Development and Change最新文献

In 2021, the World Bank, in association with the Tanzanian Ministry of Lands, Housing and Human Settlements Development, added yet another chapter to the long and contentious history of land tenure reform in Tanzania. It approved US$ 150 million for the second phase of a village-wide individual titling pilot programme that employs new technologies for surveying under the rubric of a private sector competitiveness project. This article assesses the nature, evolution and impact of the World Bank project in Tanzania within the context of its broader titling agenda in Africa. It provides an overview of the formation of the World Bank's land policy agenda in Africa, followed by an evaluation of the titling project in Tanzania. The final part of the article critically examines the arrival of new actors and players in Tanzania and assesses the new World Bank project.

This article analyses how rural Indonesians involved in land conflicts articulate their claims vis-à-vis palm oil companies and government. Addressing a long-standing debate about the relative importance of laws and rights in the contentious politics of marginalized citizens in the Global South, the authors examine statements of community spokespersons as published in regional newspapers from four Indonesian provinces. They find that this discourse is characterized by an emphasis on social norms and customary traditions, while laws, regulations and conceptions of justice are rarely invoked. The authors argue that this modest and comparatively ‘rightless’ discourse is a consequence of the character of the marginalization facing rural Indonesians. The combination of relative powerlessness and an unreliable legal system forces rural Indonesians to avoid an assertive claiming of rights and, instead, to adopt a more muted and polite tone to cultivate the goodwill of companies and local authorities.

This article brings together recent debates in urban and development studies to illuminate the understudied politics and compromise involved in the rollout of globally funded urban development in Africa. The argument presented builds on a detailed analysis of the World Bank's urban development portfolio in Tanzania, with a specific focus on the Dar es Salaam Metro-politan Development Project, to draw attention to the disjuncture between rising urban investments and persistently low levels of city-level autonomy in urban Africa. Challenging views of cities as either active agents or mere subjects of urban development, the article focuses on the negotiation strategies that have been employed by donors and recipients alike to enable the continued disbursement of urban development funding. The pragmatic and non-confrontational nature of these negotiation strategies is illustrated by highlighting the role of a transnational community of urban development professionals who contribute to embedding local support for policy reform from within. It is argued that while this community has been key to enabling the massive growth of the World Bank's urban lending portfolio in Tanzania, it has also contributed to undermining effective local government reform, thereby reshaping conventionally assumed pathways and understandings of urban agency and development.

This article examines the puzzle of why China's two policy banks, China Development Bank (CDB) and the Export-Import Bank of China (Eximbank), have lending portfolios for power-generation projects in Africa that have drastically different levels of carbon dioxide emissions. From the supplier side, Eximbank balances two imperatives: Beijing's ideational ambition as a new development provider to African recipients with sustainability commitments, and China's industrial goal to offshore non-renewable capacity. In contrast, the CDB prioritizes its commercial interests, which results in the bank lending solely for coal projects. On the demand side, Eximbank's concessional capital has emerged as a second-best option among international financial sources for renewable and hydropower generation projects. Conversely, CDB's market-rate lending makes it the fiscal last resort for host countries seeking financial support for thermal-power projects which are shunned by other financiers. This divergence can be understood through the polycentric development finance model, which captures the parallel decision-making institutions governing Chinese energy financing in Africa. Specifically, the lending decisions of Eximbank are linked with institutionalized policy processes, translating priorities of Chinese and African state actors. Meanwhile, the loan origination processes of CDB are more independent of state actors, allowing greater autonomy for the financier to pursue commercial interests.

Since the 2000s, rural elites have engaged in ‘greening’ the Amazon extractive frontier. Private and state-led initiatives have consolidated the agro-industrial system by incentivizing compliance and effectively legalizing deforestation. Brazil's Rural Environmental Registry (Cadastro Ambiental Rural — CAR) is fundamental to ‘sustainable producer’ initiatives and international and local carbon markets. Since its emergence at the end of the 1990s, it has been funded and promoted by European countries and the World Bank through the G7 Pilot Programme for the Conservation of Brazilian Rainforests and the Amazon Fund. This analysis draws on a critical political economy approach and several years of multi-site interviews, participant observation and archival research to illuminate how donor and recipient agencies have sustained territorial and georeferencing technologies as an international state project to enable the green economy, despite political shifts and the inherent contradictions of this instrument. The article shows how ecological modernization technologies enable the ‘greening’ of agro-industry expansion while exacerbating land conflicts and marginalizing Indigenous and traditional peoples’ collective land rights.

The rise of China as a trading partner, lender and investor is among the most significant developments in the global political economy over the last two decades. This shift has created important new opportunities for developing countries, but it has also introduced new challenges, with benefits and drawbacks unevenly distributed across different nations. This article argues that understanding the developmental consequences of China's involvement requires studying not only Chinese priorities and modalities but also the interests and strategies of local elites. The development of Latin America has been profoundly influenced by these elite interests, which are shaped by the region's integration into the global economy. Elites may leverage the benefits of the relationship to China to enhance their rent-seeking capabilities and limit competition, thereby hindering development and perpetuating inequality in Latin America. This argument is examined through the contrasting cases of Chile and Venezuela; while Chile's approach to China has been dominated by private sector elites, Venezuela's approach has been driven by governmental elites. In both cases, integration with China is shaped by and has in turn strengthened interests and strategies of the elites.

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.

Scholars of critical agrarian political economy see agriculture in liberalization-era India as a form of disguised unemployment, part of wider agrarian distress. This article engages with literature differentiating the class/caste responses to agrarian and non-farm livelihood distress in India to understand the different diversification options that households have available. The article draws on research carried out in a village in dryland, Bt cotton-dependent Telangana in south India to show these variegated practices. While Other Backward Caste households invested in livestock to cope with heavy Bt cotton investments and losses, Scheduled Caste households focused on the educated rural youth, relying on their non-farm wage labour in jobs such as taxi driving. Despite rural–urban migration and higher levels of education, under/unemployment remains persistent for rural youth. In this context, Ryuthu Bandhu, a cash transfer programme pioneered in Telangana in 2018, proved crucial for rural livelihood survival in the study village, contributing up to 22 per cent of annual household incomes. However, negative average net incomes across all households show that attempts to diversify out of distress have been largely unsuccessful.