Dominant Development Discourse Research Articles

A discursive field of contested ethics: Reporting the UK’s blue economy in the making

This paper analyses newspaper coverage of ‘blue economy’ in the UK 2012–2020. It elaborates on Germond-Duret and Germond’s (2022) finding that UK media published a dominant development discourse concerning the UK’s marine space without reflecting on the risks of growth agendas. Articles from UK print media featuring ‘blue economy’ were compiled from LexisNexis then analysed to establish patterns of publishing, the investors, investments and projects reported, the experts cited and their statements on blue economy. Analysis reveals no sustained coverage, little that communicated with a national audience, little investigative reporting, and no predominance of London-based newspapers in news production. Reporting on blue economy was sporadic until a surge in 2020 that coincided with efforts to secure investments through local growth plans. Newspapers registered this buzz of activity, collecting statements from actors who used business ethics to express the legitimacy of their planning to build what they called a ‘blue economy’ even though this looked more like ‘blue growth’. A second group of actors including the Scottish Government announced plans to build a ‘sustainable blue economy’. These actors used the ethics of regional development, achieving net zero and protecting, enhancing or restoring ocean environments. Journalists reported critical views on these plans: inadequate attention to environmental protection, investment in activities seen as environmentally unsustainable or investments with limited regional development. Thus, analysis of statements on ‘blue economy’ reveals a discursive field featuring a confusion of contested ethical claims. This paper identifies the UK’s fragmented newspaper landscape and new architecture of public–private enterprise partnerships as important contexts shaping media engagement with blue economy.

Activists’ heterodoxic beliefs in fostering urban environmental education in Indonesia

ABSTRACT It has been widely recognized that environmental activists’ agency is shaped by their knowledge, childhood upbringing, exposure to environmental campaigns and projects. Deploying the sociological concept of “heterodoxy”, this study aims to explore young activists’ counter-beliefs against the dominant discourse of neoliberal urban development, which intrinsically motivated them to develop alternative environmental education for primary school students in Bandung City, Indonesia. By employing in-depth interviews that focus on significant life experiences, the present study reveals that activists’ nonconforming beliefs were formed through their childhood experiences with nature, their objections to today’s environmentally-unfriendly development, and the failure of formal education to foster children’s interest in the environment. From the activists’ point of view, the development of Bandung City in Indonesia has become more neoliberal, with less regard for environmental conservation.

Media coverage of the blue economy in British newspapers: Sea blindness and sustainable development

AbstractThe wide acceptance and endorsement of the blue economy by public and private actors can be considered as a positive step towards the sustainable transition of coastal and marine environments. While particular attention needs to be paid to the potential risks posed by the perspective of economic gains resulting from marine exploitation, a large public support is also required to build a sustainable society. The mass media plays a critical role in communicating scientific advances and risks, shaping opinions, and fostering behavioural change. The article discusses the media coverage of the blue economy in British newspapers through a frame analysis. The analysis reveals that the blue economy is largely framed in terms of economic opportunities and weak sustainability, and treated in a very factual, non‐critical way. Sea blindness enables us to understand the lack of in‐depth discussion about the blue economy and its framing as an overtly positive economic opportunity. The findings also suggest that the way the blue economy is represented proceeds from the dominant development discourse that has spread onto the marine space.

Reimagining resilience: COVID-19 and marine tourism in Indonesia

ABSTRACT As the COVID-19 crisis virtually halts tourism operations globally, questions arise as to what makes tourism operations and the socio-ecological systems they operate within resilient to such disruptions. This period also presents a moment of critical self-reflection and reinvention for tourism operators that hope to not only be resilient themselves, but to foster resilience in the communities and ecosystems upon which they depend. These issues are explored in the context of different forms of tourism in a marine national park in eastern Indonesia. This paper uses an agency-based livelihood resilience framework to examine the social structures, agency, and livelihood capital of the surrounding socio-ecological systems as driven by these operations. The findings suggest that the dominant development discourse in Indonesia and among tourism planners focusing on the growth of ‘high-end’ exclusive forms of tourism has neglected livelihood capital and made communities more vulnerable to ruptures like COVID-19. Emerging from this crisis, this research urges academics, practitioners, and business owners to ‘reimagine’ the potential of tourism to first and foremost empower more resilient socio-ecological systems in the face of an increasingly uncertain future.

Drawing on knowledge: Visual narrative analysis for critical environment and development research

Counter-narratives to dominant development discourses are made possible using research methods designed to elicit marginalized voices. In this article, we propose a new analytical framework called the interpretive schema for drawings for analyzing visual narratives. The interpretive schema for drawings consists of five themes or interpretive lenses ( scale, centrality, inclusion, connections, and relationality) that were generated from maps of fuelwood collection in rural India. We suggest that the interpretive schema reflects and animates a range of spatialities that are central to geographic studies of human–environment dynamics. Using the interpretive schema for drawings in this way enables us to emphasize emic socio-spatial perspectives, and offers a critical research avenue through which everyday realities can be represented, understood, and validated. While other image-based research approaches, critical cartographies and participatory mapping exercises may encourage the expression of alternative knowledges, our proposed interpretive schema for drawing presents a specific set of guidelines for interpreting and making sense of visual narratives through explicit socio-spatial analysis.

‘Privations’ as a Development Concern: A Study of Two Communities in the National Capital Region of India

Development scholars are tracking a wide range of well-being indices across countries including life expectancy, school enrolment and a wide range of ‘freedoms’ now. Yet, a critical set of ‘privations’ or collective hardships, that undermine general well-being and call for concerted public response, still remain excluded from the mainstream development discourse. This article highlights six sets of major ‘privations’ relevant to development studies based on an extended fieldwork in a village and a slum on Delhi’s periphery. It consists of four sections. The first section elucidates the conceptualisation of ‘privations’, its principal categories and their distinction from related terms such as deprivations, poverty and suffering. The next section explains the multi-method approach used in this study to track ‘privations’ in the studied communities (called Dhantala and Aradhaknagar) through surveys, interviews and group discussions conducted since 1988. The third segment of the article focuses on two specific ‘privations’, namely safety and health risks experienced by studied subjects over the recent decades. The article concludes with reflections on reasons for the neglect of the cited ‘privations’ in dominant development discourses. It offers suggestions for their better coverage in development indices and their mitigation by more concerted government response and civic action, in future.

Contested practices of trade and taxation: (in)formalization and (il)legitimization in Eastleigh, Nairobi

ABSTRACT Taxation represents a claim to statehood and plays a vital role in processes of mutual recognition between subjects and the state. Debates on the benefits of taxing the informal economy have stressed the mutual benefits of entering into such formalized contracts of recognition. However, based on eight months of ethnographic fieldwork in Eastleigh, Nairobi, I will show how fixed categories of formality and legitimacy are inadequate for capturing the empirical realities of trade and taxation in Eastleigh and beyond. Rather we need to recognize how practices of trade, taxation and governance are continuously contested and move along continuums of (in)formalization and (il)legitimization. I argue that insights into these processes lead to a broader perspective on contracts of recognition, allowing us to (a) recognize practical contracts constituted within state institutions without adhering to formalized laws and regulations and (b) question the perception of fixed links between formality and legitimacy that implicitly underlie much of the dominant development discourse on taxing the informal economy.

Voices of Farmer-Widows Amid the Agrarian Crisis in India

This article centers the voices of the widows of farmers from Yavatmal, Maharashtra, who give meaning to the patriarchal structures that unfold amid neoliberal agriculture in India. The theoretical framework of the culture-centered approach presented in the article works in solidarity with transnational feminist scholarship to interrupt the dominant discourse of development that reproduces the disempowerment experienced by these widows. Based on in-depth interviews conducted across villages, this article foregrounds the meanings and explanations of India’s agrarian crisis through the voices of widows of farmers. Their narratives position the suicides of their husbands amid the high-investment Bt cotton farming that incurred debts from which it became impossible to recover. By deploying voices of the gendered subaltern to interrogate the agrarian crisis, the article highlights the multiple structures that make widows’ lives precarious. Their reflective journeys address the communicative erasures faced by the widows within households and the larger discourse of neoliberal development of agriculture.

The erasures of racism in education and international development: re-reading the ‘global learning crisis’

ABSTRACT Despite pervasive forms of racism on a global scale, the field of education and international development continues to fail to substantively engage with the production and effects of racial domination across its domains of research, policy and practice. Considerations of racism remain silent, or indeed, are erased, within teaching and research, often in favour of colour-blind and technocratic approaches to ‘development’. This not only ignores the sector’s historical links to systems of racial domination, but also the current ways in which the field is implicated in producing unequal outcomes along racial lines. The authors present a re-reading of the ‘global learning crisis’ – as the dominant discourse of contemporary educational development – to demonstrate how the framing of the ‘crisis’ and the responses it engenders and legitimises operate as a ‘racial project’. The paper offers theoretical and methodological resources with which to interrogate the field’s entanglements in systems of racial domination and challenge its erasures of racism.

Ebbs and Flows of Authority: Decentralization, Development and the Hydrosocial Cycle in Lesotho

Dominant development discourse holds that water scarcity reflects geophysical limitations, lack of infrastructure or lack of government provision. However, this paper outlines the ways in which scarcity can only be fully explained in the context of development, specifically, neoliberal economic policies and related notions of good governance. Water is Lesotho’s primary natural resource, yet many of its inhabitants remain severely water insecure. Presently, decentralization and Integrated Water Resource Management (IWRM) are embraced in Lesotho as a philosophy and method to engage varied stakeholders and to empower community members. Using a water committee in Qalo, Lesotho as a case study, this paper explores the micro-politics of water governance. As individuals contest who is responsible for managing water resources for the village—by aligning themselves with traditional chiefs, elected officials, or neither—they transform or reinforce specific hydro-social configurations. While decentralized resource management aims to increase equity and local ownership over resources, as well as moderate the authority of traditional chiefs, water access is instead impacted by conflicts over management responsibility for water resources. Drawing on theories of political ecology and governmentality to extend recent scholarship on IWRM, this paper re-centers the political in water governance by situating local tensions within national policies and development agendas and demonstrating how scarcity is hydro-social.

Upgrading for whom? Relationship coffee, value chain interventions and rural development in Indonesia

Abstract Value chain upgrading interventions have emerged in recent years as a dominant approach to rural development. In coffee value chains, upgrading opportunities are presented by the growth in consumption of specialty coffees, which are associated with direct engagement with producer communities by roasting firms, along with an apparent increased commitment to social responsibility. Known in the industry as “relationship coffee”, such interventions align with a value chain approach to development and are promoted as offering upgrading opportunities for otherwise marginalized rural communities. In this article, we critique the dominant development discourse of relationship coffee in Indonesia via three case studies of livelihoods and local agrarian dynamics across three coffee-growing communities on the islands of Sulawesi, Bali and Java. We find that the relationship coffee model does present opportunities for producer upgrading. However, these benefits have been subsequently captured by key individuals within the producer community who are able to accumulate wealth and consolidate their social position. As it is currently implemented in Indonesia, the relationship coffee model has reproduced local patterns of inequality rather than contributing to poverty alleviation efforts. These insights suggest the urgent need to develop a critical political economy of upgrading in the global value chain and rural development literature.

Public Land Movement in Nepal: Expanding Coverage and Diminishing Achievements

In many countries of the developing world, the dominant development discourse is being contested by the emergence of different kinds of social movements and the land rights movements in agrarian socieites is not an exception. Despite having a long historical background, critics suggest that the land governance is largely based on state-centric epistemology and less on the pro-poor discourse of movement and struggle. Building on this critique, this paper highlights different issues, challenges and opportunities of the land-based movements particularly in context of western Tarai region of Nepal. The central proposition of the paper is that there are some significant implications and research gaps to be analyzed under the emerging discourse of “land movement” in Nepal. It therefore argues that ‘public land management’ and ‘public land movement’ are two mutually contested phenomena with contradicting actors, strategies, policy gaps, empirical dilemmas and shifting of power dynamics.

Disrupting Development, Reclaiming Solidarity: The Anti-Politics of Humanitarianism

Originally developed for the Center for Development Studies at Birzeit University in 2011, this paper examines the humanitarian assistance that flooded the occupied Palestinian territories after the beginning of the second intifada (2000–2005). It provides a critical analysis of the international development aid that was directed at Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, where the Oslo process was territorialized, to the exclusion of the vast majority of the Palestinian people. Today, Palestinians are challenging the dominant development discourse and neoliberal economic model set in place by the Oslo Accords, wherein development recast Israeli settler colonialism as an externality, which the putative Palestinian state-building project would transcend. Returning to Yusif Sayigh's view that development cannot occur under settler colonialism, Palestinians are articulating alternatives to the Oslo post-conflict paradigm that emphasize self-reliance and resistance. The discussion that follows situates itself as a contribution to this process by interrogating the anti-political bias of humanitarianism and charting how indigenous Palestinians are building alternatives to food aid.

Embedding Remittances: A Methodological Note on Financial Diaries in Nicaragua

AbstractIn response to the methodological challenge of embedding remittances to counter dominant development discourses, this paper aims to contribute to remittances research by discussing financial diaries in Muy Muy, Nicaragua. Based on longitudinal and integrated quantitative and qualitative tracking of migrant household practices, financial diaries facilitate explorations of the social and contextual dimensions of remittances that may help account for their heterogeneous character. In particular, the paper highlights the partiality of diaries as well as the translocal interdependency and irregularity of household practices, providing clues for integrating remittances instead of isolating them as neutral instrumental transfers. It uses the example of household debt to further anchor remittances locally, illustrating how financial diaries can expose the changes and considerations that are part of household practices, including remittances. The paper concludes by suggesting that financial diaries need a decisively qualitative framework and may be particularly useful in contexts characterised by multiple migrations.

Towards a More Nuanced Theory of Elite Capture in Development Projects. The Importance of Context and Theories of Power

Elite capture in development projects is problematic across a wide range of cultures, governance contexts and geographical locations. The dominant development discourse suggests that elite capture can be addressed using principles of good governance and participatory democracy. We critique the notion that this is sufficient to challenge practices of elite domination that detrimentally affect the outcome of development projects. Using a Foucauldian notion of power we suggest that power relationships are more complex than current conceptualisations of elite capture allow. We offer some definitions and suggest a common conceptual framework to unify the concept of elite capture across cultures. This conceptual framework is used to analyse data from 2 case studies in south western Zambia. We conclude that the dominant discourse ignores complex power relationships and uses a simplistic notion of political legitimacy that may enhance elite capture rather than prevent it. The concept of political legitimacy needs to be expanded to include traditional institutions that are not elected, while still applying principles of participation and accountability to the design of institutions.

In the Service of Technocratic Managerialism? History in UK Universities

This article discusses the conceptualisation, organisation and philosophical orientation of academic history culture in UK higher education. It problematises the extent to which a dominant history culture in UK universities implies and uncritically reproduces normative understandings about the subject; about its epistemological standing, sociopolitical functions, and the presumed cultural value of the discipline practices that students learn to perform. We suggest that current conceptions of history degree curricula are overly thin and organised around a dominant managerialist discourse of skills, personal development and learning outcomes. In a historicised world, in which history-focused behaviour has a crucial, ideological, affirmatory role, and in which historical narratives have a privileged cognitive function, we argue that it is critical for university history students to be able to deconstruct the processes by which history legitimises itself, and reinforces matrices of power in our societies. The positioning of history in higher education as a form of technocratic managerialism closes down spaces in which students can explore the potential of historical practices as a means of engaging with issues of current sociopolitical and ethical concern. We ask in this article, is this what we want an academic history culture to do?

Empowerment beyond resistance: Cultural ways of negotiating power relations

Synopsis This paper explores Muslim women's experiences of empowerment in northern Pakistan by drawing upon the life history of a woman informant named Dana. It also outlines some of the methodological concerns related with researching empowerment in a situation where the researchers and the researched share common context. The paper re-conceptualizes the utility of empowerment by unveiling it as an intricate process, which involves the negotiation of roles, responsibilities and values by individuals. The findings evidence that empowerment is not always exhibiting absolute power over others or open defiance against standard norms; neither is it resistance against coercion at all times. Instead it is also about strategically acting in a way that makes women feel more secure within particular circumstances. Importantly, since the process of being empowered involves constant personal labor, pain of being denied respect and dignity it is not as glorious as depicted in the dominant development discourse.

Structure and agency: understanding water policy changes in West Africa

Ownership of development processes has been high on the international agenda since the Paris Declaration of 2005. There is, however, much discussion about whether highly aid-dependent governments can really ‘own’ policy reforms in their countries. In this paper, we argue that the ownership of policy reforms is the outcome of an interaction between individual agency and structural conditions. Taking the implementation of Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) in Burkina Faso (since 1996) and Mali (since 2004) as an entry point, the paper describes the interplay between national policy makers, international organizations and dominant development discourses in the shaping of water policy reforms in both countries over the past 15 years. Despite the apparent uniformity of the global IWRM paradigm, a qualitative comparison of water policy changes in the two countries shows that policy reforms, as well as the extent to which they are ‘owned’ by national policy makers, are significantly distinct. This can be explained by different forms of individual agency and diverse structural conditions at a national level.

Civil society or ‘comprador class’, participation or parroting?

This article critically looks at the interfaces between the ideal notions of civil society and participation within the remit of Bangladesh’s Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP) formulation process. On the one hand, the idea of civil society has been likened to a renaissance and is often considered to be the most likely route out of development ‘problems’, particularly in the poor countries. Dominant development discourses have scripted the liberal interpretation of civil society as the only game in town. However, on the other hand, as a consequence of growing criticism on the failure of top-down development approach in the late-1960s, and throughout most of the 1970s, there was a sudden upsurge of interest that ordinary citizens might have a part to play in the development process. A generalized consensus took shape that people’s participation in projects is an important component of development programmes and a means to their success and hence participation has turned out to be a ‘new paradigm’ of development. The PRSP framework, that precepts a romantic marriage between civil society and participation, was foisted by two major International Financial Institutions (IFIs) as a condition of further debt and other development assistance for all poor countries. Participation from ‘all relevant stakeholders’ including civil society was trumpeted as a significant policy shift from previous development prescriptions of these IFIs. This article presents observation from 36 semi-structured interviews with civil society representatives including key people who prepared and finalized the PRSP of Bangladesh and the review of six daily national papers (September 2004 to October 2005). This piece argues that, in theory, participation can be manifested as the ‘key’ for development, but in practice, participation can be an iron hand in a velvet glove. Participation can turn into parroting and often resemble similar views that are ‘expected’ and required to validate external framework. Moreover, through such process of mainstreaming participation, an interest group within the civil society can emerge who has the technical knack of producing development policy according to donor recipe with some flavour of participation. This work therefore asks whether civil society and participation should be used as technologies of social control or as anti-hegemonic and anti-clientelistic forces in order to empowering marginalized members of the society.

Dropping out: Identity conflict in and out of school in Ghana

This paper explores geographies of identity of Ghanaian school dropouts. In particular, we investigate how school dropouts in rural communities construct narratives of identity within and outside school. In our analysis we trace how space, power and identity intersect in accounts of dropping out. Focusing on the narratives of four school ‘dropouts’, we start with their accounts of life outside school where they have significant social responsibilities as parents, carers and/or wage-earners. We contrast this with their accounts of their experiences as students in school. After exploring their efforts to gain and sustain access to school, we turn to their accounts of life in school and the ways they navigate the institutional gender and age regimes. These narratives highlight how being ‘over-age’ intersects with polarised student gender identities in a range of variable ways that discourage staying in school. The analysis indicates that the social positioning and identities of drop outs within school spaces were in tension with those they occupied in their homes and communities. More specifically, we suggest that the difficulties in navigating power and identity in these different spatial geographies are critical to understanding the processes of dropping out. In addition, we reflect on the methodological implications of this research which demonstrates the limits of quantitative data on dropout and associated problems with homogenised, deficit accounts of dropout often articulated in dominant development discourses. In turn this has important implications for how we might construct interventions to address dropout and the right to education for all.