Contemporary Development Practices Research Articles

Everyday governance in areas of contested power: Insights from Mozambique, Myanmar, and Pakistan

SummaryMotivationHow do poor and marginalized people solve problems and claim rights and entitlements in places affected by conflict and where state authority is contested? Understanding such processes is important as the numbers of poor people living in difficult settings grows, yet existing research on governance in conflict largely misses a “citizen's eye” view of these processes.PurposeThe article focuses on “everyday governance” from a citizen's perspective. What do engagements with the multiple state and non‐state actors that prevail in such settings look like? We present insights from longitudinal research in conflict‐affected areas in Mozambique, Myanmar and Pakistan.Methods and approachResearch was undertaken in two phases over the period 2017–2021. Researchers developed an innovative method, “governance diaries,” in which we interviewed the same set of poor and marginalized households over a period of a year, capturing an unfolding citizen's eye view of governance. We subsequently used the same method to include key intermediaries to whom households went with problems.FindingsWe find that in most instances poor and marginalized households did not rely on the state or other formal or external authorities to resolve problems. Mostly, they simply “lived with” those problems, or resolved them through “self‐provision”—mutual aid and community action. When they did go to authorities, they used “governance intermediaries”—actors that connect people with authorities or mediate between households. These intermediaries played a central role in local governance, using their networks and deploying a range of strategies with a focus on local resolution of problems.Policy implicationsThese findings challenge some core assumptions of contemporary development practice. First, development programmes tend to focus on improving state‐run services, rather than engaging with the diversity of how public goods are governed on the ground. Second, policies assume that people can go directly to authorities with their problems, and do not take into account the role that intermediaries play. Finally, the highly diverse networks of governance actors that matter to specific places challenges the common focus on formal systems rather than informal practices.

Non-Governmental Organizations and Development Service Provision: A Conceptual and Empirical Review

Globally, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are seen as a significant driving force behind delivering development services. There is universal consensus within the development community that development service delivery will be incomplete without the involvement of NGOs. Thus, many NGOs across the globe complement governments' efforts in development service delivery, a situation that has occasioned a rapid rise in both the volume and scale of operations of NGOs. Nonetheless, there is a growing debate regarding the conceptual intentions of NGOs. While some scholars believe that NGOs effectively provide development services, others have suggested that development service delivery does not constitute a critical component of NGOs' agenda. There is also the issue of whether or not the approaches NGOs employ in development services are participatory enough. While some scholars opine that participatory development communication approaches characterize NGOs' development services, others maintain that participation is merely rhetoric value within the NGO sector. These contending views risk an obliteration of the continuing relevance of NGOs in development discourse. This paper seeks to contribute to the debate on the place of NGOs in development services and the approaches NGOs employ in contemporary development practice. The authors posit that NGOs occupy a central place in development service provision but concede that NGO operations in development services are not without challenges. The authors argue further that NGOs’ role in development services can better be appreciated based on a thorough understanding of the role of participatory development communication in development service provisions. The paper presents a review of the relevant conceptual and empirical literature on NGOs' activities in development services and concludes by identifying lessons that should engage the attention of key stakeholders.

Room for money or manoeuvre? How green financialization and de-risking shape Zambia’s renewable energy transition

ABSTRACT SDG-backed green finance efforts have become popular vehicles for private investors to participate in development collaborations. We critically examine two transnational renewable energy projects in Zambia, drawing on the financialization literature and, particularly, the concept of de-risking. We find that new public–private partnership coalitions impose a global market and financial logic on the Zambian energy sector and its customers. While this development may attract transnational investment into renewables, we argue that it also sidelines smaller Zambian businesses and financializes the daily life of Zambian citizens. This paper, thus, provides critical scholarly insights into the greening of contemporary development practices.

What Empirically Based Research Tells Us About Game Development

This paper reviews empirically grounded research on practices in game development with the intent to give a comprehensive overview of contemporary development practices used in the video game industry. While there are many intangible elements that inform game development processes, this review specifically covers the more immediate practical challenges. The review covers a total of 48 papers published between 2006 and 2016, which were all subjected to thematic analysis by three reviewers. The results of the review show that an almost universal characteristic of game development is that it is almost impossible to accurately plan a development project in detail, largely due to the soft requirements inherent in game production which emerge mid-process during development projects, during when testing is coupled with continuous ideation and refinement. Practicing game developers have created their own frameworks that accommodate for this lack of planning. They include flat hierarchies, democratic decision-making, creative autonomy, and informal communication, which are designed to create an environment that maintains creativity and openness to product changes long into the production process. These frameworks vary significantly between studios and often between individual projects. This review also shows that the term ‘Agile’, while often used by both researchers and developers to characterize the process of game development, is not an apt descriptor of how game developers actually work. Agile is used as shorthand for unstructured and flexible development, rather than serving as a descriptor of a definable or unified work method. Finally, as companies develop more complicated hierarchies of stakeholders and staff, the desired flexibility and autonomy of game development becomes increasingly complicated to maintain, and often necessitates more formalized management processes and company structures. In these cases, inherent tensions of game development become more pronounced, and continuous creativity is hard to maintain due to a growing need to formalize processes.

Consuming Indigeneity: Baba Ramdev, Patanjali Ayurveda and the Swadeshi Project of Development

How does the discourse of indigeneity converse with the imperatives of economic and cultural globalization in a postcolonial state like India? The complexity of the question and the possibility of multi-layered responses become all the more intriguing when such a discourse is promoted by Ramdev, a yoga guru turned entrepreneur. Responding to the question, the article focuses on the role of tradition in normative development thought and its mainstreaming in a culture-conscious India, the postcolonial desire for Swadeshi (exemplified in Patanjali Ayurveda) and the possibility of a consumption pattern that goes beyond individual gratification. To begin with, the article draws from a recent controversy which brought into popular discussion the attitude of foreign companies vis-à-vis cultural sentiments. It addresses the question of tradition in Western development theory and how that theorization is interrogated in contemporary development practices. Then it traces the evolution of Swadeshi as an attempt at epistemic and economic autonomy and how such thinking is co-opted by Ramdev in advancing the fortunes of Patanjali. This deployment of Swadeshi vocabulary is then combined with the practice of consumption that is loaded with associations of indigeneity and nationalism. In the process, the article offers a template for reworking some of the common sensical assumptions about tradition, development and consumption.

Getting the Resilience Right: Climate Change and Development Policy in the ‘African Age’

ABSTRACTFounded on a call to place climate change adaptation and climate risk management at the heart of contemporary development practice, the World Bank’s Africa Climate Business Plan presents an ambitious agenda for coordinating $19bn of loans, grants and investment over the coming decade. The centrepiece of this recasting of development thinking is the notion of resilience, which ties together the various activities proposed under the Plan. Resilience must respectively be strengthened, empowered and enabled in order for African countries to withstand climate change impacts. In this paper we subject this new climate-resilient development discourse to critical scrutiny. Using the theoretical lens of post-politics, we caution how the ill-defined category of resilience is deployed to reinforce a profoundly depoliticising agenda in which climate change is posited as an external threat to an otherwise seamless narrative of African advancement. In so doing, we illustrate how the Bank obscures the contested histories of African development and uses the discourse of climate-resilient development to perpetuate its neoliberal agenda within the continent.

Settler Violence?: Race and Emergent Frontiers of Progress in Honduras

Settler Violence? Race and Emergent Frontiers of Progress in Honduras Christopher A. Loperena (bio) The displacement of black and indigenous peoples from sites of economic opportunity in Honduras, and the systematic enclosure of the natural resources within their territories, is intimately tethered to white socio-spatial imaginaries and the politics of frontier making. In this essay, I analyze how elite investors, with support from the state and multilateral development banks, mobilize the ideology of national progress to further disenfranchise rural communities of color and to legitimate acts of violence against land and environmental activists. This violence has increased dramatically since the 2009 coup against Manual Zelaya Rosales, which was followed by a surge in extractivist activities throughout the national territory. In the quest for land, mestizo elites harness both legal and physical coercion to seize vital natural resources within indigenous and black territories.1 The process of turning indigenous territories into frontier zones for economic development underscores not only the racialized dimensions of dispossession but also the ways in which violence is used to hasten the power and racial domination of mestizo settlers over indigenous and black peoples.2 Settler colonialism, according to Patrick Wolfe, entails conquering the land and then populating the conquered territory with the victorious people. Although qualitatively different from the colonial project imposed by the Spanish and Portuguese—at least from an ideological perspective, since it was contingent on the incorporation of indigenous peoples into the national body politic—settler colonialism remains pertinent to analyses of race relations in Latin America. Wolfe states that settler colonialism is an ongoing process premised on a “logic of elimination.”3 Through an analysis of settler violence, I elucidate the relationship between settler colonial logics and contemporary development practices in Honduras. The ongoing removal and elimination of indigenous and black peoples is epitomized by the targeted repression and killing of key indigenous social movement activists, including the March 2016 assassination of Goldman Environmental Prize winner Berta Cáceres. [End Page 801] The logic of elimination is also expressed through legal arrangements that erode collective property rights and undermine black and indigenous sovereignty over the natural resources within their territories. Although Honduras has signed and ratified international legal conventions on the territorial rights of indigenous and tribal peoples, the state has aggressively pursued development projects that directly violate these rights. Even communities in possession of titles to their lands are subject to these forms of expropriation, particularly when the motive is couched within the discourse of national progress. Progress as Settler Colonial Logic In Latin America, national progress is crucially bound up with white socio-spatial epistemologies, which relegate indigenous peoples to a mythical past and thus render invisible contemporary indigenous peoples’ existence and political vitality.4 Indeed, the ideology of indo-Hispanic racial mixture, or mestizaje, has been used to negate indigenous and black territorial claims and to buttress the political and economic aspirations of the mestizo elite. The incorporation of indigenous peoples into the nation through the ideology of mestizaje ultimately furthers the whitening project on which postcolonial national identity was founded.5 Aspirations to whiten the nation gain material coherence through development practice. Following Keisha-Khan Perry, I understand development projects as the spatial dimension of the whitening ideology.6 The proliferation of extractivist economic activities within black and indigenous territories asserts national sovereignty over the natural resources to which rural communities of color lay claim, and thereby buttresses white spatial imaginaries. Sharlene Mollet’s research in the Honduran Mosquitia illustrates how indigenous land use practices are defined as backward and thus deemed, by the state, unsuitable for market production.7 In this way, racist understandings of indigenous inferiority position mestizo colonos (settlers) as more apt to use the land productively and thus legitimates their continued presence and spatial dominance over black and indigenous peoples. Indeed, the notion of “idle” or “underutilized” land has served as a central justification for the usurpation of lands in areas populated by indigenous and black peoples and which have been folded into the agrarian reform policies adopted by the state, beginning with the Agrarian Reform Law of 1962. Because indigenous and black peoples’ lands were often classified as underutilized, they were subject...

Understanding Sustainability through Traditional Maasai Pastoral Systems in Southern Kenya

In the developed world, we tend to think of sustainability as a newly articulated solution to challenges of environmental resource degradation and issues of social and economic injustice. However, pastoralism as traditionally practiced by the Maasai of southern Kenya is tied closely to the land and responds to climatic variation within the region. In the early 20 th century, colonial policies began to alter traditional land use systems, compromising inherently sustainable arrangements and isolating populations from the land. This trend has continued somewhat in contemporary development practice. As a result of a shift toward privatization of land tenure, traditional pastoral systems are no longer viable. While studying abroad with The School for Field Studies, we became aware of the struggle many Maasai face as they attempt to continue pastoralism in an increasingly hostile environment. Ultimately, development efforts in the region should focus not on implementing exogenous concepts of ‗sustainability‘ but rather on supporting and adapting systems that are already in place. Author’s Note Kaitlyn received an email from Consilience while we were in Kenya. That night, we started talking about sustainability in the context of the Maasai. While we come from different disciplinary backgrounds—Emma is focused on Africana Studies while Kaitlyn‘s background is in Environmental Biology—in Kenya we had both come to understand the inextricable relationship between people and conservation in the developing world. We wanted to share our thoughts on issues of sustainable development, as well as some of the more formative experiences that contributed to our understanding of the complex nature of social and environmental issues in southern Kenya. We‘ve both developed a strong connection to the area. Emma plans to return to southern Kenya and research sustainable agriculture, ultimately working toward a graduate degree in the field. After spending a year in western Kenya studying the behavioral ecology of blue monkeys, Kaitlyn plans to pursue graduate education in the field of conservation biology. She will continue to engage in projects that integrate conservation and development efforts.

The Transnational Project and its Implications for Migrant Civil Society in Bangladesh

In Bangladesh, overseas labor migration plays a vital role in the development strategy promoted by government agencies, international donor organizations and civil society organizations. Civil society organizations facilitate the migration process, respond to exploitation facing migrants while overseas and assist migrants upon their return to Bangladesh. Organizations in Bangladesh are pursuing a ‘transnational project,’ whereby their activities, missions, and objectives are now focused around transnational work in order to assist migrants. The transnational project is driven by foreign development agencies and the legitimating actions of local migrant organizations. This paper demonstrates the different ways transnationalism has moved from a radical concept to a banal development practice, by critically analyzing contemporary development practices of migrant civil society organizations in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Also addressed are the implications of the transnational project on migrant organizations, development, and migrant political inclusion, arguing that the transnational project creates new power structures and paradoxes within organizations.

The Antinomies of ‘Financial Inclusion’: Debt, Distress and the Workings of Indian Microfinance

The concept of ‘financial inclusion’ has become a central trope that legitimates a wide range of contemporary development practices. By constructing a new object of development – the ‘financially excluded’ – it facilitates the expansion of an increasingly corporatized microfinance technocracy. The present paper problematizes the underlying binaries of inclusion/exclusion and formal/informal finance upon which this narrative is based. Through an examination of the 2010 Andhra Pradesh microfinance crisis, it demonstrates key contradictions within the discourse and practices of commercial microfinance. In so doing, it demonstrates why the narrative of financial inclusion and its correlate notion of ‘consumption smoothing’ are inadequate tools with which to conceptualize the political economy of contemporary agrarian change.

Component Based Software Engineering

Traditional software estimation models are directed towards large monolithic software development projects. Contemporary software development practices require a new approach to software cost estimation. Contemporary development practices characterize a software application as interacting, independent components. Component-based development offers many potential benefits such as a greater reuse. Component based software development approach is based on the idea to develop software systems by selecting appropriate off-the shelf components and then to assemble them with a welldefined software architecture. Software community faces a major challenge that is raised by fast growing demand for rapid and cost-effective development and maintenance of large scale and complex software systems. To overcome the challenge, the new trend is to adopt component based software engineering (CBSE).The key difference between CBSE and traditional software engineering is that CBSE views a software system as a set of off-the-shelf components integrated within appropriate software architecture. CBSE promotes large-scale reuse, as it focuses on building software on building software systems by assembling off-the-shelf components rather than implementing the entire system from scratch. CBSE also emphasis on selection and creation of software architecture that allow systems to achieve their quality requirements .As a result, CBSE has introduced fundamental changes in software development and maintenance.

Holding it Together in a Crisis: Family Strengthening and Embedding Neoliberalism

This article seeks to intervene in debates about the role of crisis in Post-Washington Consensus (PWC) policymaking. Gender and sexuality are largely absent from that debate. What do experiences of crisis reveal about the inter-connections between crisis, gender, and sexuality? In concrete crisis conditions, which common sense groundworks of the present (Nikolas Rose) get unsettled, which get reentrenched, and what is the role of the development industry in this process? Using policy texts, interviews with World Bank policymakers, and fieldwork on a family strengthening loan in Argentina, the author argues that denaturalisation of free markets in the PWC is articulated partly through the renaturalisation of monogamous heterosexual couplehood. With the injuries of neoliberalism framed as injuries to loving couplehood, the World Bank and its allies resolve to (re)generate intimate partnership as the defining feature of the post-crisis era, raising crucial questions about new regimes of heteronormativity under construction in contemporary development practice.

Sustainable Development, Rolled-out Neoliberalism and Sustainable Communities

Recent contributions by geographers on the relationships between states and citizens have documented the rise of rolled-out neoliberalism. Development agendas are, it is argued, increasingly dominated by the principles of market-driven reforms, social inequality, and a drive towards enhancing the economic competitiveness of the supply side of the economy. However, at the same time, a parallel set of discourses has emerged in the development literature which argues that it is principles of sustainable development that have, in practice, become dominant. The emphasis is, instead, on democratic empowerment, environmental conservation, and social justice. This paper examines the relationships between these ostensibly very different interpretations of contemporary development with an assessment of one of the Labour government’s most ambitious planning agendas—the publication in February 2003 of the document Sustainable Communities: Building for the Future. The proposals are promoted as a ‘‘step change’’ in the planning system with a new emphasis on tackling shortages of housing in the South East and reviving the economy of the Thames Gateway area. The paper assesses the different ways in which such programmes can be interpreted and argues that contemporary development practices in countries such as Britain are constituted by a hybridity of approaches and rationalities and cannot be reduced to simple characterisations of rolled-out neoliberalism or sustainable development.

Embedding security practices in contemporary information systems development approaches

As information and communication technologies become a critical component of firms’ infrastructures and information establishes itself as a key business resource as well as driver, people start to realise that there is more than the functionality of the new information systems that is significant. Business or organisational transactions over new media require stability, one factor of which is information security. Information systems development practices have changed in line with the evolution of technology offerings as well as the nature of systems developed. Nevertheless, as this paper establishes, most contemporary development practices do not accommodate sufficiently security concerns. Beyond the literature evidence, reports on empirical study results indicating that practitioners deal with security issues by applying conventional risk analysis practices after the system is developed. Addresses the lack of a defined discipline for security concerns integration in systems development by using field study results recording development practices that are currently in use to illustrate their deficiencies, to point to required enhancements of practice and to propose a list of desired features that contemporary development practices should incorporate to address security concerns.

Working with the grain? Towards sustainable rural and community development

This paper explores some connections between the ‘cultural turn’ in recent social theory, and the emergence of new models of local and regional development which have potential importance for the pursuit of sustainable rural development. Two particular examples of attempted cultural engineering, centred on ideas of ‘enterprise culture’ and of ‘corporate culture’, are reviewed and both shown to be flawed by their weak conception of culture. A more convincing account of its importance is derived from work on regional development which emphasises the role of social networks and institutional thickness in enabling the growth of confidence and trust as preconditions for success. It is noted that these institutional conditions show some surprising similarities to traditional social features of rural areas, and so help explain the shift from failed strategies of rural development towards more integrated approaches. A number of examples of contemporary development practice in rural Wales are described, to support the suggestion that the attainment of sustainable economic and social development in rural areas depends upon creating social and institutional networks which embed change within the prevailing social and cultural resources of rural populations.