The Global Development Project Contested: The Local Politics of the PRSP Process in Malawi

Development, in an age of globalizations, has indeed become a global project. However, this project remains contested and contestable. While much attention has been given to this contestation at a macro-policy level, the dynamics of such contestations on the ground remain less studied. Noting that development projects, policies and programs are themselves products of power relations and social struggles, this paper focuses on the dynamics of these relations and struggles in relation to the dissemination of the global development project in Malawi. Drawing from the experiences and fractious journey from 2000 to 2006 of the broad-based civil society network involved in Malawi's ongoing PRSP process, the paper shows how local actors draw creatively on globalized discourses of participation and representation to contest and confound the objectives of the elites, thereby complicating the channels through which the global development project is promulgated.

El desarrollo en la era de la globalización, se ha convertido en un proyecto global. Sin embargo, este proyecto sigue siendo controvertido y cuestionable. Mientras que se le ha dado mucha importancia a esta controversia a nivel macro-político, la dinámica de estos cuestionamientos es menos estudiada a nivel local. Dado que los proyectos, programas y políticas de desarrollo son a su vez el producto de las relaciones de poder y de las luchas sociales, este artículo se centra en la dinámica de estas relaciones y de estas luchas en la diseminación del proyecto global de desarrollo en Malawi. Con base en la experiencia y las dificultades que surgieron entre el 2000 al 2006, entre el proceso PRSP de Malawi y la amplia red de la sociedad civil involucrada en él, el artículo demuestra cómo, de manera creativa, los actores locales, basándose en el discurso globalizado de la participación y representación, protestan y confunden los objetivos de las élites, complicando los canales a través de los cuales se divulga el proyecto de desarrollo global.

在全球化时代,发展问题已然成为一个全球性项目。然而,对这一项目仍然存有争议。不过争议主要集中在宏观政策层面上,对争议在草根层面上的动力学研究不足。本文注意到发展项目、政策和方案本身是权力关系和社会斗争的产物,着重研究涉及马拉维全球发展项目传播过程中这些关系和斗争之间的动态关系。从基础广泛的市民社会网络从2000年到2006年的经验和反抗历程来看（该网络参与了马拉维正在进行的减贫战略文件进程）,本文表明了当地行为者是如何创造性地利用参与权和代表权等全球性话语,来竞争和挫败精英的目标,从而使得全球发展项目的传播路径复杂化。     

Fiscal Pressure of Migration and Horizontal Fiscal Inequality: Evidence from Indian Experience

This article examines the patterns and trends in inter‐State migration across the Indian States and observes that along with the demographic factors, migration is also affected by the fiscal profile of States. Controlling for the economic prosperity of States as reflected in their per capita Net State Domestic Product and the nature of fiscal policy stance, econometric estimation using the gravity model suggests that level of vertical federal transfers and its horizontal distribution is an important determinant of the pattern of inter State migration. To correct for the extant horizontal fiscal inequality across the Indian States, the article suggests a relatively more progressive transfer system and a developmental fiscal policy stance at the State level to reduce the pressure of out‐migration to prosperous regions of the country.     

The PRSP Approach and the Illusion of Improved Aid Effectiveness: Lessons from Bolivia,Honduras and Nicaragua

Since 1999, poor countries that want to qualify for concessionary IMF loans and debt relief must elaborate and implement Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers. Donors claim that the PRSP approach will increase aid effectiveness since PRSPs will enhance broad country ownership and lead to better ‘partnership’ with donors, implying more donor co‐ordination under government leadership. By examining the experiences of Bolivia, Honduras and Nicaragua, this article finds that the results are disappointing. The article also shows that, by emphasising rational planning and ignoring politics, the PRSP approach has unintended and sometimes harmful consequences. This leads to recommendations for changes of the approach.     

Age,Experience, and Schooling: Decomposing Earnings Inequality in the United States and Brazil*

This article analyzes age and experience profiles of earnings inequality for U.S. and Brazilian males. Decomposition of the inequality profiles using a standard human capital earnings equation clarifies the determinants of cross-sectional inequality profiles and demonstrates a number of important differences in the shape of the two countries' profiles and in their underlying components. Most dramatic are Brazil's higher returns to schooling and higher variance in years of schooling, both factors contributing to the significantly higher level of income inequality in Brazil. Changes in the distribution of schooling across cohorts are shown to play a central role in explaining cross-sectional inequality profiles within each country and differences in earnings inequality in the United States and Brazil.     

Between reform and inertia: Bolivia's employment and social protection policies over the past 20 years

With the coming to power in 2006 of Evo Morales' Movement Toward Socialism, Bolivia entered a new stage in its history: a period of ambitious political and economic reform aiming to transcend the neo‐liberal development model in place since 1985 and to renew the State on the basis of its new Constitution, drawn up in 2008. Against this background, this article examines changes in labour law and social protection during the 1980s and 1990s and takes stock of the challenges of implementing a development strategy focusing on full employment and equity.     

Situated legitimacy: Deliberative arenas and the new rural governance

Rural governance in the UK and elsewhere has undergone far-reaching changes, as partnerships and other collaborative approaches have emerged to address the challenges of rural sustainable development. The legitimacy of this ‘new rural governance’ is purportedly grounded in deliberation between stakeholders, but this is problematic—it is not clear how ‘legitimacy’ is to be understood now that the criteria of legitimacy appropriate to representative democratic government are not obviously applicable.Here we propose an analysis of legitimacy as situated—that is, given meanings by actors in specific contexts—and continuously constructed through discursive processes, where it also plays a reciprocal, highly political role in shaping those processes. We use this framework to analyse decision making in three distinctive deliberative arenas for sustainable transport policy making in the Peak District National Park in England. Legitimacy claims were found to be significant elements in each arena, but no single, overriding legitimacy discourse was successfully established. Instead, each arena's legitimacy was a hybrid, justified through a complex mix of competing rationales.While no single conclusion can be drawn about the legitimacy of ‘the new rural governance’, the strongest legitimising principles remained those grounded in representative democracy. In contrast, the ‘new’ approaches rely on deliberative norms accepted only by (some of) the relatively limited circle of stakeholders directly involved. More generally, if such norms are to become accepted principles for legitimate rural governance, then more work is needed to discursively establish their acceptability both in networks of governance and with the wider population.     

Deliberative Democracy and the Paradox of Participation

Citizen involvement and participatory governance have been adopted as essential components of urban development policies in many countries. For instance, participatory budgeting in Porto Alegre was successful in mobilizing and empowering poor people. However, in many cases, participation is merely a buzzword which often leads to co‐optation. In this article, we propose an explanatory model of participatory governance for making comparative analyses and compare participatory budgeting in the 1990s in Brazil with the Japanese community policy of the 1970s. Based on this, our analysis identifies the paradox of participation and the importance of gatekeeping functions. As a consequence of enhanced citizen participation, the power of the bureaucratic administration becomes dominant unless politicians and the legislature retain their autonomy in decision‐making. If the gatekeeping functions of involvement and decision‐making are monopolized by the administrative body urban development is de‐politicized, which, in turn, leads to co‐optation by government and exclusion. It is important to retain the function of politics to deepen democracy through citizen participation in urban development.     

Revisiting the sociology of identities and selves with discursive resources

In recent years, a growing body of multidisciplinary research has used the concept of the discursive resource. Discursive psychologists, communications scholars, and sociologists have all used this concept. Discursive resources are clusters of categories supplied by culture that present explanations for past and future activities, provide individual and collective identities for self‐construction, and enable and constrain texts. In this essay, I describe how this research contributes to sociological theorizing of identity, and make some recommendations for researchers who wish to use these concepts or improve these concepts. Studies using the concept of the discursive resource contribute to sociological theorizing of identity by showing how discursive resources are related to important features of social life such as future talk; collective identities; space and time; and complex and political divisions of labor, culture, and postmodernity. I then conclude by suggesting that future research analyze the social distribution of discursive resources across different kinds of social environments.     

Illustrating the Implications of How Inequality is Measured: Decomposing Earnings Inequality by Race and Gender

This paper makes three distinct contributions: it presents a novel modification to an established methodology for assessing inequality using the CPS ASEC data, it illustrates how valuable a multi-metric inequality analysis is by reconciling some open questions regarding the trend in inequality and the role of the composition of income along the distribution, and it provides a baseline assessment of the trend in earnings inequality for four distinct groups of income earners. The evolution of earnings inequality from 1995 to 2010 is compared to increasing inequality in total income as documented by Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez to show that earnings inequality has followed a qualitatively similar, though less extreme trend. In the process, the disconnect between the trend in the Gini coefficient and inequality assessed via the share of income going to the top 1 % of income earners is reconciled through the use of several alternative inequality indices. Finally, the evolution of the earnings distribution for black women, black men, white women, and white men are considered separately, which shows that there are important differences in the experience of inequality. The main findings are that only white men have experienced changes in within-group earnings inequality that parallel the changes in inequality seen in the overall distribution. By contrast, black income earners have seen no notable increase in within-group inequality by any measure, suggesting that they may rightly perceive growing inequality as primarily a between-group phenomena.     

Cooling the Mother Out: Revisiting and Revising Goffman's Account

This article revisits Erving Goffman's important yet neglected metaphor of “cooling the mark out.” Drawing on a study of mothers whose child has Down's syndrome, I explore the value of Goffman's work for capturing how mothers interpret their child's diagnosis as a loss and rectify this breach by constructing an acceptance of their new situation. The mothers' accounts highlight how Goffman's contentions can be enriched by acknowledging the gendered, temporal, and public character of a loss. This article, thus, can be read both as a celebration and critical revision of his theoretical contribution.     

Magic happens: Revisiting the spirituality and social work debate

Abstract

The social work profession is currently undergoing a resurgence of interest regarding the issue of spirituality in social work. This article attempts to summarise and explore the debate so far and to discuss the implications of this in a practice context. Current issues including definitions of spirituality and the key concerns in the areas of both practice and education are addressed. The article concludes with an overview of a model of spiritually sensitive social work practice, and poses options for further professional reflection on the place of spirituality in social work practice.     

Group Dynamics in Development of the Poor: Experience from BRAC

The groups deliberately formed by nongovernmental organizations to organize the poor for their development are often subgrouped for better performance. In this connection, the study investigates the extent subgroups contribute to group performance, the mechanisms that lead to the contribution of subgroups to group performance, and changes in the contribution of subgroups to the performance of a group. Altogether 239 Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee groups, i.e., village organizations (VOs), with and without subgroups were investigated. The VOs with subgroups performed better than those without subgroups. The performance of the VOs with subgroups, however, declined over time. One of the reasons why effectiveness of VOs with subgroups declined was the belief that pursuing subgroup responsibilities would not bring any personal gain for members.     

Volunteering and Income Inequality: Cross-National Relationships

Wilkinson and Pickett, in their 2009 book The Spirit Level, found that, in rich countries, income inequality was negatively associated with a range of indicators of well-being, but they did not consider the relationship with volunteering. This paper seeks to fill that gap. Using existing data sources, it shows that, among European countries, higher levels of volunteering are associated with lower levels of income inequality. The relationship is particularly strong for regular and sport-related volunteering. The basic Spirit Level thesis is therefore confirmed as applicable to volunteering. However, while the thesis involves just one theoretical explanation for the income inequality/well-being relationship, namely status anxiety, in the case of volunteering, other variables are also found to be at play, including government social spending, available leisure time and geo-historical traditions. It is concluded that, while high levels of volunteering, as a form of social capital, can be seen as one of a number of features of more equal societies, disentangling cause and effect may require a more holistic approach to understanding its contribution to the generation and sustaining of social well-being.