What’s new in the ‘New Partnership for Africa’s Development’?

This article provides an overview of the New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD) in the context of Africa's current economic and governance crises, the attempt to establish an Africa Union, and the interest in Africa displayed by the G8 leadership and in particular by the UK's prime minister Tony Blair.
NEPAD has to be seen simultaneously as a 'big idea', a new way of doing business, and a comprehensive development framework. The 'big idea' is to put Africa's concerns on the table of the G8 and seek a much better deal for Africa in terms of international aid, debt relief and access to markets. The new way of doing business is a new form of 'enhanced' development partnership that makes both donor and recipient mutually accountable for development outcomes. The development framework is a long—and expanding—list of programmes and projects, akin to those that have been tried before.
The heart of NEPAD is a commitment to good governance, operationalized through a radical plan for 'peer review' of governance performance. This promises a radical new approach to development partnership, but it also faces political hazards. The governance component is also analysed in the context of the pan–Africa institutions envisaged by the African Union. There is a need for coordinating and rationalizing peace and security initiatives. NEPAD may unlock additional financing for development, but it should not be seen as a cash cow.
The challenges for NEPAD include opening up the process to make it more participatory, including greater focus on HIV/AIDS. NEPAD faces the real danger of being over–sold and of raising unrealistic expectations among Africans. It is, nevertheless, an outstanding opportunity for Africa's development.     

Explaining the Failure of Thailand's Anti‐corruption Regime

Despite the presence of strong anti‐corruption policies, state and regulatory capture may persist and thrive in the highest echelons of government. This article explores such a case, that of Thailand under former Prime Minister, Thaksin Shinawatra. The author argues that the primary explanation for this contradiction lies in Thailand's post‐1997 anti‐corruption framework. Because of the ascendancy of a business–politics nexus more powerful in blocking reform than Thai constitutional drafters had anticipated, and because of the decline in political contestability as a result of Thaksin's control of both the legislature and the executive, the stage was set for a dramatic increase in the levels of state capture. The author suggests that effective control of such political corruption calls for a strategy which extends far beyond the technocratic approaches used by Thai reformers in the mid to late 1990s.     

Rewriting Carlyle and Scottish cultural history

Carlyle and Scottish Thought. By Ralph Jessop (London: Macmillan, 1997) xvii + 266 pp. £40.00 cloth.     

FACTS, VALUES AND RATIONAL DECISION MAKING

This paper introduces some distinctions related to facts and values, indicates some of the uses and misuses of these distinctions, and draws conclusions for the problem of rational decision making. A major claim is that everyone but metaphysicians should forget about the fact-value distinction and get on with the pursuit of truth and the performance of good deeds.     

Book reviews

Australian politics

David Corbett, Australian Public Sector Management (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1992) pp.280. $24.95 ISBN 1 86373 312 4.

Chris James, Chris Jones and Andrew Norton (eds.), A Defence of Economic Rationalism (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1993) pp.194. $19.95 ISBN 186 3735348.

James Jupp and Marie Kabala (eds), The Politics of Australian Immigration (Carlton, Vic: Bureau of Immigration Research, 1993) pp.302. $n.p. ISBN 9 780644 272933.

H.P. Lee and George Winterton (eds), Australian Constitutional Perspectives (Sydney: The Law Book Company, 1992) pp.347. $55.00 ISBN 0 455 21085 3.

Ian McAllister, Political Behaviour: Citizens, Parties and Elites in Australia (Melbourne: Longman Cheshire, 1993) pp.308. $24.99 ISBN 0 582 86987 0.

Stephen Mills, The Hawke Years: The Story from Inside (Penguin, 1993) pp.330. $19.95 ISBN 0 670 84563 9.

P. Molr and H. Eijkman (eds), Policing Australia: Old Issues; New Perspectives (Melbourne: Macmillan, 1992) pp.391. $34.95 ISBN 0 7329 0390 4.

Jocelyn Pixley, Citizenship and Employment: Investigating Post‐Industrial Options (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1993) pp.339. $29.95 ISBN 0 521 44615 5.

S. Nicholas Samuel and Desh B. Gupta, Issues in Applied Economics: An Australian Text (Melbourne: Macmillan, 1993) pp.247. $26.95 ISBN 0 7329 2019 1.

M. Sawer and M. Simms (eds), A Woman's Place: Women and Politics in Australia, 2nd edition (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1993) pp.345. $22.95 ISBN 1 86373 169 5.

Comparative and international politics

Tsuneo Akaha and Frank Langdon (eds), Japan in the Posthegemonic World (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1993) pp.295. $US17.95 ISBN 1 55587 385 5.

Michael R. Beschloss and Strobe Talbott, At the Highest Level: The Inside Story of the End of the Cold War (London: Little, Brown, 1993) pp.498. $40.00 ISBN 0 316 90523 2.

John Coates, Suppressing Insurgency: An Analysis of the Malayan Emergency, 1948–54 (Boulder: Westview Press, 1992) pp.223. $US45.00 ISBN 0 8133 1436 4

Rafe de Crespigny, China This Century (Hong Kong, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1992) pp.353. $19.95 ISBN 0 19 585164 1.

Geoffrey K. Fry, Reforming the Civil Service: The Fulton Committee on the British Home Civil Service, 1977–1968 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993) pp.296. £45.00 ISBN 0 7486 0412 X.

Leslie Holmes, The End of Communist Power. Anti‐corruption campaigns and legitimation crisis (Cambridge: Polity, 1993) pp.358. $13.95 ISBN 0 7456 0580 X.

Joel Krieger (ed.), The Oxford Companion to Politics of the World (London: Oxford University Press, 1993) pp.1056. $59.95 ISBN 0 19 505934 4.

Brij V. Lal, Broken Waves: A History of the Fiji Islands in the Twentieth Century (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1992) pp.404. $US38.00 ISBN 0 8248 1418 5.

Malcolm McKinnon, Independence and Foreign Policy: New Zealand in the World Since 1935 (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1993) pp.329. $29.95 ISBN 1 86940 070 4.

Marina Ottaway, South Africa: The Struggle for a New Order (Washington DC: Brookings Institution, 1993).pp.250. $US34.95 ISBN 0 1857 6716 1.

Bob Tucker and Bruce Scott (eds), South Africa: Prospects for a Successful Transition (Kenwyn, South Africa: Juta & Co, 1992). pp.314. $n.p. ISBN 0 7021 2920 8.

Richard B. Spence and Linda L. Nelson (eds), Scholar, Patriot, Mentor: Historical Essays in Honor of Dimitrije Djordjevic (Boulder: East European Monographs, 1992) pp.422. $US51.00 ISBN 0 8803 217 4.

Carol M. Swain, Black Faces, Black Interests: The Representation of African Americans in Congress (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1993) pp.275. $US37.50 ISBN 0 674 07615 X.

Katherine Tate, From Protest to Politics: The New Black Voters in American Elections (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1993) pp.221. $32.50 ISBN 0 674 32538 9.

Howard Williams, Moorhead Wright and Tony Evans, A Reader in International Relations and Political Theory (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1993) pp. 334. $39.95 ISBN 0 335 15667 3.

Political theory and methodology

F.G. Bailey, The Kingdom of Individuals: An Essay on Self‐Respect and Social Obligation (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993) pp.231. $US15–35 ISBN 0 8014 8078 7.

Alan Carling, Social Division (London: Verso, 1991) pp.442. $45.00 ISBN 0 86091 506 9.

James W. Ceaser, Liberal Democracy and Political Science (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992) pp.242 $29.00 ISBN 0 8018 4511 4.

Eva Etzioni‐Halevy, The Elite Connection: Problems and Potential of Western Democracy (Cambridge: Polity, 1993) pp.239. $39.95 ISBN 0 7456 1068 4.

Shaun Hargeaves Heap, Martin Hollis, Bruce Lyons, Robert Sugden and Albert Weale, The Theory of Choice (Blackwell: Oxford, 1992) pp. 398. $49.00 ISBN 0 63118322 1.

Bonnie Honig, Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993) pp.269. $US17.95 ISBN 0 8014 8072 8.

Paul Patton (ed.), Nietzsche, Feminism and Political Theory (London: Allen & Unwin, 1993) pp.258. $24.95 ISBN 186373 445 7.     

British Imperialism and the Political Economy of Malayan Independence

The article focuses on Britain’s relationship with Malaya shortly before and after its independence from the British Empire. The article looks at the negotiations concerning the financial settlement prior to independence. Britain sought to keep Malaya within the sterling area at all costs, even after de jure convertibility had been achieved, due to its high dollar earning capacity, which remained important due to persistent trade deficits with the US from the end of the Second World War. The article argues that this settlement, while seemingly very generous for an independent Malaya, was still very much intended to maintain Britain’s role within the global economy, to ensure sterling’s status as an international currency and to support conditions for British economic growth.     

Empowered spaces? Management articulations of gendered spaces in apparel factories in Karachi,Pakistan

Feminist scholarship has often focused on gendered workspaces within the apparel sector, where it is taken for granted that it is work conventionally attracting neophyte women. Within it, the task of managers is to discipline these young women to become docile and malleable workers. While this may have held to be the case temporally and regionally, South Asia’s experience has exhibited country-specific facets. This article focuses on these gendered workspaces in three factories in Karachi, Pakistan, in which we undertook research. In this context, there was a deliberate change in place facilitated by a United Nations Development Program’s Gender Promotion (GENPROM) initiative – to recruit and retain women workers, even though they acknowledged skilled workers were men. The factory managers we interviewed and spoke with used discursive tropes of gender equality and culturally appropriate women’s-only spaces as ways of justifying their labor recruitment strategy. However, digging deeper through interviews with managers at various levels suggested that their recruitment tactic had similar undertones to that revealed by early feminist research – although articulated via different mechanisms. We argue that this creation of empowerment spaces in particular Pakistani apparel sector factories requires careful tracing because it suggests how management interpellations reconfigure worker subjectivities. We also want to suggest that attentiveness to these practices is important because they may have specific bearings on temporal and spatial realities faced by Pakistan.