Development and Change最新文献

Nidhi Srinivas, Against NGOs: A Critical Perspective on Civil Society, Management and Development. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022. 343 pp. £ 42.00 hardback.

Jenna H. Hanchey, The Center Cannot Hold: Decolonial Possibility and the Collapse of a Tanzanian NGO. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2023. 232 pp. £ 76.00 hardback.

The invitation to write an essay1 on Srinivas's Against NGOs: A Critical Perspective on Civil Society, Management and Development reached me as I was revisiting the Tanzanian village where I had begun my own research on NGOs 30 years before. Only that village was now a district headquarters and burgeoning urban centre. The state and ruling party dominated the scene architecturally, aesthetically and economically. The modest cluster of houses and shops I remembered from 1993 had morphed into a paved main road lined with electrified supermarkets, bars, restaurants and ATMs. The ancestral wells, which had provided water for Maasai people and livestock for generations immemorial, were surrounded by urban sprawl and said to be going dry. The dusty offices of community-based NGOs had disappeared, along with the flags of opposition parties. While this modern main street certainly bustled, it no longer crackled with the nervous energy of an emergent land rights movement.

One day, during this visit, I sat talking with a Maasai elder I had not seen since the 1990s. In the friendly way of people who had known each other once but never well, we waxed nostalgic about the heyday of Tanzania's Indigenous NGOs: short courses in participatory research methodologies, land rights workshops, grassroots protests and a community-based FM radio station. He then asked my professional opinion as to what had become of those promising NGOs and their dynamic leaders. Sad to be dampening our enthusiasm, I described how donor agendas and reporting requirements had moved NGO leaders away from their communities. Moreover, the state systematically harassed the most influential leaders, and competing donor agendas turned NGOs against each other. Many donors were quick to lose interest, making it difficult for Indigenous NGOs to sustain their own agendas and activities on behalf of their constituent communities. Under these pressures, some leaders burnt out, fell ill and even died. Others left for more secure opportunities in the development sector, academia and officialdom. Others faded into obscurity. Considering this, my old acquaintance asked if I thought such days could ever come again. Since they happened before, I reasoned, they could happen again. ‘Let us pray that they do’, he said. ‘Yes’, I agreed, ‘let us pray that they do’.

On my flight home, I recalled this conversation, noticed that it coincided with my agreement to review a book about NGOs that I had yet to read, a

This article seeks to understand why community forestry enterprises in the Mayan rainforest of Mexico are losing ground, while middlemen and manufacturers are regaining control over forestry resources. It focuses on the case of the Ejido San Felipe Oriente where an NGO codesigned a commercialization platform with the objective of bringing together local cooperatives to negotiate in the market from a position of strength. The project was hampered by an internal rupture in the ejido; in investigating this rupture, the authors use the concept of institutional bricolage to understand local power struggles, and the theory of gradual change to search for historical causal mechanisms. They find that the proximate causes of the rupture were family rivalries, suspicions of embezzlement, unfair exclusions, and the disruption of customary practices regarding the distribution of monetary benefits. However, historical continuities lay beneath the power struggle: ejidos in the Yucatan Peninsula have used their function as intermediaries to subordinate local interests rather than promote endogenous development. The authors advocate for an institutional design process that takes account of the unconscious and taken-for-granted meanings that influence institutional adaptation; they encourage development practitioners promoting community forestry enterprises in the Mayan rainforest of Mexico to address historical continuities in local institutions as a focal target of development interventions.

This article shows that economic inequality between nations has systematically worsened in monetary terms since 1950, and that the principal explanator is inequality between blocs of nations, notably the persistent gap between the Global North and Global South. By 2022, the GDP per capita of the North was 12 times greater than that of the South, this ratio being twice as great as in 1950. This general trend has two consistent exceptions, China and Vietnam. There was also a brief reversal of the trend from 2000 to 2012. However, except for China and Vietnam, it has resumed since then. The article shows that both the Global South and North are coherent entities: they are historically stable and converge internally while diverging from each other. It assesses the implications for international inequality and convergence research and draws out some consequences for world geopolitical relations. Finally, the article sets out the case for an international classification standard that facilitates systematic research into inter-bloc inequality.

Based on qualitative research on marital problems in Dhaka, this article uses the term ‘intimate extractions’ as a lens to explain the relationship between escalating levels of demand dowry and neoliberal development in Bangladesh. Evidence from across Bangladesh shows that demands for cash made by husbands, accompanied by threats of violence or divorce, are on the rise. Building on gendered theories of contemporary capitalist development and feminist analysis of microcredit, the article argues that demand dowry should be understood within the current context of rapid economic development in Bangladesh. High levels of precarity, lack of state welfare and the need for cash for businesses, labour migration, education and healthcare mean that people from all social classes are in perpetual need of money. Marriage problems and the practice of demand dowry present opportunities for husbands to extract money from wives and their families. Embedded in the intimate relationship of marriage, demand dowry can therefore be understood as a ‘conversion’, a process in which intimate relationships are converted into projects of capital accumulation, thus becoming an ‘intimate extraction’.

This Comment is both a response to critique and a wider contribution to renewed debate on the politics of development and development studies amidst multiple, intersecting challenges. In an article published in World Development in 2021, Leach et al. proposed that COVID-19 and earlier epidemics provided fundamental lessons for post-pandemic transformations and for rethinking development more broadly. In an article published in this journal in 2023, Wiegratz et al. critiqued Leach et al., arguing that their universalist framing effaces structural inequalities between the global North and the global South, and that the analysis underplays the importance of historically embedded political-economic inequalities. This Comment shows how elements of the article by Wiegratz and colleagues point to ways to extend and elaborate Leach et al.’s overall argument — not to refute it — but that it is also based on a highly selective reading of the latter's work and its implications. Focusing first on the core question of universality, and then more briefly on the themes of inequalities and of uncertainty, it resurfaces parts of the authors’ work that Wiegratz et al. selectively ignore, and reflects on further recent evidence of pandemic impacts and inequalities amidst structural violence and contemporary capitalist dynamics. These are relevant across all geographies and polities, although in different ways, as shaped by particular contexts and histories that include, but also cross-cut and complicate, dichotomies between the so-called global North and global South. This Comment thus clarifies and extends the argument for a recasting of development around a radically transformative, egalitarian and inclusive knowledge and politics, relevant to all settings across the world.

In 2014, Nigeria adopted a new law for its healthcare system, which mandated the establishment of a novel health-financing mechanism, the Basic Health Care Provision Fund (BHCPF). The BHCPF was created to provide sustainable funding with a view to fast-tracking Universal Health Coverage (UHC) and improving health outcomes in Nigeria. This article places Nigeria's UHC reform process in the broader context of social policy implementation in Africa to illustrate the extent to which interactions between different agents, contextual factors such as Nigeria's federal character, as well as changing conceptualizations of social policy at a global level, shape views on how best to implement UHC. The article is based on the careful examination of three different versions of implementation guidelines for the BHCPF combined with qualitative data collected during fieldwork. It argues that there is a discrepancy between the Nigerian government rhetoric of putting into place a system that improves access to healthcare and the actual practice of implementing UHC via the BHCPF. In reality, a range of controversies surround the ongoing operationalization of the BHCPF, contributing to the perpetuation of a social policy environment that allows poor health outcomes and significant health inequities in Nigeria to persist.

India's annexation of Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir in August 2019 has generated debates within Critical Kashmir Studies regarding the kind of settler colonialism that is operating in this disputed Himalayan region. To illuminate the current relationship between land dispossession and narratives that legitimize land grab (for the settlement of Hindu Indian settlers), this article traces the logics and genesis of this ongoing settler project in Kashmir, going back to the historic Dogra feudal rule. The authors argue that the Hindu Dogra dispensation installed a revenue surveillance system that enabled it to engage in institutionalized land grab, and show how that extractive land administrative structure has been repurposed by the Indian state for its settler project. The article demonstrates how the Indian state engages in the (epistemic/discursive) erasure of local voices to ensure that the Kashmiri (Muslim) native is stripped of the position of indigeneity both over land and over the narrative of an expropriatory land grab. It further illustrates how the state strives to create facts on the ground to (re)define the ‘native’ and (re)claim the land for Indian Hindu settlers.