Development and Change最新文献

How do states maintain economic development in the face of sanctions? Recent studies have examined economic resilience as a property of a system preceding a shock, leaving unanswered questions about how sanctioned states discipline employers and limit predatory behaviour. Using the case of Iran, this article aims to fill this gap by presenting a model of Mobilized resilience, describing how bottom-up and top-down mobilizations can create demand for institutional capacity. Integrating unique qualitative and quantitative material, the author argues that Iran's political elites responded to sanctions by launching top-down campaigns that appealed to workers, promoted capital–labour unity, and demanded state commitment to development. These campaigns facilitated widespread labour protests that further empowered the state to block capital flight and steer firms onto more profitable, growth-oriented routes. Labour ‘resistance’ thus unexpectedly helped to realize the Supreme Leader's calls for a ‘resistance economy’. These findings suggest that political support for worker mobilization in the context of sanctions can result in economic benefits, with significant consequences for our understanding of economic statecraft, development and labour movements.

This article examines the prevailing assumption by donors that connecting smallholder women to value chains will close the gender gap and empower women. Based on a case study of a programme that seeks to empower women through their integration into value chains in Vietnam, the article assesses women's empowerment across four dimensions: economic, psychological, social and political. The authors argue that women's engagement in value chains does not always financially benefit and empower women because patriarchal power structures within families, communities and businesses make it challenging for women to gain authority over production decisions in higher-value crops. Women in the study gained more autonomy over ‘women's crops’ which yielded small incomes, while men had control over production that was seen as ‘men's work’, and in large-scale and more lucrative production. Gendered power relations affect women's access to economic opportunities: in this context, development agencies should reconsider their approaches to women's economic empowerment by focusing on relational rather than individual empowerment. This means that women's economic empowerment programmes should involve both men and women, with targeted interventions ensuring women are empowered within the household and in their connections with the community, local authorities and businesses.

This article examines the relationship between reparations as compensation and reparations as transformation in settler colonial Australia. Much of the global reparations debate on colonization and slavery has focused on important demands confronting the historic damages and ongoing accumulation of disadvantage from colonization in ex-colonies or from plantation slavery. Much less has been said about reparations for settler colonialism which is a specific form of ongoing colonization in the here and now. Drawing on long-standing work around reparations for colonization by Indigenous peoples in Australia, and the woeful compensatory responses the state and judiciary have offered, this article argues that reparations for ongoing colonization could consider options beyond monetary compensation. This includes the critical domain of reparations as transformation that aim less to offset damage and reconcile suffering, but rather to comprehensively transform colonial relations.

This article examines white settler colonialism and racial capitalism as the primary mechanisms for the historical and ongoing land dispossession of Afrikan people in South Africa. It argues that by addressing land dispossession through land restitution, South Africa could begin to meaningfully address the ongoing impacts of settler colonial displacement of Afrikan people. It contends that land reparations are central not only to restorative physical and spatial justice but also to physical healing. The aim of this contribution is to historicize and herstoricize the South African land question; situate this within the context of racial capitalism and settler colonialism; provide a framing of the racialization and feminization of the land economy; and expound on the particularities of misogynoir and critical feminist theory in theorizing the acute land dispossession of Afrikan women. Situated within the Azanian School of thought, its essential contribution is the suggestion that land restoration is a necessary and meaningful reparative measure for South Africans.

This article examines how and why water privatization has been in place for nearly three decades in Mozambique, expanding from cities to towns despite a lack of conclusive evidence of its merits. Drawing on primary data and secondary sources, the article argues that powerful actors driving water privatization in Mozambique ‘produced success’ out of what has been a messy and problematic process of implementing water privatization in cities in the 2000s. This strategy is cultural, in that actors constructed and mobilized a success narrative to legitimize the retention of water privatization in cities and to widen its spatial scope to towns. Yet, because water privatization in cities was not actually successful — quite the contrary — the retention and expansion of water privatization necessarily relied on a political economic process that buttressed this cultural production of success. That is, proponents expended power and resources in critical decision-making moments to ensure water privatization and its underlying neoliberal water imaginary would be sustained, at the expense of alternative (post-neoliberal) modes of water supply. As such, this article concludes that water privatization in Mozambique represents an exemplary case of neoliberal resilience.

The idea of global reparations has received increasing attention in recent years, not only with respect to legacies of slavery and colonialism, but also to interrelated issues such as climate change, debt crisis, or ongoing financial transfers from the Global South to the Global North. This article, which introduces and sets the Debate for the 2024 Forum issue on the political economy of 21st century global reparations, offers a critical perspective on contemporary global reparations agendas, including their macroeconomic and development implications for the Global South. It highlights the contentious, unresolved questions about how reparations movements should interact with the highly unequal structures of global capitalism. To what degree should they seek large redistributive gains within these structures, or else aim for more revolutionary standpoints which reject these structures? If the former, would this compromise any hope for reparations to be truly transformative and able to address the challenges presented by global white supremacy? The hope of reparations movements is to make progressive gains that could become the catalyst for more transformative changes on a global scale. At the same time, sympathetic critics question whether reparations are feasible or should be a primary focus of advocacy for achieving racial and climate justice on national as well as global levels. In outlining these points of debate, the article also considers the questions of how to make global reparations work for recipients, and how to finance them. It concludes by elaborating on the challenge of moving towards a more developmentalist emphasis of ‘systemic reparations’.