The road from serfdom: economic storytelling and narratives of India in the rise of neoliberalism

Abstract

Studies of neoliberalism’s rise in the second half of the twentieth century have focused on influential US and European thinkers and global economic institutions. They rarely mention India. This article argues that, in the 1950s and early 1960s, Nehru’s India served as both a central laboratory and a discursive field for international economists debating the proper role of the state in economic development. US economists like John Kenneth Galbraith held up India planning as a proxy for the ‘American way’ of capitalism in Asia; neoliberal economists like Milton Friedman and B.R. Shenoy excoriated Nehru’s ‘road to socialism.’ As India’s economy stumbled in the late 1960s, neoliberal economists used Indian foundations to build an empirical and rhetorical case against scientific planning. Their cautionary tales about India’s ‘Permit-License-Raj’ helped to construct and sustain the project of delegitimizing state action and celebrating markets.     

‘Every household will be a micro-enterprise’: a youth micro-loan scheme’s role in restructuring Nepal

ABSTRACT

Lack of secure employment mobilized many young people into Nepal’s civil war and a decade of political opposition (1996–2006). As a result, both the post-war government and foreign donors invested in policies aimed to harness the productive capacities of young people in restructuring the nation. This article explores the theme of aspiration on the national and personal level and their convergence through a micro-finance program in post-war Nepal, the Youth, Small Enterprise, and Self-Employment Fund (YSEF). The national-level aspiration to make ‘new Nepal’ hinged on young people fulfilling their personal aspirations. I consider whether post-conflict pacification measures like YSEF can foster the sense of national belonging necessary by analyzing the challenges faced in instituting this loan scheme nationally and locally along Nepal’s open border with India. Analyzing YSEF’s institution from a borderland optic reveals assumptions inherent in peacebuilding intervention and limits YSEF’s ability to wholly accommodate its recipients. I suggest that the government’s attempt to bring marginalized youth into the ‘official’ economic fold through YSEF falls short in accommodating young people’s livelihood aspirations within their lived reality. Instead young people are creating pathways beyond state dependence.     

‘So that we don't spoil them’: understanding children's everyday mobility through parents’ affective practices

ABSTRACT

Children's everyday mobility and freedom of movement have been closely linked to parental practices, or what has been referred to as parental ‘mobility permits’ or ‘mobility licences’. Most research tends to focus on parental restrictions, while this article explores the affective practices Swedish middle-class parents use in order to enhance their children's mobility, i.e. how emotions are perceived as enabling parents’ and children's spatial experiences and thus their feelings of safety and security; as well as how emotions are talked of as disabling or disrupting the potential for children's mobility. These affective practices are analysed in relation to the parents’ self-reflexive positioning on a continuum between ‘the helicopter parent’ and ‘the engaged and enabling parent’. The material for the article is comprised of 33 interviews with the children's parents, carried out within a larger ethnographic research project on children's everyday mobility in Sweden.     

The ‘Cultural Turn’ in Australian Regional Economic Development Discourse: Neoliberalising Creativity?

Regional economic policy‐makers are increasingly interested in the contribution of creativity to the economic performance of regions and, more generally, in its power to transform the images and identities of places. This has constituted a ‘cultural turn’, of sorts, away from an emphasis on macro‐scale projects and employment schemes, towards an interest in the creative industries, entrepreneurial culture and innovation. This paper discusses how recent discourses of the role of ‘creativity’ in regions have drawn upon, and contributed to, particular forms of neoliberalisation. Its focus is the recent application of a statistical measure — Richard Florida's (2002) ‘creativity index’— to quantify spatial variations in creativity between Australia's regions. Our critique is not of the creativity index per se, but of its role in subsuming creativity within a neoliberal regional economic development discourse. In this discourse, creativity is linked to the primacy of global markets, and is a factor in place competition, attracting footloose capital and ‘creative class’ migrants to struggling regions. Creativity is positioned as a central determinant of regional ‘success’ and forms a remedy for those places, and subjects, that currently ‘lack’ innovation. Our paper critiques these interpretations, and concludes by suggesting that neoliberal discourses ignore the varied ways in which ‘alternative creativities’ might underpin other articulations of the future of Australia's regions.     

Participatory work with young children: the trouble and transformation of age-based hierarchies

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the ways that participatory work with young children was actually lived in practice, in one early childhood setting. Drawing on an ethnographic study, the paper argues that disruption of age-based hierarchy was key for making space and time for young children’s meaningful participation. Practitioners held a strong, nuanced view of young children’s ‘richness’, rather than defining young children in terms of what they lack. The finished state of adulthood was troubled, with adults seen as fellow ‘emergent becomings’, in the process of learning alongside children. However, despite conscious efforts to deconstruct age-based hierarchy, age and life experience remained troublesome concepts at the nursery. The paper examines tensions and limitations in how far adults were willing to cede control to young children, focusing on the example of care routines. The paper contends that participatory work with children must itself be maintained as a space for inquiry and reflection.     

Post COVID-19 ecological and social reset: moving away from capitalist growth models towards tourism as Buen Vivir

Abstract

Tourism has been one of the industries most highly affected by COVID-19. The COVID-19 global pandemic is an ‘unprecedented crisis’ and has exposed the pitfalls of a hyper consumption model of economic growth and development. The scale of immediate economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic has shattered the myth of ‘catch up development’ and ‘perpetual growth’. The Crisis has brought unintended degrowth, presenting opportunities for an economic and social ‘reset’. In terms of long-term thinking post COVID-19, it is time to change the parameters of how we imagine a trajectory going forward, to prefigure possibilities for contesting capitalist imperatives that ‘there is no alternative’. In relation to tourism, the pandemic provides an opportunity for reimaging tourism otherwise, away from exploitative models that disregard people, places, and the natural environment, and towards a tourism that has positive impacts. Non-western alternatives to neo-colonial and neoliberal capitalism, such the South American concept of ‘Buen Vivir’, can help us to shift priorities away from economic growth, towards greater social and environmental wellbeing, and meaningful human connections. Taking a Buen Vivir approach to tourism will continue the degrowth momentum, for transformative change in society within the earth’s physical limits. Yet Buen Vivir also redefines the parameters of how we understand ‘limits’. In limiting unsustainable practices in development and tourism, a focus on Buen Vivir actually creates growth in other areas, such as social and environmental wellbeing, and meaningful human connection. Buen Vivir can reorient the tourism industry towards localised tourism, and slow tourism because the principles of Buen Vivir require these alternatives to be small-scale, local and benefiting host communities as well as tourists to increase the wellbeing for all.     

Globalised dreams,local constraints: migration and youth aspirations in an Indian regional town

Youth in India’s regional towns face a paradox: they are exposed to discourses of neoliberal globalisation through education and media, yet are unable to seize the benefits of globalisation, due to regional isolation. In this paper, we explore how aspirations of youth in India’s regional towns are influenced by their geographic marginalisation. Drawing on interviews and ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Darjeeling, a regional town in West Bengal, we demonstrate that regional youth feel disadvantaged in their access to middle-class jobs, modern education and lifestyles associated with neoliberal globalisation. Consequently, they express strong desires for ‘exposure,’ which can only be met through migration, particularly to India’s metropolitan cities. They are frustrated in their aspiration to migrate, however, as they feel constrained by the traditional family structure, discrimination in the larger cities and the uneven temporalities between regional towns and ‘global India.’ Their experiences highlight the geographically uneven effects of neoliberal globalisation.     

Making creative industries policy in the real world: differing configurations of the culture-market-state nexus in the UK and South Korea

ABSTRACT

This paper compares creative (content) industries policies in the UK and South Korea, highlighting the coevality in their development. Seeing them as ‘industrial policies’, it focuses on how state intervention is justified and why a certain set of policy options have been chosen. The UK policy-makers prefer passive and decentralised roles of the state that addresses market failures via generic and horizontal policies. Meanwhile, Koreans have consistently believed in the strong, resourceful and ambitious state in developing centralised, sector-specific policies for cultural industries. While demonstrating two contrasting approaches to the nation state’s management of cultural turn in the economy, both cases seem to present a ‘paradox’. Despite its neoliberal undertone, the horizontal and fused approach taken by the UK’s creative industries policy engenders some space for ‘cultural’ policy. On the contrary, the non-liberal and state-driven content industries policy in Korea has shown a stronger tendency of cultural commodification.     

Learning to belong? ‘Culture’ and ‘place making’ among children and young people in Hull,UK City of Culture 2017

ABSTRACT

Despite the rise of ‘child-friendly cities’ internationally, and a growing interest in youth engagement in urban planning, the role of children and young people in culture-led regeneration and ‘place making’ schemes, remains under-researched. Notwithstanding the wealth of research into childhood and youth cultures, little is known about the ways in which the abstract (and perhaps predominantly ‘adult’) notions of ‘culture’ and ‘place’ are negotiated by younger citizens. Drawing on participative research with schools across Hull, the UK City of Culture 2017, this contribution explores children’s and young people’s understandings of culture and place within this cultural regeneration event. Although our findings suggest that the City of Culture designation has brought benefits to children and young people in a marginalised city, there is still much to be learned from their often personal and informal interpretations of ‘place’ and ‘culture’, as well as the role played by schools in this context.     

The Malleability of Participation: The Politics of Agricultural Research under Neoliberalism in Bolivia

This article analyses how neoliberal restructuring encouraged the use of participatory methods in agricultural research in Bolivia and how, at a later stage, participatory development initiatives had to be adapted to prevent conflicts with the post‐neoliberal views of farmer organizations. The article contributes to the debate on the normalization of participatory methods in agrarian development. Engaging with Foucault's work on governmentality and neoliberalism, our analysis goes beyond interpretations of participation which conceptualize it exclusively as a technology of power to discipline subjects. Drawing on a distinction between a liberal and a neoliberal moment in the restructuring of agricultural research, we study the case of PROINPA (Foundation for the Promotion and Research of Andean Products), a national NGO that was once part of the state system for agricultural research but was then privatized. Although PROINPA employed participation mainly to enhance managerial effectiveness, it also facilitated moments of participation from below. We argue that participation designed by this type of NGO is not just ‘technical’ as PROINPA professionals would like to perceive it, nor is it simply ‘political’ as critical views on participation hold. Instead it is malleable in the sense that each actor is involved in finding a new balance between technical, economic and political considerations.     

Into the arms of dolls: Japan’s declining fertility rates,the 1990s financial crisis and the (maternal) comforts of the posthuman

Abstract

Japan’s 1990s financial crisis proved psychically traumatic for many men, their trauma exacerbated by decades of falling fertility rates and related sociospatial attenuation. The crisis disrupted a range of heteronormative practices that had stabilized post-war gendered identities, especially marriage and stay-at-home motherhood. Some men consequently began seeking comfort in the company of youthful-looking, large-format, hyper-feminized commodity-dolls of which there are two psychical kinds: ‘infantile’ dolls used largely by precariously positioned young men for comfort and play; and expensive ‘Oedipal’ silicone sex dolls associated with Japanese salarymen whose jobs had become less secure. Both have worked emotionally for two reasons: dolls are evocative of the maternal – the basis of intersubjective (be) longing/Eros; and the dolls are owned, ownership allowing pleasure and control more securely to intertwine. Following the oil crisis and the de-industrialization that followed, men in racially and economically privileged terrain across the US and Europe turned to similar kinds of commodity dolls for comfort, if for differently sexed and racialized reasons. Japanese men’s doll markets therefore speak to certain particular and general conditions of masculinity and geopolitical economic trauma.     

Whither the Developmental State in South Korea? Balancing Welfare and Neoliberalism

Abstract

Scholars of political economy have been debating the role of the Korean state in the economic development of the country, as the characteristics of a developmental state, a neoliberal state and/or a welfare state have appeared simultaneously in the various governments’ policies since the 1990s. This paper argues that although the nature, degree and extent of government intervention has varied from administration to administration, the basic stance of a developmental state has been retained while neoliberal and welfare policies have been used concurrently to further economic and social development. This coexistence of contradictory approaches reflecting alternative market economic systems was the product of a combination of government policies that has for the past 20 years provided the Korean government with the ability to deploy flexible policy mixes in response to changes in the political and economic environment and to maximise the outcomes of developmental policies.     

China and Japan in Myanmar: Aid,Natural Resources and Influence

Abstract

This article highlights the parallels between Japan’s leveraging of foreign aid to secure access to strategic natural resources in the post-World War II period, and China’s similar use of foreign aid since the early 1990s. It then shows how both countries have applied similar strategies in their aid programs in Myanmar, and points out how dramatic shifts in Myanmar’s domestic politics have shaped their opportunities for economic engagement. China seized upon Myanmar’s political transition in 1988 to expand its aid program, while Japan has responded to Myanmar’s reform measures since 2010 by resuming its aid efforts. The article concludes by considering the potential for China–Japan cooperation through their aid programs in Myanmar.     

COVID-19: from temporary de-globalisation to a re-discovery of tourism?

Abstract

The processes of globalisation and time-space compression, driven mainly by the neoliberal agenda and the advancement of various space-shrinking technologies, have markedly re-shaped the world over the last 75?years in an almost unchallenged manner. Amongst the most significant outcomes of these processes have been the popularisation of international travel and the accompanying global expansion of the tourism industry. As the first major force ever to effectively stop (or even reverse) globalisation and time-space compression, the COVID-19 outbreak has also put on hold the whole travel and tourism industry. In this respect, the tourism as we knew it just a few months ago has ceased to exist. Although the price the world is paying for this is enormous, the temporary processes of de-globalisation offer the tourism industry an unprecedented opportunity for a re-boot – an unrepeatable chance to re-develop in line with the tenets of sustainability and to do away with various ‘dark sides’ of tourism’s growth such as environmental degradation, economic exploitation or overcrowding. However, the path of re-development and transformation which the global tourism production system will follow once the COVID-19 crisis has been resolved is yet to be determined.     

‘Wherever I lay my head is home’ – young people's experience of home in the Brazilian street environment

Although academic research on street children is increasing, few have discussed the multiple meanings of home, as well as young people's perspectives on their homeless status. Drawing on several qualitative fieldwork studies in Salvador, Brazil, this article explores the ‘home’ narratives of a group seldom appraised: the grown-up ‘street children’ of the 1980s and 1990s. Although many of these young people may be described as homeless in a territorial sense, their narratives demonstrate the complex ways in which many feel or have felt at home in the streets of a middle-class neighbourhood. The feeling of being at home is closely interlinked to aspects they find important in their everyday lives, namely that of autonomy, safety and belonging. This analysis illustrates earlier ignored dimensions of why young people choose the street rather than home, and in addition, challenges some common definitions and assumptions.     

‘Afterschool and during vacations’: on labor and schooling in the postcolony

ABSTRACT

The Indian state's recent deregulation of child labor, several years after it passed a law making schooling free and compulsory, forces us to attend to the distinct dynamic between child labor and schooling that frame contemporary efforts around compulsory education. This paper opens-up this terrain through historicizing the child-figure – who combines school with wage labor – within the workings of colonial and postcolonial capitalism. It discusses how the strong and continuing traces of a longer history of exclusions is manifest in the widespread global construction of ‘school’ as inherently ‘fungible’ or the fragility of the school form, as central to this moment of compulsory schooling. Through a focus on this subaltern child-figure, this paper contends that both the ‘fungibility’ of schools for marginal children as well as the privatization of child labor foregrounds the antipolitics that undergirds the current fraught working out of compulsory education in the postcolony.     

Stabilizing neoliberalism in Bolivia: popular participation and privatization

Neoliberal theorists and development practitioners contend that economic liberalization and privatization lead to increased private sector productivity and decentralization accompanied by administrative reforms lead to greater democracy, more efficient public sector investment, and faster local development. Examination of the Bolivian case, which has been promoted as a global model for neoliberal restructuring, presents a different picture. There, economic restructuring and privatization have led to a decline in government revenues and a continuing economic crisis. Privatization of public services has led to rate hikes, which, in turn, have generated massive social protests. Political restructuring through decentralization has as often resulted in the entrenchment of local elites as in increases in truly democratic control of resources and social investments. This economic and political restructuring has also served to territorialize opposition to privatization and neoliberal economic policies and, in some areas, reinforce regional social movements. When examined together, it becomes clear how economic and administrative restructuring has sought to provide transnational firms both access to Bolivian natural resources as well as the social stability necessary in which to operate. As privatization through the Law of Capitalization further opened the country’s borders to global capital, the decentralization program through the Law of Popular Participation served to focus the attention of popular movements from national to local arenas. While foreign investment has increased, the lack of benefits for the majority of the country has led to mounting regional social protests in the face of reduced government spending on social programs and increased prices for basic services.     

The Precarity of Young People’s Housing Experiences in a Rural Context

Young people’s housing, economic and labour market circumstances have become increasingly insecure due to the combined effects of the 2007/2008 economic crisis, neoliberal welfare reforms, rising costs of higher education and the shortage of affordable housing. Discussions of young peoples’ experiences in these domains have largely neglected their spatial variability but evidence suggests that young people living in rural parts of the UK have distinctive experiences of housing, which are closely connected to labour markets and educational opportunities. By drawing on qualitative data from young people and housing professionals, this article explores some of these rural distinctions and frames them within theoretical debates about the ‘precariat’. It argues for a more theoretically informed and geographically nuanced understanding of contemporary housing issues as rural youth potentially face greater precarity than their urban peers.     

Distant Daughters

Abstract

Labour shortages in New Zealand during World War II prompted the ‘importation’ of domestic labour from its colonial dependency of the Cook Islands, and over 100 young women were employed as ‘house girls’ in private homes. These expedient arrangements were viewed less favourably when the young women moved toward more independent lifestyles, and issues over rights of citizenship arose when they opted to remain in self-chosen employment in New Zealand. Official concerns were clouded by allegations of moral misconduct, and ‘problems’ were further complicated by the adverse social and economic conditions that eventuated in the Cook Islands through the loss of so many marriageable young women. By examining the passage of these young migrants into New Zealand's wartime society, this paper shows how efforts to repatriate perceived troublemakers generated unexpected political tensions, developments that challenged colonial power relationships and highlighted inconsistencies in the Dominion's policies in relation to its Pacific Islands territories.     

Mercosur: A Failing Development Project?

Latin America is a developing region. Although it is different from other such regions it shares with them ‘the challenge of change’, particularly as a result of globalization. Its response has been to embrace democracy, neoliberal restructuring and ‘new (open) regionalism’. The ‘Common Market of the South’—Mercosur—was an important regional initiative involving Argentina and Brazil, and included in its various aims was the acceleration of ‘economic development with social justice’. This article explores to what extent development aims have been achieved and whether Mercosur is little more than a loose confederation of states unable to build institutional structures that could help development. To what extent is this the result of traditions that have entrenched elites and prevented a more egalitarian approach? Has the law generally failed its citizens? Or does it have a place in development? The article begins by briefly considering the concept of ‘development’ and seeks to place Latin America within the ‘developmental framework’ and questions whether there is a distinct Latin American development tradition. Within that tradition, and in the context of the ‘inter‐American system’ and globalization, the development of Mercosur is assessed both in terms of institution building and legal traditions. Finally, some preliminary conclusions are drawn about Mercosur's future and the extent to which institutional and other constraints have contributed to Mercosur falling short of its devleopmental potential.