Development and Change最新文献

As digital employment becomes increasingly significant, a number of legal cases have emerged centred on whether digital workers should be classified as independent partners or employees. Workers’ freedom in choosing whether and how long to work for an app is central to the argument by platform firms that they are mere technology providers to independent partners. Conversely, the tight control exercised by apps is emphasized by those who see ride-hail work as unprotected wage work. Drawing on mixed-methods research in Dar es Salaam, Johannesburg and Nairobi, this article contributes to the literature by analysing the paradoxical perceptions about work by ride-hail drivers who operate under tight control from apps and yet often think of themselves as their own boss. The manuscript reviews the literature which explains this paradox as the result of the apps’ successful ideological control over work, which is hegemonic and is internalized by drivers, inducing them to consent. The article then discusses the value and limitations of this explanation. It argues that a stronger focus on drivers’ employment histories, and on the often-unexplored dynamics of drivers’ internal class stratification, are essential to understanding why some drivers consider themselves to be their own boss, whilst others do not.

This article examines the compatibility of Ujamaa's conceptualization of freedom with the limits of the sovereign state. This is done by examining popular enactments of Ujamaa in Tanzania in the 1960s, which resulted in what, for a moment, was a quasi-utopian realization of post-colonial freedom. It analyses the ways in which Julius Nyerere, in turn, was inspired by these popular practices and attempted to codify and advance their spread. Viewing this back-and-forth communication as a multidirectional means of theorizing the ideals of Ujamaa, including its radical conceptions of freedom, the article examines how such imaginations were eventually interfered with and restricted by the state, and how they might be revisited today.

Transnational ‘helping’ today relies upon partnerships with private companies as enshrined in the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, creating Faustian bargains of neoliberalism. However, a knowledge gap remains over how state institutional structures produce these neoliberal solutions. This article explores the case of Italy, an under-researched development actor, to analyse the interactions between its development institutions and their politics to better understand the role of for-profit actors in transnational helping. As in other donor countries, there has been a weakening of public trust in the traditional aid sector of Italian non-profits, combined with recent decreases in national funding for assistance abroad. The article is based on review of state, NGO and private sector documents, including laws and policies, as well as participant observation and review of academic literature in Italian and English. Using an historical institutional approach, the author demonstrates how Italian helping has been characterized by a strategic co-mingling of public and private aid, development and humanitarian aid, and of helping abroad and within Italy. In a changing institutional context for Italian NGOs characterized by reduced public solidarity, negative discursive framing and the need to diversify fund-raising channels, Italian businesses are being sought out for partnerships between for-profit and non-profit actors.

In current debates, green energy is often presented as an opportunity for peripheral states and regions to take a lead in energy production and challenge their peripheral status. This article offers a counterview. It builds on qualitative fieldwork at the Zhanatas 100 MW Wind Power Plant in southern Kazakhstan — Central Asia's largest wind farm at the time of construction. On terrain considered by some to be ‘wasteland’, wind is captured, extracted and centralized as an emerging energy resource. At the same time, the nomadic population remain politically marginalized and the land and its many non-human inhabitants continue to be ecologically vulnerable. This article argues that the long-term effect can be described as changing state power within unchanging and unequal centre–periphery power relations. The article provides a theoretical contribution to the understanding of how green energy and state power can substantially reconstruct each other on the ground; it furthers our knowledge of the relationship between space and state under the conditions of energy transition, and advocates for a focus on spatial and historical inequalities in the context of changing energy production.

This article consists of a systematic review of 73 empirical articles in economics journals using the ‘ethnic fractionalization’ variable in cross-country analyses with developing countries. This variable was introduced in development economics in 1997 by two World Bank economists, Easterly and Levine. Their publication was followed by many others using the same variable. What is striking is that the variable does not measure fractionalization of ethnic groups but simply ethnic diversity. The negative connotation of such groups falling apart resulted in many hypotheses about a negative relationship of ‘ethnic divisions’ with a variety of economic development outcomes, including economic growth, investment and innovation. This systematic review reveals that less than half of the 73 publications confirm hypotheses about negative effects of ‘ethnic fractionalization’. Most of the selected studies do not discuss relevant theory and they do not include confounding variables about how ethnic groups relate to each other. Although more research is needed regarding Scholars' motivations for the use of the variable, the way in which researchers have used the variable points to normative choices made in terms of hypotheses, data, variable label and models. This calls for more reflection about research ethics in applied economics.

Understanding what brokers do and what happens to them in the doing is a way of understanding highly uneven processes of market-making and value distribution. This article explores the production and functioning of brokers’ moral ambiguity as a necessary and enabling feature of market exchange in a liberalized agricultural market. It focuses on tensions that have their origins in contradictory ideologies and the intertwining of instrumentality and affection. Through a close look at two different types of brokers — one closely linked to his client base through horizontal ties of mutual interdependence and one more socially distant — the article argues that how brokers respond to these tensions is constitutive of social power, the distribution of value between market actors, and the transformational processes at the heart of political economy.