The Politics of Development

A Survey

Heloise Weber

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781857435009
• eBook ISBN: 9781136644412
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The Politics of Development: A Survey provides an overview of the intrinsically political relations of development. It brings together essays written by experts in the politics of development and covers a range of significant and topical concerns: gender, race, indigenous development, social movements, religion, security, environmental concerns, colonialism and its legacies, migration, the political economy of development, trajectories in urbanization, and the agrarian question. It introduces and examines key concepts and approaches which have underpinned development, as well as the struggles it has engendered historically, and in contemporary contexts. This volume provides critical insights into the global politics of development and offers alternative analytical frameworks for understanding the relationships around development and inequalities.

The Politics of Development: A Survey is organized in an accessible manner, catering to a wide audience (ranging from undergraduates at University level to practitioners and Non-Governmental Organizations [NGOs] engaged in advocacy as well as practical political aspects), and provides introductions to key issues and themes around contemporary challenges and opportunities in development.

The title also includes an A-Z Glossary, covering key terms, organizations, concepts and actors in the politics of development.

A–Z glossary

Heloise Weber, Martin Weber, Leah Aylward and Kamil Shah

Note: Organizations and agreements are listed under their acronym if they are usually known by the abbreviated version of their official title. The A–Z also contains public-sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v2.00 (www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-licence/version/2/) from the Department for International Development Glossary of Terms, and from the Europa World Year Book and its online version Europa World Plus (www.europaworld.com), published by Routledge.

A

ACBF (African Capacity Building Foundation)

Founded 1991 by the World Bank, UNDP, the African Development Bank (AfDB), African governments and bilateral donors. Aims to build sustainable human and institutional capacity for sustainable growth, poverty reduction and good governance in Africa. Its members are 44 African and non-African governments, the World Bank, UNDP, the AfDB and the IMF.

Accumulation

In general, to accumulate means to increase, to collect, or to build up. In economic terms it generally refers to the continuous growth of capital through the retention of savings or interest. In agrarian terms, this term refers to the potential capacity that agricultural processes have to produce a surplus of both food and non-food/financial output, which can be used to support the costs of industrialization and structural transformation both within and beyond the agricultural context.

See also agrarian political economy, agrarian question and capital.

AfDB (African Development Bank)

Established in 1964, the Bank began operations in July 1966, with the aim of financing economic and social development in African countries.

Agrarian political economy

Agrarian political economy is a term that can take on diverse meanings depending on the context and discipline in which it is used. In general, the term ‘political economy’ refers to range of approaches used to study the relationship between economic and political social dynamics. Agrarian political economy, then, refers to economic and political relations of the agrarian context and to the study of these social dynamics.

Agrarian question

A term used to make reference to an analytical framework used to understand how rural societies are transformed by capitalist forces and capitalist relations of production. According to Karl Kautsky, the agrarian question can be defined as ‘whether, and how, capital is seizing hold of agriculture, revolutionising it, making old forms of production and property untenable and creating the necessity for new ones’ (Kautsky 1988 [1899]: 12). Though the agrarian question received much focus in the 19th century, it has re-emerged owing to the contemporary threat that the liberalization of agriculture holds for peasants around the globe.

Agrarian reform

Closely related to land reform, these are policies that are usually enacted by the state to redistribute land for social reasons. However, such policies can also comprise practices of displacement (by the state) of peasants and/or can be strategically motivated for ideological purposes, and can also include policies geared towards the modernization of agricultural production. For example, in Honduras during the 1960s and 1970s agrarian reform laws were enacted to distribute land for the collective use of the peasantry (Kerssen 2013: 16). This redistribution of land was intended to quell the rising tide of communism, whilst socially and economically it was designed to transform peasants into agricultural entrepreneurs and bring about their deeper integration into the capitalist world system.

AIDS

Acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) describes the third (and final) stage of the pathology of HIV infection in humans. It refers to the phase when the viral infection moves from the stage of clinical latency to the emergence of significant symptoms of immune system deficiency.

ALBA-TCP

Alianza Bolivariana por los Pueblos de Nuestra América—Tratado de los Comercios de los Pueblos (ALBA-TCP, Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America—People’s Trade Treaty) is a regional alliance that grew out of a trade-in-kind partnership between Cuba and Venezuela over medical support and oil. Subsequently enlarged, it is now a regional alliance comprising nine countries (Honduras having left after the coup d’état in 2009). The organization sees itself as an alternative, broadly of a social-democratic orientation, to the regionalism project advanced under the Free Trade Area of the Americas, which the members of ALBA-TCP consider to be US dominated and directed towards neo-liberal political goals.

ALBA-TCP has used practices of trade-in-kind and barter to supplement or replace some more strictly commercial forms of trade, and has also introduced the SUCRE, a regional common currency for electronic trade.

Alternative World Water Forum

See FAME.

Anthropocene

The ‘Anthropocene’ is a concept intended to capture what is argued to be a profound transformative effect inaugurated by human activities in terms of the sequence of the ‘geological ages’ of planet Earth. It was introduced by the ecologist E.F. Stroemer, and has been popularized in recent years among scientists and analysts dealing with questions of anthropogenic ecological change.

‘Anthropocene’ is not an officially accepted nomenclature for a new geologic epoch (following from the Pleistocene and Holocene), but rather a pitch for considering the systemic impact of human civilizations on planetary ecological systems. Scientists exploring the concept will look, for example, to changes in the so-called ‘pedosphere’, the Earth’s ‘outer skin’ comprising the formation of topsoils and surface ecologies.

Anthropogenic environmental crisis

The notion that, to significant levels, environmental problems encountered today are the result of human activity, as opposed to ‘natural’ (and hence unalterable) forces. In distinction to major natural events (tsunami, cataclysmic volcanic events, long-term cyclical climate variations), anthropogenic environmental crises can be linked through convincing narratives, arguments or evidence to human practices. A good example is the loss of topsoil owing to unsustainable farming practices. Questions around what kinds of environmental problems occur ‘naturally’ and which ones may be the result of human activity are central to many political disagreements with reference to development policies and expectations.

Appropriate technology

See intermediate technology.

ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations)

The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) is a regional political and economic organization comprising the founding members of Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand and Singapore, as well as Brunei, Myanmar (Burma), Cambodia, Laos and Viet Nam. Its purpose is to advance regional cooperation and integration in the areas of security, socio-cultural affairs and economic relations.

ASEAN has been considered an alternative approach to regional integration, providing much more latitude to informal ways of rule making and driving regional concerns forward. Its critics see this as a potential weakness, but for its advocates this allows greater flexibility in bringing the regional partners together, and an enhanced and conducive pluralism based on sovereignty and non-intervention.

ASEAN is a ‘nuclear weapon-free’ region, with all its members now having ratified a treaty to that effect.

B

Bali Action Plan

This is the outcome of the Bali Summit (December 2007) relating to the environment, where after two weeks of intense negotiations, governments of more than 190 countries reached agreement on a roadmap for achieving a global climate-change deal by the end of 2009.

Banana republic

The term ‘banana republic’ is intended to capture the political economy of (neo-)liberal development, both in Latin America and elsewhere. This is because in the normal usage a ‘banana republic’ is essentially a country whose government operates to privilege profits for big business interests rather than the redistribution of wealth, whilst favouring large-scale plantation agriculture. Many such countries continue to reflect the legacies of colonial rule, including and especially the creation of plantation systems or plantation economies. Honduras is considered the quintessential banana republic because beginning in the early 20th century, large transnational fruit companies held huge swaths of land for plantation fruit production (mostly bananas) with one of the largest, United Fruit (now Chiquita), acquiring the nickname El Pulpo (The Octopus) for its control over resources, land and political power (Kerssen 2013: 14).

Banana republics have also recently come to be associated with Charter Cities. Critics of the Charter Cities thus equate them with banana republics in two separate ways. First, they associate plantation agriculture with creating the conditions that force small-holder farmers off the land to work in the manufacturing industries that will form the economic base of the Charter Cities. Second, they see the creation of Charter Cities as ceding sovereign rights to both foreign and domestic big business interests. In short, the Charter Cities, much like the conditions of the ‘original’ banana republic, are seen to be a new phase of capitalist expansion and the continued repression of the poor.

Bandung Conference

The Bandung Conference was a milestone in the development of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM). It was held in 1955 in Bandung (Indonesia), and brought together representatives from 25 Asian and African countries with the aim of strengthening the political struggle against colonialism, and the legacies of and forms of neo-colonialism.

Basel Convention

The Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes and their Disposal (known for brevity as the Basel Convention) is an international agreement (treaty) with the purpose of reducing the trade and transfer of hazardous materials from developed industrialized countries to less developed countries. Trade in hazardous materials has often involved the exploitation of lower or non-existent environmental regulations and/or health safeguards in developing countries by trading partners looking to dispose of dangerous materials, while avoiding the costs associated with specialist disposal technologies that are often required in developed countries.

A more recent initiative to impose an outright ban (Basel Ban Amendment) on transfers of all hazardous materials to certain developing countries has not yet entered into force, owing to industry resistance and the ensuing failure to achieve a 75% quorum of support from the signatories to the Convention. The terms of the Basel Ban Amendment have nevertheless been implemented unilaterally by some of the signatory parties.

Bilateral aid

Bilateral aid refers to the provision of aid (for example, in terms of grants or concessional loans) to a developing country and/or a country in transition by another country. In the case of the UK, the countries that receive bilateral aid appear on the Development Assistance Committee list indicating each country and the institutions that administer the assistance, which are normally based in Britain, and working in fields relevant to these countries. Bilateral aid can also take place in kind. See ALBA-TCP for an example (although ALBA-TCP is itself not a bilateral aid programme).

Biodiversity

Biodiversity loss presents a huge challenge to development projects and policies. In many cases, practices in pursuit of industrialization, urbanization and economization have direct negative implications for biodiversity. There are many reasons for this, which are often interlinked: biodiversity may be lost as a result of the direct destruction of a habitat (as in cases involving highly specialized and localized species of plants or animals) on one end of the continuum, or as a result of patent-based market-cornering practices on the other end (as in cases in which owners of seed patents phase out a particular variety of a crop in order to concentrate and consolidate market share, as has been the case, for instance, with varieties of staples such as rice, maize and potatoes).

See also intellectual property rights.

Biofuels

Also known as bio-ethanol, biofuels are essentially (ethyl) alcohol produced from crops or plant materials. Sugar cane, beets, potato, corn, sunflower, manioc and may other crops (including straw) can all be used in biofuel production. Typically, reference to biofuels is associated with the development of alternatives to fossil fuels, and in particular oil and petrol. This is one reason why biofuels are popularly thought of as linked to fuelling cars. However, biofuels have a wider range of application, including for the firing of ‘new’ heating systems utilizing biomass (for instance ‘pellets’ made of waste wood or other compressed bio-matter).

Biofuels have become a very controversial issue. Given widespread concerns over global food security, for instance, it is quite problematic that foodstuffs are now introduced into markets traditionally dominated by petro-products, a practice that leads to relatively poor consumers of staple products such as palm oil having to compete with wealthy purchasers of ethanol-enriched gasoline. There are also major concerns about claims to the ecological sustainability of biofuel products, as most are produced in highly intensive mono-cultural plantation systems, reinforcing problems with biodiversity, soil quality, water management, and vulnerability to pests and diseases.

Biopiracy

Biopiracy is a term popularized by the Indian physicist and environmental activist Vandana Shiva to refer to the practice of the expropriation of common, local knowledge and practices through the use of patent law. In many different places of the world, people have passed on particular knowledge(s) and practices regarding, for instance, plant breeding, the use of herbs for medicinal or hygienic purposes, or the benefits of certain techniques of food production and processing from a nutritional or health perspective. The rapid rise and transformation in recent years of patent law and legal provisions for patenting scientific discoveries for the purpose of exclusive commercial exploitation has led to situations whe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• ESSAYS
• Introduction
• The politics of governing development
• Race and development
• Politics of Indigenous development
• Gender and development
• Social movements and the politics of development
• Religion and development
• The security-development nexus and fragile states: a critical political analysis
• The environmental politics of development
• Politics of neo-liberal development: Washington Consensus and post-Washington Consensus
• Charter cities and development: examining a paradox
• The politics of migration and the North American Free Trade Agreement
• Politics of the agrarian question
• Select bibliography
• A–Z GLOSSARY