Development and Change最新文献

In East Africa, social enterprises that fuse development work with entrepreneurial activities and a language of ‘innovation’ are becoming prominent. Critical of the NGO/donor model, which they hold as unsustainable, such organizations are funded by corporate investment and philanthropic capital but aim for self-reliance through enlisting local actors to market social services, while providing loans, digital infrastructures and training in entrepreneurship. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Kenya, this article examines the ethos, ambitions and practices of one such enterprise operating across Africa — Healthy Entrepreneurs. This not-for-profit organization seeks to enable community health workers to become ‘health entrepreneurs’ by training them in business management and offering them a loan and mobile phone from which they order health commodities online and sell them to rural communities. Focusing on the perspectives, motivations and experiences of local managers and the entrepreneurs themselves, the article explores relations between entrepreneurism, community health work, sustainability and the ‘social good’, and the frictions surrounding them. The model of turning community health workers into entrepreneurs, which fosters competition while placing the burden of success onto the individual, shifts the ethos of community health work towards a focus on business. However, the moral economies in which community health entrepreneurs are embedded complicates this picture.

State and non-state water service providers in Nairobi strive to produce legitimate claims to water. This article examines the state's attempt to regulate water provision in Kibera, a slum of Nairobi, Kenya, where the state-owned water service provider has installed a water system, the so-called ‘chambers’, to combat the unauthorized diversion of water from the grid and extend the reach of their services. While the chamber system has failed the intended regulation of water provision in Kibera, it plays a central role in structuring the water provision system in the settlement. The article shows that the interactions the chambers facilitate between state and non-state service providers produce a localized legality which draws on the language of the state and the appearance of the rule of law. At the same time, this localized legality is operationalized by illegal activities and the direct transgression of statutory law. Therefore, the legitimacy and legality of service providers is co-produced by state and non-state actors and between the ideal of law and practical norms constituting a ‘practical water law’.

In Southeast Asia, environmental and human rights activists resisting authoritarian rule and extractive development face harassment, intimidation and lethal danger in dramatically different ways. In the Philippines, this atmosphere of violence intensified under former President Rodrigo Duterte, a political ‘strongman’ whose militarized masculinity deepened the repression of left-wing women activists and other political opposition across the country. Despite macro-level studies examining the trends and patterns behind the surge in activist harassment, the micro-politics of Duterte's misogynistic and revanchist violence towards women activists has received insufficient attention. Drawing on feminist political ecology, this article explores how and why women activists on Palawan Island and elsewhere in the Philippines continued their advocacy work as they navigated intersectional spaces of violent misogyny and government repression. It shows how women activists in Palawan drew upon hope to persevere in their work amidst the violent atmospheres stoked by authoritarian masculinity. The article describes how the temporalities of intersectional gendered violence variously impacted the lives of women activists as they defended the environment and human rights on the island, while the country's highest office legitimated toxic chauvinism as a mode of governance.

This article uses a novel dataset comprising 42 countries for the years 1985–2020 to explore the relationship between public spending on social protection and GDP. The article contributes to the empirical literature on social protection spending by conducting a large multi-country study using the structural vector autoregression approach. The results of the study highlight the positive effects of social protection expenditures on GDP that surpass those of total government expenditures. These results vary considerably across countries, with impact multipliers ranging from 5 in Mexico to -0.71 in Paraguay. The authors find that the cumulative multiplier exceeds 1 for most of the 42 sample countries, suggesting that the positive impact of social protection spending on GDP accumulates over time. The article finds statistically significant and strong correlations between the cumulative and impact multipliers and inequality measures such as the Gini coefficient and the income shares of the poorest and the richest. Indeed, the positive impact of public spending on social protection on GDP is especially pronounced in countries characterized by higher inequality. Taken together, the results have significant policy implications and suggest that the growth-enhancing potential of social protection policies is complementary to the ability of such policies to reduce inequality.

China's rise as a major development financing provider is widely seen as challenging traditional donor states’ influence over the norms and institutions of global development and over aid recipients. Amid intensifying geopolitical rivalry, now often called a new or second Cold War, some argue that traditional donors are adopting Chinese-style practices to compete with China for developing countries’ allegiance. This article supports the convergence thesis but argues further that Chinese practices are also converging with those of traditional donors. Moreover, this convergence is on a less generous middle ground that will likely be worse for developing countries than the logic of geopolitical competition suggests. Rather than mobilizing additional resources, both sides are retrenching. This is because geopolitical competition is mediated through domestic political economy models entailing limits to providers’ generosity: China's commercial model confronts recipients’ declining repayment capacity, while traditional donors, unwilling to devote fiscal resources for aid, rely on mobilizing reluctant private finance.

The effects of climate change add to the challenges facing those with rice-based livelihoods in West Africa. This article presents a long-term ethnographic case study in southern Guinea-Bissau where, in contrast to other reported cases in the region, uncertainty regarding the future of mangrove rice production overlaps with efforts to rehabilitate abandoned mangrove rice paddies. Agricultural knowledge is produced, renewed and transmitted along with the construction of site-specific, techno-ecological hybrids needed for water management in rice fields. This article analyses the role of communal, reciprocal and contract labour in the circulation of knowledge between villages with historically stable rice production (rice refugia) and villages where production has been discontinuous (rice margins). Knowledge circulation and experimentation are key to local adaptation to climate change and climate resilience programmes can play a role if they are able to adapt to current needs, for instance, by considering decentralized funding strategies. By promoting the exchange of services and goods, decentralization of funding can facilitate the redistribution of knowledge and labour, particularly if rice refugia, as regional knowledge repositories, participate in the recovery of rice production in rice margins. These connections revitalize and strengthen regional rice knowledge networks and their ability to confront climate change.

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.