Redefining ‘Aid’ in the China–Africa Context

Discussions on the politics of Chinese engagement with African development have been marked by increasing concern over Chinese use of aid in exchange for preferential energy deals. Normative liberal discourse criticizes the Chinese for disbursing ‘rogue aid’ and undermining good governance in the African continent. These criticisms not only ignore the longer‐term motivations and modalities of Chinese aid and the historical diversity of Chinese relations with Africa, but also uncritically assume ‘Western’ aid to be morally ‘superior’ and ‘more effective’ in terms of development outcomes. This paper consists of three parts. First, it will discuss the debates surrounding Chinese engagement in Africa, especially around aid and development issues. Second, the paper maps the historical development of China–Africa engagement and investigates the impacts of the changing modalities of Chinese aid with reference to case studies of two countries: Angola and Ghana. It then offers a comparative analysis of the similarities and differences between these two cases. The principal argument is that Chinese and Western donors employ different ideologies and practices of governance to conceal their own interests and political discourses in the African continent.     

Who cares in Nicaragua? A care regime in an exclusionary social policy context

In Latin American countries with historically strong social policy regimes (such as those in the Southern Cone), neoliberal policies are usually blamed for the increased burden of female unpaid work. However, studying the Nicaraguan care regime in two clearly defined periods — the Sandinista and the neoliberal eras — suggests that this argument may not hold in the case of countries with highly familialist social policy regimes. Despite major economic, political and policy shifts, the role of female unpaid work, both within the family and in the community, remains persistent and pivotal, and was significant long before the onset of neoliberal policies. Nicaragua's care regime has been highly dependent on the ‘community’ or ‘voluntary’ work of mostly women. This has also been, and continues to be, vital for the viability of many public social programmes.     

The politics of protecting the poorest: Moving beyond the ‘anti-politics machine’?

Famously derided as the ultimate ‘anti-politics machine’, international development has increasingly sought to integrate a stronger political perspective within its ambit. This includes devising new forms of political analysis to inform development interventions and efforts to support forms of politics that are deemed to be ‘pro-poor’. However, this engagement with pro-poor politics remains limited and the agenda of advanced liberalism that international development agencies remain embedded within tends to draw its understandings of politics from ideology rather than evidence. Case-study analysis of the politics associated with successful social protection interventions in eight countries suggests that the political modes preferred within advanced liberalism – including civil society representation, inclusive policy spaces, and securing ownership – have been much less important in securing poverty reduction than more deeply political institutions and processes, particularly efforts from within political society to re-embed capitalism and extend social contracts to previously marginal groups. Deeper forms of political, political economy and political geography analyses are required to capture the politics of reaching the poorest groups, which needs to be understood in terms of processes of capitalist and political development that have important spatial dimensions, and which can be conceptualised in terms of extending the ‘social contract’ between states and citizens.     

Consumption,Environmental Sustainability and Human Geography in Australia: a Missing Research Agenda?

‘Consumption’ is a central concept in the global environmental sustainability agenda. However, one important argument from Agenda 21 — that all social actors must now practise ‘sustainable consumption’— has been publicly and politically marginalised in high‐income countries such as Australia. Geographers potentially have a role in bringing consumption back onto the agenda by constructing a critical geography of consumption. Such research can help understand how the contextual use of natural resources is perceived and practised, and how consumption helps to shape contemporary social relations. This body of knowledge is vital for building sustainable development into everyday lives. Yet a focus on urban consumption perceptions and practices appears somewhat lacking in Australian geography. Ways forward can be drawn from international geography, such as in the United Kingdom where a substantial body of work has drawn a complex picture of contemporary consumption and environmental understanding. It has also challenged prevailing ‘ecological modernisation’ policy approaches, which ignore consumption's cultural facets. In sum, considering consumption in Australia can offer insights into cultural practices expressed through consumption; can challenge and add to European geographical literatures, and can also contribute to sustainability debates by offering alternatives to currently ineffective policy discourses.     

The Politics of Service Delivery Reform

This article identifies the leaders, the supporters and the resisters of public service reform. It adopts a principal–agent framework, comparing reality with an ‘ideal’ situation in which citizens are the principals over political policy‐makers as their agents, and policy‐makers are the principals over public service officials as their agents. Reform in most developing countries is complicated by an additional set of external actors — international financial institutions and donors. In practice, international agencies and core government officials usually act as the ‘principals’ in the determination of reforms. The analysis identifies the interests involved in reform, indicating how the balance between them is affected by institutional and sectoral factors. Organizational reforms, particularly in the social sectors, present greater difficulties than first generation economic policy reforms.     

Historicising Agency

Why has ‘agency’ been such a tenacious concept in historical scholarship on women and gender, and what have been the consequences on this tenacity? This essay tackles these questions and proposes, through a brief examination of the history of skin lighteners in South Africa and beyond, how agency might be pushed in more surprising, more analytically productive directions. Too often agency slips from being a conceptual tool or starting point to a concluding argument. For example, in my subfield of African women's and gender history, statements like ‘African women had agency’ can stand as the impoverished punch lines of empirically rich studies. Consideration of Walter Johnson's 2003 essay ‘On Agency’ highlights the intellectual and political imperatives of 1970s Marxist and feminist social history that placed agency at centre stage. This essay examines why, more than a decade after Johnson's critique, agency endures as a ‘safety’ argument for reasons related to representational politics, research methodologies and the circumscribed imagination of intellectual gatekeepers. It argues that we should move beyond agency as argument by attending to the multiple concerns and desires – some intentional, others not – that animate human actions, including contentious gendered practices, and by examining how different historical actors have themselves understood agency. Agency has a history. By acknowledging and tracing that history, we will be better able to discern the usefulness and limits of agency for our own analyses.     

An epidemic on wheels? Road safety,public health and injury politics in Africa (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

Anthropologists have showed only marginal interest in road safety, despite the loss of some 1.3 million people killed in road crashes every year, the bulk of which occurs in ‘developing’ countries. 2011 marks the beginning of a UN Decade of Action for Road Safety. Its scope is ambitious: to save five million lives and fifty million injuries by the end of the ‘decade’ in 2020. In this article, the author examines the way public health professionals and educators have appropriated the language of epidemiology to argue that road death and injury can be viewed as an ‘epidemic on wheels’ or a ‘disease of development’, to mention two often cited epithets among participants in the global road safety lobby. One major consideration of interest to anthropologists and policy makers is to what extent this effectively essentializes road death in Africa and depoliticises its injury politics. Bearing in mind the historical context of medical interventions in Africa, the article examines the global road safety lobby and its affinity with public health as a form of transnational governance, arguing alternatively that if the UN Decade of Action on Road Safety is to have any significant impact, it must recognize more clearly the political stakes being raised in claims to reduce deaths and injuries caused by automobility.     

Een‐Gonyama Gonyama!: Zulu Origins of the Boy Scout Movement and the Africanisation of Imperial Britain

British imperialists in the late 19th century denigrated non‐western cultures in rationalising the partition of Africa, but they also had to assimilate African values and traditions to make the imperial system work. The partisans of empire also romanticised non‐western cultures to convince the British public to support the imperial enterprise. In doing so, they introduced significant African and Asian elements into British popular culture, thereby refuting the assumption that the empire had little influence on the historical development of metropolitan Britain. Robert Baden‐Powell conceived of the Boy Scout movement as a cure for the social instability and potential military weakness of Edwardian Britain. Influenced profoundly by his service as a colonial military officer, Africa loomed large in Baden‐Powell's imagination. He was particularly taken with the Zulu. King Cetshwayo's crushing defeat of the British army at Isandhlawana in 1879 fixed their reputation as a ‘martial tribe’ in the imagination of the British public. Baden‐Powell romanticised the Zulus' discipline, and courage, and adapted many of their cultural institutions to scouting. Baden‐Powell's appropriation and reinterpretation of African culture illustrates the influence of subject peoples of the empire on metropolitan British politics and society. Scouting's romanticised trappings of African culture captured the imagination of tens of thousands of Edwardian boys and helped make Baden‐Powell's organisation the premier uniformed youth movement in Britain. Although confident that they were superior to their African subjects, British politicians, educators, and social reformers agreed with Baden‐Powell that ‘tribal’ Africans preserved many of the manly virtues that had been wiped by the industrial age.     

Affluence,Poverty and the Idea of a Post-Scarcity Society

The ‘end of nature’ and the attenuation of tradition, associated with accelerated modernization on a global scale, increase the need for conscious reflection on many aspects of life formerly considered to be givens. Thus in developed and developing countries alike, new questions of personal choice and ethics form the basis for a kind of life politics which is different from — and supplements, but does not replace — the longer-established practice of emancipatory politics, concerned above all with issues of social justice. This essay invites us to consider how life politics can generate new strategies to reduce inequality and alleviate poverty.     

From the ‘new localism’ to the ‘new regionalism’? The implications of regional development agencies for city–regional relations

Throughout the last three decades efforts to regenerate British cities have been based around the construction of new institutional alliances and policy networks supported by a series of urban-based initiatives. Successive Conservative governments premised their intervention on the assumption that cities (and particular parts therein) were the most appropriate geographical level around which to organise policy intervention. In pursuing this city-based agenda, the policies were themselves instrumental in constituting the city as an object of policy: a problem in need of a solution. The aim of this paper, however, is not to explore how certain spaces or scales become constructed through, for example, government policy, political practices or state restructuring. Rather the paper augments work conducted on the socially constructed nature of ‘cities’ and ‘regions’. It explores for regeneration policy and politics the implications of the tendential shift away from a model of ‘new localism’ towards an alternative model of ‘new regionalism’. The origins of the central element of New Labour's emergent regional project — the Regional Development Agencies (RDAs) — are established before the paper moves on to examine the likely political relationships between the local state, drawing upon the example of Manchester, and the regional state, drawing upon North West England, under the new institutional arrangements.     

Situating Political Agronomy: The Knowledge Politics of Hybrid Rice in India and Uganda

The emergence of ‘political agronomy’ — a research agenda that interrogates the knowledge politics through which agronomic debates are constructed, shaped and contested — has added a new and important tool for the analysis of agricultural research and policy making in development contexts. This article seeks to advance the scope of political agronomy by providing an enhanced framework to link the analysis of agronomic knowledge production to the study of new agricultural technologies in practice. Using case studies of hybrid rice promotion in southern India and western Uganda, the article illustrates the power relations and unanticipated outcomes that accompanied the translation of agronomic research into agrarian settings characterized by pronounced social polarization and marked environmental transformations. These case studies affirm how the starkly uneven outcomes of technological change refract back into the politics of agronomic research and extension as both researchers and policy makers react to the unintended impacts of previous interventions when designing future agendas.     

Negotiating Authority between UNHCR and ‘The People’

Refugee camps are exceptional places that are left to the benevolent governing of international humanitarian agencies, and offer unique opportunities to explore the making and un‐making of public authority. This article examines how certain groups of young men in a refugee camp in Tanzania manage to establish public authority by relating to ideas of a Burundian moral order, while at the same time relating to the ‘development‐speak’ of international relief operations. The refugees' attempts to establish public authority are highly contested and highly politicized, clashing with the relief agencies' vision of the camp as non‐political. Ironically, the young men who engage in politics in the camp are also closely linked to these relief agencies in their role as brokers between the agencies and the ‘small people’. Public authority is partly produced by the powers that are delegated to them by the agencies and partly formed in the ‘gaps' in the agencies’ system. Similarly, authority rests in part on the respect that these brokers gain from other refugees — a respect that is earned in numerous ways, including outwitting the international organizations — and in part on the recognition that they get from the very same organizations. In other words, public authority rests on complex relations between legitimacy and recognition and between sovereignty and governmentality.     

‘YOUTH RIOTS’ AND THE CONCEPT OF CONTENTIOUS POLITICS IN HISTORICAL RESEARCH

This article analyses European ‘youth riots’ as a social phenomenon after World War II. It also uses a specific riot – the 1948 Stockholm Easter Riots – in order to discuss the limits and potential of some theoretical assumptions underlying the field of historical contentious politics studies, primarily ‘contentious politics’ and ‘claims’. Using police reports and newspapers, the article shows that the riots were part of a European repertoire of post-war ‘youth riots’, but that they also bear similarities to an older popular repertoire of contention in Sweden. However, the riots do not really fit into the concept of ‘contentious politics’, as this concept is built on ‘claim-making’ as a key aspect and the participants did not make explicit claims. This leads to the conclusion that other theoretical tools, inspired by the concept of ‘moral economy’, are better suited for understanding the motivations of the rioters, whose actions are interpreted as a way of defending a perceived moral right of access to the urban public space.     

Accordism and the environment: The resource assessment commission and national environmental policy‐making

This paper explores the reform of environmental policy‐making by the Hawke government through its creation of the Resource Assessment Commission (RAC). The paper pursues two themes. First, it argues that this reform must be seen within the broader context of the Hawke government's approach to public policy generally. The paper argues that the Australian Labor Party (ALP) has instituted a model for policy politics based on key strategic and normative approaches—a model this paper refers to as ‘Accordism’. Secondly, this paper looks at the RAC and in so doing argues that, on the basis of the norms that underpinned the reform of environmental policy‐making based on this body, the Commission may be placed squarely within the ‘Accordist’ paradigm.     

Authoritarianism and the securitization of development in Africa

Debate on the ‘securitization’ of aid and international development since 9/11 has been anchored in two key claims: that the phenomenon has been driven and imposed by western governments and that this is wholly unwelcome and deleterious for those in Africa and elsewhere in the developing world. This article challenges both of these assumptions by demonstrating how a range of African regimes have not only benefited from this dispensation but have also actively encouraged and shaped it, even incorporating it into their own militarized state‐building projects. Drawing on the cases of Chad, Ethiopia, Uganda and Rwanda—four semi‐authoritarian polities which have been sustained by the securitization trend—we argue that these developments have not been an accidental by‐product of the global ‘war on terror’. Instead, we contend, they have been the result of a deliberate set of choices and policy decisions by these African governments as part of a broader ‘illiberal state‐building’ agenda. In delineating this argument we outline four major strategies employed by these regimes in this regard: ‘playing the proxy’; simultaneous ‘socialization’ of development policy and ‘privatization’ of security affairs; making donors complicit in de facto regional security arrangements; and constructing regime ‘enemies’ as broader, international threats.     

The political logic of discourse: a neo-Gramscian view

This article contrasts Mark Bevir's approach to the history of ideas with a neo-Gramscian theory of discourse. Bevir puts the case for an ‘anti-foundationalist’ approach to understanding ideas, yet he defends a weak rationalism centred on individual intentions as the original source of all meanings. Discourse theorists—specifically Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe—also adopt an anti-foundationalist perspective but pursue its implications beyond any rationalism. The advantages of discourse theory are argued to lie in its emphasis on power and conflict in the consitution and transformation of social meanings and identity. Laclau and Mouffe's work, it is claimed, alerts us to a political logic of discourse that Bevir's more rationalist approach to ‘ideas’ sidesteps.     

The political logic of discourse: a neo-Gramscian view

This article contrasts Mark Bevir's approach to the history of ideas with a neo-Gramscian theory of discourse. Bevir puts the case for an ‘anti-foundationalist’ approach to understanding ideas, yet he defends a weak rationalism centred on individual intentions as the original source of all meanings. Discourse theorists—specifically Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe—also adopt an anti-foundationalist perspective but pursue its implications beyond any rationalism. The advantages of discourse theory are argued to lie in its emphasis on power and conflict in the consitution and transformation of social meanings and identity. Laclau and Mouffe's work, it is claimed, alerts us to a political logic of discourse that Bevir's more rationalist approach to ‘ideas’ sidesteps.     

Combating coloniality: the cultural policy of post-colonialism

The distinguishing characteristic of cultural policy in countries characterized by a legacy of coloniality is the importance of the identity formation and the politics that are involved in formulating its definition. At root, coloniality is an experience involving dominating influence by a stronger power over a subject state. However, this is not just a matter of external governance or economic dependency, but of a cultural dominance that creates an asymmetrical relationship between the ‘center’ and the ‘periphery,’ between the ruling ‘hegemon’ and the marginalized ‘other.’ In these circumstances, what constitutes an “authentic” culture, and how this informs national identity, is a central political and social concern.     

Cultural policy as mythical narrative

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we argue that policy assumptions are shaped by mythical narratives carrying underlying beliefs and values. Drawing on narrative studies, organisational theory and Gramsci’s cultural hegemony theory, we examine how sense-making narratives create consensus, how they imply causation and individual agency, and finally how narratives fragment to reveal alternatives to hegemonic ‘common sense’ assumptions. Applying this framework to cultural policy we examine the place of mythic, sense-making narratives in the historical development of foundational national cultural policies in the UK and Mexico – respectively, narratives of ‘the civilising mission’ and ‘social transformation’. We then consider narrative emplotment and individualisation underpinning assumptions about individual creativity in the UK creative industries policy. Finally, we address the postmodern turn in narrative studies, showing how fragmented, polysemous narratives fracture cultural policy into ‘personalised truths’ and give voice to other, counter-hegemonic perspectives. We conclude by proposing an agenda for narrative research in cultural policy.     

Comparative and transnational perspectives on the introduction of multiculturalism in post-war Sweden

In the 1970s, Canada, Sweden and Australia became the first countries in the West to adopt formally the idea of multiculturalism as a basis for the political management of immigrant settlement. This article compares the introduction of the idea and politics of multiculturalism in Sweden in the 1960s and 1970s to the introduction of multiculturalism in Canada and Australia during the same time period. The emergence of a politics of multiculturalism in Sweden shares many similarities with the emergence of Canadian and Australian multiculturalism: ‘white’ and ‘European’ immigrant minority groups; ethnic lobbying; expert and academic advocacy; multiculturalist public officials; and effectual claims-making based on the innovative idea of multiculturalism. The comparative perspective on the birth of Swedish multiculturalism furthermore highlights Finland as an important historical and transnational factor in the introduction of official multiculturalism in Sweden. The article contributes to research on the history of multiculturalism, the politics of ethnic diversity in Sweden and comparative research on modern Swedish history.