Volume 23, number 2 (2002)
Articles
Reprocity and Rent-Seeking: A Study of the Partnership Approach to Development Assistance
Under the partnership approach to development assistance, donor agencies fund partnerships between donor-country and host-country institutions. This paper develops a model of development assistance in which project participants attempt to extract rents from donor agencies. The model is applied to an academic exchange between Carleton University and the University of Havana. The behaviour of project participants is rational given the constraints and incentives they face, yet individually rational responses can undermine collective reciprocity and jeopardize both partners’ goals for development assistance. The paper concludes that structural and ideological issues may be easier to account for than personal needs and power.
Partnership as Process: Municipal Co-operation for International Development
In recent years, development practitioners and academics have waxed eloquent about the advantages of partnering over more conventional donor-recipient forms of development assistance. As yet, however, the literature includes few “ground-level” analyses, which would allow for a better understanding of how such partnerships actually function and of the factors that ultimately contribute to their success or failure. This study offers a critical in-depth look at one type of innovative partnering strategy operating at the level of local government and known generically as international municipal co-operation (IMC). This case study seeks to identify key factors determining partnership success through an examination of the specific mechanisms of this form of interchange in two radically contrasting contexts. The study reveals that as is the case with other types of partnership relations, municipal partnering for development is a process that requires considerable preparation and cultivation in order to ensure that its potential as a unique mechanism for aid delivery is fully realized.
Changing Rural Power Structures Through Land Tenure Reforms: The Current Dismal Role of International Organizations
Agricultural or rural development, although generally considered to be a process to improve the economic and social conditions of poorer groups in rural areas, signifies different things to different people. The meanings vary in terms of priorities to be considered, the means needed to achieve the set goals, and how the principal actors should co-operate. This paper examines the role of leading international agencies in sponsoring land tenure reforms—a role which had vanished from the development agenda in the 1980s and early 1990s, but which has resurfaced in recent years thanks to actions by national and international civil society organizations and to grassroots mobilizations. Promoting reforms in land tenure institutions and relations is key to reducing rural disparity and improving food security, income and family welfare among marginalized rural population groups. But modifying a rural power structure to promote the interests of the poorer and weaker segments of the rural population is a complex process, and the international organizations included in the analysis have focused their activities on less politically sensitive, subsidiary issues, leaving existing rural power structures and relations largely unimpaired. The paper is based mainly on secondary material, combined with primary information and the author’s observations of a number of ongoing land reform initiatives.
Privatisation et ouverture des télécommunications en Afrique subsaharienne : modalités et implications des réformes
Throughout the world, deep reforms are being implemented in telecommunications networks. Sub-Saharan African countries are not immune to the dispute over the way the sector has been managed to date, dominated as it was by a technological stability and bilateral institutional arrangements between public monopolies. The factors structuring the new landscape of the African telecommunication networks lead to partial privatization of the national incumbent operator, but also to a greater competition through the fixed as well as cellular mobile networks. All these changes should help to provide more services and to promote an improved quality. However this outcome requires the establishment of a greater autonomy and efficiency within regulatory bodies. Some of the main institutional questions to solve are addressed in this paper, not only the way the openness of telecommunications has to be realized, but also the interconnection of the networks as well as the universal access problems.
Gender, Environment and Development in Southern Africa
Using data from research in a Zimbabwean resettlement area, this paper argues that considering the environment enriches gender analysis in Southern Africa. The paper also provides an overview of various feminist approaches to the study of women and the environment in Southern Africa over the past two decades. Ecofeminist approaches are found to be problematic, particularly the theoretical position that women are somehow closer to nature than men are. The paper argues that a feminist political ecology approach that calls for careful consideration of the cultural, ideological and institutional context under study works well to reveal important gendered social dynamics and relations regarding the environment. Finally, through challenging the “crisis narrative” that runs through environmental studies, including feminist political ecology, the paper argues for a new dimension in gender and environment research.
Changes in Employment by Gender and Business Operation in Newly Privatized Companies in Tanzania
Although a body of research is now available on privatization in Africa, little has been published on the changes in employment by gender or of changes in business organization in the newly privatized enterprises. In all sub-Saharan African countries where privatization has occurred, employment levels have fallen from preprivatization levels. In general, government policy in the socialist countries was to treat women equally with men in employment and wage levels. However, practice was often at odds with policy. In this case study, sixteen newly privatized firms in Tanzania were visited each year for four years. This article includes a brief description of the changes in ownership/management, type of business organization, employment levels, problems, and potential economic viability of the new enterprises. In 2000, data on employment by gender were also obtained, together with changes in business organization, physical working conditions and management attitudes toward female employment. It was assumed that in a male-dominated society with a high unemployment rate, a stagnant economy and a withdrawal of the socialist emphasis, the ratio of female to male employees would fall. However, it was actually found to have risen. Additional research is necessary to confirm or deny this important finding.
Social Capital Formation in Large-Scale Development Projects
Project design, implementation and evaluation are undergoing major change in line with new concepts and practices of community participation, consultation and stakeholder analysis. Social capital is the key in this change process. This paper surveys recent literature on social capital and derives guidelines for development projects, especially large-scale projects. The paper offers a micro-economic method for measuring social capital derived from interdependent utility functions.
Reviews
The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else, Hernando Desoto
UNESCO: Reflections on Educational Aid, Development, and Peace (review essay)
Education Reform in the South in the 1990s, Lene Buchert (ed.)
World Social Science Report 1999, Ali Kanancigil and D. Makinson (eds.)
Changing International Aid to Education: Global Patterns and National Contexts, Kenneth King and Lene Buchert
World Education Report 2000. The Right to Education: Towards Education for All Throughout Life, UNESCO
Human Development Report 2001: Making New Technologies Work for Human Development, United Nations Development Programme
The Economic North-South Divide: Six Decades of Unequal Development, Kunilbert Raffer and H.W. Singer