainable energy technologies in the Netherlands; Qu et al. (2010) undertake a content analysis of Chinese news articles on bioenergy, finding the media emphasises the benefits of these energy sources; Delshad and Raymond (2013) find media frames shape public attitudes towards biofuels in the USA; and Ulmanen et al. (2009) consider biofuels in Sweden and the Netherlands, concluding that biofuel development is a non-linear, multifaceted process that policymakers cannot fully manage.

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Conclusion: The Future of Biofuels?

Although biofuels have lost some of their prominence on the global stage in the second decade of the twenty-first century, with energy debates shifting to natural gas and hydraulic fracturing, they remain important parts of many countries’ energy portfolios, under industrial agricultural systems. Biofuel headlines and global campaigns have slowed, but battles continue both locally and globally—in a rural community in coastal Kenya, for instance, where proposals for biofuel projects have been postponed, but not stopped, while further land-use planning and consultation occurs (Neville 2015), and in transnational activist groups such as Birdlife International and Oxfam, where campaigns continue as negotiations over biofuel targets and regulations by European Union officials remain unfinished. The future impacts of biofuels are likely to be uneven, both geographically and socially. Given recent patterns of production and governance, we are not especially hopeful about the potential of biofuels to transform patterns of inequality. We have, in our previous work, anticipated ‘that the emerging

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political economy of biofuels will repeat and reinforce many of these same environmentally destructive trends’ (Dauvergne and Neville 2009: 1087) and that ‘even the development of so-called “sustainable” biofuels looks set to displace livelihoods and reinforce and extend previous waves of hardship for such marginalised peoples’ (Dauvergne and Neville 2010: 631). Smallholder farmers, landless rural cultivators, pastoralists requiring dispersed grazing lands, and already-impoverished consumers of staple foods are unlikely to benefit from current agricultural and energy systems. For development studies, scholars with interests in equitable opportunities, autonomy, and justice, these outcomes for marginalised communities should raise concern and provoke ongoing attention. We continue to hold out hope, though, that by considering multiple perspectives, world views, and theoretical approaches, scholars can inform policy, facilitate participation, and create opportunities for change. Our projections suggest a continued need for critical assessments of new technologies, policies, and practices, particularly those—such as biofuels—that are presented as mechanisms to reduce poverty and achieve rural development. Through a multiplicity of lenses and angles—in all the categories we have identified, as well as through the rich crossovers among them—academic work on biofuels has the potential to contribute to a more sustainable future. By identifying more equitable systems of production, more socially just distribution of costs and benefits, more transparent decision-making processes, and more ecologically sound patterns of consumption and production, this scholarship could help biofuels contribute to development across the Global North and South in the context of rapid social, ecological, and economic change.

References Alden Wily, L. 2012. Looking back to see forward: The legal niceties of land theft in land rushes. The Journal of Peasant Studies 39(3–4): 751–775. Amanor, K.S. 2012. Global resource grabs, agribusiness concentration and the smallholder: Two West African case studies. Journal of Peasant Studies 39(3-4): 731–749. Ariza-Montobbio, P., S. Lele, G. Kallis, and J. Martinez-Alier. 2010. The political ecology of Jatropha plantations for biodiesel in Tamil Nadu, India. The Journal of Peasant Studies 37(4): 875–897. Bastos Lima, M.G., and J. Gupta. 2013. The policy context of biofuels: A case of non-governance at the global level? Global Environmental Politics 13(2): 46–64. Behrman, J., R. Meinzen-Dick, and A. Quisumbing. 2012. The gender implications of large-scale land deals. The Journal of Peasant Studies 39(1): 49–79.

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Benjaminsen, T., and I. Bryceson. 2012. Conservation, green/blue grabbing and accumulation by dispossession in Tanzania. The Journal of Peasant Studies 39(2): 335–355. Boddiger, D. 2007. Boosting biofuel crops could threaten food security. The Lancet 370: 923–924. Börjesson, P. 2009. Good or bad bioethanol from a greenhouse gas perspective – what determines this? Applied Energy 86: 589–594. Borras Jr, S.M., P. McMichael, and I. Scoones. 2010. The politics of biofuels, land and agrarian change: Editors’ introduction. The Journal of Peasant Studies 37(4): 575–592. Borras Jr, S.M., D. Fig, and S. Monsalve Suárez. 2011. The politics of agrofuels and mega-land and water deals: Insights from the ProCana case, Mozambique. Review of African Political Economy 38(128): 215–234. Borras Jr., S.M., J.C. Franco, S. Gómez, C. Kay, and M. Spoor. 2012. Land grabbing in Latin America and the Caribbean. The Journal of Peasant Studies 39(3–4): 845–872. Chant, S., and C. McIlwaine. 2009. Geographies of development in the 21st century: An introduction to the Global South. Edward Elgar Publishing. Clapp, J. 2012. Food. Cambridge: Polity. Clapp, J. 2014. Financialization, distance and global food politics. The Journal of Peasant Studies. doi:10.1080/03066150.2013.875536. Clapp, J., and P. Dauvergne. 2011. Paths to a green world: The political economy of the global environment, 2nd ed. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Clémençon, R. 2012. Welcome to the anthropocene: Rio+20 and the meaning of sustainable development. The Journal of Environment and Development 21: 311–338. Colbran, N. 2011. The financialisation of agricultural commodity futures trading and its impact on the 2006–2008 Global food crisis. University of New South Wales Faculty of Law Research Series, 14. Conca, K. 2001. Consumption and environment in a global economy. Global Environmental Politics 1(3): 53–71. Conceição, P., and R.U. Mendoza. 2009. Anatomy of the global food crisis. Third World Quarterly 30(6): 1159–1182. Corson, C., and K. MacDonald. 2012. Enclosing the global commons: The convention on biological diversity and green grabbing. The Journal of Peasant Studies 39(2): 263–283. Danielsen, F., H. Beukema, N.D. Burgess, F. Parish, C.A. Bruhl, P.F. Donald, D. Murdiyarso, B. Phalan, L. Reijnders, M. Struebig, and E.B. Fitzherbert. 2009. Biofuel plantations on forested lands: Double Jeopardy for biodiversity and climate. Conservation Biology 23(2): 348–358. Dauvergne, P., and J. Lister. 2013a. Eco-business: A big-brand takeover of sustainability. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Dauvergne, P., and J. Lister. 2013b. The corporatization of sustainability, 17 Jan 2013. http://www.e-ir.info/2013/01/17/the-corporatization-of-sustainability

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Dauvergne, P., and K.J. Neville. 2009. The changing North–South and South–South political economy of Biofuels. Third World Quarterly 30(6): 1087–1102. Dauvergne, P., and K.J. Neville. 2010. Forests, food, and fuel in the tropics: The uneven social and ecological consequences of the emerging political economy of biofuels. The Journal of Peasant Studies 37(4): 631–660. Delshad, A., and L. Raymond. 2013. Media framing and public attitudes toward biofuels. Review of Policy Research 30(2): 190–210. Duffield, J., and K. Collins. 2006. Evolution of renewable energy policy. Choice: The Magazine of Food, Farm, and Resource Issues 21(1): 9–14. Duvail, S., C. Médard, O. Hamerlynck, and D.W. Nyingi. 2012. Land and water grabbing in an East African coastal wetland: The case of the Tana delta. Water Alternatives 5(2): 322–343. Fairhead, J., M. Leach, and I. Scoones. 2012. Green grabbing: A new appropriation of nature? The Journal of Peasant Studies 39(2): 237–262. Fernandes, B.M., C.A. Welch, and E.C. Gonçalves. 2010. Agrofuel policies in Brazil: Paradigmatic and territorial disputes. The Journal of Peasant Studies 37(4): 793–819. Fortin, E. 2013. Transnational multi-stakeholder sustainability standards and biofuels: Understanding standards processes. The Journal of Peasant Studies 40(3): 563–587. Friedmann, H. 1994. Distance and durability: Shaky foundations of the world food economy. In The global restructuring of agro-food systems, ed. P. McMichael. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Gerber, J.-F. 2011. Conflicts over industrial tree plantations in the south: Who, how and why? Global Environmental Change 21: 165–176. Gurgel, A., J.M. Reilly, and S. Paltsev. 2007. Potential land use implications of a global biofuels industry. Journal of Agricultural and Food Industrial Organization 5(2): 1–34. Haugen, H. 2010. Biofuel potential and FAO’s estimates of available land: The case of Tanzania. Journal of Ecology and the Natural Environment 2(3): 30–37. Helleiner, E. 2011. Introduction: The greening of global financial markets? Global Environmental Politics 11(2): 51–53. Henn, M. 2011. The speculator’s bread: What is behind rising food prices? European Molecular Biology Organization, Science & Society Series on Food and Science 1–6. Hochman, G., D. Rajagopal, and D. Zilberman. 2010. The effect of biofuels on crude oil markets. AgBioForum 13(2): 112–118. King, C., A. Holman, and M. Webber. 2008. Thirst for energy. Nature 1: 283–286. Ma, S.-Y. 1998. Third world studies, development studies and post-communist studies: Definitions, distance and dynamism. Third World Quarterly 19(3): 339–348. McMichael, P. 2000. The power of food. Agriculture and Human Values 17: 21–33. McMichael, P. 2010. Agrofuels in the food regime. Journal of Peasant Studies 37(4): 609–629. McMichael, P. 2012. The land grab and corporate food regime restructuring. Journal of Peasant Studies 39(3–4): 681–701.

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Part VIII Vulnerability and Adaptation to Environmental Change

37 Food Security, Land, and Development Philip McMichael

1

Introduction

In a fundamental sense, modern ‘development’ has been premised on replacing peasantries. This has been the case since the appearance of the first monocultures in non-European colonies,1 and it has informed understandings and theories of development over the last one and a half centuries as factory labour forces and industrial technology have emerged. Since the register of development is the (apparent)2 absence of peasantries3 in the Global North, this condition is projected as a universal goal—and has been written into representations of (capitalist and socialist) development from classical political economy through Rostow (1960) and Barrington Moore (1967) to contemporary World Bank and Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) publications. Given the substantial agrarian features of the non-European world, its (development) future has been represented as one in which peasantries disappear. 1

C.L.R. James observed that slave labour systems in the Americas prefigured the first proletariat, insofar as extensive monocultures in Europe were disallowed at the time by guild laws and property relations (1963). 2 Nevertheless, the USA, UK, France, the Netherlands, and New Zealand have a percentage of small farms in the range of 10–25 % (Hilmi 2012: 69). 3 ‘Peasantries’ are diverse across time and space, sharing attributes of the ‘farm as a place of labour, where… labour is provided by the family and mobilised within the community through relations of reciprocity’ (Hilmi 2012: 25).

P. McMichael ( ) Department of Development Sociology, Cornell University, USA © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 J. Grugel, D. Hammett (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of International Development, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-42724-3_37

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However, peasantries are fluid entities whose changing fortunes reflect uneven and contradictory trajectories of capital across time and space. Thus, Ploeg (2009) claims that 80 % of European farmers are engaged in ‘depeasantisation’ via intensification of labour and ecological farming to reduce agro-input dependency associated with neoliberal capitalism, and peasants are increasing in Asia, Africa, and Latin America (Altieri and Toledo 2011). Meanwhile, observers note that peasants and small farmers produce up to 70 % of the world’s food, and about 90 % is consumed where it is produced (ETC 2009; McCalla 1999). Small-scale producers account for 70 % of the world’s 525 million farms, and between 1970 and 2000, small farms increased by 91 % (Hilmi 2012: 24, 68, 70). While much is made of the urbanising global population, nevertheless, place-based small-scale producers remain significant in food provisioning, and potentially critical to humanity’s long-term survival. By representing depeasantisation as ‘development’, modernity presents an ‘autocentric picture of itself as the expression of a universal certainty, whether the certainty of human reason freed from particular traditions, or of technological power freed from the constraints of the natural world’ (Mitchell 2000: xi). Thus, in an influential study at the height of the post–World War II ‘development era’, Barrington Moore (1967) complemented the modernisation trope with a nuanced comparative scenario in which elimination of the peasantry was a condition for the development of English-style democracy, conveniently ignoring the role of the non-European peasantry, and the soil-exhaustive mining of American prairies, in provisioning European industrialisation (Davis 2001; Friedmann 2000). As a litmus test for conventional understandings of development, replacing peasantries is the ontology governing ‘food security’ in the modern world, and, in the twenty-first century, land use. It is not a natural evolution so much as an engineered solution to the needs of an ever-expanding commercial frontier, for industrial foods (including the fourfold increase in land cultivated for soybeans, palm oil, rapeseed, and sugar cane (Carasik 2014)), agro-inputs suppliers and agribusiness in general. However, to the extent that peasants persist, or small-scale producers re-emerge in a world where employment trends are relatively stagnant, development theory and practice will likely evolve to reflect these stubborn material facts.

2

Development Theory

Development theory initially informed an international ‘development project’ in the decolonising era of the mid-twentieth century (McMichael 1996). The First World, led by the USA, championed an institutional architecture of aid and trade relations with the Third World geared to defining and realising wealth

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in price terms, as represented in standardised measures of gross national product (Waring 1988; Payne and Phillips 2010). For a quarter century, national development was the unifying mission, organised within an international Cold War geopolitical framework through which the USA and the Soviet Union sponsored spheres of influence via aid and trade. Farm sectors, protected during this ‘development’ era—but subject to agricultural modernisation via, notably, green revolution technologies (Patel 2013), and eroded by US food aid policies (Friedmann 1982)—were eventually fully exposed to trade liberalisation policies from the 1990s onward as the World Trade Organization (WTO) emerged as the neoliberal governing body of the post–Cold War world. The economism of mainstream development theory sustained a steady (‘post-modern’) critique through the decades: from Gandhi in the 1940s (Chatterji 2001), through Memmi (1967), Fanon (1967), and Said (1979), to post-development thinkers in the 1990s—all essentially contesting the legitimacy of development discourse as a misrepresentation of non-European cultures and as a discourse of control (Sachs 1992; Crush 1995; Escobar 1995; Rist 1997). These critiques echoed an economistic ‘impasse’ in critical analysis of capitalist development (Booth 1985), provoking a refocus on the unifying normative issue of ‘poverty’ (Schuurman 2000), beyond cultural difference. Arguably, this only reinforced economism by affirming a binary between inequality and diversity, ignoring how capital impoverishes not just classes of people but also the material relations that enable imagining and realising new social futures (Da Costa and McMichael 2005). In this sense, a universalist conception of development—as the progressive commodification of social life—elides alternative ontologies, such as those that include place-based smallscale production and reproduction of social life (Gibson-Graham 2006; Ploeg 2013) with quite distinct localised forms of food provisioning (see Burnett and Murphy 2014). Within this broader critique, combined with the evident failure of neoliberal trade relations to guarantee food security, there is a renewed interest in redefining development in participatory terms, which concretise the current lip service to sustainability by anchoring it in place-based strategies drawing on cultures of self-organisation and ecological renewal. The global food sovereignty movement represents one such form of an ontological turning of mainstream ‘development’ on its head (Mann 2014, Andreé et al. 2014).

3

Food Security and Development

Historically, ‘food security’ has been central to governing legitimacy, whether in communities, empires, or states (Spitz 1985). It has generally been in the interest of rulers to ensure a basic level of food provisioning for their

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immediate subject populations.4 This became abundantly clear during the dramatic food price inflation of 2007–08, when food rioting cascaded across the Global South (with significant political effects from Haiti through the Middle East), and where the Arab Spring had its roots in food insecurity (Patel and McMichael 2009; Bush 2010; Gana 2012). The world was not short of food, but with biofuels competing for grain (notably, corn), financial speculation, and the banning of grain exports by governments concerned to feed domestic populations, the cost of staple grains spiked, rendering basic foods beyond the reach of low-income citizens (McMichael 2009). What this so-called ‘food crisis’ revealed was how much food insecurity was a function of rising food dependency via WTO trade rules, which required states to reduce protection of domestic food systems and open up to food imports (principally from US and European ‘granaries’). Under this regime, ‘food security’ was represented as best achieved through the world market, under the aegis of the global grain traders. The crisis politicised this neoliberal representation and has arguably allowed a renewed understanding, particularly in UN agencies, of the importance of domestic food security (De Schutter 2011; McKeon 2015). The original concept of ‘food security’ was anticipated in the 1941 Atlantic Charter’s vision of ‘freedom from want’, which in turn informed the creation of the UNFAO, with its mandate to stabilise world agriculture and establish global food security (Jarocz 2009). In 1946, the FAO proclaimed: The raising of the levels of living of rural populations calls for the improvement of agriculture, rural industrialisation, large-scale public works, and social and educational services in the countryside, and the raising of the levels of living of many different races and peoples. This in turn requires a reorientation of world agriculture and of world trade in which food will be treated as an essential of life rather than primarily as merchandise (quoted in Phillips and Ilcan 2003: 436).

While this assignment for ‘feeding the world’ embodied a postcolonial vision of ending colonial extractions of food for European empires, it also projected a vision of agricultural modernisation rooted in modern science. This vision was a key component of the ‘development project’, orchestrated internationally, under US leadership, to impart a programme of national development including publicly supported capital-intensive agro-industrialisation, via the green revolution (McMichael 1996). Contrary to evolutionary assumptions, such intensive agriculture had political origins (Patel 2013). Thus, wartime 4

Davis shows how this was hardly the case for colonial subjects (2001).

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nitrogen production for bombs was converted to inorganic fertiliser, displacing nitrogen-fixing legumes and manure associated with mixed farming systems (Cleaver 1977: 17). Further, in the name of the UN’s Freedom from Hunger campaign (1960), the FAO agreed to an industry plan to disperse surplus inorganic fertiliser as part of extension services in Third World countries (Ibid: 28). The stage was set to universalise a ‘development’ trajectory, abandoning agriculture’s natural biological base via agro-industrialisation, and transferring displaced peasants to urban centres, as envisioned in an influential economistic representation of the peasant sector as providing ‘unlimited supplies of labour’ to urban industry (Lewis 1954). Complementing green revolution agriculture across parts of the Third World food aid shipments from the USA, via the PL-480 Program, disposed of US food surpluses to strategic states on the Cold War perimeter, thereby subsidising industrialisation (via cheap ‘wage foods’) in host Third World states (Friedmann 1982). As the ‘economic nationalism’ phase of ‘development’ gave way to a neoliberal development vision, ‘food security’ assumed a new meaning. Under the terms of the GATT Uruguay Round (1986–94), it was redefined as ‘best provided through a smooth-functioning world market’ (Ritchie 1993: fn 25), corresponding to the organisation of transnational food flows by agribusinesses. Under the WTO’s Agreement on Agriculture (1995), states lost the right to food self-sufficiency as a national strategy, despite the identification of human rights with sovereignty over natural resources in the 1948 UN Declaration. The WTO regime was constructed to enable the USA and the EU to protect their agricultural sectors, and thereby release artificially cheapened foodstuffs in world markets (McMichael 2005, Rosset 2006). The consequence, for the remainder of the 1990s, was to displace, by conservative FAO estimates, upwards of 30 million peasants from their farms (Madeley 2000). At the same time, the intensive agro-export model was generalised across the world, particularly as indebted southern states were enjoined by the international financial institutions (IMF, World Bank) to raise revenue through exports. An Indian policy analyst observed: ‘whereas for small farmers the subsidies have been withdrawn, there is a lot of support now for agribusiness industry… The result is that the good area under staple foods is now shifting to export crops, so we’ll have to import staple food’ (quoted in Madeley 2000: 79). Under these circumstances, ‘food security’ became food dependency,5 based in a deepening agrarian crisis across the world, as small-scale food producers 5

The WTO’s export regime has contributed to the transformation of Africa into a food importer, importing 25 % of its food, and exporting high-value crops such as green beans, coffee, flowers, and biofuels. While economic theory postulates that high-value exports can assist in financing staple food imports, the food crisis revealed the limits of this scenario.

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experienced public neglect and private assault via market relations. Something had to give, and it did, in the form of two landmark events in 2007–08: the publication of the World Bank’s 2008 World Development Report (2007) and the food price crisis. Both events, registering a legitimacy crisis of the food regime (Almås and Campbell 2012; McMichael 2013b), combined to reorient the question of food security from market provisioning to land use. With agflation, consequential grain exporters like Russia, India, and Vietnam imposed export bans, causing food shortages and further price volatility in world markets, and encouraging offshore ‘land grabs’ to secure non-trade access to food supplies. Land grabbing has taken two particular forms: largescale investment in plantation estates and ‘value chain’ complexes.

4

Food Security via Land Acquisition

After a quarter of a century of neglect of agriculture in its annual World Development Report, the World Bank acknowledged that it was time ‘to place agriculture afresh at the centre of the development agenda’ (2007: 1), and, indeed, refocus on smallholders as the new object of development. At the same time, the Bank recycled an impoverishing image of the peasant (as poor) and peasant farming (as anachronistic) in the opening sentence of the report: An African woman bent under the sun, weeding sorghum in an arid field with a hoe, a child strapped on her back—a vivid image of rural poverty… But others, women and men, have pursued different options to escape poverty. Some smallholders join producer organisations and contract with exporters and supermarkets to sell the vegetables they produce under irrigation. Some work as labourers for larger farmers who meet the scale economies required to supply modern food markets. Still others, move into the rural nonfarm economy, starting small enterprises selling processed foods (2007: 1).

The notion of ‘different options’ represents alternatives to small-scale producers that are regarded as appropriate by the development industry. (The missing ‘option’ is to reinforce small-scale producer communities on their own terms, redirecting the huge subsidies that support agribusiness and energy interests (which contradicts economies of ‘scale efficiency’).) As it happened, the ‘different options’ define the ‘new agriculture for development’ advocated by the Bank, namely large-scale investment and ‘value chains’. And in context of the ‘food crisis’, the Bank’s vision shaped the Rome

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Food Summit in June 2008, to which development agencies and political and economic elites came to manage the crisis. As the International Planning Committee for Food Sovereignty noted during the Summit: The serious and urgent food and climate crises are being used by political and economic elites as opportunities to entrench corporate control of world agriculture and the ecological commons. At a time when chronic hunger, dispossession of food providers and workers, commodity and land speculation, and global warming are on the rise, governments, multilateral agencies and financial institutions are offering proposals that will only deepen these crisis through more dangerous versions of policies that originally triggered the current situation (IPC 2008).

The solution was not to restore the health and viability of small-scale producers with public subsidies and institutional supports. Rather, the solution has been to renew the legitimacy of the World Bank as the premier development institution, brokering financial investment and portraying the food crisis as a productivity issue, requiring large-scale agricultural investments and/or incorporation of farmers into commercial circuits via value chains. Represented as rural development, these initiatives impose forms of industrial agriculture (as markets for agro-inputs, and sources of food, feed, and fuel for processors and retailers and global consumers with purchasing power) on agrarian regions vulnerable to land annexation via host states using land as collateral6 for investment and much-needed foreign currency (Liberti 2013:  24; Fairbairn 2013). At the time of the 2008 World Food Summit, Jacques Diouf, the UNFAO Secretary-General, advocated bringing ‘African agriculture into line with changing conditions worldwide’ to prevent ‘its agricultural trade deficit to deteriorate any further’ in the event that food surplus nations reduced exports (Diouf and Severino 2008: 16). As the food crisis unfolded, Bank President Robert Zoellick announced a 50 % increase in financial support for global agriculture, amounting to $6 billion, in addition to a need for ‘seeds and fertiliser for the planting season, especially for smallholders in poor countries’ (GRAIN 2008). This was consistent with the World Bank’s new agenda, where agriculture would be ‘led by private entrepreneurs in extensive value chains linking producers to consumers’, with the expectation that the private sector would 6

Thus: ‘Underpinning these deals is the longstanding failure of many African states to recognise, in law and practice, the customary land rights of existing farming households and communities, and the perpetuation of the colonial legal codes that centralise control over such lands in the hands of the state as trustee of all unregistered property’ (Hall 2014).

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drive ‘the organization of value chains that bring the market to smallholders and commercial farms’ (2007: 1, 7). Curiously, the Bank acknowledges that structural adjustment policies (continuing) ‘dismantled the elaborate system of public agencies that provided farmers with access to land, credit, insurance inputs, and cooperative organization. The expectation was that removing the state would free the market for private actors to take over these functions. … Too often, that didn’t happen’ (World Development Report, 2008). The difference now is that private actors are encouraged by specific governance policies to invest in ‘value chains’ for these purposes. While the proximate goal of ‘value chains’ is to improve smallholder productivity, the outcome is to embed farmers in relations of dependency on agro-inputs and redirect food to external markets. A prototypical value chain investor is the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), which plans an agro-dealer infrastructure (10,000 agro-dealers) encompassing farmers in value chains comprised of agro-inputs and contracts for delivery of produce to processors and retailers to retire contract debt. The Food Summit secured for AGRA a pivotal agreement on developing and promoting a commercial seed sector in Africa (FAO 2008). There followed a subsequent agreement (AGRA 2008) with the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) to provide ‘technologies, infrastructure and financing’ to Africa’s farmers, unrepresented in a governance structure dominated by large investors and biotechnology representatives (ActionAid 2009). This kind of value chain programme invests financially in African agriculture by eliminating producer investment (of labour) in the resilience of farming resources. That is, agro-inputs undermine self-reproducing farms, now bearing the full risk of price volatility, debt, and loss of land.7 While business failure is part of market reality, it operates here as a method of expropriation, given that self-reproducing farmers surrender autonomy by participating in value chains.8 This is a qualitative change in their condition, misunderstood through a productivist lens-viewing farmers as ‘potential entrepreneurs’. Thus, the director of Self Help Africa, which, with PepsiCo support, works with cashew nut farmers and processors in Benin to supply Europe, declared: ‘Strengthening smallholder value chains is really about helping farmers to 7

Unsurprisingly, AGRA recognises ‘this will require some degree of land mobility and a lower percentage of total employment involved in direct agricultural production’ (Gates Foundation 2008, quoted in Mittal 2009: 4). 8 Unless supply chains are regulated in the interest of the producer—thus, the UN Right to Food Rapporteur has proposed, in addressing rights violations stemming from buyer concentration: ‘global food supply chains will contribute significantly to the reduction of rural poverty only to the extent that such abuses are effectively combated through competition law regimes that are designed to be consistent with the obligation of States to protect the right to adequate food’ (De Schutter 2010a: 6).

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move from being subsistence based to enabling them to make a better profit’ (The Guardian, 2012). Shifting from ‘subsistence’ to ‘better profit’ is not a natural progression,9 rather it is a transformation in the modus operandi of small-scale producers, particularly in underprivileged circumstances. The productivist approach imposes a yield metric on farming comparisons that elides history, culture, and ecology. For example, a snapshot productivity comparison between farms and agribusinesses ignores the neglect of smallscale farming, particularly in the Global South, over the last three decades.10 It measures only plant yields (neither efficiency of water/energy use nor environmental externalities), rather than the ecology of farming land as wealth itself (which has additional sociocultural value). The FAO Committee on World Food Security’s (CFS) High Level Panel of Experts Report on Investing in smallholder agriculture for food security defines small-scale farming in the following way: Smallholder agriculture is practised by families (including one or more households) using only or mostly family labour and deriving from that work a large but variable share of their income, in kind or in cash… it includes crop raising, animal husbandry, forestry and artisanal fisheries…. Off-farm activities play an important role in providing smallholders with additional income and as a way of diversifying risk… smallholders producing only or mainly for subsistence are not uncommon… smallholder’s families are part of social networks within which mutual assistance and reciprocity translate into collective investments (mainly through work exchanges) and into solidarity systems (2013: 10–11).

The report continues: smallholder agriculture is ‘the foundation of food security in many countries and an important part of the social/economic/ecological landscape in all countries’ (Ibid: 11), and the ‘potential efficiency of smallholder farming relative to larger farms has been widely documented, focusing on the capacity of smallholders to achieve high production levels per unit of land through the use of family labour in diversified production systems’ (Ibid: 12). The irony is that in the name of feeding the world, food security foundations are destabilised and/or replaced by large-scale investment in

9

Thus, ‘for many agribusiness companies the contract farming solution is a public relations exercise designed to build alliances in the areas where they produce and source their throughput, and to access subsidised credit from agencies buying into the “smallholder path” to development. In fact, access to subsidised credit seems a significant factor driving agribusiness to engage smallholders’ (Oya 2012: 10). 10 For example: ‘conventional agricultural research enjoyed 60 years of massive private and public sector support for crop genetic improvement, dwarfing funding for organic agriculture by 99 to 1’ (HoltGiménez 2012: 1).

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land grabs via plantation estates, or value chains (Pearce 2012; Liberti 2013; Kugelman and Levenstein 2013; Kaag and Zoomers 2014).11 Large-scale (financial) investment is justified by scale economies, as spelt out by the Bank’s chief economists: ‘recent innovations in breeding, zero tillage, and information technology … make supervision easier. By facilitating standardisation, they allow supervision of operations over large spaces, reducing owner-operator advantages’ (Deininger and Byerlee 2011: 31). In response to controversy over large-scale land acquisition, the Bank has developed Principles for Responsible Agricultural Investment (PRAI), within a framework privileging (financial) investor rights (omitting small producer input), and advocating ‘environmental sustainability’. These initiatives, however, ignore the incommensurability of financial investment and farmer– labour investment, and seek only to reduce ‘external’ environmental impacts. Such approaches discount environmental benefits of low-input farming that renews nutritional and hydrological cycles to maintain soil health and biodiversity (Altieri and Nicholls 2008). PRAI land governance, in focusing on how to regulate investment and land use capitalisation, diverts ‘attention from what is wrong with the economic development model it aspires to, and from the key role of land in the model. It also diverts our attention away from coming to terms with how rural poor people’s land (and water) rights, interests and concerns must be prioritised and promoted, and not just recognised and protected’ (Borras and Franco 2010: 3). Meanwhile, host governments are incorporated into the Bank’s ‘Doing Business’ rankings, which order states according to how well their business environments facilitate land investments and commercial production systems. By establishing a competitive environment—both within and between states—the Bank leverages public resources and commitments to commodification and capitalisation of land (often common property resources upon which rural communities and producers depend for their livelihood and identity). This public–private partnership approach to agroindustrialisation is exemplified by the G8-sponsored New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition (NAFSN), dedicated to ‘accelerating the flow of private capital’ for poverty reduction via agricultural-led growth in at 11

For example, in the Kisarawe region, southwest of Dar es Salaam (Tanzania), 11 villages agreed to convert ‘village land’ into 20,000 acres of ‘general land’ to Sun Biofuels for a large-scale biofuel plantation to supply Europe. The project failed, the villagers remain excluded from their land (now planted in Jatropha trees) and without the compensation promised in the form of 1000 jobs, infrastructure, schools, health clinics, and investment in local farms. And so long as the company pays the minimal rent, the land remains available for the next investor (Wise 2014). As the World Bank’s recent Report on The Practice of Responsible Investment Principles in Larger-Scale Agricultural Investments (2014c) makes clear, this is not an isolated occurrence.

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least ten African countries. NAFSN capitalises the land (for agro-industrial estates) and labour (as contract farming) under the control of international investors, traders, and retailers, promoting ‘growth corridors’ on the best lands and ‘value chains’ to leverage legitimacy (Paul and Steinbrecher 2013; McKeon 2014). The Bank’s recent programme of Benchmarking the Business of Agriculture, in response to a request by the G8 for agricultural sector benchmarking, intensifies private land governance within a development frame—described by the UN Right To Food Rapporteur as ‘responsibly destroying the world’s peasantry’ (De Schutter 2010b). This new project12 compels states to intensify competition for financial investments by privatising public resources and practices. It also reproduces a narrative to avoid rethinking development trajectories in an era combining a contradictory unity of ‘land clearing’ of food producers, and rising environmental and climatic uncertainty. At a time when low-input farming is essential to combating climate uncertainties and the environmental degradation described by the UN Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MEA) (2005), and advocated by the International Assessment of Agricultural Science Technology and Development (IAASTD 2008, see also UNCTAD 2013), to marginalise or eliminate low-input forms of (labour) investment is to potentially foreclose a viable future, to override the rights of current land users, and to exacerbate a profound ‘planet of slums’ crisis (Davis 2006).

5

Managing the Future

Insofar as development has always claimed to be about improving on the past (including, in particular, replacing peasantries), the development industry is now in the business of managing the future via an ethic of land ‘improvement’, in which the replacement of peasantries is enabled by their relative invisibilisation. Claiming small producers are ‘poor’ and ‘potential entrepreneurs’ obliterates the specificity of peasant farming, and reproduces a conventional ‘development stages’ paradigm (compare Rostow 1960). Thus: ‘science has made peasant farming invisible. It has created an ideal model of what the 12

Thus: ‘benchmarking produces comparisons and contrasts that will stimulate policy change’ (World Bank 2014e)—policy change, that is, in the Bank mold, now termed ‘the process of agricultural transformation’—involving reforms ‘towards a more favourable enabling environment (to) support the growth and productivity of small, medium and large-scale smallholder farmers engaged in agribusiness’ (Idem). Note the ‘goldilocks trilogy’ language here that does not distinguish farming models between industrial and non-industrial agriculture. This obscuring process is repeated in the Bank’s report The Practice of Responsible Investment Principles in Larger-Scale Agricultural Investments (2014c, emphasis added).

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agricultural entrepreneur should be and obscured the way in which peasants do operate today in the countryside’ (Hilmi 2012: 60). Obscurity depends on epistemic erasure: Peasant-like ways of farming often exist as practices without theoretical representation. This is especially the case in developed countries. Hence, they cannot be properly understood, which normally fuels the conclusion that they do not exist or that they are, at best, some irrelevant anomaly. And even when their existence is recognised (as in development countries), such peasant realities are perceived as a hindrance to change (Ploeg 2009: 19).

Having rendered small farming irrelevant, the way is cleared for recycling Malthusian food scarcity scenarios based on population growth projections.13 And so the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change offered a gloomy forecast in 2014 regarding the threat to extra grain production in the planet’s temperate zones. The World Resources Institute commented that studies ‘suggest that feeding more than nine billion people in 2050 will require 70 per cent more calories than the world’s population consumes today’ (Porter 2014: B1, 10). The counter-argument is that in 2007 (start of the ‘food crisis’), despite almost one billion hungry, sufficient calories were available to feed the world’s population adequately at 2796 kcal per person per day, and the actual figure, ‘calculated on the basis of produced edible crops, is 4,600 kcal per capita per day before post-harvest losses; losses due to the conversion into animal feed and home waste’ (Hilmi 2012: 26). Additional losses are from the diversion of food crops to the agro-fuel industry, with the US ethanol sector consuming two-fifths of domestically produced corn (Baines 2014), and biofuels accounting for 60 % of land grabbing during the first decade of the twenty-first century (Vidal 2012). An alternative view of emerging limits comes from the UN’s MEA, which offers a social constructivist lens on the downside of ‘development’: Over the past 50 years, humans have changed ecosystems more rapidly and extensively than in any comparable period of time in human history, largely to meet rapidly growing demands for food, fresh water, timber, fibre, and fuel. This has resulted in a substantial and largely irreversible loss in the diversity of life on Earth … These problems, unless addressed, will substantially diminish the benefits that future generations obtain from ecosystems (2005: 1).

13

Accompanied by misinformation from the biotechnology industry, since GM crops (overwhelmingly for feed and fuel) have not proven to be any more productive than conventional crops, encourage superweeds and overuse of chemicals, and certainly do not match small farm biodiversity (Patel 2013).

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At this point, it is necessary to ask why there is such an ‘environmentalist paradox’? The answer is epistemic. That is, modern (social) science formed in isolation from society’s ecological underpinnings. Classical political economy overtook the eighteenth-century Physiocrat theory of social wealth deriving from agriculture, refocusing on a general labour theory of value. Here, land, not produced by human labour, was considered a free gift, despite yielding differential rent once rendered as a ‘factor of production’, given its differential qualities. Marx’s critique of political economy (working within and against this paradigm) reproduced the free gift notion: ‘A thing can have use-value, without having value. This is the case whenever its utility to man is not due to labour. Such are air, virgin soil, natural meadows, and so on’ (1967: 40). While Marx recognised subsequent co-production of nature and human labour, the ‘free gift’ notion remains an implicit assumption in his value theory. This is a methodological device by which Marx demystifies ‘price’, revealing it as the phenomenal form of underlying relations through which commodities come to assume social value. Ascribed ‘value’ is an expression of the disposition of labour power at any given time in a commodity-producing society. It is a social substance net of labour–nature relations, where labour is posited as the sole source of value, abstracted (‘externalised’) from natural processes. This ecological blind spot in value theory reinforces the ‘value’ concept’s abstraction from nature. The very abstraction of nature in value theory (representing how capital ‘sees’ the world)14 registers a deeper commodity fetishism that features in classical political economy, and informs Marx’s method of political economy, as it models how to historicise capitalist development. Proceeding from the historic fact of ‘the conversion of agriculture to a branch of industry’, Marx inverts the historical succession of landed property to capital: Capital is the all-dominating economic power of bourgeois society. It must form the starting-point as well as the finishing-point, and must be dealt with before landed property…. It would therefore be unfeasible and wrong to let the economic categories follow one another in the same sequence as that in which they were historically decisive. Their sequence is determined, rather, by their relation to one another in modern bourgeois society, which is precisely the opposite of that which seems to be their natural order or which corresponds to historical development (1973: 107). 14

This is exemplified in Moore’s comment that, in distinguishing capitalism’s value from nature’s wealth: ‘Marx does not deny that external nature does work useful to humans, only that (from the perspective of capital) its productions do not directly enter into capitalism’s particular crystallization of wealth’ (2003: 450).

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The inversion Marx performs in order to historicise landed property generates a capitalist narrative, informing critical thought. At the same time, it privileges an ontology that obscures or discounts ecological understandings, practices, and processes not governed by (market) value relations (Schneider and McMichael 2011). Thus, ecological relations in ‘peasant’ farming, and peasant agency itself, are elided in the interest of specifying capital’s subordination of landed relations. This transgression is fundamental to commodity relations, as it transforms (in thought and practice) land from a source of life, livelihood, and culture to an inert source of profit. Polanyi captures this conversion in his concept of land as a ‘fictitious commodity’ when it is subject to a price regime. Polanyi sensed the double fetishism of commodified land, in that it profoundly compromised social and ecological relations: in the annihilation of ‘the human and natural substance of society’ by ‘the idea of a self-adjusting market’ (1957: 3). Thus, the classical labour theory of value and Marx’s historical specification of this theory and its concept of ‘value’ reinforce the market calculus informing the development episteme.15 This understanding of value progressively displaces or eliminates the association of farming with ecological relations, as reflected in the practice of capitalist agriculture. With abstraction of nature as the goal, capital deploys ‘biophysical override’ (Weis 2007) in the form of synthetic fertiliser, manufactured seeds, pesticides, and herbicides to overcome biological obstacles (Mann and Dickinson 1978) and control nature. Within this ‘externalising’ episteme, then, industrial agriculture becomes (for the development industry) the only solution to global food security in general and to managing nature in particular. Managing nature for food security means replacing peasantries, substituting industrial monocultures for producer-based farming systems, and commodifying lands and forests and wetlands serve as lifeworlds of communities of producers. The ‘land grab’ has proceeded accordingly, expanding commodity frontiers for bulk commodities and value chain-based specialty crops. For South East Asia, ‘83 % of the farmland being acquired or leased on a longterm basis is dedicated to the production of major row crops (soy, oilseeds, corn, wheat and feed grains)’ (Borras and Franco 2010: 31). In the Southern Cone, land grabbing via the soy revolution deepens monoculture, since soy15

This is not to say Marx approved of this. Thus: ‘the entire spirit of capitalist production, which is oriented towards the most immediate monetary profits—stands in contradiction to agriculture, which has concerned itself with the whole gamut of permanent conditions of life required by the chain of human generations’, and ‘The moral of the tale … is that the capitalist system runs counter to a rational agriculture, or that a rational agriculture is incompatible with the capitalist system (even if the latter promotes technical development in agriculture) and needs either small farmers working for themselves or the control of the associated producers’ (quoted in Foster 2000: 164–165).

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beans are only profitable via industrial production (Wald et al. 2012: 168– 169). And, in general, large-scale land investments in Africa ‘follow a simple model of concentrated production using a plantations system’ (Committee on World Food Security 2011: 34). Analogous concentration is in the upstream and downstream segments of ‘value chains’ (Gibbon and Ponte 2005; Nielson and Pritchard 2009; McMichael 2013a). In Africa, while 90 % of seeds are local varieties, value chain agriculture is premised on the progressive privatisation of seed technologies. Hybrid and genetically modified seeds individualise cropping at the expense of systems of crop diversity, with emphases on product traceability and quality assurance. Private standards contracts require certification, organised, for example, by GlobalGAP, through which global retailers exert a centralising control over supply quality (Burch and Lawrence 2007; Bain 2010). Managing the future, then, is interpreted through the market lens as justifying land clearing of small-scale producer communities to make way for agro-industrialisation. As suggested, this comes at the expense of food access for those without purchasing power. The market serves only the consumer class, which has the power to bid land use away from food crops to feed crops and fuel crops. Thus, while 48 % of total grain production is consumed directly by humans, 35 % is consumed by livestock, and biofuels account for the remaining 17 % (Weis 2010: 327). In other words, more than half of land use services a relatively affluent minority of the world’s population, while progressively undermining the conditions of survival of much of the rest. ‘Green grabbing’, by which forests, wetlands, and other ecosystems are set aside for carbon sequestration, compounds the problem (Fairhead et al. 2012). The commodification of land and ‘ecosystem services’ exerts a particular class-based future control over the natural world in the sense that it forecloses other meanings and uses of nature. Pricing land and ‘ecosystem services’ not only artificially fractionates ecological processes, disembedding them from farming practices, but also privileges investor rights with exclusionary consequence. Thus: ‘any choice over what kinds of environments and landscapes are to be produced, and for what purposes, increasingly passes from any semblance of broad social discussion into narrow class control orchestrated through the market’ (Smith 2007: 26). Analogously, conservation projects may preclude peasants ‘from current and future accumulation possibilities (as well as livelihoods)’, thereby maintaining ‘the resources for future capitalist accumulation by others, be it via conservation or exploitation’ (Corson 2011: 707). Thus, ‘development’, as reformulated in the new century with green directives, continues to view the process of ‘emptying the countryside’ as the solution to sustaining accumulation.

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Conclusion

Monopolising land for agro-industry and emission offsets is unsustainable over the longer run. Industrial agriculture has experienced a declining biophysical productivity, with soil depletion and a drop in efficiency of nitrogen use from 60 % to 20 % from the 1950s to the 1990s (Ploeg 2010, 100), and the expense of ‘biophysical override’ rising with the price of commodity inputs, including energy (Weis 2007). These trends are expressed in falling agro-industrial grain yields—from increases between 5 % and 10 % at the height of the green revolution (1960s) to 1 % or less in the new millennium (Cribb 2010: 8). Further, soil erosion occurs at a rate likely to destroy two-thirds of the world’s productive land by 2050, the global nutrient cycle is declining with the exhaustion of world phosphate reserves, there is rising competition for freshwater for agriculture, which already uses 70 %, and the ocean fish catch is predicted to collapse by 2040 (Cribb 2010: 10–11, 54, 76). Meanwhile, the industrial food system ‘expends 10–15 energy calories to produce 1 calorie of food, constituting a reversal of the original purpose of agriculture’ (Taylor 2014: 92). Related to this resource intensiveness is the substantial responsibility of modern agriculture for approximately 30 % of greenhouse gas emissions (McMichael et al. 2007; Sage 2012: 113).16 In other words, the industrial food system is a source of the problem for which it is considered the solution. As above, recycling the problem as solution is embedded in an ontology that assumes small scale, localised production systems are inadequate to modern needs. But modern needs are filtered through the market lens, in turn, jeopardising social sustainability. As the IAASTD report noted, markets fail to adequately value environmental and social harm (2008). That is, application of a standardising metric deepens market rule, and interprets social needs and ‘ecosystem services’ in interchangeable and abstract terms—much like the abstraction of nature in value theory. The IAASTD continues: ‘the path of global agricultural development has been narrowly focused on increased productivity rather than on a more holistic integration of natural resource management with food and nutritional security’ (Ibid: 17–18)—underlining agriculture’s multifunctional contribution to complex social reproduction issues, including restoring soil fertility and maintaining ecological resilience. The IAASTD report coincided with and contributed to an emerging scientific consensus that the relative yields of organic/agro-ecological versus non-organic farming are 16

This percentage includes both agriculture and land use change, much of which involves clearance for agriculture.

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sufficient to provision the current daily average consumption of calories across the world (Pretty and Hine 2001; Pretty et al. 2003; Badgley et al. 2007; CFS 2013). Further: ‘research shows that small farms are more productive than large farms if total output is considered rather than yield from a single crop….Yield advantages can range from 20 to 60 per cent, because polycultures reduce losses due to weeds, insects and diseases and make a more efficient use of the available resources of water, light and nutrients’ (Altieri and Nicholls 2008: 474). Under such circumstances, including managing an uncertain future (rather than improving on the past), ‘development’ may undergo a long-term recalibration as citizens and policymakers recognise the significance of preserving the land and/or the folly of identifying modernity solely with urban–industrial expansion. The classical agrarian question concerning the modalities of peasant eclipse as capital commodifies the land is being reframed as a question concerning the principle of ‘food first’, privileging healthy diets produced on a scale appropriate to environmental and human health (Lappé 1971; UNCTAD 2013; McMichael 2013b). A vibrant food sovereignty movement across the world, combining land movements with a myriad of local agrifood experiments (Rosset et al. 2006; Desmarais 2007; Wittman et al. 2010, 2011; Andrée et al. 2014; Mann 2014), represents an emergent alternative to a development narrative premised on abstraction of land and local land users at the expense of comprehensive food security. In consequence, development theory is under pressure to acknowledge the primacy of food provisioning, but under sustainable conditions—how that will proceed is already prefigured in the multiple tensions around defining and implementing ‘sustainability’.

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Waring, M. 1988. If women counted: A new feminist economics. San Francisco: Harper and Row Publishers. Weis, T. 2007. The global food economy. The battle for the future of farming. London: ZedBooks. Weis, T. 2010. The accelerating biophysical contradictions of industrial capitalist agriculture. Journal of Agrarian Change 10(3): 315–41. Wise, T.A. 2014. “Land grabs” and responsible agricultural investment in Africa. Triple Crisis Blog, August 4. Available at. http://triplecrisis.com/land-grabs-andresponsible-agricultural-investment-in-africa/?utm_source=GDAE+ Subscribers&utm_campaign=3c3dc9b3f9-Land_Grabs_8_4_2014&utm_ medium=email&utm_term=0_72d4918ff9-3c3dc9b3f9-49715917. Wittman, H., A.A.  Desmarais, and N.  Wiebe (eds.). 2010. Food sovereignty: Reconnecting food, nature and community. Halifax: Fernwood. Wittman, H., A.A.  Desmarais, and N.  Wiebe. 2011. Food Sovereignty in Canada. Creating just and sustainable food systems. Halifax: Fernwood Publishing. World Bank. 2007. World Development Report, 2008. Washington DC: World Bank. World Bank. 2014c. The practice of responsible investment principles in larger-scale agricultural investments. implications for corporate performance and impact on local communities, Report No 86175-GLB. Washington, DC: World Bank. World Bank. 2014e. Benchmarking the business of agriculture. http://bba.worldbank. org/

38 Livelihood Adaptation and Climate Variability in Africa Lindsey Stinger, Claire Quinn, Rachel Berman, and Jami Dixon

1

Introduction

Incremental changes in temperatures and increased climate variability pose threats to the development of natural resource dependent national economies and livelihoods across the developing world. Climates across Africa have historically been characterised by natural variability and the occurrence of extremes such as floods and droughts. Some of this variability is well understood, for example, changes that take place from season to season. However, less is known about variability over longer time scales: years, decades, centuries and millennia, because of the highly complex nature of the climate system. In recognition that global temperatures increased over the second part of the twentieth century, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reiterated that interacting with these natural patterns of variability are the

L. Stinger ( ) School of Earth and Environment, University of Leeds, UK C. Quinn Sustainability Research Institute, University of Leeds, UK R. Berman School of GeoSciences, University of Edinburgh, UK J. Dixon LTS International, UK © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 J. Grugel, D. Hammett (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of International Development, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-42724-3_38

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combined effects of human-induced global warming (anthropogenic climate change) and other human actions and impacts (IPCC 2013). It is therefore expected that projected climate changes and the ways they will affect people will exceed the extremes and variability experienced in past. Future climate change and variability pose unprecedented challenges for international development. Climate impacts have the potential to undermine development progress to date and damage the wellbeing of current and future populations. Whilst some research disciplines focus on enhancing the robustness of future climate projections and assessing how they may impact upon different economic sectors, international development researchers and practitioners are concerned with understanding the human dimensions of global climate change and the links with other development challenges. In this chapter, we approach adaptation and climate variability from a development perspective, placing people at the centre through a focus on livelihoods in Africa. A diverse range of climates can be found across the African continent, from the arid Sahel to the humid Congo Basin. Sub-Saharan Africa has been identified as a particularly vulnerable region where more frequent and intense extreme events are projected, which will directly threaten lives, livelihoods and infrastructure. Present high levels of poverty, stagnating agricultural production and weak institutional capacities potentially constrain the ability of countries and communities across sub-Saharan Africa to adequately respond to future climate changes. Although fewer people live in extreme poverty in the world today than 30 years ago, around half of the population across the region still survive on less than $1.25 per day (World Bank 2010). Addressing such levels of absolute poverty, defined as a severe deprivation of basic human needs, including food, safe drinking water, sanitation facilities, health, shelter, education and information, remain an on-going development challenge. In response to growing recognition of the multi-dimensional nature of poverty, there has been a shift away from a purely economic focus and use of indicators such as income and expenditure towards alternative approaches to identifying who is poor. Sub-Saharan Africa repeatedly fares poorly in international development indices that use a wide range of different indicators and methodologies. The contemporary literature covers more holistic conceptualisations, including rights-based approaches, Sen’s capabilities approach which focuses on people’s ability to achieve the things that they value (Sen 1999) and approaches that advocate the achievement of sustainable livelihoods, such as the Sustainable Livelihoods Framework (SLF). The SLF enables identification of the key vulnerabilities (shocks, trends and seasonality) and transforming structures and processes (laws, policies and institutions) that affect the achievement of livelihood outcomes (DfID 1999) and is a popular frame-

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work amongst international development researchers for exploring the links between poverty, climate change and livelihood adaptation. In this chapter we define livelihoods as the ‘capabilities, assets ….and activities required for a means of living’ (Chambers and Conway 1992: 10). Scoones (2009: 5) proposes that ‘a livelihood is sustainable when it can cope with and recover from stresses and shocks and maintain or enhance its capabilities and assets both now and in the future, while not undermining the natural resource base’. Adaptation in the context of livelihoods is relevant to both long term global climate change and to current variability. Adaptation is broadly ‘a process of deliberate change, often in response to, or anticipation of, multiple pressures and changes that affect people’s lives’ (Stringer et  al. 2010: 146). Building on this, climate adaptation is ‘an adjustment in natural or human systems in response to actual or expected climatic stimuli or their effects, which moderates harm or exploits beneficial opportunities’ (Parry et al. 2007: 7). Such a definition encompasses past, actual or anticipated responses. It also includes all dimensions of adaptation: coping, adjustment and transformation (Béné et al. 2012). Here, we base our analysis of the links between climate variability and poverty on an understanding of the concepts of resilience, vulnerability and adaptation. These are described in the next section through focus on the shocks and stresses that affect African livelihoods and consideration of what they mean for the resilience of livelihood systems. The categorisation of different phases of livelihood adaptation is then discussed, with attention drawn to the challenges of scale and the problems that can occur when adaptations are ‘maladaptive’ or unsuccessful. The subsequent section explores different barriers and limits to livelihood adaptation and identifies how a range of different obstacles can lead to lock-ins or path dependencies. The challenge of delivering policy support for adaptation is then presented, before the chapter concludes by examining the opportunities for livelihood adaptation and development that are provided by mainstreaming and synergistic approaches. We conclude by noting the urgent need to enhance understanding of the links between livelihood adaptation and climate change, if international development processes are to assist the world’s poorest groups to better prepare for the future.

2

Livelihoods and Resilience

Whilst climate change adaptation is receiving increasing attention, individuals and communities have always responded to climatic and non-climatic trends, variability, shocks and stresses, over different temporal and spatial

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scales. Shocks and stresses can be covariate, where the impacts are felt across a community, such as in the case of droughts or floods, or idiosyncratic, where impacts are felt in individual households, such as in the case of illness or death of a household member. Shocks can occur quickly in their onset, as is commonly the case with floods, whereas stresses develop slowly, as found with droughts. The combination of exposure and sensitivity, together with people’s capacities and abilities to adapt and respond to shocks and stresses, determines their vulnerability (Parry et al. 2007). The SLF (Scoones 1998) is increasingly used to understand how livelihoods adapt to, and cope with, shocks and stresses, including those linked to climatic variability. It identifies five types of capital assets important to livelihoods: human capital (for example, health and education), natural capital (such as land and water), social capital (for example, networks and leadership), physical capital (in the form of infrastructure and tools, for example), and financial capital (including savings and wages). These assets underpin the livelihood portfolios that households adopt to make a living but can also be drawn on to cope with and adapt to shocks and stresses (Bebbington 1999). The ways in which assets are accumulated, used or substituted, contribute to the ways in which shocks and stresses are managed, as well as underpinning overall livelihood resilience. The use of some assets during times of stress may not reduce the continued availability of that asset, at least in the short term. For example, drawing on social capital to ask friends, neighbours or family for food during lean periods does not necessarily reduce the availability of that asset at other times and for other purposes. However, other assets can be depleted through their use or consumption, for example by spending savings or selling livestock for cash during a drought, as Thomas et al. (2007) found in South Africa. Using and consuming assets can restrict livelihood activities, either as assets become unavailable, or as households become unable to accumulate assets. This restriction can ultimately either lead to or hold a household in poverty, with the additional impact of limiting adaptation options. Climate change has the potential to have significant and detrimental effects on livelihoods and poverty levels unless adaptation strategies are, at the very least, prevented from eroding households’ asset bases. In general, losses of assets are closely linked to reduced livelihood resilience. Resilience is a term that is most commonly used in the ecological sciences. In ecological systems, resilience can either relate to the extent to which a system can absorb pressures or perturbations before it is fundamentally changed or to the speed at which a system can recover from shocks and stresses. These two aspects are also relevant to analyses of livelihood resilience. Diverse livelihood portfolios resulting from access to a wide range of assets can absorb stresses by allowing households to alter their reliance on different livelihood activities.

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For example, households might rely more on waged income activities during a drought when agricultural production is negatively affected. Households with diverse livelihoods can also bounce back quickly if they can remobilise assets in a timely way, such as being able to buy seeds and replant directly after a flood. In these cases, diverse livelihoods can absorb pressures through asset switching and substitution, and bounce back from disturbances through asset mobilisation, without fundamentally changing. Households that are able to manage stresses in this way are often said to possess adaptive capacity, that is, the ability to adapt. Adaptive capacity helps livelihoods to be more resilient.

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Coping, Adjustment and Transformation

Adaptation is often considered to have three dimensions: coping, adjustment and transformation (Béné et al. 2012). Distinguishing between these is important in order to understand how different adaptations can affect livelihoods over varying time frames, and whether these adaptations lead to a reduction in poverty or undermine future development options. Essentially, coping is seen as a short-term, immediate response to reduce (climatic) risk to livelihoods. Coping responses are therefore largely reactive, both to climatic variability and extremes, as well as to non-climatic shocks and stresses such as conflict and famine. Adjustment commonly constitutes more deliberate planned change(s), representing adaptation(s) to longer-term climatic stimuli, such as the mean climate of an area. Recognising the wider development context within which African rural livelihoods are determined, coping is often considered to occur within existing institutional systems, whereas adjustment can involve changes to rules, processes, structures and institutions that enable the (livelihood) system to continue functioning. This may also include changes to livelihoods themselves (Parry et al. 2007). Transformation involves fundamental changes to either system function or political economic structures, and is dependent upon adaptive capacities. In particular, transformation relies on human assets, such as the ability to learn and apply knowledge, and social assets, such as access to networks and strong leadership. Transformational adaptation can therefore help to address the wider development and poverty challenges associated with rural African livelihoods. However, discussion and understanding of transformational adaptation processes is still in its infancy (Klein et al. 2014). Some authors view coping, adjustment and transformative types of adaptation as phases on a flexible continuum. Pelling (2011) suggests that adaptation can be divided into a first phase associated with enabling resilience (bouncing back or coping); a second phase of transition (adjustment or tran-

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sitional adaptation); and a third phase of transformation (relating to system structure or function). Each phase does not necessarily occur discretely, and movement can be in either direction, so is not linear. While such approaches are useful for assessing the adaptation progress of a household, community or country, local context remains important. A coping strategy in one location could represent an adjustment or transformation in another. Livelihood adaptation therefore tends to simultaneously include coping, adjustment and transformation due to the variety of contexts in which adaptation occurs. Similar to shocks and stresses, adaptations can occur at different scales. The decisions and actions that determine the nature of livelihood adaptation predominantly take place at a local scale, for example within a household or community. However, different actors facilitate adaptation across different scales; from individual farmers to local authorities, public bodies and international donors. When individuals such as farmers are faced with multiple pressures and opportunities, they prioritise between production, consumption and ecological systems, as Osbahr et al. (2010) found in South Africa and Mozambique. However, their decisions and actions are influenced by multiple factors, including the goals of a particular individual or household. Although these goals are determined at a household scale, they are informed by socio-cultural and socio-economic factors situated in the wider economic, political and institutional context. This highlights the importance of geographical space and spatial scale in influencing adaptation. There are also temporal dimensions to livelihood adaptation with temporal scale relating to rates, durations, or frequencies (Cash et al. 2006) of both the shocks and stresses driving adaptation and the adaptations themselves. In practice, multiple factors operating over different timescales influence livelihood adaptation, as found across Malawi and Zambia amongst others (Vincent et al. 2013). This further contributes to the complexity in distinguishing between different livelihood adaptations, the extent to which they represent coping, adjustment or transformation, and whether or not they are successful. Adaptations judged by one group to be successful may be considered by different groups in other places and times as unsuccessful. Similarly, an adaptation that is successful for one individual or community may have spill-over effects and negative externalities for another individual or community. For example, extraction of river water for crop irrigation may affect the water flow and availability downstream, thus adversely affecting people further afield (see Swain, this collection). Livelihood adaptations may also reduce short-term impacts but inadvertently increase vulnerability to other risks or other longer term changes. For example, planting in waterways to reduce the impacts of a drought may help to maintain yields in the short term, but undermine the

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natural resource base and therefore increase exposure to future flooding over the mid to long term, as found in southern Africa (Vincent et al. 2013). Any response that is not sustainable or increases vulnerability is typically termed a maladaptation. Barnett and O’Neill (2010) suggest that maladaptation arises through at least five distinct pathways, including: (1) increasing greenhouse gas emissions; (2) placing disproportionate burden on the most vulnerable; (3) having high opportunity costs; (4) reducing incentives to longer-term adaptation; and (5) creating path dependency. When institutions and policy makers are planning adaptations, they should also consider cost-effectiveness, environmental sustainability and interaction with other policy objectives. Maladaptation has important implications for development practitioners and policy makers, as any promotion of adaptation must consider whether short term, local scale adaptive practices might have longer-term or larger-scale consequences, particularly for the poor.

4

Barriers, Limits and Knowledge in Livelihood Adaptation

The extent to which individuals, households and communities can adapt their livelihoods in order to manage risks from both climatic and non-climatic stresses can be restricted by a variety of obstacles. Some obstacles will act as a barrier to livelihood adaptation, requiring an increased level of effort or a change in management approaches. When a barrier becomes a permanent obstacle to adaptation, it prevents any future options, thus acting as a limit (Adger et al. 2007). Barriers and limits can occur across a range of adaptation strategies. In regions with limited land area or high population densities, intensification of farming practices may be an adaptation option. However, there is a limit to the land’s capacity to be farmed more intensively, particularly in the absence of additional resource inputs such as fertilisers, manure and other sources of nutrients. Land availability can therefore act as a limit, while access to other resources can form a barrier. In areas of rural Africa where population densities are low, extensification is often an adaptation option. Human capital barriers such as increased demand for labour and time can nevertheless restrict this. Households may seek to diversify their livelihoods with additional activities, therefore spreading risk across a greater portfolio. However, the ability of an individual or household to enter new livelihood activities will depend on a range of socio-economic factors that could present barriers. For example, poorer households may not be able to invest the capital needed, as found in Zanzibar by households wanting to

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diversify into fishing but lacking the resources to do so (Suckall et al. 2014b). This can mean that sometimes households are limited to diversifying into other natural resource based activities that are equally as sensitive to climate impacts as existing livelihood activities. Livelihood adaptation can also experience obstacles across a range of scales. Both diversification and extensification can face institutional and structural barriers, for example, due to prevailing land rights and globalised processes of ‘land grabbing’. Land grabbing describes the process of large-scale acquisition of arable land, often by companies that are driven by global economic incentives or by foreign governments. For rural households, land grabbing can limit access to the natural resource base, thereby removing livelihood opportunities, particularly for the poorest people who lack other assets. National and local level policies and incentives can also drive certain livelihood strategies and act as a barrier to others. For example, the policy and economic context in Uganda incentivises agricultural intensification, promoting specialisation of particular livelihood strategies, thus acting as a barrier to diversification. Evidence suggests that such specialisation can undermine the adaptive capacity of a household and restrict future adaptation options (Dixon et al. 2014). Livelihood adaptations driven by factors interacting across a range of scales can limit the livelihood strategies available to households, thereby removing livelihood opportunities, and locking households into a particular livelihood strategy or portfolio of strategies. Increasingly, barriers to livelihood adaptation are found to occur through both formal and informal processes. They can result from low political capacity within a country to facilitate and implement strategies to support adaptation, from a lack of flexibility within existing institutions to adapt to the changing needs of household livelihoods, or from restricted market access. Informal barriers can include cognitive barriers such as whether the household perceives the risks they face, the social norms that influence behaviour within the households’ community, and institutional marginalisation that, for example, might limit opportunities for women to diversify into new activities (Jones and Boyd 2011). This demonstrates that culturally ingrained beliefs such as ancestral traditions and inherited practices may also limit behavioural changes. Behavioural change is a type of adaptation strategy within individuals, households, communities and even institutions that is often linked to transformative adaptation. In rural livelihoods, behavioural changes can include adopting new agricultural techniques or changing planting calendars on a long term basis. Behavioural changes can also be more top-down and fixed term. Fisheries management institutions for example, may periodically restrict

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access to inland fisheries, to enable the system to recover and allow fish stocks to increase. Such strategies are designed to enforce changes to household behaviours, despite the negative livelihood impacts they may have for highly specialised households that are solely dependent on fishing. Behavioural change can often be difficult to achieve if it is externally driven. Resistance may lead to incremental adaptation, even in situations in which more transformative adaptation is both urgent and necessary. Behavioural adaptations require the individual or household to perceive or acknowledge the need to adapt. Such acknowledgement is often based on previous experiences. Evidence suggests that natural resource users draw upon knowledge and experience that has developed over centuries (Dixon et  al. 2014). Traditional knowledge has informed responses to past climate hazards leading to claims that these knowledge systems can help to foster livelihood resilience in the face of future climate hazards. However, few attempts have been made to assess the role of local and traditional knowledge in livelihood adaptation to future climate change. There are also concerns that future climates may exceed the extremes of past experiences, therefore limiting the role of traditional knowledge. This supports the need for scientific approaches to play a key role in generating new knowledge about climate change, livelihoods and adaptations. However, science is criticised for its lack of sociallyrelevant outcomes, leading some commentators to stress the importance of linking different knowledge systems to foster behaviour change (Berkes and Folke 2002). Failure to integrate local and traditional knowledge runs the risk of inappropriate recommendations or solutions, however focusing on multiple knowledges can generate findings that are contradictory. Many technical and social issues can be found at the intersection of different knowledge systems. Linking the scales and contexts associated with different forms of knowledge presents a challenge to studies of livelihood adaptation to future climate change and variability. These barriers and limits highlight our lack of understanding of the risks that future changes will have for livelihood activities and their implications for larger scale development. Lock-ins or path dependencies may ensue, creating a further barrier to transformation. Path dependency is linked to notions of resilience (Wilson 2014) and the idea that resilience changes over time as a result of decisions that are made in response to trends, shocks and stresses, and the knowledge and decision-making context (Fig.  38.1). Path dependency highlights the importance of the past in determining what happens in the future. The decisions that a person, household, or community has made in the past, and the memories of those decisions, affects the decisions that they can make in the present or future, creating a decision-making trajectory. Path

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Fig. 38.1

Path dependency (Adapted from Wilson 2012)

dependency is also the result of ideology (beliefs about what is possible); political (governance and the effects of power), institutional (established customs and practices) and social (wider acceptability) legacies; and memory (including knowledge, experience and accumulated wisdom), all of which affect the decision-making options that are available (Bailey and Wilson 2009). This complicated context in which decisions are made can create a lock-in effect which constrains choices to a smaller set of possible options (Fig. 38.1) and is something that international development practitioners should seek to avoid. Path dependency can mean that decision-making is constrained in such a way that the only choices available are those that erode resilience over time, through for instance the loss of assets. This is why decisions can often lead to maladaptation, because the subset of choices available does not contain any other options. Some decisions can increase resilience but only within the constraints of the path determined by lock-in effects. An example of the effects of path dependency and lock-in can be seen in research undertaken with pastoralists in semi-arid Morocco (Freier et al. 2012). In light of predicted future decreases in rainfall, researchers found that pastoralists still chose livelihoods based on livestock but moved to sedentary activities, even though this would increase pressure on available land and water resources and reduce resilience. However, they also found that lock-in effects were not fixed; perceptions of sedentary lifestyles were able to change in response to climatic stress. This suggests that the constraining context for decision-making

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can change creating opportunities for people, households and communities, allowing them to break out of their predetermined paths and overcome path dependency. This process is an important element of adaptive capacity.

5

Adaptation in Policy and Practice

Ensuring that livelihood adaptation is facilitated in the face of climate change, and that lock-ins prevent maladaptation and the erosion of resilience, requires appropriate policy support. In providing such support, policies need to not only enable transformation, but also to build on and enhance the strengths of existing livelihoods and adaptations; all within the context of climate change. This remains a challenging task for governments because policies tend to align to specific sectors or ministries, whereas development, livelihoods and climate impacts tend to cross-cut a range of different domains. Similarly, a range of interrelated factors trigger adaptation (Osbahr et al. 2010). Research from Malawi, Botswana and Swaziland has suggested that in some cases, policies duplicate activities across ministries that aim to support adaptation, leading to competition for the same funding and resources. International development donors have recognised that a sector-wide approach is necessary, and some sub-Saharan African governments have set up inter-ministerial committees that help to create a wider context for developing and implementing climate change policies and strategies. For example, Zambia has established a cross-ministry Future Climate Change Council including representation from ministries from across different sectors, while Zimbabwe has a National Task Team on Climate Change coordinated through the Office of the President (Stringer et al. 2014). While these efforts can help with the alignment and mainstreaming of climate change adaptation, they also offer potential to facilitate knowledge exchange and to share good practices from multi-stakeholder, cross-sector settings. Experience sharing is vital if policy is to build on and reinforce locally appropriate adaptations and livelihood activities in the context of climate change and variability. However, ensuring sufficient funding, resources and capacity to move from cross-cutting discussions at a national level towards action to support adaptation on the ground remains a challenge. Research from Uganda has identified the temporal and spatial trade-offs that policy-makers should consider when designing and implementing adaptation programmes. NGO and Government programmes can often focus on technological adaptations that increase the short-term productivity of rural livelihood systems, such as crops and livestock. However, these are implemented without considering how such programmes impact on wider resources and

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institutional arrangements that also shape household livelihoods (Dixon et al. 2014). Development programmes that work to stimulate adaptation in one community or for one household will not necessarily have the same success elsewhere. The impacts that short-term coping responses have on households options for future adaptation depends on the interaction between the specific context of the household and the opportunities and constraints within the surrounding environment (Berman et al. 2014). In many cases those adaptations outlined within policy correspond with the adaptations that households are already undertaking and constitute gradual adjustments with the potential for transformation. For example, adaptation of crop varieties (particularly moves towards high yielding, drought and disease tolerant seed varieties) is mentioned in national policies in Botswana and Malawi, as well as being reported as a pro-active behavioural change that farmers are making in order to maintain their livelihoods and income sources (Stringer et al. 2009). However, there are also various instances where adaptation policy and practice take divergent directions. For example, policies in Swaziland aim to facilitate a shift towards increasing the adoption of different crop species (sorghum and cassava, rather than maize). However, the deeply embedded cultural aspects of maize cultivation mean that uptake of alternative staples is low, as households are often unwilling to make such a big change to their cultivation activities. Similarly, in Botswana’s rangeland areas, pastoralists are reluctant to reduce their livestock numbers, despite rangeland degradation being exacerbated by climate change. Cattle in particular are an important symbol of power and social status across much of sub-Saharan Africa, and are traditionally used in place of banks as stores of wealth. Any policies that require deeply engrained cultural values, behaviours and practices to alter are likely to require longer time frames for implementation. They would also need to be accompanied with comprehensive programmes of awareness raising and education. Policies that build on and support existing, successful practices can yield faster results.

6

Towards a More Holistic Approach to Livelihood Adaptation and Development in View of Climate Variability

The previous sections have demonstrated the importance of considering different spatial and temporal scales, of bringing together different knowledges, of looking across different assets and sectors and seeking policies and practices

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that converge. These elements are vital if maladaptation and lock-ins that limit future adaptation options are to be avoided. Addressing these aspects in a holistic way remains an important challenge for international development programmes, as livelihoods contend with climate change and variability into the future in addition to other current and future development challenges. This section concludes our chapter by examining some of the ways in which these links and relationships can be further developed, through processes of mainstreaming and developing synergistic, no or low regret, win-win options. Mainstreaming refers to the acceptance, embedding, and normalisation of climate and livelihood considerations, such that they are inherently included in policy development across sectors as ‘par for the course’. Mainstreaming climate change and adaptation strategies that support livelihoods across different sectors nevertheless remains an elusive goal across Africa, as well as globally. There is currently high potential for actions in one sector to undermine steps taken in another. There is also a need to recognise the possibility of trade-offs occurring between policies and actions that target climate change mitigation, those that target adaptation and those that seek to promote development. Recent work by Suckall et al. (2014b) analysed livelihoods in Tanzania (Zanzibar) and community responses to socio-economic and climate stressors. They found that at the local level, responses frequently take the form of coping strategies, providing short-term relief in difficult times, but that over the longer term, these actions have a negative effect on progress towards development, with adaptations also undermining mitigation efforts. Similarly, through their work in Copperbelt Province, Zambia, Kalaba et al. (2013) recognise that as households seek alternative income sources, charcoal production becomes an attractive livelihood option,, particularly in view of increasing energy demands from growing urban centres of population in other parts of the country. Although charcoal production and sale provides a route to increasing income and sustaining livelihoods over the short-term, the deforestation that occurs has important negative impacts on climate change mitigation, as well as longer-term livelihood options and development through biodiversity loss. These examples of maladaptation illustrate the need to evaluate the climate and development impacts of activities and policies over different temporal and spatial scales. Such evaluations may also usefully take into account different socio-economic and climate scenarios. Autonomous livelihood adaptation may hinder long term development and mitigation goals, thus without policy measures or planned adaptation, maladaptation could occur (Suckall et  al. 2014b). However, as with development policy, planned adaptation measures may create winners and losers, meaning that issues of equity and justice of paramount significance. Avoiding maladaptation in policy interventions requires understanding of how mal-

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adaptive practices arise, an area in which further research is required. If the intervention may lead to maladaptation over the time frame(s) under consideration, then the measure should be redesigned or reconsidered before being mainstreamed and before any negative lock-ins arise. An alternative way of avoiding maladaptation is to identify ‘no-regret’, ‘low regret’ or ‘win-win’ adaptation options. ‘No-regret’ options are defined by de Bruin et  al. (2009) as measures which should be implemented irrespective of climate change. Such options are also considered as being politically and economically feasible under a range of possible climatic futures. ‘Low regret’ options require identifying highly vulnerable sectors, geographical regions or populations and implementing feasible, cost-effective and low-risk responses with relatively large benefits under future climates. ‘Win-win’ actions are those that contribute to adaptation but also have wider social, environmental or economic policy benefits, including mitigation benefits. Adopting such approaches also provides a way to deal with the uncertainties surrounding future climate change and variability, rather than using uncertainties and risks to justify inaction. Policies that seek to balance development with climate change mitigation and adaptation are often referred to as ‘triple win’ policies. Suckall et al. (2014b), nevertheless recognise that triple wins are constrained in practice due to a combination of resource, regulatory, learning and governance barriers that span a range of scales and stakeholders. Resource barriers include a lack of technology and agricultural inputs that can support adaptations such as planting at different times. Regulatory barriers could include a lack of enforcement of laws that prevent deforestation. Learning and governance barriers are linked, with the former being exemplified through a lack of knowledge about alternative cultivars and farming techniques and the latter being a lack of integrated cross-ministerial approaches that could help overcome learning barriers through joint activities that could span different ministries. The interactions between the various types of barriers can inhibit adaptation and reduce the possibility for triple wins to be delivered. The quest to facilitate triple wins is increasingly being taken up by policymakers (Suckall et al. 2014a). This has led to emergence of the concept of climate compatible development (CCD): ‘development that minimises the harm caused by climate impacts while maximising the many human development opportunities presented by a low emissions, more resilient future’ (Mitchell and Maxwell 2010: 1). Initial analyses have suggested that CCD remains conceptual rather than something that is easily operationalised and there is confusion over whether CCD is more usefully conceived of as a process or an outcome. Commentators have also questioned how it differs from other inte-

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grated approaches such as green growth or sustainable development. There is a further lack of knowledge surrounding many aspects of CCD, including (i) the kinds of governance arrangements and sharing of roles and responsibilities, within and across levels and stakeholder groups, that can facilitate progress along CCD pathways; (ii) the types of incentives that can entice different types of stakeholder to engage in CCD activities; (iii) the ways in which unjust distributions of costs and benefits can be avoided; (iv) the temporal and spatial scales over which CCD is most usefully monitored and assessed; and (v) the ways in which CCD activities are best reported in order to share and upscale good practices and experiences and develop a stronger evidence base for the delivery of triple wins. Research is needed in order to address each of these knowledge gaps, as well as to further our overall understanding of the complex relationships between livelihoods, adaptation and climate variability. International development researchers and practitioners can play a useful role in these efforts, building an empirical evidence base and critically reflecting upon the robustness of investments under projected climatic conditions and the ways in which they shape the distribution of winners and losers across the developing world.

References Adger, W.N., S. Agrawala, M.M. Mirza, C. Conde, K. O’Brien, J. Puhlin, R. Pulwarty, B. Smit, and K. Takahashi. 2007. Chapter 17: Assessment of adaptation practices, options, constraints and capacity. In Climate change 2007: Impacts, adaptation and vulnerability. Contribution of working group II to the fourth assessment report of the intergovernmental panel on climate change, ed. M.L.  Parry, O.F.  Canziani, J.P.  Palutikof, P.J.  Van Der Linden, and C.E.  Hanson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bailey, I., and G.A. Wilson. 2009. Theorising transitional pathways in response to climate change: Technocentrism, ecocentrism, and the carbon economy. Environment and Planning A 41: 2324–2341. Barnett, J., and S. O’Neill. 2010. Maladaptation. Global Environmental Change 20: 211–213. Bebbington, A. 1999. Capitals and capabilities: A framework for analysing peasant viability, rural livelihoods and poverty. Word Development 27: 2021–2044. Béné, C., R.G. Wood, A. Nwesham, and M. Davies. 2012. Resilience: New Utopia or new Tyranny? Reflection about the potentials and limits of the concept of resilience in relation to vulnerability reduction programmes. IDS Working Papers 2012: 1–61.

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Berkes, F., and C. Folke. 2002. Back to the future: Ecosystem dynamics and local knowledge. In Panarchy : Understanding transformations in human and natural systems, ed. L.H. Gunderson and C.S. Holling. Washington; London: Island Press. Berman, R.J., C.H. Quinn, and J. Paavlova. 2014. Identifying drivers of household coping strategies to multiple climatic hazards in Western Uganda: Implications for adapting to future climate change. Climate and Development 1–14. Cash, D. W., W. N. Adger, F. Berkes, P. Garden, L. Lebel, P. Olsson, L. Pritchard, and O. Young. 2006. Scale and cross-scale dynamics: Governance and information in a multilevel world. Ecology and Society 11. Chambers, R., and R.  Conway. 1992. Sustainable rural livelihoods: Practical concepts for the 21st century. IDS Discussion Paper 296. De Bruin, K., R.B. Dellink, A. Ruijs, L. Bolwidt, A. Buuren, J. Graveland, R.S. Groot, P.J. Kuikman, S. Reinhard, R.P. Roetter, V.C. Tassone, A. Verhagen, and E. Ierland. 2009. Adapting to climate change in The Netherlands: An inventory of climate adaptation options and ranking of alternatives. Climatic Change 95: 23–45. DFID. 1999. Sustainable livelihoods guidance sheets, London. Dixon, J., L. Stringer, and A. Challinor. 2014. Farming system evolution and adaptive capacity: Insights for adaptation support. Resources 3: 182–214. Freier, K.P., R.  Bruggemann, J.  Scheffran, M.  Finckh, and U.A.  Schneider. 2012. ‚Assessing the predictability of future livelihod strategies of pastoralists in semiarid Morocco under climate change. Technological Forecasting and Social Change 79: 371–382. IPCC. 2013. Summary for policymakers’. In Climate change 2013: The physical science basis. Contribution of working group i to the fifth assessment report of the intergovernmental panel on climate change, ed. T.F.  Stocker, D.  Qin, G.-K.  Plattner, M. Tignor, S.K. Aallen, J. Borschung, A. Nauels, Y. Xia, V. Bex, and P.M. Midgley. Cambridge, UK and New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Jones, L., and E. Boyd. 2011. Exploring social barriers to adaptation: Insights from Western Nepal. Global Environmental Change 21: 1262–1274. Kalaba, F.K., C.H. Quinn, and A.J. Dougill. 2013. Contribution of forest provisioning ecosystem services to rural livelihoods in the Miombo woodlands of Zambia’. Population and Environment 35: 1–24. Klein, R. J. T., G. F. Midgley, B. L. Preston, M. Alam, F. Berkhout, K. Dow and M.R. Shaw. 2014. Chapter 16: Adaptation opportunities, constraints and limits. In Climate change 2014: Impacts, adaptation and vulnerability. Contribution of working group II to the Fifth assessment Report of the intergovernmental panel on climate change. Mitchell, T., and S.  Maxwell. 2010. Defining climate compatible development. CDKN ODI Policy Brief, Nov 2010/A. Osbahr, H., C. Twyman, W.N. Aadger, and D.S.G. THOMAS. 2010. Evaluating successful livelihood adaptation to climate variability and change in southern Africa. Ecology and Society 15.

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Parry, M., O.  Canziani, J.  Palutikof, P. van der Linden, and C.  Hanson. 2007. Climate change 2007: Impacts, adaptation and vulnerability. In contribution of working group II to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 1–13, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Pelling, M. 2011. Adaptation to climate change: From resilience to transformation. Abingdon,UK: Routledge. Scoones, I. 1998. Sustainable rural livelihoods: A framework for analysis. IDS Working Paper 72. Scoones, I. 2009. Livelihoods perspectives and rural development. Journal of Peasant Studies 36: 171–196. Sen, A. 1999. Development as freedom. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stringer, L.C., J.C. Dyer, M.S. Reed, A.J. Dougill, C. Twyman, and D. Mkwambisi. 2009. Adaptations to climate change, drought and desertification: Local insights to enhance policy in southern Africa. Environmental Science & Policy 12: 748–765. Stringer, L.C., D.D. Mkwambisi, A.J. Dougill, and J.C. Dyer. 2010. Adaptation to climate change and desertification: Perspectives from national policy and autonomous practice in Malawi. Climate and Development 2: 145–160. Stringer, L.C., A.J.  Dougill, J.C.  Dyer, K.  Vincent, F.  Fritzsche, J.  Leventon, M.P. Falcao, P. Manyakaidze, S. Syampungani, P. Powell, and G. Kalaba. 2014. Advancing climate compatible development: Lessons from southern Africa. Regional Environmental Change 14: 713–725. Suckall, N., E.  Tompkins, and L.  Stringer. 2014a. Identifying trade-offs between adaptation, mitigation and development in community responses to climate and socio-economic stresses: Evidence from Zanzibar, Tanzania. Applied Geography 46: 111–121. Suckall, N., L.C. Stringer, and E. Tompinks. 2014a. Presenting triple-wins? Assessing projects that deliver adaptation, mitigation and development in rural Sub-Saharan Africa. Ambio. Thomas, D., C. Twyman, H. Osbahr, and B. Hewitson. 2007. Adaptation to climate change and variability: Farmer responses to intra-seasonal precipitation trends in South Africa. Climatic Change 83: 301–322. Vincent, K., T.  Cull, D.  Chanika, P.  Hamazakaza, A.  Joubert, E.  Macome, and C.  Mutonhodza-Davies. 2013. Farmers’ responses to climate variability and change in southern Africa – is it coping or adaptation? Climate and Development 5: 194–205. Wilson, G.A. 2012. Community resilience and environmental transitions. London: Routledge. Wilson, G.A. 2014. Community resilience: Path dependency, lock-in effects and transitional ruptures. Environment and Planning A 57: 1–26. World Bank. 2010. Development and climate change. Washington, DC: World Development Report.

39 Can Regional Cooperation Promote Sustainable Development? Karen M. Siegel

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Introduction

This chapter examines the question of whether and how regional cooperation can promote sustainable development. Examining the relationship between regional cooperation on the one hand, and sustainable development on the other, is a topical issue for several reasons. First, many concerns relating to sustainable development cross national boundaries or are similar for several neighbouring countries. At the same time, they are not necessarily global issues or the regional level may be a more favourable framework to address them. Regional cooperation on transboundary or shared socio-environmental concerns can thus be crucial in strengthening sustainable development. Second, we know relatively little of how regional cooperation on sustainability concerns takes place. In studies of environmental governance, the regional level has only recently gained attention while most studies on regional cooperation, particularly in regions of the Global South, have focussed on trade and economic concerns, but have said much less about socio-environmental concerns. In order to explore how regional cooperation can contribute to sustainable development, the chapter is structured in three parts. The first part discusses in more detail why many challenges of sustainable development have regional

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relevance. The second part focusses on different motivations for using regional cooperation to address sustainability concerns. Yet, even if there are good reasons for addressing shared socio-environmental concerns at the regional level, regional cooperation on these is by no means automatic. The final section therefore focusses on the conditions under which regional cooperation is more likely to promote sustainable development. This depends very much on the particular actors driving a regional agenda with sustainability objectives and their relationship to national governments.

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The Relevance of Regional Cooperation for Sustainable Development

Since the first UN Conference on the Human Environment held in Stockholm in 1972, sustainable development has become a key concept in international development. While there are many perspectives on sustainable development, arguably the most important aspect in relation to international development is the promise to reconcile economic and social development with ecological sustainability. Consequently, the concept of sustainable development has played a crucial role in bridging North–South divides in international environmental politics (Vogler 2014). In 2012 the UN Conference on Sustainable Development, or Rio+20, reaffirmed the importance of sustainable development as a guiding principle for international development by launching a process to formulate a set of concrete Sustainable Development Goals to complement the existing Millennium Development Goals. Sustainable development has thus played an important role in global environmental politics for several decades. However, while many sustainability concerns cross national boundaries and thus require cooperation between countries in order to address them effectively, they do not necessarily relate to global commons concerns. For a number of reasons, the regional level, that is, relations between neighbouring countries sharing a particular socio-environmental concern, constitutes an important scale of analysis for understanding how sustainable development can be promoted. The regional level may be a more practical or feasible level to address common sustainability problems simply because fewer countries have to coordinate. In addition, it may also be seen as more legitimate because countries are more likely to share a common history, culture or language and North– South differences which have often led to severe criticism of environmental cooperation at the global level are likely to be less pronounced at the regional level (Balsiger and VanDeveer 2012: 3; Elliott and Breslin 2011: 8–10). The regional level may also be able to act as a building block towards cooperation

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at the global level (Balsiger and VanDeveer 2012; Carrapatoso 2012) and help in addressing implementation gaps of global conventions (Selin 2012). In this sense, the regional level could potentially complement the global level which is particularly important at a time where the global level is often perceived to be stagnating or failing to address important international socio-environmental concerns although, of course, numerous problems also exist in regional cooperation (Balsiger and VanDeveer 2012: 2; Conca 2012). Yet, until very recently most studies have not distinguished between the global and the regional dimension of cooperation on socio-environmental concerns, thus lumping together phenomena that are analytically quite different (Balsiger et al. 2012: 5; Balsiger and VanDeveer 2012: 7). Consequently, even studies of environmental cooperation that address topics which are clearly not global in scope and relate much more to regional issues, such as cooperation on the Rhine basin (Bernauer 1996), the Baltic and North Seas (Haas 1993) or the Great Lakes (Valiante et al. 1997), have generally not analysed these as a form of cooperation that is analytically distinct from global environmental cooperation. The main exception to this is the European Union (EU) which has been very successful in promoting regional cooperation on socio-environmental concerns and where this has also been researched specifically from a regional perspective (see e.g. Jordan and Adelle 2013; Vogler 2011). In the context of the EU, spillover effects from economic integration to other policy areas and the existence of supranational institutions, that is, institutions whose mandate is to represent the EU as a whole and promote the common good of the EU rather than the interests of the individual member states, are thus crucial to explain why regional-level cooperation has become so central in addressing socioenvironmental concerns. However, although the EU is often seen as ‘the standard model for regional integration’ (Börzel and Risse 2012a: 197), regional cooperation in other parts of the world mostly looks very different. Even in South America where the regional organisation Mercosur has frequently been described as the regional organisation that has advanced most outside Europe (Kaltenthaler and Mora 2002: 73; Telò 2006: 131), no significant supranational institutions have been developed and spillover effects remain much more limited (Kaltenthaler and Mora 2002; Malamud 2005: 434). In this chapter, I therefore argue that it is crucial to take a broader view on regional cooperation, examining processes of cooperation between neighbouring countries on transboundary or shared socio-environmental concerns more generally, whether these resemble the EU integration process or not. The chapter thus examines not only formal regional organisations with well-developed institutional structures, but also more informal regular

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joint or coordinated activities between partners in neighbouring countries on shared or transboundary concerns in relation to sustainable development. If we adopt such a broader understanding of regional cooperation, we can identify two broad pathways leading to regional cooperation on sustainability concerns.

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Motivations for Pursuing Sustainable Development at the Regional Level

In some cases, already existing regional organisations or efforts at regionbuilding in other policy areas also lead to cooperation on socio-environmental issues. In other cases, the opposite occurs and environmental cooperation which comes out of a need to address shared environmental problems becomes a form of regional cooperation (Elliott and Breslin 2011: 15). Although there are sometimes overlaps between the two processes, the distinction is useful because it impacts on the characteristics of regional cooperation on socioenvironmental concerns. If this follows on from previous regional cooperation initiatives on other issues, a particular regional organisation is likely to serve as the institutional framework. This also means that the membership or the geographic boundaries correspond to that regional organisation with ecological criteria not playing much of a role. Moreover, the variety of different environmental issues covered can be quite large. Conversely, if shared environmental problems are the starting point for regional environmental cooperation, this impacts on the characteristics in a different way. In this case, the boundaries are thus likely to be determined by ecological criteria, that is, the countries that share a particular environmental problem, as well as political considerations in terms of which countries are willing to work together. The scope of issues covered then corresponds to the problems that need to be addressed while the institutional framework is secondary and depends on which frameworks are available and most suitable.

Shared Socio-environmental Concerns Leading to Regional Cooperation The recognition that socio-environmental concerns are transboundary or shared between countries in a particular region can lead to cooperation. First, there are environmental concerns relating to the scarcity or degradation of a shared resource and problems of transboundary pollution. These cases present

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a scenario of interdependence where one state alone cannot effectively address the problem. Second, there are environmental concerns whose impact is more local than transboundary, but which are similar in several neighbouring countries. In these cases, countries may benefit from cooperation, for example, through information exchange or joint research. Third, some environmental problems are deemed as globally important, but implementation or coordination at the regional level provides an added value. In the first group, transboundary freshwater resources are one of the most common concerns. This is not surprising given that many rivers and some larger lakes and aquifers cross national boundaries. Moreover, freshwater is of course necessary for a multitude of purposes including drinking water, household needs, agriculture, industry, navigation, generation of energy, tourism and many others. Water scarcity or degradation thus affects economic activities as well as the quality of life of individuals. In some cases, this has led to regional institutions, for example, for the management of international rivers or lakes. This is the case, for example, for the Rhine basin (Bernauer 1996) or the Great Lakes (Valiante et al. 1997) as well as the Amazon (Ferris 1981; Hochstetler 2011) or the La Plata basin in South America (del Castillo Laborde 2008; Gilman et al. 2008). Reflecting trends in international politics more generally, environmental sustainability has become more prominent in international river management from the 1970s onwards. In regions of the South, the ecological aspects of cooperation on rivers gained in importance particularly in the period right after the UN Conference on Environment and Development held in Rio in 1992 (Conca et al. 2006: 271–273). In other cases, serious safety or security concerns have led to regional cooperation in the form of capacity-building and financial aid programmes. This was the case for the countries of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union where, with the fall of the Iron Curtain, information about the extent of environmental problems became available. The transboundary effects of issues such as nuclear safety or air pollution meant that these concerns had direct relevance to citizens and governments in Western Europe. As a consequence, numerous programmes of East–West environmental cooperation were launched (Andonova and VanDeveer 2012; Connolly et al. 1996; Connolly and List 1996). The second group includes environmental concerns which do not have such obvious transboundary consequences, but where neighbouring countries share similar sustainability challenges and thus benefit from cooperation. This is the case for the Mediterranean where the effects of marine pollution are relatively local, but where all countries face the same problems. Here, the Mediterranean Action Plan has been significant in promoting shared norms

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and supporting capacity-building although it has not led to joint policies or programmes (Kütting 2011). Another example is North Africa where water scarcity is a serious concern shared by several countries. Consequently, the Arab Water Council was created as a non-profit/non-governmental professional organisation to implement and coordinate studies in relation to water protection and management. Moreover, the Center for Environment and Development for the Arab Region and Europe was established as an intergovernmental organisation with diplomatic status to promote issues such as capacity-building or technologies for water protection (Kulauzov and Antypas 2011: 123–124). Likewise, the effects of climate change and desertification are often similar in neighbouring countries and thus provide incentives for cooperation, for example, in North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa as well as in the Hindu Kush-Himalaya region (Compagnon et al. 2011; Kulauzov and Antypas 2011; Matthew 2012; Swain 2011). Finally, the last group relates to those concerns which are regarded as globally important, but where implementation or coordination takes place at the regional level. This includes the regional implementation of global environmental conventions. Two global environmental conventions, the Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes and Their Disposal and the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants have, for example, set up regional centres. These were created following the recognition that countries need different kinds of support to meet their obligations in relation to the treaties. Regional centres are seen as a way of pooling resources and focus in particular on capacity-building and technology transfer as well as raising awareness, strengthening administrative ability and the diffusion of scientific and technical assistance and information. Overall, the objective of regional centres is thus to help in addressing implementation gaps of the global conventions (Selin 2012: 29–33). Other global environmental conventions contain regional arrangements too. The UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), for example, recognises the importance of regional differences and characteristics and established five regional implementation annexes as a framework for regional coordination and cooperation. This is also reflected in the institutional structure of the convention which includes regional coordination units (Bauer 2009: 296–297). The regional annexes played an important role in the negotiations over the convention. The UNCCD was initiated and promoted by the Group of 77 (G77) and exposed clear North–South differences, but on the other hand there were also important differences within the G77. However, the latter were overcome in part due to the use of regional annexes which allowed addressing different regional interests and concerns under

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the umbrella of the global convention. This meant that the different countries of the South could maintain a common position supporting the convention while still being able to keep a focus on their regional interests (Najam 2004). Finally, in South America the Convention of Migratory Species (CMS) has become a framework for regional environmental cooperation through several agreements targeting specific species whose habitat is shared by several neighbouring countries (Siegel 2014: 146–169).

Pre-existing Regional Organisations Engaging in Cooperation on Sustainability Concerns While all of the above examples are cases where regional cooperation on socioenvironmental concerns developed from the bottom-up in order to address important transboundary or shared concerns, in other cases regional organisations created for other purposes already existed and then became frameworks for addressing sustainability concerns. For example, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) both adopted sustainability objectives. On the one hand, this was a response to serious transboundary environmental problems affecting the quality of life, but in the case of ASEAN it also served as a way to strengthen the regional identity and was supported by external actors and donors, in particular UN agencies, as well as NGOs (Elliott 2011: 60–66, 2012; Swain 2011: 82–84). Similarly, the South American regional organisation Mercosur was originally created for economic and political reasons but has also pursued objectives linked to the sustainable development of its member states and the region as a whole. In this case, inter-regionalism or the dialogue and cooperation between regions has played an important role in the diffusion of environmental norms and policies. The EU has been a driving force in this process as it actively promotes the EU model in other regions by supporting regional integration elsewhere. In addition to encouraging regional integration, the EU promotes values such as democracy, human rights, social responsibility or environmental sustainability, using a range of tools such as elite interaction, policy advice, political summits, inter-regional agreements and declaratory statements or financial and technical assistance (Börzel and Risse 2012b; Grugel 2004; Lenz 2012; Manners 2002). Moreover, the EU links the different values it promotes to regional cooperation or, in other words, it promotes a very particular model of regional cooperation that includes certain values. Environmental sustainability is one of the core

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values and consequently efforts of the EU to promote regional cooperation elsewhere also address environmental concerns even though environmental protection is not the main objective. In the case of Mercosur, cooperation on socio-environmental concerns has thus been promoted and made possible to a large extent by exogenous drivers, most importantly European donors. With only limited financial support from the Mercosur governments, funding from these donors has been crucial to support regular meetings and joint projects (Siegel 2014: 122–145). However, regional cooperation processes that are not linked to the EU model can also play a role in promoting regional cooperation on socioenvironmental concerns. Another very different motivation can thus be the desire to mitigate potential or de facto negative environmental impacts of regional cooperation. The creation of free trade areas, for example, often leads to fears of a ‘race to the bottom’ where countries converge on the lowest environmental standards in order to remain competitive. In some cases, this fear has led to a transnational mobilisation of civil society and in particular environmental groups, in order to ensure that environmental standards do not drop. This was the case in the negotiations for the North American Free Trade Area (NAFTA) between Canada, the USA and Mexico. Because of the plans for NAFTA, Mexican environmental policy suddenly received much more attention and became an international issue. Environmental organisations from the three countries thus started to work together in order to ensure that Mexico’s lower environmental standards would not become the new norm for all NAFTA countries. This meant Mexico’s government was suddenly confronted not only with domestic, but also international pressure. With support from other proponents of NAFTA, such as the USA and the World Bank, the Mexican government then started to improve its legislation and strengthen its environmental budget and human resources. Moreover, an environmental supplementary agreement was added to the free trade agreement (Hogenboom 1996; Vogel 1995: 7). Overall, there are thus different motivations for regional cooperation on sustainability matters. However, such general motivations on their own are not sufficient to make regional cooperation on socio-environmental concerns happen. As Matthew (2012) notes in relation to the Hindu Kush/Himalaya region, there are many convincing reasons for regional environmental governance, yet environmental institutions and governance processes are hard to create. Ultimately, whether regional cooperation fosters sustainable development and how this takes place thus depends to a large extent on the specific people or organisations driving a sustainability agenda at the regional level and their relationship to national governments.

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Under Which Conditions Does Regional Cooperation Promote Sustainable Development?

Even in ideal circumstances, ecological sustainability is often hard to reconcile with economic development and as governments are under pressure to take into account many competing interests, socio-environmental concerns are frequently pushed into the margins. Consequently, ecological sustainability rarely makes it high up on the agendas of the highest levels of government anywhere. However, the marginality of regional cooperation on socioenvironmental concerns is arguably even more pronounced in many regions of the South where governments often have many other pressing social, economic and security concerns to deal with. In relation to the Middle East and North Africa, Kulauzov and Antypas note that so far both environmental and regional cooperation are ‘marginal phenomena’ (2011: 128) and referring to sub-Saharan Africa Compagnon, Florémont and Lamaud characterise regional environmental governance as ‘embryonic’ and ‘fragmented’ (2011: 106). With regard to South Asia, Swain notes the ‘lack of political will’ (2011: 87) and Matthew describes initiatives of the SAARC as ‘modest actions with little tangible effect’ (2012: 111). Finally, Hochstetler points out the ‘institutional fragility’ (2011: 145) of regional environmental governance arrangements in South America and Elliott (2011: 71) notes the lack of funding for environmental concerns in both Northeast Asia as well as Southeast Asia even though the latter has much more developed regional institutions. If regional cooperation on sustainability concerns does take place, this is therefore frequently an outcome of specific people or organisations driving forward a sustainability agenda at the regional level often in the face of significant obstacles and competing priorities. This includes actors coming from within the region, that I call ‘endogenous drivers’ as well as ‘exogenous drivers’, that is, external actors from outside the region. This section examines civil society organisations as well as transnational networks of government officials as crucial endogenous drivers as well as international donors which represent one of the most important exogenous drivers. Moreover, networks and collaboration between different drivers are crucial elements in strengthening regional cooperation. However, it is not only the networks between drivers that matter but also their relationship to national governments. Disagreements and diverging objectives between donors and recipients can thus seriously hinder the ability of exogenous drivers to promote sustainable development at the regional level, while for civil society organisations,

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the ability to convince governments to lend formal support in the form of treaties or agreements with neighbouring countries on a particular sustainability concern is an important further source of strength.

Exogenous Drivers Exogenous drivers play an important role in the majority of studies on transboundary cooperation on sustainability concerns in regions of the South and some have noted that cooperation is more driven by external actors than domestic ones (Compagnon et al. 2011: 107; Kulauzov and Antypas 2011: 113). This section focusses on international donors as the most important exogenous driver, although international organisations can also play important roles in terms of raising concern, promoting environmental norms and providing a structure for regional cooperation which goes beyond providing financial and technical assistance (Levy et al. 1993: 399–404). Donors offer financial and technical support as well as policy models or guidelines. Consequently, environmental aid has the potential to affect political dynamics positively by increasing concern and improving capabilities as well as the contractual environment (Connolly 1996: 362–363; Keohane 1996: 1–14). If strategies are carefully designed and take into account recipients’ priorities, environmental aid can help to change the incentives of key actors, strengthen domestic coalitions interested in environmental protection and significantly improve capacity (Connolly 1996: 328). If donors target specifically transboundary or shared socio-environmental concerns in a particular region, they can thus use a variety of tools and strategies to promote sustainability at the regional level. This also means that if regional cooperation on socio-environmental concerns is highly dependent on external funding, donor priorities can have a large impact on the kinds of issues that receive support as well as the institutional frameworks of cooperation. While donors prioritise certain environmental issues, geographical locations or institutional frameworks, it is much harder to develop regional cooperation on other issues which are not able to attract funding. As part of its international waters programme, the Global Environment Facility (GEF), for example, has funded transboundary cooperation on shared rivers or aquifers in several regions. However, the emphasis of the GEF is on supporting projects with global environmental benefits (Gerlak 2004) and this has an impact on the types of river basins that receive support as well as the contents of projects (Siegel 2014: 192). At the same time, the role of donors does not remain uncontested. For example, as noted above European donors wishing to promote the

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EU model have been important to support cooperation on sustainability concerns in the framework of the regional organisation Mercosur. Yet, over time, it has become clear that Mercosur governments do not wish to follow the path of European integration and have resisted the diffusion of European norms. Given these discrepancies between the priorities of donors and recipients, it is perhaps not surprising that regional cooperation in the Mercosur framework suffers from interruptions and discontinuity (Siegel 2014: 122–145). Disagreements can also arise over the practicalities of implementation, for example, whether local staff or foreign consultants should be hired to carry out projects (Connolly 1996: 347; Fairman and Ross 1996: 42, 44). Moreover, short-term financial aid can result in serious contracting problems because recipients may stop implementation as soon as the external funding runs out (Connolly 1996: 339). Whether donors are successful in promoting regional sustainability agendas thus depends to a large extent on their willingness and ability to work with local governments and/or civil society in recipient countries towards shared objectives.

Endogenous Drivers However, external actors are not the only drivers and endogenous drivers equally play crucial roles. Yet, as Steinberg points out (2003: 19), domestic actors and domestic political resources have a much lower visibility than international ones and are frequently overlooked. Nevertheless, endogenous drivers are fundamental because they have access to important domestic political resources which external actors rarely possess. Key elements of domestic political resources are a long-term presence, access to domestic networks, knowledge of policy processes and domestic political culture (Steinberg 2003: 20–21). International actors rarely have such domestic political resources and as a result of the colonial legacy and history of foreign intervention in domestic political affairs sometimes lack legitimacy. Moreover, foreign staff working for international agencies seldom spend more than a few years in a certain country and political contacts and experience is not necessarily transferred to new people taking over. This means international actors may provide crucial funding, but they lack the long-term presence at the level of individual people as well as the political legitimacy to become involved in domestic policy processes. Whereas donor priorities often change, domestic actors can thus provide continuity and institutional memory and they are able to learn from past experiences. This is crucial because it can take multiple attempts and several years to develop project proposals to apply for funding and the creation

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of laws and institutions typically requires a decade or more (Steinberg 2001: 136–140). Key actors are then often individuals, called ‘bilateral activists’, who are able to operate simultaneously in the international and the domestic sphere and who can provide a link between endogenous and exogenous drivers (Steinberg 2003: 17). Important endogenous drivers include transnational networks of government officials as well as civil society organisations. Government officials often form transnational networks with their counterparts in neighbouring countries (Slaughter 2004). Even if the highest levels of governments do not prioritise regional environmental cooperation, staff working at lower levels of governments, such as environment ministries, national park administrations or technical commissions, can play an important role in cooperating on environmental issues with their counterparts in neighbouring countries. Regional organisations like ASEAN (Elliott 2012), Mercosur (Hochstetler 2003, 2005) or NAFTA (Slaughter 2004) have all created networks on environmental concerns between high-level officials at the ministerial level as well as lower-level civil servants. Transnational networks of government officials also exist in other less institutionalised frameworks, such as the South Asian Cooperation for Environmental Protection (Matthew 2012: 113; Swain 2011), the Senior Officials Meeting for Environmental Cooperation in Northeast Asia (Elliott 2011: 67), the Commission for the Forests of Central Africa or the African Ministerial Conference on the Environment (Compagnon et al. 2011). However, it is crucial to note that the members of such networks usually have no autonomous source of funding and underfunding is often a problem. Moreover, they still have to represent and work towards the national interests. These in turn are still defined by government policy which, at least on sensitive issues, will be decided by the highest levels of government. How much influence such networks have therefore depends very much on the positions of national governments. A good working relationship with national governments is also important for civil society organisations wishing to drive forward sustainability agendas at the regional level. Bringing governments on board is important because they can strengthen regional cooperation by making formal commitments in public in the form of treaties or agreements with neighbouring countries which provide a long-term framework for cooperation and increase visibility and credibility at the international level. On the other hand, civil society organisations and in particular NGOs working on socio-environmental concerns, frequently provide additional resources and often carry out the practical elements and daily work of regional cooperation on socio-environmental concerns.

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Many NGOs, for example, are involved in carrying out conservation measures as well as monitoring and providing alternative sources of information on environmental concerns which is often more comprehensive than the information supplied by governments (Jacobson and Brown Weiss 1998: 533–534; Keck and Sikkink 1998: 18–22; Raustiala 1997: 728; Steinberg 2005: 345). Some NGOs also work together with governments by providing free policy advice (Raustiala 1997: 727) and supporting these in implementation. In some countries in Latin America and Asia where NGOs are relatively strong, they have taken on quasi-governmental functions, in particular, if governments do not have the capacity to carry out certain tasks (Fairman and Ross 1996: 43–44). Moreover, some NGOs are in a strong position vis-à-vis national governments because they are part of global networks and thus have access to funding from Northern partner organisations which is independent of governments (Fairman and Ross 1996: 43–44; Jacobson and Brown Weiss 1998: 533–534). Some international environmental conventions have also recognised the additional tools and expertise that NGOs can provide and explicitly use NGOs in developing and implementing agreements (Jacobson and Brown Weiss 1998: 545). In some cases, NGOs also help strengthen regional environmental cooperation between governments and there are several examples of public-private partnerships. Examples include the ASEAN Regional Centre for Biodiversity Conservation (Elliott 2012: 51), the Global Tiger Forum in South Asia (Matthew 2012: 113) or the Asia Forest Partnership (Elliott 2011: 70). In South America, cooperation on migratory species has been driven forward by regional networks linking NGOs, researchers, government officials and the CMS itself (Siegel 2014: 146–169). While relying on the resources of civil society organisations can be advantageous for governments, the latter are usually selective in terms of the organisations they are willing to work with. Governments tend to grant more access and influence to organisations which are willing to work within the framework conditions set by governments while those with more radical or very critical approaches are excluded. In some international environmental negotiations, NGOs have to be ‘qualified’ to address a particular subject and this can act as a criterion to exclude more radical groups. Overall, states thus only allow some NGOs to participate and restrict the roles they are able to play in international negotiations (Raustiala 1997: 734). Other studies have noted that NGOs have more influence if their arguments do not contradict dominant discourses and if there are lower levels of contention over economic interests (Betsill 2008: 201–202). Moreover, government policies also shape how civil society organisations can act and how much influence they have (Steinberg 2005: 364) and this can also shape regional cooperation. Elliott (2012: 52),

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for example, outlines how ASEAN governments have selectively included some NGOs while not providing broader participation mechanisms.

5

Conclusion

This chapter has argued that regional-level cooperation can be an important factor in promoting sustainable development and it has traced different pathways leading to regional cooperation on socio-environmental concerns. This has demonstrated the importance of going beyond the EU model of regional integration and not only looking at state-led formal institutions and regional organisations with well-defined structures but also taking into account regular coordination and collaboration between various actors in neighbouring countries in less formal or institutionalised settings. While regional cooperation on sustainability concerns is rarely a high priority for the highest levels of governments, different types of endogenous and exogenous drivers are crucial to promote this. Yet, governments play an important role in enabling or restricting the work of such drivers, so that the ability to bring governments on board significantly strengthens the objectives of those promoting regional cooperation on socio-environmental concerns. This dynamic points to at least two important future research agendas. In relation to international donors, it is important to note that the range of donors involved in environmental programmes is huge and includes UN agencies, international organisations and international development banks as well as national government agencies, NGOs and private foundations. There are also significant variations in terms of objectives, priorities and the relationships with domestic actors as well as the type of support offered and the amount of money involved or the duration of projects. Moreover, in some cases regional environmental cooperation on a particular issue may depend on one main donor, whereas in other cases it is supported by several different donors. In the first case, the influence of a single donor can thus be fairly large, whereas in the second scenario it is more balanced so that the constellation of donors can also lead to different outcomes. Overall, more detailed and systematic research on different donors would thus significantly advance the research programme on regional cooperation on sustainability concerns. In relation to endogenous drivers, further research could examine more clearly under which conditions domestic actors can shape regional cooperation on socio-environmental concerns and what their influence consists of. Clearly, not all civil society organisations are equally well placed to work with governments and influence policymaking at the regional level. A perceived lack of

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involvement of endogenous drivers could therefore also reflect a lack of access for interested civil society organisations. This provides an important avenue for further research in cases where endogenous drivers for regional cooperation appear to be absent. Conversely, in cases where endogenous drivers do play a role, it is worth investigating further how these have gained access and under which conditions. All of these questions are also important in relation to the accountability and legitimacy of regional cooperation and tie in with wider research programmes on environmental governance (Biermann and Gupta 2011).

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40 Rethinking the Vulnerability of Small Island States: Climate Change and Development in the Pacific Islands Jon Barnett and Elissa Waters

1

Introduction

The term small island developing states (SIDS) encompasses a wide array of countries that, despite their shared label, differ in their geographies, economies, cultures, and political systems. These range from tiny atoll states like Tuvalu in the Pacific to the dispersed archipelagos of Micronesia, as well as large countries such as Papua New Guinea, and relatively wealthy states such as Trinidad and Tobago. Despite this heterogeneity, it is widely accepted that there are development challenges that are particular to SIDS due in large part to their location, land mass, populations, geomorphological characteristics, resource profiles, economic characteristics, and susceptibility to extreme events such as epidemics and natural disasters (see Dommen 1980). In the 1970s, disillusionment with modernisation theory and its teleology of development gave rise to new attempts to explain development, including with a focus on the diverse historical and material conditions of societies. From this time onwards, development policy institutions have shown significant interest in the unique characteristics of SIDS. Their special circumstances were formally recognised in 1994  in the United Nations’ Barbados Programme of Action (BPOA), which was a multichapter programme of action for sustainable development in SIDS. By way of the BPOA and other initiatives, development institutions have paid significant attention to the J. Barnett ( ) • E. Waters ( ) School of Geography, University of Melbourne, UK © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 J. Grugel, D. Hammett (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of International Development, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-42724-3_40

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sustainable development challenges of this group of states, many of which are also considered least developed countries (LDCs). One important by-product of this increase in attention since the 1970s has been the formation of a particular development discourse for SIDS that talks of them as ‘vulnerable’. Standard development assumptions applied to SIDS point to a seemingly insurmountable deficit in the preconditions for growth, which we explain, and question, in the following section. Among scholars of SIDS, however, there is a growing recognition that continental development assumptions may fall short of explaining the complex vulnerabilities and development pathways for island states, and offer a misguided basis for enhancing their sustainable development. In this chapter, we describe and interrogate the main discourse on the development of SIDS, beginning with an explanation of the grounds by which they are described as ‘vulnerable’. Vulnerability is understood here as susceptibility to harm from shocks, for example: the trade balances of small islands can be badly affected by energy price rises and so they are said to be disproportionately vulnerable to oil prices (Niles and Lloyd 2013), and the small size of SIDS means that their entire land areas can be damaged by a single cyclone, leading them to be described as vulnerable to cyclones (Pelling and Uitto 2001). Vulnerability is therefore about risks to development, and as such is associated with, but not the same as development (which we understand to be the expansion of freedoms and opportunities as explained by Sen 1999). We then turn our attention to the body of literature that has begun to look critically and empirically at these assumptions. Using the example of climate change in the Pacific, we unpack the multiple drivers of vulnerability in island states. We seek to identify the unique advantages and coping capacities that island nations have been developing for centuries and which have sustained them in the face of an enormous range of local and global challenges. We conclude that vulnerability in SIDS is best understood from an island-centred perspective where historical, cultural, and social contexts (as well as physical and economic) are central to small island development models. These capacities and institutions offer a more efficient and effective basis on which to foster sustainability in SIDS.

2

The Vulnerability of Small Island States

In this section, we seek to outline the reasons why small island states are said to be particularly vulnerable to changing economic and environmental conditions. The beginnings of this discourse lie at least as far back as the early

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twentieth century, as evidenced in the writings of Ellen Churchill Semple and Vidal de la Blance (Barnett and Campbell 2010), but its contemporary manifestations are most clearly formulated in the writings of Lino Briguglio (1995). Briguglio (1995) identifies a range of factors that make SIDS’ economies small and highly susceptible to price shocks. These factors include the small size of populations and national economies, which results in small domestic markets, the inability to exploit economies of scale, an inability to supply domestically a range of goods and services that must instead be imported, and the high ratio of imports to exports and to GDP. Dependence on imports also means that island states are vulnerable to volatility in the terms of trade, and to limited, unreliable, and expensive transport systems. This combination of smallness and exposure to exogenous shocks is seen as a key challenge for achieving sustainable development, particularly in the face of other interacting vulnerabilities such as environmental problems and natural disasters. Of course, these factors pertain only to the formal economies of SIDS, which are of varying degrees of importance to the lives of people living on islands. This discourse of economic vulnerability pervades thinking about environmental changes in small island states as well (Douglas 2006), with particular attention placed on their vulnerability to natural hazards. Because many islands are located in tropical and subtropical zones and on active tectonic plate boundaries, they are particularly exposed to natural hazards such as cyclones, earthquakes, and tsunamis (Méheux et  al. 2006). High ratios of coastline to land areas, and the fact that almost all settlements are on the coast further increase the exposure of critical infrastructure and people to these hazards. Others identify ecological uniqueness, with small economies, resource-dependent livelihoods, and poorly developed infrastructure as additional factors that heighten the vulnerability of SIDS to disasters (Kaly et al. 2002). These issues of exposure and sensitivity to hazards are linked to their economic vulnerability. Many of the most important sectors of SIDS’ economies— such as agriculture, fisheries, and tourism—are sensitive to environmental perturbations, making their economies generally more susceptible to harm from environmental change than more industrialised economies (Barnett and Campbell 2010). Further, most SIDS have small economies that are remote from large metropolitan economies, which limits the foreign direct investment necessary to build disaster resilient infrastructure (Pelling and Uitto 2001). For small islands, it is not just the incidence and frequency of natural hazards, which for some like Tonga and Haiti is quite high, but the impact of each event relative to economies and population. One big cyclone or tsunami can overwhelm much of an entire island state, leading to proportionately high

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losses in housing and infrastructure and agricultural crops, as well as high mortality and morbidity (Lewis 1990). Beyond economic vulnerability and social vulnerability to hazards, small island states are also said to have vulnerable ecosystems. Freshwater resources, soils, and coral reef systems are prone to over-exploitation as populations and economies grow, and inorganic pollutants from vehicles and industry, as well as consumption are hard to dispose of safely and can reach high levels of concentrations (Kaly et al. 2002). Managing these impacts and threats is already a key development challenge for many island states, and climate change, as we discuss later in this chapter, is likely to amplify these challenges, particularly in low-lying atoll islands. Nevertheless, some contend that the power of these claims about the vulnerability of small island states to explain the nature of development on islands is limited (Campbell 2009; Hau’ofa 1994). This is not just because the heterogeneity of SIDS makes all generalisations falsifiable, or even because the key factors of smallness and isolation are so relational and socially constructed as to become almost meaningless. Rather, these claims about vulnerability have limited explanatory power because they arise from a panoptical and developmental view of islands that does not speak at all to how people in islands make meaningful lives for themselves. A simple example exposes the differences. Samoa has long been classified as an LDC on the basis of its low GDP, and it is a country where most people’s livelihoods depend heavily on remittances and fisheries. Samoa’s official GDP is significantly underestimated by at least a third due to problems in recording remittances and significant underreporting and undervaluation of subsistence fisheries (see Brown 1995 and Zeller et al. 2007), creating the paradoxical situation where Samoa is both among the world’s poorest countries and among the countries with the highest rates of obesity (Kopelman 2000). This is but one basic example of how the discourse on island vulnerability that arises from within development and environmental policy communities is far removed from islands themselves, and if islanders engage in their perpetuation that is less a reflection of what happens on islands, and more a manifestation of what they understand donors want to hear (Watters 1987).

3

Critiques of Standard Development Assumptions for Small Island States

The dominant framing of island states in the development studies literature is one of economic fragility, justifying (or at least not offering alternatives to) a standard set of development practices including microeconomic reforms and

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structural adjustments, as well as trade and investment liberalisation (Murray 2001; Slatter 2006). For example, as a response to the ‘key vulnerabilities’ of isolation, smallness, and exposure to shocks, The Commonwealth Secretariat suggests that ‘small states will need to introduce changes which stimulate and encourage the private sector and the government to identify and vigorously pursue new trading opportunities in the international system’ (Commonwealth Secretariat 1997: 13). Similarly, the United National Conference on Trade and Development has for many years expressed concerns about the ‘fragility’ of open island economies maintaining that ‘Macroeconomic policies can play stabilization and growth-promoting roles in highly-open small economies’ (UNCTAD 2011: 12). The underlying assumption is that island economies are intractably ‘fragile in the face of the face of forces outside their control’ (Briguglio 1995). However, the theoretical and empirical underpinnings of this discourse on the fragility of small island states have been the subject of critique. Perhaps the most significant critique has been the argument first put forward by Bertram and Watters (1985) in their article ‘The MIRAB economy in South Pacific micro states’. Here they argued that in the South Pacific at least, there are historical socio-economic processes that mediate the effects of smallness and isolation on island economies, namely: migration, remittances, aid, and bureaucracy (MIRAB). Through empirical research on the economic conditions that have sustained island economies since decolonisation, despite major shifts in the political and economic forces that impinge on them, the MIRAB model challenges the prevailing assumption that vulnerability is the sine qua non of island development. The MIRAB model asserts that transfer payments in the form of remittances and aid, combined with government dominated non-tradable production (bureaucracy) are the key drivers of economies in the Pacific. This runs counter to the preferred model of the World Bank and other development institutions which favour a combination of export-led tradable production and private sector investment (Bertram 1999). While the MIRAB argument has been both criticised and refined (see e.g., Poirine 1995; Hayes 1993), it still serves as powerful reminder of the need to contextualise the economic development challenges of small island states within their own specific historical, social, and microeconomic settings. Other authors have criticised the dominance of economic and environmental framings of vulnerability by asserting that the focus is too narrow, with not enough attention given to the social and institutional challenges that small islands face (Mossler 1996). Campling and Rosalie (2006) use a case study of the Seychelles to argue that contrary to the dominance of

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exogenous economic factors in the literature, social welfare provisioning is in fact the primary structural vulnerability for the majority of SIDS. There are also trends in demographics and settlement patterns that produce particular development challenges for islands. For example, Douglas (2006: 77) argues that, in many island contexts ‘rising single centre urbanisation has led to urban primacy’, creating uneven development across communities and islands. While these alternative accounts of development in small island states challenge the prevailing constructions of island vulnerability, there are postcolonial critiques that step outside development logics altogether. In the South Pacific scholars such as Epeli Hau’ofa (1994—discussed below), Yvonne UnderhillSem (2001), Katerina Teaiwa (2014), and Teresia Teaiwa (2006) have all challenged the way the region and its people are typically framed, offering accounts from their perspective as Pacific peoples. From these accounts, life in the Pacific Islands is rendered more meaningful to Pacific Islanders, emerging as a matter of flows of cultural knowledge and services among extended kinship networks that stretch across multiple temporal and spatial scales. Theirs is an account of people and quotidian and cultural practices, rather than one of abstract national economies disembodied from meaningful lives. As we show later, such postcolonial accounts have implications for understanding vulnerability in islands. These and other studies are essentially calling for a broader conceptualisation of the development challenges of island states, while at the same time highlighting the importance of contextualising specific local challenges. They stress the importance of testing standard development assumptions and emphasise the mediating effects of local and historical forces. Ultimately, they are calling for a more complex and nuanced understanding of development in small island states. Taking these insights on board, the following section of this chapter aims to unpack the complexities of vulnerability with respect to the issue of climate change in the Pacific Islands.

4

Climate Change and the Pacific Islands

It is often said that SIDS are highly exposed to the effects of climate change because many are located in climatologically hazardous zones, and almost all have high ratios of coastline to land area (Mimura 1999; Nurse and Sem 2001; Nurse et al. 2014). This section explains the risks climate change poses to development in small island states through a focus on these issues in the Pacific Islands.

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Global climate change will cause rising sea levels, changes in regional climate systems, and ocean acidification, all of which pose risks to environmental and social systems in the Pacific Islands. Gradually rising sea levels and more intense extreme sea-level events associated with both higher mean sea levels and stronger storms pose risks to coastal settlements, water resources, crops, and human health (Nurse et al. 2014). The impacts of climate change on coastal areas are exacerbated by demographic trends, and in particular increased development on the coast and increased urbanisation in main islands (Mimura 1999). Increased variability in the El Nino-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) system is possible, and temperatures everywhere in the South Pacific are very likely to increase. Changes in the frequency and intensity of annual precipitation and increased wind speeds during cyclones are also likely (Christensen et al. 2013). All other things being equal, these changes are likely to enhance problems of flooding, drought, and bushfires, impacting on settlements, infrastructure, agriculture, health, biodiversity, and economic growth. Many islands already experience periodic risk to settlements and infrastructure from extreme events, however an increase in the intensity or frequency of extreme events will effectively reduce the windows of time for recovery, creating the risk of successive disasters causing cumulative damages to critical infrastructure and livelihood systems (Pelling and Uitto 2001). Increases in sea surface temperature and in the acidity of oceans are also expected, and this is likely to have significant effects on important marine ecosystems. Coral reefs, which for many islands provide protection from storm surges and coastal erosion as well as significant earnings from fishing and tourism, are at risk from coral bleaching under increased greenhouse gas emissions scenarios (Hughes 2003). The growth of species—including corals and plankton—that have calcium carbonate skeletons or shells is likely to be impeded by rising CO2 levels on oceans. This will further undermine the ability of reefs to grow apace with sea levels, and reefs and oceans to supply food to human populations (Hoegh-Guldberg et al. 2007). The impacts of this decline in food supply on human health may be very significant given that the average person in the Pacific Islands consumes 70 kg of fish per year (Gillett et al. 2001). Air temperature increases and generally drier conditions may also affect productive agricultural systems including both subsistence and cash crops. This will negatively impact export capability for certain island states and threaten food security, particularly in outer islands. Countries in the south-western tropical Pacific such as Fiji, Samoa, Tonga, and Vanuatu seem particularly exposed to increased drought and bush fire (Christensen

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et al. 2013). Yet, even in the equatorial regions where climate models do not indicate much change in drought risk, drought can already be a severe problem: for example, in 2013 drought depleted freshwater resources across the north of the Marshall Islands, impacting on food crops such that shortages affected 11,000 people, and causing increases in waterborne diseases such as diarrhoea and influenza-like conditions (OCHA 2013; UNICEF 2013). Freshwater systems are likely to be adversely affected by rising sea levels causing salinisation of groundwater in coastal areas, and from storm events causing flooding of freshwater systems and damage to water supply infrastructure. These impacts on water will be the primary drivers of risks to public health, agricultural production, and the tourism industry. For example, severe flooding in Fiji in early 2009 disrupted tourism arrivals and bookings, and more than doubled the number of smallholder cane farmers who fell below the national poverty line in that year (Lal et al. 2009). Other important sectors like heath and tourism are likely to be negatively impacted by increases in temperature, sea-level rise and the increased intensity of extreme events. Public health under these conditions could be adversely affected through more frequent outbreaks of ciguatera fish poisoning due to higher sea surface temperatures, as well as increases in incidence of diarrhoea and mosquito-borne diseases (Singh et  al. 2001; Hales et  al. 1999). Fears about health risks in Pacific Islands has the potential to negatively impact tourism industries, as does higher incidences or intensities of extreme events (Becken 2005). If tourism declines, there is also the possibility of secondary flow on effects for employment in areas that rely on tourist spending, which are many in the Pacific. Of course, not all islands are environmentally alike, and so to some degree the effects of climate change in SIDS will be heterogeneous, and this is true even within regional groups of SIDS such as those in the South Pacific. For example, while variation in the rise in sea level across the region is likely to be minimal, its effect on different islands will vary depending on tectonic movement: some islands like Niue are rising from the sea floor, some such as Tongatapu are tilting, and others are subsiding (Nunn 2008). The nature of coastal morphology also matters, on islands with basalt coasts, such as Savai’i in Samoa, increased erosion from higher seas and storms is far less likely to be a problem than those with soft, sandy coastlines such as are found along the region’s hundreds of low-lying coral atolls. Islands with hard coasts and which are uplifting, are therefore far less likely to be impacted by sea-level rise than those that have soft coasts and are subsiding. Exposure and sensitivity to changes in atmospheric systems also varies among islands

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in the region: much depends on location, with risks differing from West to East and North to South, and according to soil types and hydrology (Barnett and Campbell 2010). Nevertheless, there is no doubt that Pacific Islands are highly exposed to a range of significant climate changes that put the goal of sustainable development at risk, both in the short and long term. Globally, significant attention has been paid to the ‘plight’ of the region, in part due to the dialogue developed by Pacific Island leaders in international negotiations that stresses extreme vulnerability and minimal responsibility for greenhouse gas emissions (Barnett and Campbell 2010). Yet, while it is true that much of what drives climate change impacts is out of the control of countries of the Pacific, it is too simplistic to assume that climate change impacts will render all these communities intractably vulnerable. When social scientists consider the possible impacts of climate change on people, they distinguish between the environmental drivers of change such as those described above, and the capacity of social systems to manage those risks so that impacts are avoided or reduced. Differences in capacity to adapt to climate change explain why small island developing states such as Samoa, for example, are said to be more at risk that developed small island states such as Singapore: the latter has the wealth and technology to modify its environment such that climate risks are minimised, whereas such modifications are beyond the means of Samoa. This issue of adaptive capacity is discussed in the following section. Despite this, most of the climate change literature suggests a uniform set of (severe) impacts from climate change based on the aforementioned assumptions about the economic and environmental vulnerability of islands. In other words, the issue of climate change maps seamlessly onto pre-existing development discourses to further amplify the characterisation of islands as vulnerable (Barnett and Campbell 2010).

5

Vulnerability, Adaptation, and Adaptive Capacity in the Pacific

At a broad level then, climate change poses seemingly insurmountable challenges to small island states, and seems likely to compound the existing challenges of sustainable development. However, as many historians have pointed out, people on islands have had a long history of coping with and adapting to complex external change, as evidenced in their survival through episodes of colonialisation, war, and the more recent changes brought about by globalisation. This is certainly a case in the Pacific Islands, all of which have

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experienced occupation by colonial powers, blackbirding (forced deportation of Pacific Island people to work as slaves on plantations in Australia and in other colonial settlements), major battles during WWII, nuclear testing and forced migration, and significant changes in the terms of trade in key commodities. Yet, in all such islands life goes on and people persist through a combination of skills, tenacity, and flexibility. Despite this history of resilience, the climate change literature still tends to focus on the environmental drivers of change and not on the capacity of people to adapt to it. The agency of people on islands is under-appreciated and under-researched, which results in assumptions of vulnerability, fragility, and low adaptive capacity, dominating climate change science and policy (Barnett 2010). In the same way that we have argued for broader and more contextualised understanding of development in small islands states, so too there is a need to problematise and contextualise these assumptions of vulnerability to climate change. The concepts of adaptation and adaptive capacity are central to understanding the vulnerability of people and places to climate change. Adaptation means ‘modification’ or ‘fitting to suit’. In climate research and policy it is defined as ‘the adjustment in natural or human systems in response to actual or expected climatic stimuli or their effects, which moderates harm or exploits beneficial opportunities’ (Parry et  al. 2007; Field et  al. 2014). The capacity that a system, region, community, or individual has to adjust to changes varies enormously across places and societies. For example, the capacity of different communities to manage the risk of sea-level rise varies according to the options they have to move, or the skills and resources they have to accommodate, or defend against rising seas. In much of Fiji, for example, land is under customary control and most villages have access to land that is more elevated and inland, making relocation from rising seas a far more feasible option than on atolls where land is scarce and flat. So, even with respect to sea-level rise, to which all Pacific Islands are equally exposed, vulnerability is locally nuanced and highly varied depending on the choices people have in responding to change. The discipline that has been most influential in advancing theory about adaptive capacity is development economics, with the most important early work being that of Yohe and Tol (2002). There is some irony here, for this is the same development paradigm that casts small island states as vulnerable to economic change. There are generally said to be five principal determinants of adaptive capacity. First, economic resources are obviously important in establishing how much people can spend on, for example, insurance against losses from extreme weather events, relocating their homes away from coastal locations, or water tanks to help manage drought risks. The full costs of adaptation are not known and difficult to estimate, not least because the

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full suite of potential effective responses in any given place remains uncertain (Fankhauser 2010). Second, infrastructure and technology also determines the capacity to expand the range of present and future possible response to climate change. For example, an island state such as Singapore with engineering capability can modify its coastline as necessary, and recycle water, and those with advance meteorological and communication systems can receive advance warning of extreme events. Third, and related, are information and skills, which include understanding that there is a need to adapt, understanding the nature of the likely changes, being able to devise appropriate responses, and being able to successfully implement those responses. Fourth, institutions (ritualised practices) help maintain social cohesion and collective responses to change; for example, in many island communities the state, church, and traditional leaders are important sources of leadership, and influence people’s values and provide important social protection roles. Finally, social equity is also often said to be important, as it is generally considered that communities with a fairly even distribution of power and resources are better able to adapt to exogenous changes than those that are strongly stratified. Taking these determinates of adaptive capacity as a guide it is easy to see how people in small island states are viewed as having little capacity to adapt to climatic change. In many SIDS, incomes are low, beyond urban centres there is minimal infrastructure, and human resource development remains a challenge in many SIDS.  However, in terms of the less easily quantified variables of institutions and equity many SIDS may well fare better than their developed country counterparts, for local institutions are often strong, and local communities tend to share common property and have high degrees of reciprocity (at least this is the case outside of urban areas in the Pacific SIDS). For the most part then, the determinants of adaptive capacity that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and international development institutions consider to be important reflect assumptions about development that do not explain much about development on islands, so nor can they explain much about the vulnerability and adaptation on islands. There is a need to rethink vulnerability and adaptive capacity (and ultimately sustainable development) from a perspective that centralises the strengths and unique characteristics of islands.

6

Island-Centred Adaptive Capacity

We advance here an island-centred understanding of adaptive capacity based on an alternative perspective of development in the Pacific Islands put forward by Epeli Hau’ofa (1994). For Hau’ofa, the South Pacific is ‘a sea of

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islands’ and not ‘islands in a far sea’, and this, he says, is how Pacific people have historically viewed their world. Indeed, in precolonial times large regions of the Pacific were integrated by trading and cultural exchange systems, and Hau-ofa argues that the geographic imagery of smallness and isolation was a colonial construct that served the interests of imperialism. These gives rise to contrasting framings of the region: one of small, distinct, and remote land areas as seen by development economists, geographers, and ‘macropoliticians’, and alternatively one of the expansiveness of the ocean, to be traversed for trade, marriage, adventure, and knowledge, as seen by local people. This subaltern framing of islands as ‘neither tiny nor deficient in resources’ offers a different starting point for thinking about adaptation to climate change on islands (Hau’ofa 1994: 156). As Hau’ofa and other anthropologists suggest, it is kinship and reciprocity that binds island communities together across space and time, and these are central (if almost always overlooked) determinants of adaptive capacity in the South Pacific. Indeed, mobility and networks of kinship and exchange have been central in the way Pacific peoples have adapted to modernity. Since the 1950s, there has been substantial migration away from the Pacific Islands—particularly the Polynesian Islands—to Pacific Rim countries such as Australia, New Zealand, and the USA.  By 1996, there were some 600,000 people living in the Cook Islands, Niue, the Samoas, Tuvalu, Tokelau, and French Polynesia, and some 400,000 migrants from these places living in the Pacific Rim (Bedford 2000). This mobility, and the exchanges that it facilitates, is best understood as churn between metropoles and islands, rather than a net loss or ‘brain drain’. For example, at any given time some 20 % of the population of Niue may be away from the island, intending to return, or returning periodically (Bedford et  al. 2006). This is a de facto (if not always literally present) population that is larger than that counted in the census and which, importantly, contains many skilled workers and entrepreneurs whose skills and wealth are not lost to the island community. In almost all Pacific Island cultures, migrants maintain strong spiritual ties with their ancestral homelands, and this has led to the formation of complex meta-societies engaging in transnational exchanges of finance, materials, labour, and culture. Mobility has important economic effects: the remittances of goods and money from migrants to their homelands is now an important contemporary form of mutual assistance in countries such as Samoa, Tonga, and Tuvalu, and it enhances the resilience and adaptability of island communities to economic as well as environmental change (Bedford 2000; Brown 1995). For example, following cyclone Ofa in 1990, Samoans living in New Zealand remitted substantial amounts of money to help family members cover the costs of the damages (Campbell 1998). Remittances such as these reflect the ‘transnational economic and social rela-

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tionships’ that are one of the most important factors in the adaptive capacity of island communities. Social interaction across space, at a variety of scales, can contribute considerably to the adaptive capacity of communities, and has been integral to the past resilience of many island communities to extreme weather events (Campbell 1990). Marriages, family ties and traditions in social relationships, reciprocity and trade are significant forms of interaction in this sense. Traditionally, many islands would produce food surpluses to trade and establish relationships of reciprocity across islands. During and after extreme events like cyclones these relationships become important and productive mechanisms for the redistribution of food and other forms of disaster relief. These flows of people and money and goods continue today, in a manner that Sahlins calls ‘Indigenisation of modernity’, whereby cultures appropriate modern technologies and systems. And it is these less tangible, informal relationships, and practices that development economics so often overlooks, but which sustain SIDS, and which offer some grounds to think that despite the risks of climate change, people in islands are not without capacity and agency to adapt again to these new waves of change.

7

Conclusion: Rethinking Small Island Development

The prevailing view of SIDS in standard development discourse is that, due to their small size and economies, they are highly vulnerable to exogenous economic shocks such as changes in terms of trade and extreme weather events like cyclones. For the most part, development institutions have sought to address this vulnerability through measures designed to open island economies and increase economic growth. We argue, along with others, that this framing of small island vulnerability is too simplistic and that, for the most part, mainstream economic development measures fail to take account of the unique capacities and practices that have existed in small island societies for centuries. Broad scale and panoptic assessments do not explain the complex ways that vulnerabilities are created, managed, and influence people’s lives in island contexts. In this context, there can be no arguing that the Pacific Islands are facing large-scale risks from climate change, including impacts from sea-level rise, increased sea surface and air temperatures, as well as increased variability in the ENSO system possibly leading to more frequent extreme weather conditions. These climate change risks can interact with existing vulnerabilities such as fragile or degraded ecosystems and limited health and social ser-

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vices to produce significant challenges for sustainable development. However, exposure and sensitivity are not the only factors that explain vulnerability; the adaptive capacity of island communities, ecosystems, economies, and institutions are key. We argue that understanding this adaptive capacity requires an ‘island centred’ approach, and we have worked from Epeli Hau’ofa’s postcolonial perspective of an expansive ‘sea of islands’ connected by trade, migration, marriage, and knowledge. This approach emphasises the importance of local understandings and practices. Adaptive capacities such as mobility, trade, and social interaction will have significant and different effects in island states than in continental countries. Ultimately, international development challenges such as climate change expose the need for a rethink of small island development in ways that acknowledge and build upon the social and cultural (as well as economic and environmental) contexts of island traditions and way of life, and which build from their strengths, rather than merely highlight their weaknesses.

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41 Running Dry: Water, Development and Conflict Ashok Swain

1

Managing and Developing Water Resources

Water plays a fundamental role in human health and development. However, the world is currently suffering from a global water crisis. The water scarcity issue in many parts of the world has been aggravated by factors including growing populations, uneven development, violent conflicts and the impact of global climate change. The water crisis is becoming extensive and acute, particularly in most of the arid and tropical regions. Globally, nearly 900 million people already live without clean drinking water, 2.6 billion people do not have access to proper sanitation and 2.2 million children die every year from unsafe water-related diseases (WHO 2010). The global water crisis is of such a magnitude that it is growing into an issue of common global concern. According to UN Water (www.unwater.org), by 2025, approximately 1.8 billion people will be living in areas with absolute water scarcity and half of the global population facing water stress conditions. In this context, this chapter discusses different strategies that are being applied to meet increasing demand for the scarce water resources and the viability of these strategies in the context of new challenges posed by global climate change. More than 80 % of the total global water run-off is concentrated in the northern temperate zone, which houses a small fraction of the world’s

A. Swain ( ) Uppsala University, Sweden, UK © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 J. Grugel, D. Hammett (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of International Development, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-42724-3_41

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population. In the tropical and arid areas, where most of the world’s population lives, the remaining water run-off resources are also distributed unevenly (Oki and Kanae 2006). These variations are evident in the differences in average per capita water availability, which varies from 500  m3 in the Arab world through 1000 m3 in sub-Saharan Africa to 4741 m3 in Europe, 7200 m3 in Latin America and 13,400 m3 in North America (Kumar 2013: 2). Moreover, the countries in these regions are also experiencing most of the population growth. High population growth rates in Asia, Africa and Latin America have multiplied pressure on scarce freshwater resources. The countries in these regions are primarily agricultural economies, and to provide food to their growing populations these economies need to use proportionately more water on the agricultural sector than the industrial sector. These regional pressures are further aggravated by efforts towards increasing industrialisation, growing urbanisation and agricultural expansion. In the last century, large numbers of dams were constructed to meet growing demand for water. Dam building, which has become out of fashion in the North, is still considered the answer to water shortage problems in many countries in the arid and tropical regions. However, these dams and reservoirs are becoming larger and they have brought a number of social and environmental consequences to their sites. Dam projects submerge vast areas of land and forest and displace their inhabitants. There are millions of people who have lost their homes and livelihoods due to these projects (Swain 2010). In order to meet the demand of water scarce areas, besides building large dams, many diversion canals are being constructed to transport water from one region to another, to cities and to farmlands. There are several forms of water diversion schemes being implemented around the world. Long-distance water transfer projects are often in the planning stage for some time, with high infrastructure and maintenance costs being major deterrents for their implementation. These endeavours become more problematic when the diversion routes pass through several countries. Thus, water diversion projects have been mostly carried out within a country. Removal of bulk water (huge removal of water by man-made diversions, such as canals, ships or trucks or pipelines) has been taking place in most part of the world. Most of these water removal projects are not necessarily aimed at exporting water out of the country, but to export water out of its basin. However, in recent years, due to increasing water scarcity and improvement in water transfer technology, plans are being mooted to export water from waterrich to water-poor countries. Besides the traditional form of water transfer by diverting rivers and building canals, four other modes of transport have been developed to carry freshwater from one country to another. These are

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(1) towing icebergs from the Antarctic, Alaska, Greenland and Canada, (2) bulk freshwater transport by tankers, (3) towing water in large plastic containers and (4) export of water by pipelines. Water has recently become a booming business. The fastest growing market areas in water sectors are in water rights and urban water supply. However, the challenge of transferring bulk quantities of freshwater between distant points and distributing it to customers has so far limited the number of water-exporting arrangements. Until now, the most effective limits on the water export have been economic. The large profit margin in the bottled water industry has in some cases been able to overcome the high transfer cost. This has recently led to some water being exported from Blue Lake of Alaska to a bottling plant in the Fujian Province of China and from a fiord area of Norway to the USA to be bottled and sold in American markets (Gleick 2010a). However, the long-distance bulk water transfer by tankers is still not an economically viable option if the water is not being sold as bottled water. The opportunities for expanding traditional water development strategies such as groundwater exploitation and reservoir storage are constrained by growing economic and environmental costs. If water needs to be transported a very long distance and across the sea, canals and pipelines may not be available options. With limited supplies of freshwater, some countries are turning to desalination to meet the increasing demand. Even with recent technological advances, desalination still comes with a big price tag (Caso 2010). The development of polyurethane bag technology for shipping vast quantities of water in the late 1990s has significantly lowered the cost of transferring water by boat (Hunt 2004). Water-filled polyurethane bags, which are covered with ultraviolet coating, get hooked up to the tugboat for transporting water from one place to another. One of the big advantages of bag technology over barges is that bags are not required to be immediately unloaded. The improvement in water shipment technology has raised the hope of many water companies to transport water around the world and to make money out of it. There are many countries those who will be more than willing to buy this water. But, who will sell this water? Is there any water market, which can provide the water to be bought and sold globally? Recently many economists and even some environmentalists have been advocating ‘water markets’ as the most effective tool for water management. These water markets can facilitate time bound or permanent transfer of water-use rights between an interested buyer and interested seller in exchange for compensation on the basis of supply and demand, the cost of transfer, the reliability of the supply in terms of both quantity and quality, and the cost of addressing any environmental and third-party effects. With increasing water shortages worldwide, interest in

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water markets as a means to reallocate existing supplies and provide incentives for efficient use has grown. However, water is not just a legally but also a politically complex and conflict-prone issue. At present, some agriculturally advanced countries, particularly the USA, Australia and South Africa, have moved considerably ahead with water markets, while others are trying to move in that direction with similar market structures emerging in Chile, Mexico, Middle East and parts of South Asia. Provisions are being available to foster transferability of rights between potential buyers and sellers. But all these water markets, wherever they are, are primarily trading water among competing users in their own locality. Water markets might be easy to institutionalise at the regional and even global level, but it is not necessarily easier to buy and take water somewhere. It is not like trading on a stock market, as it demands hugely complicated and timeconsuming regulatory and transfer processes. When the proposal comes for interstate water sales, the issue becomes highly emotive. Besides politics, pricing is another major problem common across the water markets involving bulk water deals. Water pricing is a complicated process, because of the various types of subsidies and cost formulas that are used, which vary throughout the world. Water price differentials in different sectors are common in developing as well as developed countries. The large variations in values, costs and prices encourage trading of water between sectors. But when water markets deal with bulk water sales to outside the basin or region to another political unit, the problem arises in determining the price of the water (Baillat 2010). There is no dearth of formulas in suggesting what should be the proper tariff system for water service. Basic economics ask that the price of a service be at least as high as the cost of providing that service. Most of the time, tariffs imposed by authorities do not meet supply costs, and sometimes the value of water is lower compared to the cost of supply. Sustainable and efficient use of water demands the tariff to cover not only the costs of supply but also opportunity costs, economic and environmental externalities costs. This pricing of freshwater, as Agenda 21 prescribes, is needed to achieve holistic management, and the European Water Framework Directive of 2000 has already followed this efficient water pricing approach. The World Bank and other funding agencies are also pressurising several countries in the South to follow at least the cost recovery principle while collecting water tariffs. However, these principles are not of much use in open market bulk water trading: an industry may acquire cheap subsidised water by buying the water rights from a farmer, while the bottled water industry may be willing to pay more compared to other industries, and water rates may vary considerably from one

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part of the region to another. Moreover, when water trades take place between countries, pricing is influenced by additional factors including the state of bilateral relationship, geo-strategic compulsions and hope for a favourable deal in other negotiations. Globally, there is an increasing demand for water. Historically, states have dealt with shortages by expanding supply. However, with the impending crisis, countries are looking for new and innovative ways to allocate water between existing and emerging uses and to create additional supplies by nontraditional means. The water markets and water-use efficiency are two techniques being increasingly used as the new form of water management. Such methods establish a price for water, encouraging conservation and more efficient use patterns. While water markets are emerging all over the world, they are in their infancy. Lack of information on possible trading partners and prices and tight state control leading to bureaucratic delays are some of the stumbling blocks for smooth functioning of local water markets. When the local water markets are still very much in the early stage of their evolution and their presence is far from being universal, it is not surprising that there is still a long way to go for the water market at the global level to achieve a functional level. Besides the problems associated with local water markets, there are two major hurdles to establishing a global institutional arrangement. Unlike oil, water is available in almost all countries meaning it is difficult to form an elite controlling group of countries (such as OPEC). Water, unlike oil, is renewable and a resource which is necessary for basic survival. Furthermore, there is a high emotional value attached to water and strong popular opposition to interstate water transfer. However, growing water scarcity and increasing global interdependence may help to overcome these obstacles and pave the way for establishing a functional global water market.

2

Water, Conflict and Cooperation

Increasing water demand in the face of technological and institutional gaps to address the issue and the absence of a functioning global market has elevated water scarcity to dominant political agendas and to being a national security concern. Despite many attempts in the post–Cold War period, the global water crisis remains basically unaddressed and water shortages have the potential to threaten global peace, prosperity and stability (WWC 2010). At the heart of such concerns are issues relating to transboundary rivers: approximately half of global freshwater is available through 276 international river

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basins in the world: of them, 64 in Africa and 60 in Asia (www.unwater.org). About 1400 million people inhabit river basins that suffer from water stress (Arnell 2004). Besides international rivers, there are also 200 transboundary aquifers. The increasing scarcity of water and the unequal and multilateral distribution of this resource pave the way for a greater number of water conflicts. In the post–Cold War period, it was being predicted that the dependence of many countries on foreign water supply might force them to reorientate their national security concerns in order to protect or preserve such availability. The severe scarcity of water combined with the regional instability might lead to the use of force by the disputing riparian countries over the sharing of the river water resources. Even in the mid-1980s, US government intelligence services had estimated that there were at least 10 locations in the world, mostly in the Middle East and North Africa, where war could break out over decreasing shared water (Starr 1991). The United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, in his address to delegates at the first Asia-Pacific Water Summit held in Japan in December 2007, warned, ‘Water scarcity threatens economic and social gains and is a potent fuel for wars and conflict’ (http://unu.edu/ media-relations/releases/water-called-a-global-security-issue.html). This serious interstate conflict scenario pushed the issue of water to the ‘high politics’. Policymakers as well as media houses came together to prophesise that the scarcity of water has replaced oil as the source of conflict and started seeing the serious challenges to the world’s security as coming from ‘water wars’. However, these ‘water wars’ are yet to be realised (Swain 2001). In many basins, the disputing riparian states moved towards signing agreements rather than engaging in armed conflicts. Scarce water is not only expected to increase competition and conflict it can also potentially contribute to build engagement and cooperation among the riparian countries. The mutual dependence can persuade riparian states to cooperatively engage in developing the shared water resource to increase its availability. In the post– Cold War period, several competing and disputing riparian countries have opted to reach river-sharing agreements. Between 1820 and 2007, almost 450 water-related agreements have been signed (www.unwater.org). Competing riparian countries of the Mekong, Jordan, Ganges, Nile and Zambezi Rivers signed agreements in the 1990s. The signing of the agreements on these important rivers in conflict-prone regions prompted the commentators in the last decade to downplay the possibilities of ‘water war’ scenarios and started to project shared water as pathway to peace and cooperation. Recent river agreements in Asia, Africa and the Middle East have been possible because of riparian states’ desire to acquire more water resources in order

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to meet their growing demand. The agreements have been made about how the river water should be shared to decrease the tension and create conducive political and economic climate to build new water development projects on the river to supplement supply. Unfortunately, almost all of those agreements are seen as unjust as upstream countries unilaterally work towards controlling the flow of the rivers and using the maximum share. In some cases where the downstream countries are more powerful, like Egypt and Israel, these countries take measures to challenge the upstream rights and secure their share. Agreements are important elements to spark more extensive cooperation among riparian countries (Brochman and Gleditsch 2006). However, none of these agreements have been able to establish a functioning basin-based water management institution. In some cases, pressure and encouragement from the international donors and agencies have also prompted the signing of agreement process. These ‘hybrid’ water agreements however face existential threats if they do not address the ‘demand’ side of the water issue as they fail to receive support from effective institutions for proper water management at the basin level. Due to serious political, economic and environmental challenges, the hope and aspiration of these agreements even fail to increase the ‘supply’ side. In the immediate aftermath of the Cold War, the Jordan, Ganges, Mekong, Zambezi and Nile River basins were regularly projected as troubled spots with potential of armed conflict among their riparian states. The signing of agreements in all of these basins in the 1990s virtually changed the hypothesis altogether and brought the ‘water peace’ advocates to the forefront of the debate. Agreements over the Jordan River and Ganges Rivers in the mid-1990s were limited to two riparian states, but they raised hope for culminating in basinbased cooperation involving other riparian states in the basins. In the Mekong basin, the agreement among the disputing lower riparian countries to establish a River Basin Commission was certainly a positive development towards better management of this critical river basin. It was being hoped that China and Burma would join this institutional framework sooner than later. The riparian states of two important basins in Africa, Zambezi in Southern Africa and Nile in North-Eastern Africa, agreed to establish basin-based water management frameworks. All these river-sharing agreements are more than a decade old. However, after the initial hype, there has been very little progress in establishing functional basin-based water management institutions. Minimal effort has been made in the Jordan and Ganges basins to bring in other riparian countries and to transform bilateral water-sharing arrangement to joint basin-based development. Regional and national geo-strategic considerations underpinned the

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signing of bilateral agreements, but are more complex with multiple partners. The 1996 agreement allowed India and Bangladesh to increase their share of the Ganges River water, helping political elites improve their legitimacy among electorates, while the improved bilateral environment facilitated the building of additional dams and barrages on the Ganges and its tributaries. In the last two decades, the dry season run-off of the Ganges River has improved due to good rainfall in the upper basin areas. However, if the upper basin areas face a dry spell cycle, it will be a big challenge for the agreement to satisfy both the parties. Bangladesh is particularly worried as the reduced flow in the Ganges system has potentially wide-ranging socio-economic and environmental implications for Bangladesh (Mirza 1997). Moreover, primarily due to India’s strong resistance, Nepal remains outside the water cooperation, reducing the possibility for a basin-based management of the Ganges River in the future (Swain 2010). In the Jordan basin, while geo-politics was the primary factor behind this treaty, Jordan was also hopeful of getting increased water supplies and building the Dead Sea Canal project. Israel’s involvement was a high-stake investment for political reasons as well as an eventual increase in water share. In this 1994 treaty, Israel and Jordan agreed on allocations of water from the Jordan and Yarmouk Rivers and Arava groundwaters. However, this treaty was only the beginning of a wider regional agreement, bringing Syria and Lebanon to the cooperation (Postel 1999). But, due to decreasing water supply the treaty has become another hindrance in the peace negotiations between Israel and Syria. In the case of Mekong River basin, China consistently refuses to be part of Mekong River Commission. Ignoring the claims of downstream riparian countries, it is pursuing large-scale unilateral dam buildings in the upstream. China has the political, economic and hydrological superiority in the basin to unilaterally develop the water resources of the Mekong. Dam building is not only confined to China, as downstream riparian countries are also engaged in unilateral large dam construction. Meanwhile, in the Zambezi basin in Southern Africa, Zambia is obstructing progress in establishing the Zambezi Watercourse Commission, subverting this basin-based approach while planning for bilateral water resource development with Zimbabwe. Tensions between basin-based and bilateral management agreements and practices remain elsewhere. Although the World Bank successfully brought together all riparian counties of the Nile in 1999 in an effort to establish a river basin commission, the continued statements of cooperation by these countries are at odds with their continued unilateral promotion of domestic large-scale hydro projects. Furthermore, the basin countries have failed to

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take measures to reduce their dependence on the Nile River for water; rather their demand for water is consistently increasing. At the same time, powerful lower riparian states including Egypt and Sudan have blocked progress towards basin-management agreements in order to protect their historical priority over the Nile water. As seen from the examples above, none of these river agreements of the 1990s have transformed to the basin-based management framework for joint cooperative water development (Swain 2013). At the same time, increasing populations and rapid economic development in many parts of the world mean that almost all river basins are experiencing increased demand for freshwater. Meanwhile, freshwater supplies from shared river systems suffer from high fluctuation and uncertainties and the threat of global climate change further complicates the future water demand–supply scenario.

3

Global Climate Change and New Challenges to Water Sharing

Cooperative management of shared rivers requires basin-level institutions as the foundation for further cooperation, with international organisation and legal principles aiming to provide foundational guidelines for the basin-based arrangements. The United Nations Watercourse Convention entered into force in August 2014, providing a global framework for transboundary water cooperation. However, only 35 countries have ratified this Convention, with powerful riparian countries including China, India, Turkey, Egypt and the USA having failed to ratify this Convention. Global and regional geo-politics and short-term national interest complicate policies towards enhanced river basin management of shared rivers. The management of international rivers in different parts of the world cannot follow a particular golden principle as the value of water, its demand and supply vary from one basin to another (Swain 2004). The available knowledge and institutions for the governance of international rivers are increasingly turning obsolete because of increased demand and decreased supply of freshwater. This problem has been further aggravated as global climate change has started undermining existing regimes and institutions of water sharing and management of shared rivers (Gleick 2010b). While debates continue about the scale and nature of the impact of climate change, it will undoubtedly have serious impacts on access to shared water resources. Some parts of the world will become much drier, and some wetter. Increased global surface temperature is expected to increase the amount of water in the air, resulting in droughts becoming more frequent as well as increased intensity of rainfall events and an increased potential for severe flooding.

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In the last two decades, several river basins have moved towards establishing regimes and institutions over shared water. However, these arrangements are presently going through severe stress due to increasing demand and decreasing supply of water resources as we fear over the impact of global climate change. Global climate change demands extensive adjustments in the ongoing water management structure in the international river basins. The water-sharing institutions and agreements need to be flexible and compatible in allocating reduced and surplus water flow, maintaining permissible water quality level, sustaining ecosystems, controlling flood and protecting existing dams and other water infrastructures. To be able to address climate change related uncertainties, water-sharing regimes need to have the provisions for information sharing, conflict management mechanisms, flexibility to adjust to the uncertainties, and endeavour for basin-based development strategy (Goldenman 1990). The agreements must have the provisons that the riparian countries should be under obligation to regularly exchange water use, demand and availibity data and information among each other to monitor and manage changing conditions affecting shared water. In case of any disagreement, there must be provisions available to basin countries to manage them as soon as possible. To cope with changing climatic condition, shared river water management regimes and institutions will require a flexible mandate to plan and operate as mitigating or adaptive actions by indiviual riparian states are unlikely to achieve their objectives: the emerging situation requires basin countries to cooperate and act collectively. There is no doubt that climate change poses extreme challenges to water resource management in international river basins in the South. Climate change is expected to cause intense weather events, water scarcity, increasing sea levels or melting glaciers that can pose serious threats to critical river water management infrastructure (Swain et  al. 2011). In the context of climate change, the importance of adjustment of flow variability in water sharing is crucial for the smooth functiong of river agreements. However, the provisions within existing river agreements are not adaptable enough to meet the scenarios that global climate change models anticipate and agreements lack enforcement, depending upon good neighbourly riparian behaviour. However, these existing provisions and practices are unlikely to adequately address expected long-term reductions in water supply due to climate change. To reach an agreement that meets all competing and fluctuating demands for water in an international basin is a very difficult task. Hydro-diplomacy must adopt a total resource view where river water is seen as a key input for development and growth in the basin. The challenges are not only limited to

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technical and economic sectors but also to crucial water sector reform, which is political by nature. Moreover, the task of hydro-diplomacy will no longer be limited to basin-based regimes and institutions, but to achieve effective water management in the face of climate change, it must influence the supporting pathways from local, national and international policies and practices.

4

Addressing Future Water Scarcity Challenges

Scarce water resources are not only expected to increase competition and conflict but may also contribute to agreement and cooperation among countries. Recent decades have witnessed many water agreements being negotiated and signed. However, these water agreements face severe challenges as existing water allocations are often unable to meet increasing demand and potential further development of river water in the arid and semiarid regions is increasingly limited. Climate change is fast developing as a critical challenge to the ongoing strategy for addressing water scarcity. Traditionally, river water-sharing negotations could be handled by a few specially trained negotiators. But today, hydro-diplomacy needs to address not only an increasing range of fields (such as hydropower generation, agricultural production, human rights, and health and sanitation issues) but also the probable impacts of climate change (such as precipitational changes, glacier melting, temperature increase and rising sea water encroachment on freshwater systems). Furthermore, many small and primarily lower riparian developing countries have to not only survive with the existing power asymmetry vis-à-vis ‘hydro hegemons’ but also suffer from a lack of capable ‘hydro-diplomats’ who can address climate change issues within river water-sharing negotiations. In order to avoid or manage conflicts on shared water resources, a comprehensive approach to water sharing is required. Such a comprehensive basin-based measure would include treating the river system as a single unit, the involvement of both state and non-state actors in water management, recognition of social and cultural contexts in water use, clear appropriation rules in water sharing and an information-sharing network among the riparian countries. As sustainble cooperation and usage of freshwater depend upon the behaviours of a range of users, both state and non-state actors need to be involved in the negotiation process to develop a clear set of rules and regulatory measures regarding water rights and environmental and ecological obligation.

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These basin-based initiatives need to be augmented and supported by various nation-state and international measures. The adoption of a supply management strategy addressing only water shortage in the region is not nearly sufficient. To meet growing demand, there is a need to minimise water use, particularly in the agricultural sector. External intervention and assistance can sometimes facilitate the disputing riparian to come to negotiation table. Mutual suspicion and uncertainties of reciprocal action obstruct constructive engagement. To overcome such obstacles, international actors should provide credible and impartial international assistance to energise the process of riparian cooperation and use continuous engagement to establish mutual trust and enhance confidence among the basin riparians in order to strive for collective cooperative action. Increased incentives to participate are likely to follow as constraints on water resources will increase, the opportunity cost for not cooperating becomes clearer. The Indus River Agreement between India and Pakistan is one of the success stories of such external intervention. The World Bank played a critical role in bringing these two hostile countries to an agreement in 1960, to share and develop the Indus River and its tributaries. Elsewher, the Asian Development Bank played a significant role in bringing the four lower riparian countries of the Mekong River basin into cooperative agreement to establish a river basin commission. Where riparian countries have been able to establish cooperative arrangements, successful and sustainable development of water resource initiative might ensue. The establishment of cooperative arrangements on shared river systems also attracts economic and technological support. Due to resource constraints, riparian countries, particularly poor and developing ones, have become increasingly aware of the costs of not cooperating. Water scarcity and a lack of financial resources are gradually encouraging these riparian countries to cooperate in order to achieve best possible benefits. The change in attitudes of international financial institutions and bilateral aid programmes may provide incentives for existing and future basin-based cooperation. Many development agencies are already concerned with increasing water scarcity and have developed water resource strategies for foreign assistance. There are several ways in which external support could help to prevent conflict and promote regional and basin-based cooperation among riparian states of shared rivers. The international community can especially play the role of facilitator of water resource-sharing agreements. The increasing scarcity of available freshwater per capita and lack of financial strength in the developing countries may gradually encourage the basin countries to cooperate in order to increase the benefit of shared water. A strong and vibrant river basin

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institution is necessary to stipulate a set of clear rules and regulatory measures in the basin regarding water rights and environmental obligation. Moreover, in several cases, riparian countries have unequal access to data and information due to differing data accessibility and asymmetric competence to process data. River basin institutions should be assisted to possess an early-warning system and also a credible conflict management capacity. Recently, the world has witnessed success in establishing a common legal framework for the sharing of international watercourses at the global level. However, whether it will be able to address the issues over the shared water resources and manage water conflicts remains questionable. The major problem may arise in defining the ‘equitable use’ and also its conflict with the ‘historical use’. The international community may promote the idea of establishing an International Water Court. Establishing a court like this will not only help to address the existing inconsistencies associated with water-sharing norms and doctrines, but also prevent the escalation of water disputes to violent conflicts in future.

References Arnell, N.W. 2004. Climate change and global water resources: SRES emissions and socio-economic scenarios. Global Environmental Change 14(1): 31–52. Baillat, A. 2010. International trade in water rights: The next step. London: IWA Publishing. Brochman, M., and N.P. Gleditsch. 2006. Conflict, cooperation, and good governance in international river basins. Paper presented at a meeting in CSCW working group 3, Environmental Factors in Civil War. Oslo: PRIO, 21 Sept. Caso, F. 2010. Freshwater supply. New York: Facts on File, Inc. Gleick, P. 2010a. Bottled and sold: The story behind our obsession with bottled water. Washington, DC: Island Press. Gleick, P. 2010b. Climate change, exponential curves, water resources, and unprecedented threats to humanity’. Climate Change 100(1): 125–129. Goldenman, G. 1990. Adapting to climate change: A study of international rivers and their legal arrangements. Ecology Law Quarterly 17: 741–802. Hunt, C.E. 2004. Thirsty planet: Strategies for sustainable water management. London: Zed Books. Kumar, S. 2103. The looming threat of water scarcity. Vital Signs. Washington DC: Worldwatch Institute. Mirza, M.M.Q. 1997. Hydrological changes in the Ganges system in Bangladesh in the post-Farakka period. Hydrological Sciences Journal 42(5): 613–31. Oki, T., and S. Kanae. 2006. Global hydrological cycles and world water resources. Science 313(5790): 1068–1072.

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Postel, S. 1999. Pillar of sand: Can the irrigation miracle last? Worldwatch Institute. Starr, J.R. 1991. Water wars. Foreign Policy 82(Spring): 17–36. Swain, A. 2001. Water wars: Fact or fiction. Futures 33(8–9): 769–781. Swain, A. 2004. Managing water conflict: Asia, Africa and the Middle East. London: Routledge. Swain, A. 2010. Struggle against the state: Social network and protest mobilization in India. Farnham: Ashgate. Swain, A. 2013. Understanding emerging security challenges: Threats and opportunities. London: Routledge. Swain, A., R.B. Swain, A. Themnér, and F. Krampe. 2011. Climate change and the risk of violent conflicts in Southern Africa. Pretoria: Global Crisis Solutions. WHO. 2010. UN-water global annual assessment of sanitation and drinking-water (GLAAS). Geneva: World Health Organization. World Water Council. 2010. Profile and mission. http://www.worldwatercouncil.org. Date accessed 13 July 2011.

Index

A abortion, 476, 477, 479, 480, 481–2, 484 accumulation, capitalist, 86, 173, 416, 683 activist, 87, 110, 111, 142, 221, 260, 271, 272, 366, 367, 371–6, 523, 579, 586, 587, 629, 654, 720 citizenship, 585 adaption, 691–705 advocacy, 3, 172, 262, 306, 308, 309, 368, 370, 374, 376, 387, 388, 392, 458, 464, 483, 534, 538, 617 agency, 31, 61–2, 309, 369, 371, 393–4, 487, 488, 507, 628 Africa, 8, 26, 46, 89, 150, 211, 247, 290–1, 329, 400–10, 477, 478, 490, 577, 579, 580, 616, 618, 620, 658, 683, 691–705, 746 North Africa, 196, 197, 234, 478, 714 sub-Saharan Africa, 124, 175, 191, 193, 196, 197, 211, 403, 447, 477, 481, 577, 580, 581, 583, 586, 587, 589, 605, 611, 637, 659, 692, 701, 702, 714, 717, 746

agriculture, agricultural, 23, 63, 193, 283, 305, 337, 356, 525, 651, 654, 656–8, 659, 661, 671–7, 680, 682–4, 694, 698, 733, 746, 748 non-, 193, 194, 195, 197, 211 agro-industry, 684 aid development, 68, 113, 298, 434, 444, 446 donor, 254, 433, 439, 442, 445, 448 foreign, 404, 479 recipient, 434, 435 anti-development, 56–7, 62, 175, 230, 401–6, 617 Arab Spring, 36, 84, 89, 234, 235, 583, 617, 618, 672 ASEAN, 289, 715, 720, 721, 722 assets, 244, 247, 601, 610, 611, 694–5 capital, 146, 606, 694 Asia, 63, 90, 230, 234, 245, 246, 261, 290, 334, 353, 375, 376, 400, 401, 580, 618, 670, 721, 746, 749, 750 Asian Tigers, 83, 90 asylum, 333, 338, 340, 343

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 J. Grugel, D. Hammett (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of International Development, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-42724-3

763

764

Index

authoritarian, 84, 86, 95, 128, 139, 179, 248, 261, 262, 427, 554, 560, 565, 591 authoritarian development, 84, 90–2 authoritarianism, 91, 92, 128, 129, 135, 151, 233, 417 autonomy, 125, 127–34, 171, 271, 507, 622, 676 state, 128, 129

B Bandung Conference, 282, 284 Barbados Programme of Action (BPOA), 727 Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movement of Hazardous Waste, 714 basic needs, 60, 266, 336, 491, 512, 544, 582, 598 Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, 298, 299, 301, 303, 304–5, 307, 308, 309, 310 biofuels, 647–62, 672, 680, 683 biopower, 489, 499, 508, 655 Bolivia, 143, 145, 146, 170, 236–8, 260–3, 268–71, 272, 273 Botswana, 144, 179, 701, 702 Bretton Woods, 6, 87, 126, 170, 290, 490 BRICS, 135, 171, 179, 279, 281, 285, 288–93 Buen Vivir, 63 building nation, 589 state, 253, 353

C cannabis, 401, 402, 405, 407, 408, 409, 411 capability, 59, 60, 86, 733, 737 approach, 58, 59, 60, 62, 64, 66, 70

capacity building, 286, 341, 442, 465, 467, 713, 714 capital, 14, 26–9, 102, 109, 126, 131, 151, 158, 160, 212, 254, 268, 301, 315, 335, 385, 420, 421, 426, 427, 556, 681, 682 economic, 126, 158, 385–7, 389, 391, 420, 447, 595 human, 127, 176, 318, 339, 492–8, 504, 506, 595, 627, 694, 697 physical, 355, 595, 694 political, 126, 385–7, 389, 391, 420 social, 210, 231, 235, 237, 355, 338, 582, 623, 694 capitalism, capitalist, 8, 26–9, 36, 85, 86, 95, 128, 270, 281, 285, 299, 302, 356, 371, 377, 385–6, 387, 388, 391, 416, 443, 542, 554, 658, 670 Caribbean, 49, 84, 86, 174, 191, 324, 328, 329, 353, 410 celebrity, 105, 106 child, children, 402–3, 487–508, 516, 520, 745 child labour, 389, 402, 403, 495, 496–8, 502, 504, 505 children’s rights, 488, 490, 491, 505, 506, 507 China, 34, 35, 78, 79, 83, 86, 90, 91, 92, 124, 135, 167, 170–1, 178, 246, 265, 280, 281, 283, 287, 288, 289, 290–1, 316, 326, 353, 384, 439, 443, 445, 447, 597, 602, 603, 604, 609, 751, 752, 753 Chinese development, 91 citizen, 94, 99, 101, 103, 106, 108, 112, 239, 262, 554, 569, 581, 586, 590, 591, 637, 644 non-citizen, 102, 369 citizenship, 15, 238, 369, 553–70 global, 99–113 urban, 262, 554, 567

Index

insurgent practices of, 554, 555, 560–4, 568 civic engagement, 112 civil society (CSOs), 10, 99, 101, 102, 110, 227–40, 297, 307, 323, 341, 373, 377, 437, 559, 560, 579, 586, 625, 720–3 classical theories, 21, 22, 127 clientelism, clientelistic, client, 217, 246, 255, 266, 425 climate, 691–705 adaptation, 454, 464–7, 693 change, 12, 65, 66–7, 149, 234, 321, 328, 456, 464–7, 505, 623, 691, 694, 701, 703, 704, 714, 727–40 volatility, 729 Cold War, 23, 42, 80, 282, 283, 288, 417, 438, 671, 673, 750, 751 colonial, colonialism, 9, 27, 41–50, 56, 107, 124, 162, 163, 171–3, 229, 238, 279, 354, 416, 417, 423, 456, 521, 539, 658–60, 672 colonial-era, 150, 228 colonial power, 27, 520, 736 commodities, 28, 141, 173, 251, 270, 290, 384, 399, 400, 648, 651, 652, 681, 682 commodity chain, 33, 34, 35, 648, 651, 652, 656, 657 commodification, 13, 251, 671, 678, 683 commons, 160, 262, 270 communitarian, 268–71 community, 48, 63, 101–4, 111–12, 144, 150, 229, 230, 231–3, 236, 271, 503, 524, 543–5, 581–3, 660, 683 comparative advantage, 123, 127, 287, 305, 601, 612 competitive advantage, 318, 560

765

conditionality, conditionalities, 288, 292, 323, 437, 438, 442, 443, 446, 460, 461, 464 conflict, violent, 139, 142, 143, 745, 757 Convention of Migratory Species, 715, 721 Convention on the Rights of the Child, 10, 487, 488, 491, 505 Convention on the Rights of All Migrant Workers and their Families, 10 Convention on the Rights of Domestic Workers, 10 Convention to Combat Desertification, 714 Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, 514, 521 corporations transnational (TNC), 126, 254, 367, 382, 391, 393, 545, 556 multinational (MNC), 604, 647 corrupt, corruption, 64, 144, 293, 338, 400, 403–4, 406, 410, 416, 424, 641, 642 cosmopolitan, 44, 68, 69, 103, 104, 110, 111 crime, 187, 246, 250, 418, 421, 424, 504, 526, 582 crisis, crises, 7, 36, 92–5, 149–50, 165, 169, 170, 175, 179, 193, 250, 282, 443, 657, 658, 672–5, 680, 745, 749 global crisis, 33, 89, 93, 124, 170, 334 critical disability studies, 513 crowdfunding, 638–9, 642, 643 crowdsourcing, 581, 633–44 Cuba, 178, 261, 280

766

Index

culture, 105, 298, 304 cultural approach, 47 cultural difference, 43, 299, 671

D dams, 271, 437, 458, 746, 752 building, 746, 752 decolonisation, 11, 230, 282, 283, 284, 285, 417, 527, 528, 596, 602, 670, 731 debt, 171, 232, 261, 303, 319, 343, 435, 437, 440, 458, 544, 639, 676 crises, 7, 165, 175, 282 democracy, democratic, democratisation, 30–1, 37, 62, 77–98, 105, 106, 112, 131, 145, 146, 148, 151, 171, 178–9, 217, 239, 263–6, 440, 460, 568, 577–94 quality of democracy, 12, 78, 86, 146, 590 democratic peace thesis, 77, 88 democratic promotion, 88, 94, 578 demography, demographic change, 350, 357, 359, 495, 501, 605, 619, 733 dependency, 25–9, 33–6, 173, 174, 217, 282, 670, 672, 673, 676, 699–700 theory, 26, 28, 33, 36–7, 47, 107, 173, 174, 365, 512, 618–19 development, developmentalism, 21, 41, 55, 77, 99, 121, 139, 155, 243, 279, 297, 333, 365, 381, 399, 415, 453, 487, 511, 533, 577, 615, 633, 647, 669, 745 economic, 24, 25, 26, 31, 62, 63, 86, 126, 128–31, 148, 156, 161, 162, 176, 178, 320, 336, 343, 416, 422, 445, 456, 514, 596, 599, 601, 602, 605, 608, 609, 613, 678, 717, 739

education, 100, 107–8 ethics, 55, 60, 62, 65, 66–7 geography, 47, 281 political, 172–3 social, 267–8, 615, 623 sustainable, 62, 320, 350, 377, 481, 512, 534, 535, 540, 649–50, 709–23 development goals millennium, 1, 87, 100, 283, 286, 304, 320, 319, 350, 358, 401, 416, 439, 440, 443, 446, 447, 461, 472, 479–82, 489, 490, 495, 499, 512, 515, 518, 710 sustainable, 1–4, 12, 13, 320, 350, 377, 481, 483, 512, 513, 515, 534, 535, 547, 710 developmental state, 83, 121–35, 176–7, 424, 589 DFID, 107, 110, 243, 286–7, 288, 303, 438, 444, 472, 515, 692 diaspora, 334, 335, 337, 340–1, 342, 358–9, 360, 407 organizations, 341 difference, 25, 44, 111, 175, 228, 299, 356, 671, 714 digital divide, 580, 619–21, 622, 627, 628 digital revolution, 615 digital tools, 580, 581, 590 disability, 511–28, 534, 547 disabled children, 502, 516, 520 mainstreaming, 514, 518 disasters, 95, 235, 236, 306, 324, 333, 336, 518, 568, 579, 624, 629, 634, 636, 637, 727, 729 humanitarian, 333, 336 discrimination, 41, 350, 388, 425, 471 drugs, 156, 160, 161, 399–414, 421, 422, 478, 545

Index

E Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA/CEPAL), 26, 174, 440 e-governance, 616, 617, 622, 625 economic growth, 8, 23, 57, 83, 131, 149, 281, 354, 435, 444, 512, 519, 601, 609, 648 economy formal, 169–81, 729 global, 171, 180, 281, 282, 284, 288, 306, 371, 382, 384–8, 392, 596, 698 illicit, 3, 142, 185, 187, 188, 208, 399, 404 informal, 207–21, 325, 372 shadow, 185–199, 208 ecosystem, 13, 62, 239, 405, 680, 683, 684, 730, 740 ECOWAS, 289 education, 100, 107–8, 127, 160, 264, 354, 403, 473, 490, 495, 521, 562, 619 sexual education, 474, 480, 482, 483 Egypt, 89, 617–18, 751, 753 election monitoring, 590, 633, 637 employment, 185–8, 193–4, 195, 197, 198, 211, 270, 355, 359, 369, 377, 442, 500, 504, 600 unemployment, 198, 234, 435, 437, 501 empower, empowerment, empowered, 11, 61–2, 66, 86, 230, 231, 253, 340, 465, 483, 501, 616, 626, 627, 628, 659 energy, 147–9, 318–19, 321, 325, 328, 655, 660, 661, 728 security, 651 environment, 9, 221, 478, 480, 654–6, 678 environmental degradation, 93, 405–6, 648, 655, 679

767

environmental justice, 262 environmental paradox, 229 environmental sustainability, 289, 678, 713, 715–16 epistemic violence, 42 ethics, 99, 436 development, 5, 55, 60, 62, 65, 66, 67 ethnicity, 150 ethnic groups, 588 ethnic minorities, 512, 517, 518 ethnography, ethnographic approach, 48, 389, 426, 545, 587 equality, 60–1, 264, 338, 484 gender, 2, 13, 338, 472, 484, 491 inequality, 41, 42, 45, 58, 60, 66, 68–9, 83, 106, 221, 259, 261, 266, 273, 319, 320, 333, 342, 343, 443, 460, 517, 546, 619, 655 equity, 60–1, 271, 323, 622, 650–1, 655, 737 gender, 375 Europe, 7, 8, 23, 27, 78, 100, 159, 160, 191, 221, 245, 247, 262, 289, 353, 400, 408, 416, 491, 523, 557, 580, 599, 602, 647, 676, 711, 713, 714, 746 European Union, 110, 188, 197, 232, 287, 306, 339, 343, 390, 654, 661, 673, 711, 715–16, 719, 722 Eurocentrism, 42 ‘everyday,’ 92, 111, 424 evasion, tax, 139, 142, 186, 189, 211, 330 exploitation, 139, 173, 383, 660, 730, 747

F family, 125, 336, 338, 342, 516, 677 planning, 473, 476, 477, 479, 480

768

Index

female genital mutilation, 476, 482 finance, 298, 300, 303, 309, 321, 323, 325, 556 financial ‘gaps,’ 319, 320 finance capital, 14, 151, 556, 694 financial services, 419–20, 579 fisheries, 698, 730 flourishing, 57, 88, 91, 215 food crisis, 657, 672, 674, 675, 680 security, 402, 648, 669–85, 733 sovereignty, 671, 675, 685 forced marriage, 476 Ford Foundation, 110, 297, 299, 303, 310 formal, formality, formalisation, 27, 208, 218–20, 221, 169–81 fragile states, 416 freedom, 30, 58–61, 63–4, 85, 92, 370, 419, 442, 443, 447, 454, 459, 476, 672, 673 FundaMentalSDG, 533, 535, 547 Future Earth, 13

G GDP, 90, 121, 187, 188, 191–2, 194, 195, 211, 215, 246, 264, 265, 321, 323, 578, 589, 598, 603, 625, 729, 730 G20, 281, 282, 289, 291, 293, 316 gangs, 421–3, 426–7 gender, 65–6, 197, 338, 366, 375, 472, 478, 479, 481, 484, 491, 495, 514 Gender Development Index, 60 Gezi Park, 553–70 girls, 391, 471–2, 474, 477, 479, 481, 483, 484, 492, 516, 585 global burden of disease, 533, 535 global civil society, 10, 99, 101, 102, 110, 297, 307 global citizenship, 99–113

Global Commission on International Migration, 339 Global Forum on Migration and Development, 340, 367, 372, 373, 376 global economy, 282, 284, 288, 320, 371, 384–8, 456, 596 global system, 35, 42, 43, 46, 249, 284 global social movements, 99, 262 global warming, 691 globalisation, 8, 29, 31, 46, 93, 101, 170, 249, 251, 262, 291, 349, 356, 371, 382, 385, 387, 388, 391–2, 400, 438, 512, 519, 556, 596, 605, 610, 612, 735 goondas, 423–5, 427 governance, 34, 44, 64, 69, 86, 89, 94, 102, 140, 142, 143, 144–5, 148, 151, 190, 208, 219, 220, 227–40, 250, 251, 252, 319, 329–30, 366, 426, 438, 441, 590, 616, 617, 622, 625, 626, 660–1, 679, 716 global, 87, 126, 170, 249, 330, 365, 445, 648 regional governance, 717 government, 123, 129, 198, 215, 216, 217, 221, 265–6, 267, 489, 585, 588–9, 622, 720–2 governmentality, 238, 292, 506, 508 Grameen Bank, 297 green technology, green innovation, 319 Green ‘revolution,’ 297, 671, 672, 673, 676, 684 growth, 8, 23, 57, 83, 131, 149, 281, 354, 435, 444, 512, 519, 601, 609, 648 accelerated, 318 green, 3, 704 guerrillas, 418–20, 427

Index

H health, 403, 471–85, 533–52 global, 298, 301, 303, 304, 310, 512, 514, 522 public, 164, 263, 301, 304, 734 HIV/AIDS, 10, 301, 311, 375, 402, 403, 411, 454, 477–8, 480–1, 534, 535 Home Town Associations (HTAs), 334, 335, 336–7, 338, 340–1, 342, 343 households, 35, 66, 187, 235, 267, 355, 366, 372, 389, 503, 600, 625, 694–5, 696, 697, 698–9, 701–2 housing, 208, 209, 212, 213, 219, 221, 336 Human Development Index, 58, 60, 87, 121, 265 human rights, 9–11, 63–4, 305, 369, 372–4, 375, 453–70 abuse, 386, 540, 634 violations, 460, 477, 546 hunger, 402, 656–8, 673

I ICT4D, 615, 617, 618 illegal, illicit, 3, 142, 185, 186, 187, 188, 197, 208, 246, 266, 325, 384, 399, 400, 401, 403, 405, 407, 408, 423, 585 ‘impasse,’ 8, 169, 170, 385, 386, 671 inclusion, 58, 64, 211, 221, 290, 306, 375, 521, 534, 535, 539, 623, 627, 651 inclusive development, 287, 513, 514, 522 India,66, 110, 135, 164, 167, 171, 179, 245, 279–83, 285, 287, 288–93, 316, 384, 386, 402, 423, 424, 425, 445, 458, 463, 482, 527, 534, 543, 544, 545, 547, 597, 603, 623, 637, 647, 656, 674, 752, 753, 756

769

industrialisation, 30, 122, 124, 125, 128, 129, 132, 134, 148, 170, 176, 596, 658, 672, 673, 678, 683 industry, extractive, 142–3, 146 informal, informality, informals, informalisation, 207–21, 227–40 economy, 207, 208, 209–11, 214, 215, 218, 220, 221, 325 market, 215, 219, 227, 231, 245 sector, 207, 209, 217, 372, 516 infrastructure, 149, 176, 262, 267, 269, 289, 321, 325, 329, 444, 595–613, 623, 624, 627, 676, 729 institutions, 25, 88, 131, 140, 144, 158, 177–9, 233, 319, 403–4 public, 89, 175, 177 innovation, 23, 155, 157, 167, 285, 579, 586, 617, 621, 624, 628, 629 intellectual property, 155–67 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), 680, 691, 737 international system, 69 International Conference on Population and Development, 472–84 International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, 472, 475 International Financial Institutions (IFIs), 88, 233, 259–60, 261, 263, 456 International Organization of Migration (IOM), 334 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 6, 87, 88, 91, 125, 143, 170, 233, 261, 266, 320, 335, 436, 456, 463, 519, 673

770

Index

Internet, 155, 304, 577, 579, 581, 588, 589, 590, 617, 618, 619, 620, 621, 625, 626, 628, 635, 636, 637, 638, 639, 641, 642, 643 Investment, foreign direct, 156, 162, 261, 729 invented spaces, citizenship, 553–70 invited spaces, citizenship, 217, 554, 555, 559, 560–1 Iran, 88, 281, 293 Islamic regime, 88

J Jubilee 2000, 105 justice, 5, 61, 66, 68, 69, 102, 110, 248, 260, 265, 272, 371, 375, 376, 377, 453, 455, 465, 508, 519, 521, 584, 627, 628 global justice, 3, 99, 101, 104, 105, 106, 112, 367–70, 377

K Keynesian, 172, 198, 248, 435, 444, 445 khat, 401–5, 407, 408, 409 knowledge economy, 157, 160, 167, 617, 618

L labour, 185–99, 402, 403, 495, 496–8, 502, 504 forced, 27, 381–94 market, 185, 186, 355, 386, 388, 393, 505, 506 land grab, 658 use, 652, 653, 655, 656, 658, 670, 674, 678, 683 tenure, 651, 653 rights, 102, 654, 658–60, 698

legitimacy, 64, 70, 131, 159, 164, 219, 244, 250, 253, 255, 309–10, 319, 408, 422, 427, 671, 674, 675, 679, 719, 752 institutional, 319 less developed states, least developed states, 7, 25, 77, 162, 198, 199, 477, 608, 728, 730 liberalism, 80, 83, 89, 284 liberal theory, 91, 104 liberalisation, 87, 89, 94, 131, 170, 175, 291, 391, 438, 671, 731 Live8, 99, 105 livelihood, 691–705 lobby, lobbying, lobbied, 176, 272, 308, 373, 375, 392, 512, 514, 515, 518, 519, 522, 654 low income country, countries, 66, 90, 300, 316, 324, 490, 605

M Make Poverty History, 99, 101, 105, 111 Malawi, 407, 696, 701, 702 map, 231, 244, 505, 578, 581–3, 628, 635, 637, 652, 659 market, marketisation, 35, 69, 80, 83, 85, 93, 95, 122, 123, 125–6, 127, 133, 171, 175, 176, 178, 185, 186, 215, 219, 227, 231, 245, 355, 386, 388, 393, 505, 506 Marx, Marxism, Marxist, 6, 26, 27, 56, 83, 107, 122, 134, 174, 209, 210, 265, 269, 270, 284, 285, 385, 386, 388, 416, 417, 420, 681–2 maternal mortality, 476, 477, 482, 495 media, 139, 308, 577–91, 616, 617–18, 626, 627, 641, 661 mental health, 533–47

Index

services, 534, 537, 538, 539, 541, 546, 547 mental health–poverty nexus, 539–41 MERCOSUR, 289, 711, 715, 716, 719, 720 metrpolis, métropoles, 738 Middle East, 84, 90, 193, 247, 353, 447, 717, 750 middle income country, countries, high middle income, 90, 287, 315–31, 471, 534, 536–7, 540 migrant, emigrant, immigrant, 185, 333–43, 353, 354, 356, 366–70, 372, 373–7, 391, 738 migrant families, 336 migration, 349–60, 365–78 circular, 282, 351, 359, 366 control, 334, 340, 342 domestic, 358, 360 flows, 333, 342–3 forced, 66, 358, 367–8, 377, 736 internal, 350, 352, 353, 354, 355, 359, 360 international, 349–54, 358, 365, 604 return, 352, 368 temporary, 339, 366 military, militarisation, 69, 89, 178, 245, 247, 262, 266, 410, 433, 434, 438, 441, 446, 556 Millenium Development Goals (MDGs), 1, 87, 100, 283, 286, 304, 320, 319, 350, 358, 401, 416, 439, 440, 443, 446, 447, 461, 472, 479–82, 489, 490, 495, 499, 512, 515, 518, 710 Mining, Remittances, Aid and Bureacracy (MIRAB), 731 MINTS, 281, 289 mobility, 349–60

771

modernisation, modernisation theory, modernity, 21–37, 172, 435, 617, 727 Mpesa, 578, 579, 580

N North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), 716, 720 New International Economic Order (NIEO), 164, 165, 282, 286, 292, 456 neoclassical, 122, 123, 127, 175, 180 neoliberal, neoliberalism, neoliberalisation, neoliberal development, 125, 135, 170, 171, 174–7, 179, 228, 229, 230, 235, 237, 248, 292, 435–9, 507, 519, 554, 615–29 neostructuralism, 439–43 NEXT 11, 281, 289 non-alignment, 282 non-governmental organisations (NGOs), 11, 10, 45, 99, 109, 110, 111, 139, 231, 234, 240, 311, 336, 373, 473, 483, 488, 505, 519, 543, 544, 545, 583, 635, 640, 642, 654, 701 North, global North, 5, 7, 12, 44, 50, 69, 105, 106, 108, 109, 110, 112, 142, 143, 148, 149, 150, 272, 334, 366, 517, 518, 522, 523, 525, 526, 537, 538, 539, 542, 544, 618, 622, 623, 649, 662, 669 North–South, 9, 100, 102, 108, 113, 279, 286, 288, 336, 342, 464, 649, 653, 710, 714

O Occupy, 553, 554, 555, 561, 562, 569, 584

772

Index

OECD, 150, 185, 186, 191, 193, 194–7, 198, 291, 302, 310, 316, 325, 445, 446, 625 OECD Development Assitance Committee (DAC), 300, 326, 439 Official Development Assistance (ODA), 234, 300, 308, 309, 316, 317, 323, 325, 326, 433, 434, 436 oil, oil crisis, 149–50, 282, 435

P Pan African Network of People with Pyschosocial Disabilities (PANUSP), 546 participatory, participation, 61–2, 231–3 participatory research, approaches, 232, 540 path dependency, 239, 693, 697, 699, 700 peasant, peasantries, 90, 669, 670, 673, 674, 679–80, 682, 683 depeasantisation, 670 performative, performativity, performative protest, 553–70 philanthropy, philanthropic capitalism, 297–311 pharmaceuticals, pharmaceuticalization, 543–5 phone, mobile, 351, 577, 579, 581, 584, 587, 588, 589, 590, 591, 620, 621, 629, 636, 639, 640, 643 ‘piano’ protest, 564–5 police, policing, 36, 244, 245, 246, 248, 250, 255, 262, 411, 422, 441, 561, 563, 565, 567, 582, 584, 612 political economy, 34, 93, 130, 133, 175, 297, 546, 681

postcolonialism, 41–50 postcolonial theory, 29, 41–9 postcolonial elites, 43 postcolonial knowledge, 43, 48 postdevelopment, 46, 56, 546 postmodern, postmodernism, 671 poverty global, 3, 41, 69, 102, 106, 112, 320 non-extreme, 320 multidimensional, 320 alleviation, 232, 401, 434, 436, 438, 439, 443, 444, 520 reduction, 231–3, 339, 342, 446, 512, 517, 520, 678 Poverty reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP), 231–3, 235, 438, 439, 519 power, 279–93, 297–311 power relations, 45, 48, 106, 107, 108, 140, 233, 252, 288, 338, 392, 455, 457 pathologies of power, 5, 10 private security, 245–9 privatisation, 243–55, 259–73 production, 23, 26, 29, 34, 35, 149, 170, 229, 238, 251, 254, 270, 405, 406, 417, 612, 656, 681 productive change, 318 productivity, 402 progress, 87, 221, 459, 476–8 protest, protestors, 88, 553–70 public goods, 158, 190 global, 327–8 regional, 327–8 public–private partnership, 250, 261, 264, 265, 298, 308, 310, 321, 325, 444, 678, 721

Q quality of life, 580, 623

Index

R radio, 616, 617, 626 refugee, 333, 338, 339, 368 regions, regionalism, 709–23 religion, 526–7 remittance, remittances, 335–8 social, 338, 339 repression, 36, 92 reproduction, 191, 192, 254, 270 reproductive rights, 473–4, 481–5 rent-seeking, 141, 142, 144, 175 resilience, 236–7 resource curse, 141–6 resources, natural, extractive, 139–52 retroliberalism, 446, 447 rights, 155–67, 453–68, 471–85 human , 9–11, 63–4, 305, 369, 386, 372–4, 375, 453–70, 460, 477, 540, 546, 634 intellectual property, 155–67 social, 454–5 political, 368, 454 rights-based approach, 10, 367, 456–8 risk, 234–5 rising powers, 113 rivers, 602 Rockefeller Foundation, 297, 301, 305 rural, 150, 355, 408, 678, 701

S SADC, 289 Sandinista, 419–20, 427 sanitation, 259–73 SAARC, 289, 715, 717 security, 243–55, 433–48, 669–85 security–development nexus, 415 services, 259–73 service delivery, 231–3 sexual health, 471–85 shocks, 32, 178, 260, 324, 693–4, 696, 729, 739 slavery, 381–94

773

slums, slum-dwellers, 212, 213–14, 237, 422, 578, 581, 582, 587 smart city, 615–29 social capital, 210, 231, 235, 237, 355, 338, 582, 623, 694 social democratic, 263–6 social indicators, 265 social justice, 368, 371, 455, 508, 628 social media, 577–91 social protection, 86, 368, 377, 503, 515 social policy, 324 socialist, 83, 266–8 software, 578–9, 582, 586–7, 588, 590 south, global South, 10, 12, 34, 37, 44, 46, 47, 50, 99, 101, 105, 144, 207, 220, 221, 243–55, 281, 284, 336, 339, 342, 353, 385, 416, 487–8, 507, 511, 513, 516, 518, 520, 522–3, 525, 526, 538, 539, 543, 544, 545, 557, 615, 616, 624, 649–50, 672, 677, 709 South Commission, 63, 64 South–South cooperation, 279–93 sovereignty, 91, 93, 94, 150, 267, 309, 442, 671, 673, 685 state, the, 121–35, 207–21, 243–55 Standing Man, 566–7 statism, statist approaches, 83, 90 state–society relationships, 125, 126, 130, 131, 133, 135 ‘street’ children, 402, 403, 502 structural adjustment policies (SAPs), 122, 282, 286, 288, 437, 438, 440, 442, 446, 456, 676 structuralism, structuralist, 439–43 structural functionalism, 172 subaltern, subalternity, 42–5, 94, 214, 738 supply chains, 390, 392, 393–4, 659 survival, 250, 436, 477, 491, 517

774

Index

sustainable, sustainability, sustainable development, sustainable livelihoods, 709–23 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), 1–4, 12, 13, 320, 350, 377, 481, 483, 512, 513, 515, 534, 535, 547, 710

T Taksim Square, 557–60 tax, taxation, 93, 139, 142, 145, 149, 186, 187–90, 198, 211, 219, 325, 330, 435 technology, technological, 654–6 territory, territoriality, 162, 249, 433, 658–60 terrorist, 404, 427 Third Worldism, 282, 291 tobacco, 401 tourism, 360, 734 trade, 399–411 trade union, 263–4, 273, 366, 367, 371–2, 373, 374 traditional societies, 23 trafficking, human, 384–8 ‘trafficked’ women, children, 502 transition, 7, 28, 32, 33, 36, 86, 88, 91, 197 transport underdevelopment, 595–613 Turkey, 135, 281, 326, 553, 556, 557, 558, 560, 564, 565, 567, 753

U Uganda, 214, 215, 236, 434, 616, 620, 640–2, 698, 701 urban, urbanisation, 21 UN, 99 UNESCO, 100, 163, 334, 436 UNDP, 60, 285, 286, 306, 334, 438 UNICEF, 6, 7 unequal, unequal specialisation, 20 USAID, 303, 515 Ushahidi, 578, 579, 590, 637, 638

V value chains, 288, 674–6, 683 violence, 24, 89, 106, 190, 248, 250, 392, 507, 521 physical, 59 structural, 417, 459 volunteering, 108–9, 111, 640 vulnerability, 234–5. 387, 502, 696, 728–30, 731–2, 736–7

W Washington Consensus, 87, 88–9, 178, 179, 490 water, 337, 713, 734, 746–7,753–6 clean, 87, 337, 439 freshwater, 684, 713, 730, 734, 746–9, 753, 755, 756 sharing, 753–5 wealth, global wealth, 42–3 welfare, 58, 93, 176, 264, 435, 507, 732 wellbeing, 473, 474, 499 western, 23, 31–2 hegemony, 280 non-western, 23, 31, 32, 537 theory, 47 women, 35, 65–6, 197, 366, 471–7, 481–4 World Bank, the ‘Bank’, 87, 132, 178, 209, 232–3, 264, 269, 299–300, 311, 334, 437, 438, 462, 490–500, 501, 511, 514, 605, 674, 675, 748, 752–3 World Health Organization (WHO), 472, 533 world system, 7, 27, 28, 29, 33–6 workers, 10, 94, 162, 374–6, 384, 386, 390, 719 domestic, 374–6 migrant, 3, 35, 359, 366, 367, 372, 374, 375, 377

Y youth, 15, 234, 402–3, 487, 489–495, 501