Development and Change最新文献

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).

In 2015 the German government acknowledged that the Empire committed genocide in its colony South West Africa, known since its independence as Namibia. This acknowledgement marked a new reference point in how to engage with colonial crimes. Since then, Germany has fallen short of bearing full and unconditional responsibility for and recognition of the crime in terms of restorative justice. While Germany deserves credit for its commemoration and remorse over the Holocaust during World War II, victims of other forms of extermination with the intent to destroy still crave adequate recognition, commemoration and compensation in the form of reparations. This article presents the Namibian case to illustrate the contradictions and limitations that emerge when general notions are tested and undermined by asymmetric power relations of Realpolitik.

This article uses Mercado Libre, the leading digital platform company in Latin America, as an illustrative case to analyse the effect of regional platforms on development, by considering their interplay with both global leaders and local actors. Building on dependency theory, the article identifies the company's structural dependence on algorithms and computing power provided by the largest information technology (Big Tech) companies in the United States. Nonetheless, it also finds that Mercado Libre is at the frontier in applied data analysis solutions tailored for its businesses. Together with a privileged access to personalized and cross-fertilized market and financial datasets, the company's internal and purchassed technologies are the source of asymmetric relationships with its platforms’ users. The article conceptualizes Mercado Libre's place in digital capitalism as extractivist with local actors and, just like local elites when dependency theory was first formulated, it is complicit with global powers. But, unlike those elite firms, it is not technologically laggard, and its value capture is underpinned by its technological advantage. Thus, this article conceptualizes (digital) dependency as multiple layers of economic power in which leading firms from the peripheries occupy intermediate and interconnecting positions. It shows that, while these regional leaders operate at the technological frontier, economic power relations based on technological asymmetries remain crucial for studying underdevelopment.

The World Bank-funded Bisri Dam in Lebanon represents an emblematic case of a high-modernist project that has foundered on a mix of hydrogeological recalcitrance, popular opposition and compounding crises. Examining the popular contestation surrounding the Bisri Dam, this article offers a socio-ecological material lens on post-colonial state building and the political economy of infrastructural failure. Avoiding the analytical impasse of crisis epistemes and heuristics of failure within the long tradition of development studies on the Global South in general, and Lebanon in particular, the article poses a number of questions. How are ‘crises’ and ‘failures’ constitutive of capitalist development, and for whom are they generative? How can the ubiquitous failures of the promises of infrastructure become an opportunity for the re-animation, re-appropriation and re-politicization of hydrogeologies and political imaginaries? Rather than perceiving them as aberrations, the author argues that failures are constitutive of high-modernist infrastructural development, its liberal prescriptive techno-political models, and the speculative logics of endless ruination. Yet, failures can also become generative, instigating new political imaginaries and historical subjectivities. The article pays special attention to competing modalities of power, focusing on the collective power of oppositional groups, coupled with the material recalcitrant power of local hydrogeology, in resisting unviable, speculative infrastructure.

Limited progress in World Trade Organization (WTO) multilateral trade negotiations has led to calls to expand plurilateral processes through which groups of member states can negotiate new agreements. These calls have manifested in Joint Statement Initiatives (JSIs), covering issues such as investments and e-commerce. To their proponents, JSIs offer a path to update rules and move towards flexible multilateralism. However, critics argue that JSIs marginalize developing countries and reinforce the dominance of advanced economies. Notwithstanding this criticism, a growing number of developing countries are joining these initiatives. Through data collected from in-depth interviews with officials from 60 WTO member states, this article examines the drivers for growing JSI membership among developing countries. It illustrates that many are joining JSIs to avoid being excluded from agreements that might become binding in the future. While such membership is driven by fear of exclusion and the preference to ‘be in the room’, the negotiation processes of the JSIs often mean that developing countries have little actual influence over the negotiation outcomes. The article concludes that JSIs represent a significant change in the organization of multilateral trade negotiations and enable larger economies to restore their ‘go-it-alone power’ in multilateral trade governance.

This article considers why Brazilian industrial policies have varied across sectors since the mid-1990s. It relies on a Polanyian-inspired framework to propose that the strength of counter-movements against corporate welfare shapes the sector-specific capacity of policy makers to exert state discipline over business interests and diverges from neoliberal scripts of industrial policy making. The authors use prototypical case studies on the automotive, animal protein and pharmaceutical sectors to support their argument. In the automotive industry, the continuous pressure from powerful and cohesive labour unions led to the emergence of a neo-corporatist sectoral regime that was characterized by a tripartite policy design and encompassed conditionalities. In the case of animal protein, the lack of bottom-up pressure culminated in a disembedded neoliberal sectoral regime, in which business owners received almost unconditional benefits, turning industrial policies into corporate welfare. Finally, in the pharmaceutical industry, the combination of diffuse societal demands and unions with intermediate relevance led to an embedded neoliberal sectoral regime that combined selective conditionalities with some space for non-business participation in policy design.

The need for emerging economies to develop infrastructure in order to drive catch-up growth has become a common refrain in policy circuits. The dominant norm promulgated and disseminated by global development institutions to countries facing infrastructure deficits is the public–private partnership (PPP) model of project finance, a market-based model that seeks to transform infrastructure into a financial asset. Institutionalizing this model requires the deepening of market rationality in governance and the establishment of markets for infrastructure projects and infrastructure debt, underpinned by regulatory and institutional changes aimed at de-risking global investments. However, this model is neither overriding nor monolithic. It is contested, modified and augmented by alternative state-led models, rationalities and practices, animated by developmental politics. The article examines the embeddedness of the PPP model in Indonesia, where it is selectively appropriated by politicians and bureaucrats in line with state development objectives by mobilizing state-owned enterprises (SOEs) as developers, insurers and financiers of infrastructure projects. Beyond establishing the conditions for market exchange and de-risking capital, the state, through SOEs, is an active market participant, competing and partnering with private sector actors, while advancing state-led alternatives where the market-based model fails to address development needs. This case highlights the potential for developmental politics to shape the broad use of capital in the face of disciplinary pressure from global finance.