Volume 26, number 4 (2005)
National Development in an Era of Neo-Liberal Globalization
Introduction
“In the early 1980s, the development project (including its international co-operation dimension), like so many other political and intellectual projects for social change, confronted a radically different context from that in which it was initiated and had been nurtured through three decades of theory and practice. The changed context had to do with a turn toward a ‘new economic model’ (free market or neo-liberal capitalist development) that was used to usher in a process of globalization — the integration of countries around the world into a global economy — and a ’new world order.’ By many accounts the political, economic, and social adjustments to the requirements of this new order generated a worldwide process of sweeping, almost revolutionary changes in social and economic forms of organization, and with these changes an entirely new context for the process (and project) of international development.
“The papers in this issue explore diverse dimensions of this complicated and ongoing process … ”
Structural Adjustment and the Art of Discourse Maintenance
From its origin as a stopgap measure enacted by the International Monetary Fund and World Bank to counteract the economic effects of the international debt crisis on developing countries’ balance of payments accounts, structural adjustment (SA) lending has evolved into a policy roadmap for long-term prosperity, profoundly influencing and standardizing the accepted orthodox concept of development along the way. The result of this rhetorical trajectory is a conflation of the means and end of development into a common and universal vision held by the international financial institutions of liberalized market economies reinforced by market-friendly domestic policy agendas. This article examines the ascendancy of the logic of SA, the means by which such logic has come to embody the scope of development options, how it defends and propagates itself, and the effects its discursive dominance has on the field of development.
The Political Economy of the Chilean State in the Neo-Liberal Era: 1973–2005
While the present-day state in Chile operates far beyond the narrowest constraints of the “neo-liberal” state as strictly defined, it is nonetheless fatally confined by the ideological limits imposed through the neo-liberal vision of the state. Hence, Chile lacks a national development strategy and is now forced to operate within the parameters of a quasi-stagnationist structure, temporarily buoyed by 19th-century-style commodities booms. In a process that evokes Anibal Pinto’s classic dissection of Chile’s lost opportunities in the 19th century, Chile has once again failed to forge a sustainable “export-investment nexus” sufficient enough to shift away from reliance upon resource-based rentier activities.
The Politics of Administrative Decentralization in Bangladesh
Since the 1980s, many developing countries have introduced decentralization polices in varying forms and to various degrees. Philosophically, decentralization has been linked with the improvement of governmental performance as well as with the increased participation of people in decision-making processes. But while decentralization has some generic benefits, analysis of its diverse processes needs to be contextually specific. With this view, the present paper explores the dynamics of decentralization in the context of Bangladesh from 1982 to 2001. Against the backdrop of sweeping political and economic changes at the national level, we examine the underlying processes driving local government reforms during the period. The paper argues that the restoration of democracy in 1991, contrary to expectations, was insignificant with regard to the introduction of decentralization reforms based on devolution and participation and that, in fact, the military government in power between 1982 and 1990 implemented the most wide-ranging changes in the structure of local governments. The authoritarian regime’s decentralization policies can be explained by its increasing search for legitimacy and its need to create a rural power base; whereas reforms undertaken by both “democratic” governments in the 1990s were characterized by a tendency to maintain the status quo — and in some cases were actually retrogressive.
La construction des problèmes environnementaux en Afrique subsaharienne : la mise en place d’un « diagnostic de Washington sur les ressources naturelles »
This paper deals with environmental development as an economic, social, and eventually political issue. Using a sociopolitical approach, it comments on the reasons underlying why and how problems, solutions, and strategies related to the use of natural resources in sub-Saharan Africa are elaborated within the World Bank. In parallel, it uses the prism of political economy to understand how the environmental notion has been reconceptualized to finally lead to a normative approach related to the degradation of natural resources and to solutions destined to slow down this process. These elements constitute the “Washington diagnosis on natural resources.”
The Politics of Virtue: How Globalization Affects Peacebuilding in Israel/Palestine (1994–2000)
The Oslo Peace Accords are widely regarded as having yielded particular negative socio-economic effects in and on the Palestinian territories. Indeed, the post-Oslo period (1994–2000) is dominated by the economic and political policies and prescriptions of the international donor community and its financial institutions, which tend to assume primary ownership and authorship of the peace process. This paper will explore the link between the globalizing agendas of international donors in post-Oslo Israel/Palestine and the reproduction of structural violence endemic to cultures of violence and conflict. The globalization-as-peacebuilding agenda of the post-Oslo period is shown to rearticulate the asymmetrical relationship between Israel and Palestine.
Globalization and the Contradictions of Development in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union: Prospects for Post-Soviet Development in the Age of Globalization
This paper provides a critical analysis of the impact of globalization on Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. It argues that the globalization of capital is having a major impact on the social, economic, and political structure of countries in these regions, and that this process is generating serious problems for these countries as they become incorporated into the global political-economic system. The paper outlines a variety of challenges that the collapse of socialism has ushered in for countries of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, challenges that are a product of the globalization of capital on a world scale. The paper assesses the problems associated with the post-socialist transition in these regions by focusing on the experience of Romania in Eastern Europe and Armenia in the former Soviet Union and compares these with alternative models of development adopted in China and Vietnam that have been quite successful.
Globalization, Inequality, and Growth in the Caribbean
The relationship among globalization, inequality, and growth is currently a major focus of scholars and policy-makers around the world. The problem is that globalization engenders growing interdependence and a marked rise in international inequalities in income distribution, while inequality constrains economic growth and promotes social and political instability. A clear understanding of this dilemma is necessary in order to formulate better development theories and policies in the current era of globalization. Scholars and policy-makers in the English-speaking Caribbean have been drawn to these issues since the late 1980s through an intensive and extensive rethinking of development strategies pursued in the region that has resulted in four major sets of ideas on how the region could grow and develop. These are the competitive insertion and the strategic global repositioning of the region in the global economy, collective lobbying in global institutions, and strengthened governance. A close examination of these dominant ideas reveals that they merely echo the neo-liberal views on globalization. Therefore, the main proposition of this paper is that the present course of economic, political, and social action proposed for growth and development in the Caribbean based on these four sets of ideas will only increase inequality in the region, in what the US neo-conservatives have called “the new American century.”
Food for the Few: The Biotechnology Revolution in Latin America
This article introduces the main issues raised in biotechnology in Latin American agriculture in the era of neoliberal globalism. We begin by discussing the theoretical concerns regarding biotechnology’s “revolutionary” potential, and identify where empirical work could respond to these concerns. A historical overview of modern agriculture in the United States provides a means to highlight a number of problems that have arisen as a result of this technological paradigm and its transfer to the developing world. These theoretical and historical concerns are then empirically assessed with the help of case studies drawn from the forthcoming book Food for the Few. Most of these cases provide support that the technology is becoming revolutionary in its detrimental social and environmental impacts.
Reviews
Livelihood and Gender: Equity in Community Resource Management, Sunni Krishna (ed.)
Handbook of Sustainable Development Planning: Studies in Modelling and Decision Support, M.A Quaddus and M.A.B. Siddique (eds.)
The Iraqw of Tanzania: Negotiating Rural Development, Katherine A. Snyder