Through community eyes: the transition of international organizations from community aid to development in postconflict Sierra Leone

Sierra Leone experienced an 11-year civil war, brutalizing its people and destroying its communities. With the cessation of violence, international organizations helped to secure peace, deliver aid and supplies, and, after, assist with development projects. This grounded theory study, which aims to understand the role these organizations played from the viewpoint of community members in 2 communities, posits that community members’ regard of international organizations lessened as their efforts transitioned from securing the peace and relief efforts to aid for development. Highlighted are the successes and challenges of this work and a broad discussion of implications and recommendations.     

‘Farming miners’ or ‘mining farmers’?: Diamond mining and rural development in post-conflict Sierra Leone

Sierra Leone is currently emerging from a brutal civil war that lasted most of the 1990s, and now has the dubious distinction of being ranked among the world's poorest countries. As thousands of displaced people move back to their villages, a large proportion of the predominantly farm-based rural population are growing food crops for the first time in a decade. Alluvial diamond mining makes an important contribution to the national economy, though some would argue that Sierra Leone's diamonds are a ‘resource curse’. Drawing upon research undertaken in the 1970s and also in the post-conflict period, the paper provides a longitudinal perspective on the complex links between the farming and mining sectors. Recent field research in Sierra Leone's Eastern Province, indicates that many links between farming and diamond mining have actually been maintained despite severe dislocation. These links could play a key role in rejuvenating market-oriented food production, providing the much-needed impetus for post-war rural development. In charting a future development trajectory, the paper recognizes the urgent need for an effective management scheme for both mining and marketing diamonds, given the potentially destabilizing effect on the country of the uncontrolled exploitation of this valuable resource. In this context, a recent community-based, integrated management initiative adopted by one local NGO, the Peace Diamond Alliance, is examined. If meaningful rural development is to be achieved among desperately poor communities, development strategies must be based on a detailed understanding of the nature of inter-locking livelihoods in the agricultural and mining sectors.     

Indigenous peoples,the city and inclusive urban development policies in Latin America: Lessons from Bolivia and Ecuador

The historical construction of indigeneity as essentially rural policy category represents a key cause for the ongoing exclusion of urban indigenous peoples and blocks progress in delivering Agenda 2030 in Latin American cities. Even in Bolivia and Ecuador, where urban indigeneity is recognized through constitutional reforms, there are obstacles to the delivery of policies shaped to urban indigenous interests. By reviewing experiences from these countries, this article highlights that policy delivery problems are a result of multiple factors, including (1) rural constructions of indigeneity, (2) conflicting development priorities, and (3) difficulties in promoting universal rights while simultaneously guaranteeing indigenous rights. The article concludes with policy recommendations for more inclusive urban development approaches which leave no indigenous person behind.     

Access to Land,Rural Development and Public Action: The When and the How

After being marginalised in the 1980s, land‐reform policies came back to national and international development agendas during the 1990s, resulting in a revival of academic research on the subject. This article reviews the empirical literature on access to land, rural development and public action for evidence on when and how the state should intervene in the allocation of rural land. The review suggests that positive impacts are obtained if, and only if, public actions on the allocation of land are carried out under certain conditions and in a certain way. The article ends by highlighting the need to elaborate empirical models that take into consideration opportunity costs and interactions, and that integrate individual responses with aggregate effects.     

Crime,in/security and mob justice: the micropolitics of sovereignty in Cameroon

Violent crime poses important challenges for quotidian concerns over security and safety by ordinary citizens in several Africa states. This is especially so in contexts where state security agents are perceived as highly corrupt and/or where African states seem unable to “protect” their citizens from violent crime. The widespread sense of anxiety over various forms of violent crime and state failure to guarantee protection for citizens generates a quest for alternative practices of safety-making that, in turn, evoke serious concerns over state power and sovereignty in Africa. Focusing on mob justice in Cameroon, this article argues that the political contextualisation of sovereignty must pay attention not only to the sovereign’s right to kill and let live, but also its responsibility to guarantee safety for those citizens it chooses to let live. The paper demonstrates that in Cameroon mob justice is an insurgent mode of social control or securitisation as well as a contextual expression of contested sovereignty directed at the state’s unwillingness or incapacity to contain dangerous forms of violent crime.     

An evidence of frame building: Analyzing the correlations among the frames in Sierra Club newsletters,national newspapers,and regional newspapers

Based on the data reported in a published article, this study finds that the percentages of articles that have particular frames in Sierra Club newsletters correlate with those in national and regional newspapers. Partial correlation analysis also reports such a correlation between the national newspapers and the regional newspapers, which disappears when the Sierra Club newsletters are controlled. Moreover, the correlation between the newsletters and the newspapers exists when the pro-environment master frames are analyzed, but not when the pro-development competing frames are analyzed.     

Limits and challenges for the participation of migrants' associations in state development policies in Morocco and Mexico

In many developing countries, migrants play an important role by supporting their local communities in their places of origin. An extensive literature has made visible their contribution to local development, thus revealing their involvement in the provision of social services or the construction of infrastructures. In this paper we illustrate the extent and scope of this task and the types of actions that migrants have started up in different countries of the world in general, and the cases of Morocco and Mexico in particular, to examine the achievements and limitations of both states' policies and migrants' associations in regard to their involvement in local development initiatives.     

Lapses,infidelities, and creative adaptations: Lessons from evaluation of a participatory market development approach in the Andes

Participatory approaches are frequently recommended for international development programs, but few have been evaluated. From 2007 to 2010 the Andean Change Alliance evaluated an agricultural research and development approach known as the “Participatory Market Chain Approach” (PMCA). Based on a study of four cases, this paper examines the fidelity of implementation, the factors that influenced implementation and results, and the PMCA change model. We identify three types of deviation from the intervention protocol (lapses, creative adaptations, and true infidelities) and five groups of variables that influenced PMCA implementation and results (attributes of the macro context, the market chain, the key actors, rules in use, and the capacity development strategy). There was insufficient information to test the validity of the PMCA change model, but results were greatest where the PMCA was implemented with highest fidelity. Our analysis suggests that the single most critical component of the PMCA is engagement of market agents – not just farmers – throughout the exercise. We present four lessons for planning and evaluating participatory approaches related to the use of action and change models, the importance of monitoring implementation fidelity, the limits of baseline survey data for outcome evaluation, and the importance of capacity development for implementers.     

Wind,coal, and copper: the politics of land grabbing,counterinsurgency, and the social engineering of extraction

ABSTRACT

The multiplicity of violent techniques employed to impose land control and extraction remains under acknowledged. This article reviews research conducted between the years 2014 and 2018 and draws on three case studies: wind energy development in Mexico, coal mining in Germany, and copper mining in Peru. The idea of 'engineering extraction' is advanced through counterinsurgency to acknowledge the extent of extractive violence, arguing that the term ‘land grabbing’ is indeed a more appropriate term than ‘land deals’. Engaging with the land grabbing literature, the three cases seek to advance discussions around ‘the political reactions “from below”’ by emphasizing ‘insurrectionary’ positions with resistance movements fighting land deals and extractive projects. This is followed by offering a typology of ‘hard’ coercive techniques and ‘soft’ technologies of social pacification that surfaced in each case. The conclusion reflects on the social technologies of resource extraction, recognizing how social discord, ecological and climate crises are engineered and enforced.     

Transnational land investment web: land grabs,TNCs, and the challenge of global governance

ABSTRACT

Despite international media’s waning attention, research and political debates on global land grabbing have not subsided. We argue the importance of understanding the ‘transnational land investment web’ of corporate and state actors and institutions, which are not always immediately visible. Focusing on transnational corporations (TNCs) based in the European Union (EU), we examine five sets of actors and institutional spheres through which these actors are able to grab lands beyond Europe. It is crucial to understand these not as individual sets of actors or institutions, but as interconnected sets, comprising a web. These are EU-based: (1) Private companies using regular institutional platforms; (2) Finance capital companies; (3) Public–private partnerships; (4) Development Finance Institutions; and (5) Companies using EU policies to gain control of land through the supply chain. One implication of this complex web is that democratic governance in the context of land grabs becomes an even more daunting challenge.     

The enclosures of colonization: Indigeneity,development, and the case of Mapithel dam in Northeast India

This paper examines the Mapithel dam in Northeastern state of Manipur in India as a site of contestation between the state-led development agenda and the affected tribal people. Based on discursive field experiences, the paper reflects upon the competing values in relation to land use and ownership systems and raises a question – as to whether in the name of development, is the government eroding tribal people’s right over their land and resources? The Mapithel dam issue not only invites serious deliberations beyond dam construction and its social and ecological ramifications but also contemplates on the various dynamics in and through cultural identity, politics, and natural resources. The paper addresses some key aspects of the very political closure approach which emphasizes state’s hegemony through forceful intrusion into the life, livelihood, and ‘lebenswelt’ of tribal people and infringement of their traditional rights.     

Rethinking the Margins/Thinking from the Margins: Culture,Power, and Place on the Frontiers of the New World

In this article, I undertake a critical analysis of the writings that contributed to set up the foundation for eclipsing Amerindian social dynamics and their complexity. Starting from a presentation of Jesuit Jos de Acosta's classifications of the indigenous sociopolitical forms, I show that both the evolutionist and discontinuist perspective still in vogue among some Americanists and the positivist approach of some borderlands historians tend to perpetuate a conquest culture (the material and symbolic power relation of domination) while concealing indigenous social dynamics and adaptation strategies. I end the article by presenting some of the perspectives and concepts developed by a new historical anthropology that seek to re-politicize the production of social and cultural differences otherwise considered as natural.     

Rural development and the regional state: Denying multifunctional agriculture in the UK

Under the emerging rural development paradigm, we argue that to be multifunctional an activity must add income to agriculture, it must contribute to the construction of a new agricultural sector that corresponds to the needs of the wider society and it must reconfigure rural resources in ways that lead to wider rural development benefits. By evaluating UK rural policies on the basis of whether or not they attempt to meet these conditions, this paper shows that an implicit recognition of agriculture's multifunctional character has occurred recently through the shift from a sectoral to a regional and territorial perspective that reintegrates farming into rural development. However, in practice, and especially in England, the UK government has been unable to turn multifunctional activities into a real rural development option. In fact, by continuing to support agri-industrial/retailer interests on the one hand, and post-productivist— environmental and amenity— interests on the other, the State is governing mostly by setting up competitively organized ‘projects’ and schemes that continue to justify the concentration (and limitation) of resources allocated to agriculture. Based upon a critique of policy developments over the past decade, this paper emphasizes the need for more innovative forms of state innovation that provide opportunities for new, creative and more spatially embedded forms of supply and demand management in agri-food. In the conclusions, the paper also argues that more critical research is needed to uncover the existing and potential role of both governments and producer networks in progressing sustainable rural development through agricultural multifunctionality.     

Why the principle of informed self-determination does not help local farmers facing land loss: a case study from oil palm development in East Kalimantan,Indonesia

ABSTRACT

The principle of informed self-determination has been celebrated as a means to prevent involuntary land transfer and the resulting dispossession of affected communities in agricultural investments of developing countries. Based on qualitative field research conducted in East Kalimantan, Indonesia, this paper argues that such optimistic recognition needs reexamination. Drawing on a case study of indigenous Dayak communities that have faced advancement of large-scale oil palm estates since 2007, the paper examines what informs communities’ decisions to release land to estates. The underdevelopment created by government neglect and the lack of future prospects for autonomous development are shown to have contributed to communities’ decisions to release land. After a decade, encroaching palm oil has produced land shortages and depleted forest resources. This study highlights the need for meaningful state interventions to alleviate poverty and create conditions that allows local communities to make meaningful choices during the consultations over land release.     

Lessons from Latin America's neo‐liberal experiment: An overview of labour and social policies since the 1980s

Introducing the six country studies that follow, this analytical overview shows that the social and labour policies inspired by the Washington Consensus – implemented across much of Latin America in the 1980s and 1990s – consistently failed to deliver the expected improvements. Labour flexibilization, decentralization of collective bargaining, pension privatization and other measures to increase market provision of welfare typically resulted in growing informality, widening inequalities and shrinking social protection coverage, while also failing to stimulate employment growth. But the lessons have been learned: many such policies have recently been reconsidered and there are signs that a more balanced policy approach may be emerging in Latin America.     

Development-based public procurement policies: a selective survey of literature,cross-country policy experience and the Turkish experience

Technological gap (Posner, 1961) is a critical determinant of income gap between developing and developed nations. Public authorities in developing countries are preoccupied with developing and implementing policies to increase per capita income. Public procurement of machinery and other manufactured products can be utilized by public authorities to foster technological development with a view to close the technology and income gap with richer nations. Such “development-based public procurement” (DBPP) policies are considered by developed economies as well (Yülek and Tiryakio?lu 2013 Yülek, M., and M. Tiryakio?lu. 2013. “Kalk?nma Temelli Kamu Al?m? Politikalar?: Politika Deneyimleri ve Literatürden Seçilmi? Örnekler.” Third Turkish Industrial Council Conference, 20–22 November 2013, Congresium, Ankara-Turkey. [Google Scholar]; Taylor and Yülek 2014 Taylor, T., and M. Yülek. 2014. “Can Governments Leverage Procurement to Foster Development? Evidence and Projections from Public Sector Expenditures in Turkey.” Journal of International Finance Studies 14(1): 69–87. [Google Scholar]) to further their technological development. This article presents a selective literature survey of academic research and policy experience on public procurement policies utilized to foster technological development and examine a country case study on Turkey.     

Reinvigorating resilience: violence against women,land rights,and the women's peace movement in Myanmar

In Myanmar, movements for gender justice strive to foster personal and collective security, vibrant livelihoods, and political engagement during a period of rapid and uncertain transition. This article draws from the experience of the Gender Equality Network (GEN), a coalition of over 100 organisations in Myanmar. It examines three cases in which GEN sought to document existing forms of resilience and expand these mechanisms through national-level advocacy. The first describes current attempts to publicise, and eventually eliminate, violence against women (VAW). VAW is a fundamental threat to personal safety, but also to the principle of societal accountability – that is, the extent to which society upholds the interests and rights of women and girls. The second focuses on women's (lack of) access to natural resources and economic decision-making, drawing on gender-focused input into the National Land Use Policy. Finally, we examine the impacts of conflict on women's resilience, and women's increasing participation in the peace process. In all three cases, effective mobilisation and networking not only increased female political voice, but also enabled creation of a more resilient democracy by modelling effective policy, research, advocacy, and communication strategies.     

Towards a generic sustainable urban transport strategy for middle-sized cities in Asia: Lessons from Ningbo, Kanpur and Solo

Almost 10 years ago the World Bank and UNDP expressed grave concerns about the likely future adverse impact of motorization on middle-sized cities in Asia and the Pacific region.¹ They claimed that, while many mega and primary cities in the region have an acknowledged transport crisis that has attracted major planning efforts, and extensive large-scale investment, the middle-sized cities (with only a fraction of the resources available to them) remain neglected and as result will reach their own crisis points unless effective policies are developed and implemented. Both agencies argued that catching the problems at an early stage would offer the advantage of developing a more systematic approach to tackling problems associated with unabated motorization and the opportunity to develop a generic method that could be applied to many medium-sized cities throughout the region. With this in mind, the World Bank, through UNDP and ESCAP, completed a study in 1998 directed by the author which sought to establish what generic strategic steps should be taken to prepare proactive measures to confront the challenges that motorization poses for such cities. The study drew extensively on the urban development and motorization experiences of three middle-sized cities in Asia—Kanpur in India, Ningbo in China and Solo in Indonesia—and recommended building blocks of a generic sustainable transport strategy for the region. Seven years on from the completion of this study, this paper examines the validity of the original motorization fears, re-examines the study's key findings and recommendations, and concludes that many still have resonance today.     

Disability,poverty and development: critical reflections on the majority world debate

Beyond rough estimates, little is known about disability in the majority world and complexities related to context and poverty are too often unacknowledged in the quest to simplify, generalise and export disability discourse, models and strategies. Disability remains peripheral to the larger development agenda and the disability studies debate maintains an almost exclusive focus on western settings, loaded with associated historical, social and cultural assumptions. In the light of this, this paper seeks to elucidate and engage with complex issues surrounding the disability and majority world debate, critique and challenge the exportation of western focused disability models and discourse and engage with possible avenues for bridging the gap between disability and development.