Critical Development Studies Research Articles

The future is only the beginning

Recent advancements in genome editing have captured the attention of scientists and policymakers, who contend that the technology has a large role to play in advancing food and climate security on the African continent. However, the modest results of earlier generations of biotechnology—such as genetically modified (GM) crops—raise questions about the sustainability of new technological interventions. This special feature examines lessons learned from previous generations of GM crops and other agricultural technologies, using them to analyze the portfolio of gene edited crops being developed for African farmers today. In this article, we introduce the 6 papers that make up the special feature by way of examining future-oriented discourses around the advancement of genome editing. Drawing on Science and Technology Studies, political ecology, and critical development studies, this introduction highlights the crucial factors that shape technology development, agricultural practice, and the politics of knowing and emphasizes the need to look toward multiple, diverse futures.

The anti-politics of impact investment: Financial self-regulation, market competition and over-indebtedness in Cambodia

Social impact investors claim to promote sustainable development by mobilizing private finance capital to solve pressing global challenges like poverty alleviation. In this paper, I interrogate this claim through an examination of microfinance in Cambodia, a major destination for impact investment. In the past decade, Cambodia has received nearly 10% of global investments from microfinance-specific funds. It now has the largest microfinance-debt per capita ratio of any country in the world. Based on qualitative research between 2021 and 2023, I argue that impact investment functions as an anti-politics of development that reinforces finance as a political technology of neoliberal governance. Over the past two decades, impact investors have poured capital into the country’s microfinance industry to expand access to credit without acknowledging structural political-economic conditions that have produced rising over-indebtedness among microfinance borrowers. Instead, they have argued that the problems created by the microfinance industry are best resolved through a self-regulation model that uses a voluntary code of conduct based on global standards of responsible finance. Thus, impact investors have been integral in broader transformations that have extended financial logics, technologies and accumulation imperatives into people’s daily lives. This paper contributes to economic geography and critical development studies by explaining how impact investment deepens neoliberal financialization.

Beyond binaries: a comparative analysis of police reform in Jamaica and Canada

ABSTRACT This article challenges the developed-developing binary when understanding police reform by comparing two cases – Jamaica and Canada. Grounded in critical development studies and criminology literatures, it demonstrates divergences in police organizational structures/mandates and some convergences in police reform efforts, failures, and resistance to systemic change despite vast context variations. Therefore, it creates room for questioning the challenges of police reform in the development discourse as primarily a feature of a nation’s development, or lack thereof, and instead prompts us to rethink how we conceptualize, understand, and address police institutional structures that affect both developing and developed countries alike.

Participatory approaches for strengthening teacher professional development in refugee settings: successes and limitations

ABSTRACT This article presents critical reflections on a teacher professional development initiative in Kakuma refugee camp and Kalobeyei settlement in Kenya. Drawing on critical development studies, it examines the successes and limitations of efforts to facilitate a community-based participatory process that aims to respond to local refugee teachers’ needs while simultaneously developing training materials as a global good. It points to the influences of global-local dynamics, including the practical constraints of distance and time, and the role of partnerships that help or hinder these approaches. It embraces the often excluded personal and professional dimensions that intersect with our work. It further wrestles with the opportunities and limitations of these approaches to address larger structural constraints in which teacher professional development initiatives are embedded and offers considerations for future engagements.

Revisiting Dependency and Development in the Age of Globalization

Abstract Does dependency theory no longer offer an analytical and conceptual framework for the study of underdevelopment under the dynamics of modern globalization and the new international division of labor? Has the emergence of newly industrialized countries and a rising proportion of higher value-added manufacturing in the Global South cast the notions of subordination, peripherality, and dependence into the dustbin of history? These questions are today answered affirmatively by a broad consensus. In contrast to this widely-held assertion in the current development discourse, this study aims to bring these notions back to critical development studies by offering an up-to-date and analytically valid theorization of dependency in today’s Global South. Taking the historical-structural dependency perspective as a point of departure, the study revisits the notion of dependent development by drawing on a set of conceptual insights derived from Schumpeter’s theory of innovation, Global Value Chain analyses, and a class-relational articulation of the developmental state. In doing so, the study shows how core and periphery activities have clustered in time and space, leading to polarization in today’s global economy, and how new forms of dependency have been spatially reproduced along hierarchically-structured global value chains through the interplay of transnational corporations, states, and classes.

Bura ura, kendu waiyo (rain falls, water rises): the tyranny of water insecurity and an agenda for abolition in Kodi (Sumba Island, Indonesia)

This article explores the dynamic links between transformations in freshwater ecosystems and social changes in the Kodi region of Sumba (Indonesia). Insights into the politics surrounding changing hydrosocial systems are generated by using a feminist anthropology approach together with critical development studies and intersectionality theory. In aligning with fellow feminists whose advocacy sometimes takes the form of scholarship, I lay out a five-prong strategy for collecting empirical evidence from persons who are vulnerable when hydrological systems change and offer eight principles for future development interventions. The argument related to the five-prong toolkit is that by conducting intensive, extensive, opportunistic, and longitudinal research and by allying with grassroots interlocutors, interventions into water systems can be based on better evidence and can be socially just. Three stories about Kodinese interactions with water and experiences with change are at the heart of this article and lead to the formulation of consequential conclusions. In the first story, birth, death, and relocation intersect with changes in the type of reservoir and the tools and vehicles used to manage water. In the second story—the origin for “tyranny” in the subtitle—vulnerability to food and water scarcity emerges and is politicized when a river's flow is altered. In the third story—the basis for “abolition” in the subtitle—hydrological interventions perpetrated by extrinsic governments correlate to surveillance and incarceration by the military and paramilitary. One research finding is that interventions by extrinsic agencies into the hydrology of four connected watersheds have altered hydrosocial relationships. Another finding is that as water's routes shift, people adjust to new conditions with mixed outcomes. A third conclusion is water utilities have differential benefits within the Kodi community. Fourth, benefits from water development have dispersed along already existing lines within the social structure. Finally, intracultural differences related to intersectional identities coincide with variations in access to natural and developed sources of water.

The Water–Employment–Migration nexus: Buzzword or useful framework?

SummaryMotivationCritical development studies have overlooked water‐related nexuses and frameworks proposed by development agencies that recognize that water and sanitation are linked to other development challenges and identify the synergies and trade‐offs between sectors. In particular, critical development studies have ignored these nexus approaches urged upon the governments of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, the world's most water‐scarce region.PurposeThe article presents a case study of the Water–Employment–Migration (WEM) nexus framework, which has been recently proposed in policy circles. The analysis reflects on the extent to which this new nexus may be either a buzzword or instead a useful framework to improve national policies in the MENA region.Methods and approachWe undertook a comprehensive review of the relevant literature on the WEM nexus. We complemented this secondary data with interviews with key informants from the institutions involved in the WEM nexus, as well as from youth organizations active in the Mediterranean region and working in the development sector.FindingsWhat emerged is that there are no concrete examples of how to operationalize the WEM nexus at the policy level. Many respondents in the MENA region highlighted the need to “mainstream WEM in policies and plans” but were vague when asked how. There is a need for more critical evidence to elevate the WEM nexus from a discussion topic among regional organizations, to a concept that can be useful and practical.Policy implicationsRather than a new nexus, which would capture only a few sectors relating to water, what is needed is a systems thinking approach, able to encompass the complexity and multifaceted issues relating to water resources.

When we couldn’t breathe. (Our) Stories from the Margins

ABSTRACT We begin our introduction by situating our special issue Our Bodies Breathe Resistance: COVID19 Stories From/In the Margins within the emergent academic debates around global inequalities, breathing and the body under COVID19 conditions informed by international relations, critical development studies, and anti/post/decolonial feminist scholarship. We do this while articulating our experiential approach to knowing as one that questions false dichotomies between theory and practice. In this way we practice enfleshed and positioned thinking while dialoguing with literature that de-centres from western ‘contemporaneity’ and allows us to display the limits of detached and disembodied thinking in times of COVID19. Guided by the following question: What happens when global inequalities, breathing, and bodies are thought of from a different geo-genealogy to that of western critical feminist antiessentialist approaches we introduce each of the contributors to the special issue organized around the actions of Refusing, Healing, Caring, Eating, and Learning.

Análise histórica das condições de subdesenvolvimento em gestão no Brasil: a influência do Banco Mundial para a consolidação do gerencialismo em projetos públicos no Terceiro Mundo

Abstract By adopting the 1990s as a timeframe, this article addresses the influence of multilateral institutions in carrying out development projects in Brazil, based on a historical review of the notion of Development Management (Brinkerhoff & Coston, 1999; Thomas, 1996). Consolidated reports from the World Bank Management Reform period were analyzed to investigate the normative suggestions made by the multilateral agency for the success of the ventures and implementation of investment in the country at the time. The study aligns with Critical Development Studies by presenting the historical development of the management experience in Brazil as a reflection of the power and influence of project management in developing countries. The theoretical framework adopted in this study was the critical perspective from the seminal approach of inter-organizational development projects in this countries by Ika and Hodgson (2014). The results demonstrate how multilateral agencies have operated in Latin America from a managerialist perspective. This novel understanding was developed by surveying the critical factors of the alignment between the management and the principles of globalization to shed light on the interests of the directive actions of international bodies in developing countries. The article concludes with evidence of the World Bank’s performance in cohesion with the development management area and dependence on the Western model for structuring the management apparatus.

Chinese Gold-Farming in the 2000s: Worker Empowerment and Local Development Through Video Games-Based Digital Labor

This study investigates how gold-farming contributed to worker empowerment and local development in China in the 2000s. Adopting a critical development studies perspective, I appraise the positive social impact of gold-farming but also explicate how it is constrained by the capitalist economic and authoritarian political contexts. I find that gold-farming offered workers informational mobility and low-overhead entrepreneurship opportunities and that it created employment and enhanced social order in marginalized localities. But it provided only slightly better wages and work conditions than the average Chinese factory. A major reason was exploitation by global capitalist corporations and local officials. My primary dataset was collected between 2005 and 2008 from participant observation and interviewing in three gold farms, multiple and in-depth interviews of over 40 insiders, and online documentary sources.

A ‘Right to Nutrition’ in its Social, Legal, and Political Context: How International Human Rights Translate to Zambian Realities

Abstract Every country has populations that are affected by malnutrition, and one third of all people in the world are malnourished. Among approaches to addressing malnutrition, the language of human rights is notably present in international nutrition discourse and national policy and covenants, but the conceptualization, implications and utility of human rights for nutrition practice are contested. This empirical research explores how the utility of a ‘right to nutrition’ is perceived by different actors, and how differences in interpretation affect its potential for reducing malnutrition. In undertaking this qualitative case-study, we apply socio-legal, critical development studies, and political science approaches to compare and contrast written documents and stated viewpoints, across actors in different sectors and levels from global to local, with a focus on Zambia. Human rights are clearly integrated with ideas of nutrition in written documents across levels, but these are largely rhetorical devices providing moral leverage and guiding language, not clearly directing action. Zambia has domesticated relevant international human rights law and has recent case law implicitly underpinning a right to nutrition; using the law brings a strengthening of policy, but also a narrowing of focus in terms of populations covered and issues justiciable. Views on what a right to nutrition means in practice are contested, with a lack of citizen’s rights education limiting participation, and a lack of clear norms on who should be doing what scattering accountability. Our research demonstrates that there are three distinct aspects to a rights-based approach—rhetorical, legal and practical—but that these generally act in silos. We argue that explicitly acknowledging these three functions of human rights is an important first step if a right to nutrition is desired; and explicitly addressing these aspects in combination and in context is fundamental to a coherent rights-based approach to nutrition.

Critical development studies and the study of globalization

Critical Development Studies has long engaged with the study of globalization. However, the ways in which does so and how these interact, fuse and diverge from others working in the broad field of globalization studies remain avenues to explore. In this Introductory essay, we describe how critical development studies emerged and highlight some of its contributions before presenting an overview of the six papers which comprise this Special Issue. This Special Issue has its origins in the publication of our co-edited volume, The Essential Guide to Critical Development Studies (Veltmeyer & Bowles 2018), and an invitation to seek full-length articles which examine the ways in which critical development studies (cds) engages with the study of globalization.

Endless modernisation: Power and knowledge in the Green Morocco Plan

In 2008, in the aftermath of the World Food Crisis and in a context of an unfolding New Green Revolution for Africa, Morocco launched the Green Morocco Plan to ‘modernise’ its agricultural sector, thereby making the latter the main driver for economic growth and for the alleviation of rural poverty. Yet, the technicist-productivist rationale of the Green Morocco Plan, characteristic of New Green Revolution modernisation schemes, renders any positive socio-ecological outcome unlikely. Hence, recent studies of the Green Morocco Plan have focused on its impacts on food security, inequality and environment. However, how the Green Morocco Plan's rationale is (re)produced within a given set of socio-ecological, material relations has to date attracted relatively little attention. This study, therefore, explores the power-knowledge dynamics of the modernisation discourse within the Green Morocco Plan as a driver of socio-ecological change. Bringing together insights from political ecology, critical development and agri-food studies, we show how the entangled set of ideological, material, political and technical processes embodied within the Green Morocco Plan favours a reductionist view of agricultural development as increasing yields and profits. In so doing, such a view perpetuates efforts to ‘modernise’ smallholder/family farming.

Chains of dispossession and communities in struggle: the illegal opiate market in Guerrero (Mexico)

In this paper, it is explored the impact of militarized and punitive methods of drug control on indigenous and peasant communities engaged in the cultivation of poppies in Guerrero (Mexico), within a context of neoliberal agrarian counter-reform and state repression, operating through a multi-level range of power brokers. Through the lens of ethnography and mixed methodology, it is examined the dynamics and changing characteristics of the commodity chain of heroin, from field production to consumption and money laundering, and it is analysed the different logics of dispossession involved, as well as the rationales of normative discourses in producing communities and their survival strategies. The framework of analysis behind is drawn from studies regarding the anthropology of the state, the anthropology of the «illicit», and of capitalism, and critical development studies.

‘Making Strange’: Discourse Analysis Tools for Teaching Critical Development Studies

Critical development studies require not just a critical attitude, but also usable tools. This article suggests some forms of discourse analysis that can add substance to critical development studies’ aspirations and that can yet be learnt and used by students without specialist background. Central are tools for ‘making strange’ (defamiliarization), so that we view both texts and social realities in a fresh independent way and start to discern better their blindspots, and our own. The article presents accessible yet helpful forms of text analysis, argumentation analysis and content analysis that contribute in required processes of defamiliarization and reconstruction.

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Contributors

About the Contributors

About the Contributors

New extractivism and failed development in Azerbaijan

This article examines the characteristics of the resource-led development project in Azerbaijan, including the policies of the Azerbaijani government and their consequences. It makes three contributions to the literature on critical development studies. First, it fills an empirical lacuna by discussing the case of Azerbaijan. Second, it expands upon the criticisms of statist-developmentalist models raised in the literature by demonstrating how the patrimonial rent distribution strategy of the Azerbaijani government plundered resource rents through state-owned enterprises and government-connected private companies, and crippled education and healthcare through underfunding and commodification. Third, as part of an examination of the recent attempts of the Azerbaijani government to diversify the economy and move to the post-oil era, it sheds light on some of the economic development challenges faced by a unique case of a resource-rich country with a closing window of energy resources. The arguments are illustrated and supported from sources pertaining to the political and economic situation in Azerbaijan, the activities of the transnational oil corporations, and US and UK foreign policies in the Caspian Sea.

The sustainability-peace nexus in crisis contexts: how the Rohingya escaped the ethnic violence in Myanmar, but are trapped into environmental challenges in Bangladesh.

Because of ethnic and cultural violence in Myanmar, approximately a million Rohingya fled to neighboring Bangladesh starting from August 2017, in what the UN has called a “textbook example of ethnic cleansing”. Those arriving in Bangladesh were able to escape decade-long ethnic violence in Myanmar, but the Rohingya’s immediate destination, Cox’s Bazar district is one of the most climate-vulnerable and disaster-prone areas in Bangladesh. Currently, they have been subjected to extreme rainfalls, landslides, and flashfloods. With the COVID-19 pandemic, they continue to face fear and further marginalization in resource-constrained Bangladesh, as well as increased vulnerability due to tropical cyclones, flashfloods, and landslides. The Rohingya in southeast Bangladesh are now at the epicenter of a humanitarian and sustainability crisis. However, their situation is not entirely unique. Millions of displaced, stateless or refugees around the world are facing multi-dimensional crises in various complex geopolitical, and climatic situations. Using the theoretical lens of political ecology and critical development studies, this paper analyzes the sustainability–peace nexus for millions of Rohingya in Myanmar and in Bangladesh. This paper is based on information from various sources, including three ethnographic field visits in recent years, which helped to get local insights into the current sustainability challenges in this humanitarian context. The core arguments of this paper suggest that sustainability–peace nexus will especially be compromised in climate-vulnerable resource-constrained conditions. To overcome this challenge, decolonizing Rohingya solutions would be critical, by engaging the Rohingya in the process of development and meaningful change, which can affect their lives, livelihoods, and wellbeing. Even though this paper has a specific geographical focus, the insights are relevant in parts of the world facing similar social, economic, political, and environmental challenges.

Negotiating agency: disability activism in Uganda between local contexts and global influences

This article explores how disability activists in Uganda mediate their agency between influences of the Global North and local realities. Narratives of activists illuminate limits to their agency on individual, community and national levels and depict challenges to apply global frameworks to local contexts. I argue that the Ugandan disability movement needs to determine a common strategy with an increased focus on social change, but activists do not have the agency to determine priorities as funding organisations impose their agendas. Activists seem to lack awareness of current debates in critical disability studies that would support engagement with unequal power relations and reflections on the assumed universality of concepts. I conclude with the call for a dialogue between critical disability studies and development studies that supports activists in Uganda can develop a context specific disability discourse. Points of interest This article explores the work of disabled people and their organisations who aim to improve the situation of disabled people in Uganda While this Ugandan disability movement has had exemplary achievements in the past, currently it seems disorganised and not unified. The priorities of the Ugandan disability movement are heavily influenced by funding organisations, which has resulted in a focus on creating laws and policies, while work to improve the attitudes of society towards disabled people has been limited. The funding organisations are mainly development organisations that work globally and rarely take specific local contexts into account. Critical disability studies debates stress the importance of local context, but the debates do not reach Ugandan disability activists. Disability studies and development studies scholars and practitioners need to work together to find ways forward that meet the needs of disabled people in contexts like Uganda.