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- Convenors:
-
Pritish Behuria
(University of Manchester)
Tom Goodfellow (University of Sheffield)
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- Formats:
- Papers
- Stream:
- Rethinking development
- Sessions:
- Thursday 1 July, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This panel invites papers that critically examine apparent paradigm shifts in how Development Studies is being re-imagined or the recent 'mainstream' re-discovery of heterodox policies and 'older' development priorities (industrial policy, infrastructure, political analysis).
Long Abstract:
The 2008/9 financial crisis, along with the rise of China's influence within global political economy, contributed to optimism that a paradigm shift was underway in development policy and Development Studies. Industrial policy was re-discovered, infrastructure was back on the agenda, some low-income countries were enjoying newfound policy space and even international financial institutions were re-discovering long-lost topics (inequality, industrial policy and the importance of political analysis). As these topics were rediscovered, debates have ensued about the consequences of this shift in development thinking. International Financial Institutions and mainstream economics have been widely accused of diluting heterodox approaches to fit attempts at paradigm maintenance. More recently, the pandemic, cuts to aid and the merging of development and foreign policy in the UK have further fuelled debates on what 'development' might mean in the 2020s.
Alongside these policy shifts, new academic discourses like 'Global Development' have emerged, based on notions of convergence between OECD countries and the rest of the world but without clarity on whether this is a fundamental shift in global political economy or what it implies for development policy. Meanwhile the welcome ongoing movement to decolonize development and take greater account of multiple positionalities and home-grown 'development alternatives' has challenged conventional approaches to the political economy of development.
This panel invites papers that critically examine whether new academic paradigms or the rediscovery of alternative development priorities constitute fundamental change. It urges contributors to consider whether new trends constitute paradigm shifts, or represent opportunistic moves that ultimately serve paradigm maintenance.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 1 July, 2021, -Paper short abstract:
Public-private partnerships are central to current development policy and represent a new frontier of privatization. Drawing on Nigerian examples, the continuities and discontinuities between PPPs and older forms of privatization help us rethink the lines between public/private and state/market.
Paper long abstract:
By the mid-2000s, the World Bank’s two decade “privatization experiment” was finally drawing to a close (Fine 2007). With the UNDP decisively declaring the experiment “failed” (McKinley 2007), the World Bank itself conceded that, at the very least, the one-size-fits-all model of transferring public assets and utilities to private ownership would have to be revised. Yet out of the ashes of ‘hard-core’ privatization arose a new paradigm of private sector-led development: public-private partnerships (PPPs) (Bayliss and Waeyenberge 2018). PPPs have since come to dominate the development landscape: the SDGs target PPPs and they are central to the World Bank’s pandemic response (Dimakou et al. 2020; Gideon and Unterhalter 2020). Denoting a wide variety of arrangements, a common thread among PPPs is that full ownership is rarely transferred. Rather than the state ‘divesting’ from public services, it is enlisted to facilitate the participation of private actors, whether through ‘de-risking’, the creation of bankable products or the guarantee of revenue streams (Shaoul et al. 2012; Gabor 2020).
If PPPs are the new frontier of privatisation, then the empirical study of PPPs and the discourses that surround them allows us to trace how privatisation has evolved over the last two decades. This paper draws on original research on state-level PPPs in Nigeria to highlight the continuities and discontinuities between older and newer paradigms of privatization. It argues that we need to update our understanding of public/private and state/market to reflect changes in modern capitalism and the state.
Paper short abstract:
Amid lessened pressure on industrializing countries to comply with global norms, the paper explores whether reciprocal support for industrial policies delivers for countries in the shadows of regional economic powers. Its comparative analysis focuses on Paraguay, Kyrgyzstan, Nepal, and Mongolia.
Paper long abstract:
The ongoing spatial reconfiguration of global capitalism has arguably lessened institutional pressure on industrializing countries to comply with global norms. At the same time, new tactical alliances among ‘late-late’ industrializers appear more viable than before. The recent example of India and South Africa jointly arguing their case against the extension of the World Trade Organization’s e-commerce moratorium is emblematic of this trend. But what is the evidence that reciprocal support for industrial policies also delivers for countries in the shadows of regional economic powers? This paper explores the extent to which recalibration in the global division of labor and power (GDLP) since the 2008 global financial crisis has helped hitherto sidelined national policymakers implement measures that further their domestic industrial interests. It compares collaborative industrial policy initiatives of four small, landlocked countries located in the geographical vicinities of four of the five BRICS: Paraguay (bordering Brazil), Kyrgyzstan (a former part of the Soviet Union), Nepal (bordering India), and Mongolia (bordering China). Data are drawn from national governmental sources, the World Bank, UNCTAD, the World Economic Forum, and annual reports of the United Nations’ specialized agency devoted to promoting industrial development, UNIDO. The paper’s—preliminary—findings suggest that second-tier actors in regional power blocs commonly remain tied to industrial policy agendas of their larger neighbors, yet important exceptions from this pattern exist. The paper concludes with concrete recommendations for national actors seeking to leverage fortuitous policy spaces to forge effective country-specific industrial development trajectories during the 2020s.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the recent turn towards a renewed focus on infrastructure and urban development assistance among major donors (and particularly the UK), situated against the politics of increased economic nationalism and the merging of development, diplomacy and trade agendas.
Paper long abstract:
The past decade has seen repeated upheaval in the development sector, from the aftershocks of the financial crisis and right-wing populist campaigns against aid to the global trauma of COVID-19. In the UK, these events have culminated in the slashing of aid and the merging of DFID and the Foreign Office. Yet alongside this tumultuous decade in the aid sector, the emergence of the SDGs and UN-HABITAT’s ‘New Urban Agenda’ promised a new dawn for inclusive and sustainable development, built from the bottom up.
Ticking away in the background of this crisis decade has been the growing obsession with the ‘infrastructure gap’. The rediscovery of infrastructure, and indeed of cities – both central objects of aid in the early development decades that fell from grace with the neoliberal turn – intrinsically has much to recommend it. However, when set against the financial sector’s post-crisis quest for new asset horizons, the politics of Britain’s post-Brexit ‘global role’, and signs of increased alignment between development, diplomacy and trade, the raft of recent programmes on cities and infrastructure risk becoming focused on exporting British infrastructure (and infrastructure expertise) abroad. While infrastructure and urban assistance in the early development period were associated with a relatively coherent industrialization agenda, in today’s context of financialization, multipolar competition and environmental crisis these agendas are subject to competing logics. This paper explores how negative discourses concerning gaps and absences are substituting for a positive agenda, rendering the real ‘new urban agenda’ vulnerable to the whims of politics in donor countries.
Paper short abstract:
Using the Deals and Development framework to examine the political drivers of rapid economic growth and maintenance in Ethiopia, the paper contends that the 2018 disruptive change in the political settlement affected export-oriented and domestic market-oriented economic actors differently.
Paper long abstract:
The demise of the EPRDF-led dominant party political settlement caused multiple layers of rupture and disruption in the Ethiopian political economy. We adopt the Deals and Development framework to identify and analyse the political determinants of rapid economic growth (2004-2017) and how current changes in the political settlement affect the interplay among various political and economic actors. We contend that there are substantive variations in how political and economic actors are affected by, and responding to the disruptive changes in the political settlement and the deals space of the Ethiopian political economy since 2018.
Our study shows that economic actors in the export-oriented sectors (Rentiers & Magicians) are primarily feeling the burn because of increased insecurity and emergence de-facto local actors exploiting power vacuum at the lowest level of governance. Key informant interviews from oil seeds exporters and the tourism sector reported no major (in)formal policy and regulation changes; hence the order has remained intact in the rent spaces. On the contrary, economic actors that target the domestic economy (Powerbrokers & Workhorses) are heavily affected by the ongoing change in the political settlement because politicians and bureaucrats significantly shape the rents they generate. Key informants on METEC and within the construction sector illustrated that the ongoing change has induced new policies, regulations and entrants which created disorder, opening up and unpredictability.
The Deals and Development framework offers insightful perspectives by shifting the focus from a narrow study of formal institutions to examining political drivers of growth in different growth episodes.