Aid for trade and ecologically sustainable development in Australia’s international aid program

In September 2015, Australia, along with 193 member states of the United Nations, signed the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. The facilitation of international trade and increasing foreign aid for developing countries were emphasised as crucial means for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals. An important role was assigned to the international Aid for Trade initiative, which is about stimulating economic growth in developing countries through removing constraints to trade. Australia has been a strong supporter of the Aid for Trade initiative since it was launched at the World Trade Organization’s Ministerial Conference in Hong Kong in 2005. Aid for trade has become a central plank of the ‘new development paradigm’ of Australia’s international aid program. This article analyses the conceptualisation and practice of aid for trade in Australia’s aid, with a focus on how it links to ecologically sustainable development. It argues that Australia’s aid for trade is reinforcing the neo-liberal development paradigm in which environmental dimensions are overall neglected and private sector development and free trade are prioritised. In order to achieve international and national development goals of poverty reduction and sustainable development, environmental sustainability needs to be fully integrated into the growing aid for trade portfolio of Australia’s international aid.     

Can advocacy change the views of politicians about aid? The potential and limits of a presence-based approach

Advocates of foreign aid in OECD countries navigate a unique form of politics. The beneficiaries of foreign aid spending have little voice in elite level decision-making about aid commitments from OECD countries. Thus foreign aid spending has a form of politics unlike other areas of policy where there is more direct budget accountability with citizens. Scholarly attention has increased on this unusual domestic politics of aid spending yet there remains little examination of the opportunities, challenges and tensions for aid organisations in advocating to elected officials. This article focuses on the case of Australian foreign aid, and the Australian Aid and Parliament project, an initiative of Save the Children. This initiative facilitates exposure visits to aid recipient countries for Australian parliamentarians. Most aid advocacy projects in OECD countries rely on mobilising citizens of those countries to act as a proxy, advocating on behalf of aid beneficiaries. This project reveals the potential of advocacy efforts that focus on the direct ‘presence’ of aid beneficiaries in the experience of elected officials (from donor countries). Yet it also reveals several challenges, and tensions between advocates, about how aid commitments change, and the most effective role for advocacy groups to play.     

Policy versus Practice. Behind the Scenes in Dutch Development Aid, 1949–1989

The history of development aid has often been analyzed on the level of international politics and ground breaking ideas on big overriding issues. But the policies developed in the various Western capitals do not in themselves provide a full picture of foreign aid. It is important to examine the field more closely: what did actually happen ‘on the ground’ as a result of intentions and agreements on aid? Did the practice of aid projects influence aid effectiveness? The present article looks at the history of aid provided by the Netherlands, a country that for a long time liked to portray itself as occupying a guiding role in the vanguard of international development. It is based on archival study of project files, set in countries that were at the core of the Dutch aid effort. They are taken from the time span of four decades in which the aid effort was developed and flourished, before the end of the Cold War changed the scenery in 1989. The article aims to shed new light on how policy aims were translated and provides an indication as to why the desired results failed to come about.     

Foreign Aid after the Cold War

This paper argues that foreign aid programmes originated as part of the ideological confrontation known as the Cold War and that the motives behind aid were always more political than economic. It is further argued that the economic justifications for foreign aid — filling ‘gaps’ in capital, technology and skills—are suspect and that the economic benefits in terms of long-term development are at best negligible. Turning to the future, foreign aid programmes are bound to change to reflect the new realities of global international relations. Nine specific predictions are made about the future size and composition of aid programmes. The outlook for those who favour aid is not bright, but recent changes in thinking about development suggest that more sell-reliant strategies could well be more beneficial to the poor than conventional aid-supported strategies.     

New Labour’s overseas development aid policy – charity or self-interest?

Robin Cook argued that New Labour’s foreign policy would have ‘ethical dimensions’,(Cook, “Robin Cook’s Speech on the Government’s Ethical Foreign Policy.”) and an assumption is often made, within existing literature, that this is an accurate statement when considering the overseas development agenda of New Labour government’s between 1997 and 2010. Tingley argues that the more left-wing a party, the more likely they are to increase attention on, and funding of, overseas development aid (ODA) projects.(Tingley, “Donors and Domestic Politics.”) This article uses the New Labour governments, from 1997 to 2010, as a case study to test the argument of Tingley and determines that his conclusions are accurate in the case of the UK. This article will then argue, using the work of Breuning that the motivations of the New Labour governments, and the way they conveyed their policy to the electorate changed overtime rather than remaining morally focused for the duration of their time in power.(Breuning, “Words and Deeds.”) By focusing on the rhetoric of the Labour Party, the changes in motivation can be identified in the period 1997–2010, with a distinct move from moral justifications to more self-interested pragmatic reasoning, which confirms Breuning’s argument.     

Australian aid after the ‘Golden Consensus’: from aid policy to development policy?

ABSTRACT

In the decade preceding the election of the Abbott Coalition Government in 2013, a so-called ‘golden consensus’ governed Australian aid policy. During this period Australia’s aid spending increased by over 80% in real terms. However, after winning government the 2013 Federal Election, the Abbott Government made a series of significant and unexpected aid policy decisions, cutting the aid budget three times in fifteen months and integrating AusAID, Australia’s aid agency, into the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. This article considers the future role of aid in Australia’s diplomacy primarily by engaging with a prior question: how was it possible for the golden consensus to be uprooted so easily? Conducting a post-mortem reveals that Australia’s development constituency bears some responsibility for the fragility of the consensus. This analysis also reveals the critical role the development constituency will play in determining the extent to which Australia is able to embrace the ‘beyond aid’ agenda. To meet this contemporary challenge, the development community must heed the lessons of the collapse of the golden consensus and, in particular, overcome its reticence to engage in broader foreign policy debates.     

Does size matter? Foreign aid in Taiwan's diplomatic strategy, 2000–8

This article is the first systematic attempt at estimating the size of Taiwanese foreign aid and, thus, the cost of Taiwan's aid diplomacy. It questions the Republic of China (ROC) President Ma Ying-jeou's justification of his ‘diplomatic truce’ with China as necessitated by an ineffectiveness of his predecessor Chen Shui-bian's costly aid diplomacy. Deriving its evidence from the ROC governmental budgets, local media reports and interviews with Taiwanese officials involved in foreign aid implementation, the article argues that President Chen did not engage in ‘generous financial aid’ and proposes that this parsimony, rather than futility of aid diplomacy as a strategy to expand Taiwan's international space, should be considered as contributing to Taipei's diplomatic failures from 2000 to 2008.     

Struggling for food in a time of crisis: Responsibility and paradox

Struggling for food in a time of crisis: responsibility and paradox. Responsibility is a useful lens through which to examine the current state of food poverty in the UK in the context of the Covid-19 crisis, noting that this concept contains several paradoxes. Currently, responsibility involves the voluntary sector, the food industry and the state, a situation which the author has been exploring for the last five years in an ethnographic study of food poverty and food aid in the UK. Food aid organizations, especially food banks, have mushroomed during the period of austerity. This reveals the first paradox: namely, that the existence of food banks conveys the message that ‘something is being done’, but in actuality this is very far from being sufficient to meet the needs of either the ‘old’ or ‘new’ food insecure. The second paradox is that at the onset of the crisis, a government which had been responsible for inflicting austerity on the country for 10 years, dramatically reversed some of its policies. However, predictably, this did not change the situation vis-à-vis food insecurity. The third paradox is that the frequent rhetoric invoking the two world wars has not resulted in lessons being learned – notably, the creation of a ministry to deal with food and rationing, as in the Second World War. The final paradox relates to Brexit and its likely deleterious effects on food security, particularly if no ‘deal’ is achieved with the European Union, as seems likely. The voluntary food aid sector, try as it may, cannot possibly assume responsibility for the long-standing and now hugely increased problems of food insecurity. That belongs to the state.     

“We are not animals!” Humanitarian border security and zoopolitical spaces in EUrope

This article juxtaposes two prominent discourses accompanying the neoliberalisation of EUrope's borders. The first is the emerging notion of humanitarian ‘migrant-centredness’ found in the policies of elites and security professionals in the field of EUropean border security and migration management. The second is the use of animalised metaphors and imagery that pervade narratives of ‘irregular’ migrants' embodied experiences of detention across and beyond EUrope. It argues that what is at stake in this juxtaposition is more than simply a discrepancy between the ‘rhetoric’ of neoliberal bordering and the ‘reality’ of ‘irregular’ migrants' experiences. Such a view, which is commonly held among diverse critics of border violence, ultimately makes a problematic appeal back to the very humanitarian frame that has already been coopted by authorities associated with or even complicit in that violence. Seeking an alternative diagnosis and ground for critique beyond the ‘rhetoric/reality’ bind, the analysis draws on conceptual resources found in (post)biopolitical theory – particularly Jacques Derrida's concept of ‘zoopolitics’ – in order to identify and explore animalisation as a specific spatial technology of power. Understanding the work that the zoopolitical threshold does in shaping contemporary spaces of incarceration and producing animalised subjects offers new insights into both governmental logics of border security and the limits of humanitarian-based critiques.     

The new face of development: The ‘bottom of the pyramid’ entrepreneurs (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

In recent years, ‘bottom of the pyramid’ (BoP) initiatives – from Grameen Phone Ladies and Solar Sister, to Women First and Living Goods – have captured increasing attention, not only in corporate boardrooms where the desire for untapped revenue streams looms large, but also in the arenas of development policy and practice, where entrepreneurship is celebrated as a way to repurpose ‘informal’ and/or ‘subsistence’ workers through new forms of private sector engagement. Based on fieldwork with BoP schemes in Bangladesh and South Africa, and cases drawn from other regions, this paper explores how development is outsourced through the figure of the BoP entrepreneur, the ‘poor’ woman who travels door‐to‐door delivering a range of branded manufactured goods across the ‘retail black spots’ of developing countries. These women are actively converted into entrepreneurial subjects through a set of ideological and material practices that aim to produce and hone the requisite traits of industry, market discipline and entrepreneurial distinction to succeed in global business; subject positions that can bring tangible rewards to those who successfully assume them. However, the process of outsourcing development to a reservoir of ‘informal labour’ unsettles BoP claims of ‘inclusive capitalism’, as an ethos of meritocracy and individual responsibility not only deflects the responsibility for development onto the poor themselves, but remakes their subjectivities in service to global brands.     

All aboard? Women working the spaces of gentrification in Toronto's Junction

Despite early attention being paid to the connections amongst ‘gender, work and gentrification’ in the urban geography literature, there have been few attempts to examine the experiences of women as workers in gentrifying neighbourhoods. This gap leaves open critical questions about the nature of the links between the production of gendered work practices and the production of gentrified urban landscapes. In this article, I explore how women working in a variety of differently precarious situations – as struggling small business owners, self-employed workers and part-time workers – manage the tensions and contradictions of struggling for economic survival while attempting to support community-building efforts and social reproduction needs in a gentrifying area. Using data drawn from interviews and urban ethnographic methods in Toronto's ‘Junction’ neighbourhood, I argue that precarious conditions of work in the context of gentrification engender a variety of diverse economic and social practices – developed through immaterial and affective labour – that, in turn, produce particular, and often contradictory, social and economic landscapes of gentrification. I will explore the ways in which gendered vulnerabilities and insecurities are ironically produced, in part, by the feminized consumption landscape, which primes neighbourhoods for widespread gentrification. Through examining these dynamics, we can begin to theorize the structural production of precarity, and in particular, gendered precarity, through urban processes such as gentrification.     

Making gender–work practicable: situating men's reconstruction of ‘women's job’ in a Swedish supermarket's micro-politics

Based on empirical data from one Swedish supermarket, this article argues that men's reconstructing of ‘women's work’ in accordance with a masculinised sense of self what Simpson (2004, ‘Masculinity at Work: The Experience of Men in Female Dominated Occupations’, Work, Employment & Society 18, no 2: 349–368) calls ‘gender–work’ is not limited to individual men's perceptions and creations of self. Rather, by investigating the gendered boundary work in which the manager and other workers engage, this study shows how these reconstructions are legitimised and made practicable by organisational micro-politics. By emphasising the specific skills required by ‘their’ department – produce – the male workers distanced themselves from the routine and standardised stocking that dominated the work performed at the supermarket. This notion that working in the produce department required specialised knowledge was legitimised by the manager and the organisation of work at the supermarket. While at times, other workers (most of them women) challenged the boundaries of the produce department, they simultaneously re-established those boundaries by glossing over potential conflicts and maintaining equal treatment existed within the organisation.     

Soviet official critiques of the resource scarcity prediction by limits to growth report: the case of Evgenii Fedorov’s ecological crisis rhetoric

ABSTRACT

This paper focuses on official Soviet attitudes towards ‘ecological crisis’ and the rhetoric developed to address it. It analyses in particular the discussions in the Soviet Union that followed the publication of the Club of Rome report Limits to Growth (1972). It contributes to the better understanding of the debate around resource scarcity in a framework of so-called ‘ecological crisis’ as it was conceptualized in the late 1960s to the mid-1970s. It is based on the analysis of writings by the Soviet geophysicist Evgenii Fedorov (1910–81) who was among the few Soviet members of the Club of Rome and thus had direct access to contemporary Western scholarship. The paper explores how such rhetoric accepted and reconceptualized the notion of crisis for use in both domestic and international environmental politics and the associated advancement of technology as the most effective remedy against resource scarcity. Fedorov largely built his ideas on Soviet Marxism and Vladimir Vernadsky’s concepts, which preceded the current notion of the Anthropocene. In addition, his experience in nuclear projects and weather modification research –– both more or less successful technocratic projects – gave him some kind of assurance of the power of technology. The paper also provides some comparison of the views of the problem from the other side of the Iron Curtain through a discussion of the thoughts of the left-wing American environmentalist Barry Commoner (1917–2012), which had been popularized for the Soviet public by Fedorov.     

Capitalizing on Bare Life: Sovereignty,Exception, and Gender Politics

Abstract: This article examines the capital value of bare life as part of aid/development in (post)Taliban Afghanistan. I argue that the political production and spatial fixity of homo sacer “as the object of aid and protection” within specific geographic locations subsequently territorializes gendered bodies as a site for capital accumulation and exchange value through aid/development allocation. This occurs through a continual discursive reduction of “full or proper” human life to the remnants of bare life. This subjective reduction subsequently elicits capitalist‐modernity as a prime method for rescuing bare life and transferring it to an image (and imaginary) of western political and economic life. Gendered multiplicities of bare life emerge from variant forms of political and economic opportunity among aid/development workers and Afghan recipients. I argue that the discursive framing of bare life is situated as a site for (re)constructing rights through “western” frameworks infused with geopolitical and economic exchange value.     

Meeting the demand for meat?

Renewed fears expressed by the United Nations about worldwide population growth have coincided with international concerns about the increased consumption of meat. This article, which draws upon long‐term fieldwork in the Guatemalan highlands and ongoing scientific research in the Netherlands, examines the ways in which global organizations are framing and responding to these concerns. Economists generally address the problem of increased meat consumption through the language of ‘demand’, while nutritionists adopt the rhetoric of nutritional ‘needs’. Not only do these approaches tend to present meat – which in practice takes many forms – as a single substance, but they also flatten the nuanced relationships that exist between the eater and the eaten, while overlooking the diverse contexts in which ‘meat’ eating takes place. This article addresses the question how anthropologists might approach the topic of increased meat consumption, suggesting that an analysis of the ways in which global actors approach this topic can help the discipline of anthropology to re‐engage with historic debates about the role of ‘the material’ and ‘the symbolic’ in relation to eating practices and to move these debates in new and productive directions.     

Negotiating change: working with children and their employers to transform child domestic work in Iringa,Tanzania

This paper documents the practical and action-oriented findings of an investigation into child domestic work undertaken in Iringa, Tanzania from 2005 to 2007. It provides an overview of the experiences of both child domestic workers and their employers, before discussing their suggestions for how child domestic working arrangements may be improved. The latter sections of the paper relate the attempts to regulate child domestic work that emerged from such dialogue. In providing detailed information on that process, the paper is positioned within the field of action research and resists the boundary frequently applied between academia and activism. It also moves beyond the tendency – observed in many existing studies of child (domestic) work – to document problems without proposing solutions. The regulatory focus of the project is theoretically supported by a social constructionist reading of the situation facing (child) domestic workers in Iringa (and elsewhere). Domestic workers have been discursively constructed as ‘one of the family’ rather than employees. This paper posits that the exploitation of child domestic workers relies on such constructions, and that improved regulation of this employment sector may offer an opportunity to discursively and tangibly reconstruct child domestic work as ‘real work’. Although formulated in the Tanzanian context, the recommendations are of broader geographical relevance.     

Cross-border childcare strategies of Burmese migrant workers in Thailand

In discussing the challenges of cross-border childcare faced by migrant workers, most research focuses on ‘distance mothering’, assuming that children remain in the place of origin. In contrast, this article focuses on childcare at the place of destination in the context of migrant Burmese factory workers in Thailand. Since many of these workers are ‘undocumented’, they have few rights in their place of destination. This is especially problematic in the areas of reproductive health and childcare rights. Despite such obstacles, Burmese migrant workers strive to manage their childcare responsibilities by mobilizing whatever resources are available, as well as seeking to maximize the possibilities of citizenship and education rights for their children. According to our research, the specific strategies deployed vary according to the particular location in Thailand in which migrants are working. This study analyzes three locations in Thailand – one in the central Thailand, and the other two at the borderlands between Burma and Thailand. Through a feminist analysis of the ‘care diamond’, the study demonstrates how Burmese women migrant workers utilize the different migrant labor governance systems and porous international border as resources and opportunities to develop complex and changing strategies to juggle their childcare arrangements.     

Chinese Aid in the South Pacific: Linked to Resources?

Abstract

China’s emergence as a global development actor has implications for developing countries and “traditional” donor agencies. Its current provision of foreign aid and other forms of development assistance to developing countries throughout the world presents both opportunities and challenges for all actors. At the same time, China’s growing need for natural resources and its policy of securing access through state-led “resource diplomacy” are causing concern. While most scholars and commentators are focused on the “China in Africa” dimension, China’s engagement in the South Pacific region has also been growing rapidly over the past decade and offers some interesting and unique insights. This article examines the dynamics of China’s provision of foreign aid and its quest for natural resources in the South Pacific region, with comparative references to other regions. Drawing particularly upon interviews and site visits in Fiji and Papua New Guinea, it argues that although major commercial resource contracts do appear to be supported by Chinese Government assistance, resources deals are not explicitly part of Chinese foreign aid in the region.     

Rethinking vulnerability through Covid-19

In times of crisis, inequalities are more commonly exaggerated than ameliorated – meaning both that vulnerable populations are often forced to make do with what resources are at hand and that many of those who barely manage in ‘normal’ times are pushed beyond capability and opportunity thresholds. Indeed, new case definitions of vulnerability that emerge in a crisis may push previously unrecognized groups (e.g. service employees, ‘care’ facility residents) into extreme vulnerability, as borderline coping quickly becomes calamity coping. To understand emerging vulnerability, it is therefore critical for social scientists to have a seat at the table where scarce resources are being allocated – before, during and after a crisis.     

The African bill: Chinese struggles with development assistance (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

Chinese diplomats and politicians have sought to underline the mutually beneficial and cordial nature of Chinese engagement with Africa through the use of phrases such as ‘win‐win cooperation’ (huying huli hezuo) and ‘friendly collaboration’ (youhao hezuo). Avoiding the use of concepts such as ‘aid’, which suggest a hierarchical relationship between giver and receiver, they have argued that Chinese initiatives on the African continent are fundamentally different from Western development assistance. An anthropological glance at the situation on the ground however, shows that these statements are not only a part of political rhetoric, but that they also mask the similarities between Chinese and Western involvement with development in Africa.