MIGRATION AND REMITTANCES

This paper examines patterns of remittances among migrants from Guizhou province of China. Our research is motivated by three lines of theoretical arguments, namely the new economics of migration, a translocal perspective linking remittances and development, and the culture of remittances. Taking individual, household, and village-level characteristics into account, we estimated multilevel logistic models of the decision to remit and multilevel models of the amount of remittances. Our results show that migrant remittance behaviour is responsive to family needs as well as household economic position in the village. Migrants who come from entrepreneurial households are more likely to remit a large amount than other types of households. We find some evidence of ‘culture of remittances’ in these villages. Consistent with our expectations, migrants who are from villages with higher amounts of average remittances are likely to remit a larger amount than otherwise.     

THE IMPACT OF REMITTANCES ON REGIONAL CONSUMPTION AND INVESTMENT

This paper examines the effects of international remittances on regional economic development using spatial data from an original household survey carried out in the Republic of Moldova. I analyze remittance flows with a model that estimates regional (urban and rural) budget shares of consumption and investment expenditure categories for rural and urban households. An important contribution of the paper is that it analyzes the effect of remittances in the regions where spending takes place, which is not necessarily the same as the region where the households originating this spending reside. Using the multinomial logit approach, I control for potential selectivity and endogeneity biases of remittances. The results show that remittances lead to significantly increasing marginal productive investments in urban regions at the expense of rural regions. The fundamental finding of the study is that remittances influence the flight of productive capital out of rural areas into urban regions (a pattern similar to the crowding‐out effect of the Dutch Disease). The analysis carried out in this paper can be applied to other temporary income transfers and exogenous spending injected in the region that affect households' regional expenditure patterns.     

Women's collective economic strategies and political transformation in rural South Africa

This article examines the economic processes and socio‐political institutions that shape women's involvement in community projects. Feminist materialism and postcolonial theory provide the framework to analyze these livelihood strategies as they are grounded in the material conditions of women's lives. The empirical study is based in a rural northern province of South Africa where colonialism and apartheid have contributed to extreme economic and social hardships. Fieldwork was conducted in Limpopo to analyze how community projects contribute to livelihood strategies. In an area where migrant remittances remain one of the main sources of income for rural households, women have increasingly engaged in collective economic strategies such as pottery making, sewing, and agricultural production. These strategies are embedded in a complex set of patriarchal institutions that reinforce unequal access to resources and have historically marginalized rural black women. Despite these barriers, findings from this study demonstrate that community projects provide the potential for economic and social empowerment, especially among rural women.     

Forging a ‘Good Diaspora’: Political Mobilization among Somalis in the UK

This article is about a campaign that was initiated by Somalis in London in 2013 against Barclays Bank's decision to shut down the accounts of four Somali remittance companies in the UK. It explores how young Somalis mobilized politically around the issue, and how, in the process, they created and reified a particular ‘imagined community’. By drawing on multicultural notions of community, and development idioms of diaspora engagement, they fashioned themselves around a notion of ‘good diaspora’ based on generation, pan‐Somali unity, and ideas of ‘professionalism’. In so doing, they were able to mobilize politically as both national and transnational actors, but were also confronted with some of the limits of the ‘good diaspora’ identity category. This article establishes a dialogue between the literature on diaspora engagement and that on migrant political mobilization by exploring how young Somalis navigate across these different national and transnational conversations, discourses and social categories.     

Social Capital and Post‐Conflict Reconstruction in Burundi: The Limits of Community‐based Reconstruction

Using an examination of three NGO interventions in post‐conflict Burundi, this article questions community‐based reconstruction as a mechanism to rebuild social capital after conflicts, particularly when direct livelihood support is provided. The authors demonstrate a general shortcoming of the methodology employed in community‐based development (CBD), namely its focus on ‘technical procedural design’, which results in what may be termed ‘supply‐driven demand‐driven’ reconstruction. The findings suggest the need for a political economy perspective on social capital, which acknowledges that the effects on social capital are determined by the type of economic resource CBD gives access to. Through the use of a resource typology, the case studies show that the CBD methodology and the potential effects on social capital differ when applied to public and non‐strategic versus private and strategic resources. This has particular consequences for post‐conflict situations. A generalized application of CBD methodology to post‐conflict reconstruction programmes fails to take adequate account of the nature of the interventions and the challenges posed by the particular post‐conflict setting. The article therefore questions the current popular ‘social engineering’ approach to post‐conflict reconstruction.     

Hungry Translations: The World Through Radical Vulnerability

The dominant landscape of knowledge and policy rests on a fundamental inequality: bodies who are seen as hungry are assumed to be available for the interventions of experts, but those experts often obliterate the ways that the hungry actively create politics and knowledge by living a dynamic vision of what is ethical and what makes the good life. Such living frequently involves a creative praxis of refusal against imposed frameworks. Learning from such refusals requires hungry translations that are open and flowing and that are embedded in embodied solidarities that require radical vulnerability. Such translations strive to converse across incommensurable landscapes of struggles and meanings in order to co‐agitate against universalised languages that erase the vocabularies and visions of those who are reduced to hungry bodies. In reconceptualising politics as a shared and unending labour on an uneven terrain that makes perfect translation or retelling impossible, hungry translation becomes a continuous collective praxis of troubling inherited meanings of the social, and of making our knowledges more alive to the creativity of socio‐political struggle. Such hungry translations must fearlessly move between worlds in search of poetic justice and social justice without defining an origin or destination and without compromising the singularities that constitute each community of struggle.     

Lifetimes of Disposability and Surplus Entrepreneurs in Bagong Barrio,Manila

Working in collaboration with Migrante International and drawing on testimony of residents in the remittance‐dependent, migrant‐sending community of Bagong Barrio in Caloocan City in Metro Manila, Philippines, we examine the systematic production of lifetimes of disposability that drives labour migration across the generations. The closure of factories and contractualisation of work in the 1980s created the conditions in which labour migration is not a choice but a necessity. Diligent use of remittances to pay for the education of their children in many cases has produced a new generation of overseas Filipino workers (OFWs), and investment in housing often is another route to OFW status. Alongside this narrative of ongoing precarity, we listen closely to the testimony of residents for ways of living that are both subsumed within and somewhat excessive to accounts that might render their lives as merely waste or wasted.     

The Global Flea Market: Migration,Remittances and the Informal Economy in Tonga

Some common assumptions about the form and use of migrants' remittances in the South Pacific are examined and questioned in the light of information from a micro-economic study of one group of remittance recipients in the flea market of Nuku'alofa, the capital of the Kingdom of Tonga. The findings of this study suggest that economic analysis and policy recommendations based on the existing macro-economic data on recorded remittances and other economic aggregates should be treated with caution. The unrecorded inflows of remittances in kind and the associated spread of the domestic informal sector have had some important implications for the functioning of Tonga's economy. There is some evidence to suggest that the growth of informal, international trade is fostering other significant changes in the domestic economy. The functioning of remittance-dependent economies such as Tonga is much more complex than existing economic analysis suggests, and involves substantial investment – not just consumption – with the emergence of entrepreneurs and the manipulation of dependence, rather than merely passive receipt of cash and expenditure focused on consumption.     

Negotiation of Social Values in the World Heritage Listing Process: A Case Study on the Beijing-Hangzhou Grand Canal,China

This paper examines the World Heritage listing process for the Beijing-Hangzhou Grand Canal to understand the sociopolitical meanings of heritage in contemporary China. Over the past four decades, the efforts of the Chinese government have been clearly geared towards improving governance over heritage sites by designating them as state properties, which requires the selection and evaluation of cultural heritage sites on the specific political meaning based on historical, aesthetic, or scientific value. In the process of World Heritage listing of Chinese heritage sties, the model of ‘state properties’ had to be compatible with UNESCO’s understanding of ‘heritage’, as well as economic benefits of heritage. Drawing on the data collected from the process of World Heritage listing of the Beijing-Hangzhou Grand Canal, this paper explores the integration of the social meanings of heritage into the ‘authorized’ values criteria, facilitating multiple uses of ‘heritage’ through collaboration among UNESCO, Chinese heritage officials, and local communities. It argues that practices of heritage that consider social meanings will integrate local communities’ understandings into political meanings of heritage on basis of central government’s interests. This paper shows how the social meanings of heritage create a dialectical relationship to enable a ‘living’ cultural process in the preservation of ‘state properties’. In addition, the social meanings of heritage allow all potential stakeholder groups to negotiate with the heritage bureaucracy, as well as strengthening the role of local interests in heritage policy.     

Women and Peace Building: Local Perspectives on Opportunities and Barriers

The UN Security Council Resolution 1325 has made strong provisions to include women in peace‐building interventions and actions. This is, however, rarely observed in practice beyond local‐level activities. This article discusses new qualitative evidence on the opportunities and barriers to women's participation in peace‐building processes, based on a comparative analysis of case studies conducted in Afghanistan, Liberia, Nepal and Sierra Leone. The findings show that women's engagement in peace‐building activities, beyond their immediate social relations, is restricted by institutional, economic, cultural and social obstacles. These barriers prevent the realization of gender equality objectives in peace‐building initiatives. Moreover, local understandings of peace typically place family relations at the centre of how women engage with peace‐building processes, and how other community members perceive women's roles in peace building.     

When less was more: external assistance and the political settlement in Somaliland

The internationally unrecognized ‘Republic of Somaliland’ presents a case in which the domestic drivers of peace and development may be examined when aid and other forms of international intervention are not significant variables. The relative autonomy of its peace process offers an alternative perspective on post‐conflict transitions to that offered in the majority of the literature, which instead problematizes either the perverse outcomes or unintended consequences of international interventions in conflict‐affected areas. The purpose of this article is not to establish the salience of Somaliland's relative isolation in its ability to achieve peace and relative political order, as this is already documented in the literature. Rather, it explores the ways in which that isolation fostered mutual dependence between powerful political and economic actors for their survival and prosperity. It uses a political settlements framework to probe the implications of this dependence for western statebuilding interventions in post‐conflict situations. The findings present a challenge to orthodox assumptions about how states transition out of conflict, particularly that: greater vertical inclusivity necessarily strengthens a political settlement; effective Weberian institutions are a prerequisite of an enduring peace; and that external assistance is usually necessary to end large‐scale violence in developing states or to prevent a recurrence of the conflict.     

Supporting food security for Indigenous families through the restoration of Indigenous foodways

Indigenous families are overrepresented among those within Canada who experience food insecurity. Studies have largely focused on northern populations, with less attention paid to southern and urban communities, including the social, cultural, and geographic processes that challenge food security. In this study, we present findings from a decade‐long community‐based study with the Southwest Ontario Aboriginal Health Access Centre (London, Ontario) to examine family perspectives related to the social determinants of food security. These topics were explored through qualitative interviews (n = 25) and focus groups (n = 2) with First Nation mothers with young children from the city of London, and a nearby reserve community. Interviewees from both geographies identified a number of socio‐economic challenges including household income and transportation. However, some interviewees also shed light on barriers to healthy eating unique to these Indigenous contexts including access issues such as a lack of grocery stores on‐reserve; loss of knowledge related to the utilization of traditional foods; and the erosion of community, familial, and social supports. Resolving these unique determinants of food security for urban and reserve‐based First Nation families will require a range of economic and culturally specific interventions, particularly those that support development and uptake of Indigenous foodways.     

抗战期间广东省银行沟通潮梅汇路之研究

论文利用广东省档案馆藏近代侨汇档案,集中考察了1939年6月汕头沦陷后,广东省银行沟通潮梅汇路的成因、成效及局限,进而分析其对华南抗战的作用及贡献。研究显示,抗战期间汕头的陷落,是广东省银行沟通这一汇路的重要契机;其自身所具有的经营特色和优势,是其能够肩负这一历史使命的重要保证;而海内外各方则是促成汇路沟通的重要参与者。在此过程中,广东省银行发展壮大,并惠及数百万潮梅侨眷生计。同时为厚实国家外汇储备及赢取华南抗战的最终胜利做出了重要贡献。然而,国民政府严格限制其海外拓展的政策,英、法、荷等国在南洋属地实施的外汇管制以及英、美对中国资金的封存,都在一定程度上制约了它吸收侨汇的成效。     

侨批公会的建立与跨国侨批网络的制度化（1911—1937）——以潮汕为例的研究

本文以潮汕侨批业为个案研究,利用跨国主义理论,探讨了侨批网络的内部整合与制度化问题。认为侨批网络的制度化表现首先是侨批公会的建立,继而是侨批公会网络的形成,侨批公会网络再通过其制度化机制进入以中华总商会为中心的更高层次的华人社团网络。侨批网络的扩大加强了其对外的集体交涉能力,从而维护了侨批网络的正常运转。在此运作模式中,新加坡中华总商会起着领导核心的作用。侨批网络的运作模式对研究跨国华人商业网络有重要的启示意义。     

A study of social‐market interventions in the shaping of the field of cultural production

A social analysis based on extensive evaluation of the Dance and Drama Awards programme reveals the social‐market political paradigm underpinning the formation of cultural policy in the UK underthe New Labour government. This specific intervention in the field of cultural production is placed in the context of broader government interventions in the cultural domain that seek to give respect to undervalued social and cultural groups. There is a political analysis of the characteristics of the social‐market political formation that underpin New Labour’s “affirmative” actions, and the political strategies informing the government’s “access” and “inclusion” agendas and their impact on the cultural and creative industries. The authors argue that the construction of a “social‐market” position in New Labour’s cultural policy represents an attempt to bridge or “hyphenate” the contradictory claims of social democracy, on the one hand, and economic fatalism, on the other. Despite the rhetoric of social and cultural “transformation”, the authors argue that a “faith” in the market prevents New Labour from transforming the political‐economic and cultural structures that generate economic and cultural injustices.     

TENURE SECURITY INTERVENTIONS IN CAMBODIA: TESTING BEBBINGTON'S APPROACH TO DEVELOPMENT GEOGRAPHY

The relationship between the development industry and the problems it claims to address is problematic. Development studies have often found development practice systematically misrepresenting its context with the result that interventions are out of kilter with reality and fail. In a series of articles in the early 2000s Antony Bebbington suggested development geographers attend to the spatial distribution of development interventions by mapping and explaining immanent development, mapping and explaining intentional development and studying the relationships between them. This article uses the case of property rights interventions in Cambodia to examine the extent that Bebbington's approach might explain development interventions and their relationship to the contexts into which they are inserted. Primary data consist of interviews with key actors involved in decisions over the locations of these interventions. Secondary data consist of reports and databases showing their geographical spread, and political and social science literature explaining the main transitions in recent Cambodian history. The main empirical finding is that the interventions, land titling and community forestry, have not been implemented in the places where the problems they are claimed to address are located. The methodological reflection is that Bebbington's approach valuably challenges policy narratives that tend to smooth space and conceal unevenness. However, it provides only a broad theoretical framework rather than any theoretical content. The approach may only realize its potential when Bebbington and others begin to apply it to generate hypotheses and theory. A new hypothesis emerging from the Cambodian case is briefly introduced in this regard.     

Partnerships for Social Change in the Canadian North: Revisiting the Insider–Outsider Dialectic

In the two decades since Alexander Lockhart's seminal article on the insider–outsider dialectic in native socioeconomic development, a great deal of change has occurred in the Canadian North and new challenges have emerged for community‐based participatory research and development. This is particularly the case in the Northwest Territories, where Aboriginal communities are facing for the first time the triple challenges of Aboriginal land claims implementation, Aboriginal self‐government, and a boom in mining and petroleum development. Increasingly, participatory methods in research and community development are being co‐opted to serve state or corporate interests, far from their radical origins in movements for social change. A historical analysis is called for that accounts for the contradictory and contested social contexts in which participatory activities are imbedded. This article suggests that a return to the roots of the participatory method requires the creation of a new autonomous space of resistance. The academic outsider is uniquely positioned to facilitate critical interventions in both community and university contexts. The resulting convergence of critical outsider and insider has great potential in the forging of new knowledge that can contribute to self‐determination beyond the bounds of the state.     

Community as a Policy Instrument: A Comparative Analysis

Over recent decades. "community" has been a powerful theme in social policy development not only in the United States but elsewhere in North America and Europe as well. Existing analyses of the concept, however, tended to approach it more from philosophical and sociological perspectives than from the standpoint of policy analysis. This article examines the uses of community as a policy instrument, considering its diverse applications us policy objective, policy means, and policy rhetoric. A cross-section of major community-oriented policies in the United States and Quebec is analyzed, providing a basis file policy-level, regime-level, and political culture comparison. Identifying the key components that community policies may incorporate, we propose a schema for systematically describing deferent types of interventions. Finally. we review the difficulties encountered in implementing policies with a community orientation and the need to avoid simplistic judgments of success and failure.     

IT Industrial Development in Taiwan and the Constraints on Environmental Mobilization

Studies in the development of high‐tech industries have shown low levels of community involvement and environmental mobilization. In contrast to the tenets of social movement theories, it seems that the openness of political systems and the tactics of social movements are not enough to lead to increased grassroots environmental resistance in the context of high‐tech development. This article uses the example of high‐tech electronic development in Hsinchu, Taiwan, to examine why and how grassroots activism has been impeded in the past two decades. The article highlights the industrial characteristics and processes within the information technology sector, and analyses existing obstacles to environmental mobilization in the context of a fast‐growing high‐tech economy. It argues that a unique IT development structure has dramatically changed local social characteristics in a way that constrains grassroots mobilization in public social agendas. It also shows how the influential and rapidly expanding IT sector has come to dominate resource‐use in the area, leaving opposing forces more powerless than ever.     

Revamping community‐based conservation through participatory research

Community‐based conservation is experiencing a crisis of identity and purpose as a result of a disappointing track record and unresolved deficiencies. The latter include over‐simplified assumptions and misconceptions of “community,” the imposition of externally designed and driven projects at the community level, a focus on conservation outcomes at the expense of community empowerment and social justice, and limited attention to participatory processes. New approaches are urgently needed to address these weaknesses and to counter a rising trend towards environmental protectionism and a preference for conservation approaches at an eco‐regional scale that threaten the interests of local and Indigenous communities. We propose that three core principles of community‐based participatory research (CBPR)—(1) community‐defined research agenda; (2) collaborative research process; and (3) meaningful research outcomes—hold much promise. Drawing on the experience of a research partnership involving the James Bay Cree community of Wemindji, northern Quebec, and academic researchers from four Canadian universities, we document the process of applying these principles to a community‐based conservation project that uses protected areas as a political strategy to redefine relations with governments in terms of a shared responsibility to care for land and sea. We suggest that basic assumptions of CBPR, including collaborative, equitable partnerships in all phases of the research, promotion of co‐learning and capacity building among all partners, emphasis on local relevance, and commitment to long‐term engagement, can provide the basis for a revamped phase of community‐based conservation that supports environmental protection while strengthening local institutions, building capacity, and contributing to cultural survival.