Development and Change最新文献

Subcontracting relations have often been considered a key channel to facilitate growth in traditional informal enterprises and enable them to transition into larger, modern enterprises. Such relations are expected to strengthen with economic growth. Using nationally representative survey data for the Indian informal manufacturing sector, this article examines the nature and patterns of subcontracting linkages for informal family-based household enterprises over the high-growth period of 2001–2016. The article estimates the net accumulation fund (NAF) for these enterprises, which measures their ability to accumulate, and studies the transition possibilities of subcontracted enterprises over time. Results show that the NAFs of subcontracted enterprises remained much lower than those of non-subcontracted ones, with the disparity growing over the growth period. A vast majority of subcontracted household enterprises are embedded in relations that are akin to a traditional putting-out system, with little control over their production processes. Female-owned enterprises and those located within the household are more likely to be in such put-out relations. Average NAF for put-out household enterprises has been lower than for relatively autonomous subcontracted and non-subcontracted firms, although over time the gap in NAF between put-out and non-put-out firms, and thus their differential ability to transition, has narrowed. The prevailing nature of subcontracting relations in India's informal economy, even during the peak growth period, appears to be starkly different from the dynamic linkages that are celebrated in the literature as a channel for facilitating growth and transition.

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’.