Development and Change最新文献

The idea of global reparations has received increasing attention in recent years, not only with respect to legacies of slavery and colonialism, but also to interrelated issues such as climate change, debt crisis, or ongoing financial transfers from the Global South to the Global North. This article, which introduces and sets the Debate for the 2024 Forum issue on the political economy of 21st century global reparations, offers a critical perspective on contemporary global reparations agendas, including their macroeconomic and development implications for the Global South. It highlights the contentious, unresolved questions about how reparations movements should interact with the highly unequal structures of global capitalism. To what degree should they seek large redistributive gains within these structures, or else aim for more revolutionary standpoints which reject these structures? If the former, would this compromise any hope for reparations to be truly transformative and able to address the challenges presented by global white supremacy? The hope of reparations movements is to make progressive gains that could become the catalyst for more transformative changes on a global scale. At the same time, sympathetic critics question whether reparations are feasible or should be a primary focus of advocacy for achieving racial and climate justice on national as well as global levels. In outlining these points of debate, the article also considers the questions of how to make global reparations work for recipients, and how to finance them. It concludes by elaborating on the challenge of moving towards a more developmentalist emphasis of ‘systemic reparations’.

The relationship between educational level and the age at which women start families has been extensively researched. However, studies have primarily explored how additional schooling shifts the mean or, more broadly, only one point of the age at first union and first birth distributions. This ignores variation in the association between education and the timing of family formation, and the fact that schooling might shape behaviours of vulnerable and more privileged women differently. Using quantile regressions, this article examines heterogeneity in the relationship between education and the age at first union and first birth across the distribution of these events within 50 low- and middle-income countries. It investigates whether additional schooling shifts relatively early union formation and childbearing (that is, lower parts of distributions) similarly or differently than it shifts other parts of the distributions. It finds that association between an additional year at school and the age at first union and birth is weaker in the lower than the upper parts of the distributions. Education has a relatively weak effect on the reduction of early first unions and births and plays an unequalizing role in shaping family formation within countries. These findings are key to understanding persistently high levels of early marriage and pregnancy, despite the expansion of education.

The Black Lives Matter movement of 2020 has placed reparations firmly on the international agenda. This article discusses the concept of ‘reparations washing’ with reference to the measures of two British businesses, Greene King and Lloyd's of London, in acknowledgement of their historical roots in the slave trade, and the Government of the Netherlands’ public apology for the country's history of slavery. Reparations washing occurs when corporations or governments give a token nod to reparatory justice to enhance their image and to absolve them of institutional guilt. The article employs Malcolm X's metaphor of slavery, as sticking a knife into the back of the enslaved, to argue that in order to repair the harm caused, the knife needs to be removed and the wound healed. It then analyses the reparations demands contained in CARICOM's Ten Point Plan for Reparatory Justice which exposes the limits of reparatory justice campaigns. The paradox of reparations campaigns is that they ultimately leave intact a system founded on White supremacy and the exploitation of the Global South. It is therefore impossible for reparations to be realized without bringing an end to the current political and economic system. The article concludes that, ultimately, the value of reparations campaigns lies in their highlighting the need for revolution.

India's struggle for independence held the promise of an end to poverty and redemption from the communal-cum-class-based inequality which had kept the peasant economy backward. But the planned substitution of the agrarian-rural fabric for an industrial-urban way of life failed to materialize. Casualization and contractualization of waged work indicated that labour had become thoroughly commodified in a state of ongoing footlooseness. It was a proletarianization which did not allow for the collective action precondition to raise and settle the social question. The onslaught of neoliberal capitalism in the last quarter of the 20th century ended the brokerage of the nation state to secure the interests of labour next to those of capital. Less than 10 per cent of the workforce has continued to enjoy formalized occupational engagement, mainly in the downgraded public economy. Corporate capital in collusion with statist autocracy has not only effectuated the deregulation of employment but also abandoned the legal code of formality. The outcome is a state of lawlessness for the people at the bottom of the pile. Besides big business, politics and governance are identified in this reconfiguration as stakeholders in a brutal regime of informality, erosive of equality, democracy, welfare and civil rights.

Development is an important, yet contentious word, in the history of post-colonial Sri Lanka. Typically, it is linked with economic progress and societal change, intricately woven into political processes and frequently utilized as a platform to promote Sinhala-Buddhist ethnonationalist agendas. This article looks at post-colonial Sri Lanka's ‘core development project’ — the Mahaweli Development Programme — and its post-war revival with the military as a key actor. Through a detailed ethnographic study, it traces the way in which the military assumed extraordinary powers and became vital to the post-colonial project of development and the militarized practices that enabled this. The author argues that this project of militarized development unfolds in a fourfold manner: by normalizing the presence of the military; by ensuring the military is seen as charitable; by blurring the boundaries between the military and civilians; and lastly by portraying the work carried out by the military as transformative. The article concludes by demonstrating that this militarized project of development is the latest iteration of the long-standing post-colonial project of Sinhala-Buddhist state expansion, enabled through development.

ILO, World Employment and Social Outlook 2023: The Value of Essential Work. Geneva: International Labour Office, 2023. xxv + 254 pp. www.ilo.org/publications/flagship-reports/world-employment-and-social-outlook-2023-value-essential-work

The value of essential work, while long debated, became a central point of discussion during the COVID-19 pandemic, when workers across the world continued to perform what was deemed essential work while exposed to multiple risks. The 2023 International Labour Organization (ILO) flagship report World Employment and Social Outlook 2023: The Value of Essential Work rekindles this discussion by shedding light on the persisting disparities during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic between the societal recognition of certain types of work as essential and the actual conditions faced by those performing such work. Despite public expressions of gratitude during the pandemic, tangible improvements in working conditions for this group of workers have largely failed to materialize. In some cases, the mental and physical well-being of these workers has even deteriorated in the long run.

This Assessment explores the key insights and limitations of the report from a feminist political economy perspective attuned to power dynamics across various scales. The report provides valuable data on essential or key workers and enterprises, elucidating who they are as well as their working conditions both before and during the pandemic. Essential or key workers are defined in the report as those people in occupations deemed essential by 126 countries at the onset of the pandemic in March and April 2020, bar those workers who could carry out essential work from home. Importantly, the report centres the paradoxical nature of essential work — its recognition as vital for meeting the needs of society and its severe undervaluation despite this. However, it fails to consider that essential work is not merely a reflection of societal needs but is also a result of class struggles, political negotiations and historical biases. The ILO's adoption of a universal definition of essential work therefore obscures the contested nature of this category that was used by governments worldwide during the pandemic. Furthermore, the report lacks an explanation for why essential work is undervalued, offering useful but limited policy recommendations. This article argues that the devaluation of essential work stems from a fundamental dilemma within contemporary capitalism: its inherent tendency to destabilize the conditions necessary for social reproduction.

Before proceeding, a clarification of terminology is necessary. In the report, the ILO acknowledges that during the COVID-19 pandemic, the terms ‘key worker’ and ‘essential worker’ were often used interchangeably — something that is reflected in literature, policy and public discourse. However, the term ‘key worker’ is used in the report because the term ‘ess

This article considers the challenge of ensuring that international reparations payments are effective in benefiting the recipient countries of such reparations. To guarantee that these financial flows provide long-term benefits to the recipient economies, the article recommends the adoption of a developmental state approach to the use of the funds. It also considers in detail the advantages of establishing a Bank of International Reparations that serves as a trustee for the receipt and distribution of reparations, facilitates coordination of the use of reparations across countries to avoid disadvantageous forms of competition, provides investment banking services to support the use of the reparations to fund a domestically focused ‘sovereign wealth fund’, and provides ‘public option’ commercial banking services to recipient country firms in order to foster the growth of recipient country economies. Finally, the article finds that the most effective means of funding the reparations would be to use Special Drawing Rights (or SDRs).