51本色 – Page 16 – A Critical Perspective On Development Economics

What Happens to 鈥楪ender鈥� in Food and Agricultural Research? Mapping Four Broad Trends

October 7, 2021September 26, 2021 picchiofLeave a comment

By Merisa S. Thompson and Fiorella Picchioni

The Women and Development Study Group of the Development Studies Association (DSA) recently revisited Sally Brown and Anne Marie Goetz鈥檚 1997 Feminist Review 鈥榃ho Needs (Sex) When You Can Have Gender? Conflicting Discourses on Gender at Beijing?鈥�. The article examines challenges to the concept of 鈥榞ender鈥� at the UN Fourth World Conference on Women in 1995, including debates on its institutionalization and depoliticization, the tendency for it to be used as a synonym for 鈥榳omen鈥�, and the conservative backlash against the very use of the concept itself. The retrospective value of doing this showed just how relevant these questions continue to be for Gender and Development policy, practice, research and teaching today.

For example, when teaching sex and gender, critical feminist theorising can sometimes lead students to feel that Gender and Development (GAD) approaches are too instrumentalized, too much like an industry and disconnected from reality. Moreover, the positionality of working as 鈥樷€� in larger projects, where the gender component is often seen to stand alone with little connection to other intersectional dynamics, remains an ongoing challenge. The increasing and worrying trend of an anti-woke against feminist analysis and gender equality across the globe was also a recurring theme.

We also considered how 鈥榞ender鈥� as a concept is mobilised and used in food and agricultural studies specifically. In this blog, therefore, we examine what happens to the concept in food research, policy and practice, mapping out four broad trends. Firstly, the centring of the connection between gender, nutrition and mothering remains pervasive. Secondly, 鈥榞ender equality鈥� is often instrumentalized as a tool to increase marketized forms of agricultural productivity. Thirdly, while a focus on gender is obviously welcome, it can in fact obscure other important axes of oppression, such as race, class, sexuality, disability and nationality. Finally, it is consequently crucial to ground research, policy and practice in historical specificity and context in order to take into account multiple underlying oppressions and structural inequalities that influence the ability of a range of different actors in the food system to participate both socially and economically.

Walter Rodney鈥檚 Lost Book:聽One Hundred Years of Development in Africa

October 5, 2021September 25, 2021 editorroapeLeave a comment

By Leo Zeilig.

One of the most astonishing books that Walter Rodney 鈥� the Guyanese revolutionary and historian 鈥� ever wrote was published several years after he was assassinated on 13 June 1980. The story of this book and how it came to be published is almost as remarkable as the life of the revolutionary himself. In 1978, Rodney was working as a full-time activist of the Working People鈥檚 Alliance (WPA) in Georgetown, the capital of Guyana. The WPA was a revolutionary organisation seeking to unite the African and Indian working class in the highly divided country, then run by the brutal Forbes Burnham. Rodney was the group鈥檚 principal organiser and intellectual, and to support himself and his family, and to fundraise for the WPA, he travelled overseas to teach and work.

One trip to Germany in 1978 shows us how his last book came to be. Rodney travelled from Guyana to Hamburg in April of that year. He was already the celebrated and outspoken author of How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, and his arrival was eagerly anticipated. He had been invited by the radical German scholar, Rainer Tetzlaff, to teach a course on the history of African development at the University of Hamburg.

The lecture course Rodney was employed to teach was titled, 鈥楢frican Development, 1878-1978鈥�, and comprised, according to the one-page programme, 鈥�(i) a brief introduction to development concepts; (ii) a survey of African colonial economies with special reference to East and West Africa; and (iii) an examination of post-colonial developments in Kenya and Tanzania.鈥� According to the brief programme there were going to be twelve lectures, comprising, 鈥楾he debate on development concepts in Africa鈥� and 鈥楶ost-colonial development strategies鈥�.¹

The Struggle for Development

September 29, 2021September 25, 2021 benjaminselwynLeave a comment

This post is adapted from the preface for the newly published of The Struggle for Development, . The original edition aimed to root development thinking and practice in the analysis of class relations, and intellectual and political support for labouring class struggles. Turkey is experiencing numerous social struggles that illuminate the relevance of the arguments in this book. It is my hope that this book contributes to illuminating the social, developmental, value of these struggles.

Collective struggles by labouring class communities 鈥� in and beyond the workplace 鈥� have the capacity to generate real human developmental gains for these communities. Consequently, these struggles and the labouring classes that pursue them, should be considered as developmental.

The majority of development thinking across the political spectrum 鈥� whether theoretically or policy focussed 鈥� tends to downplay labouring classes, their struggles and the gains they generate. Rather, such struggles are usually ignored or are portrayed as obstacles to development, because they do not adhere to dominant capitalist notions of development.

Capitalist notions and strategies of development take many forms, and can be thought of as existing along a spectrum 鈥� from more market-led/neoliberal, to more state-directed forms. In this book I argue that, despite notable differences, these forms of development represent varieties of capital-centred development. Here capital accumulation is prioritised as the basis of economic and human development. As I show in this book, both market led and state led forms of development are based upon the assumption that labouring classes represent an objective input into the development process, rather than a subjective agent of development. This assumption legitimates labour exploitation and repression for the greater 鈥榞ood鈥� of capital accumulation.

Does financialization provoke increasing prices? The case of Brazilian private health insurance聽

September 24, 2021September 14, 2021 carlosockLeave a comment

Since the Brazilian Regulatory Agency for Supplementary Health鈥檚 (ANS) creation in 2000, health insurance inflation has grown at a much greater pace than general inflation. Indeed, after eighteen years the private health insurance price index was close to double the official inflation index, with its 382% (see ).

The upward course of prices can be interpreted as a response to the problems arising from the escalating costs. Baumol (2012) calls this phenomenon 鈥渃ost disease鈥�, designating that labor relates differently to production: in the case of the goods, work would be incorporated into the product; in the case of services, labor would be the product being exchanged, making difficult to substitute factors.

Dismantling and transcending colonialism鈥檚 legacy

September 20, 2021October 12, 2021 jotadesinaLeave a comment

In 鈥渄ecolonial鈥� discourse, the African leadership landscape is flattened to the point of becoming a caricature. In an earlier variation of this caricature, Kwame Nkrumah鈥檚 injunction of 鈥渟eek ye first the political kingdom鈥� was presented by political scientist as a deficient obsession with political power to the neglect of the economic. In the , the neglect of epistemic 鈥渄ecoloniality鈥� is characterized as the deficient underbelly of the 鈥渘ationalist鈥� movement.

Kwame Nkrumah, S茅dar Senghor, and Julius Nyerere are not only three of the most cerebral figures of Africa鈥檚鈥渘ationalist鈥� movement, but unlike Amilcar Cabral they lived to lead their countries in the aftermath of formal colonial rule.

Contrary declarations notwithstanding, Senghor, Nkrumah, and Nyerere were acutely aware of the colonial epistemological project and the need to transcend it. Indeed, philosopher Souleymane Bachir Diagne鈥檚 of Negritude as epistemology argued that its salience lies in the dissolution of the binary opposition of subject and object in the logic of Ren茅 Descartes. Whatever one鈥檚 take on the specificity of Senghor鈥檚 claims of Africa鈥檚 modes of knowing鈥攂y insisting on the interconnectedness of subject and object鈥攈e deliberately sought to mark out what is deficient in modern European epistemology and valorize African systems of knowledge. This epistemological project is built on a distinct African ontological premise.

Dependency, gender,聽and race

September 12, 2021September 12, 2021 Felipe Antunes de OliveiraLeave a comment

In the classical works of dependency theory, such as the Dialectics of Dependency (Marini 2011 [1973]); Socialism or Fascism (Dos Santos 2018 [1978]); Dependency and Development in Latin America (Cardoso and Faletto 1979) and Latin American Dependent Capitalism (Bambirra 2012 [1978]), race and gender are absent. This absence is at odds with both the evident reality of racial and patriarchal oppression in Latin America and the concomitant rise of feminist and anti-colonial literature in the social sciences. In fact, in the exciting intellectual and political environment of the 1960s and 1970s, it would not be difficult to imagine productive dialogues between Ruy Mauro Marini and Margaret Benston, and V芒nia Bambirra and Amilcar Cabral. Sadly, these dialogues never took place. Instead, the first generation of dependency scholarship privileged debates with white, male scholars engaged in modernisation sociology, structuralist economics and Marxist orthodoxy. With the sole exception of V芒nia Bambirra鈥檚 forgotten writings about peripheral women鈥檚 liberation, gender and race remain to this day ignored by the dependency tradition.

Although the absence of race and gender does indeed represent a major blind spot in the work of dependency writers, the most seminal concepts coined by some of the early dependency writers such as Ruy Mauro Marini and V芒nia Bambirra have 鈥榠ntersectional鈥� (Crenshaw 1989; 1991) potential. By that, I mean that they can be understood as referring to more than simply class-based dynamics of domination. Let us consider two examples: Marini鈥檚 concept of the 鈥榮uper-exploitation鈥� of labour and Bambirra鈥檚 definition of Latin American ruling classes as 鈥榙ominated鈥揹ominant鈥�.