A Strange Kind of Science: Making Sense of the Millennium Villages Project

Abstract

The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are often critiqued as a strategy of social engineering. This analysis would seem to be supported by the case of the Millennium Villages Project (MVP), the world's leading programme for the achievement of the MDGs. At the level of its discursive articulation, the MVP appears as a scientific ‘proof of concept’ for the comprehensive engineering of neoliberal social orders. But its evaluation methodology has been widely criticised for a lack of scientific rigour, and field research that I conducted in the Ruhiira Millennium Village in Uganda in 2013 revealed serious problems of implementation. I argue that the MVP is better understood not as a strategy of social engineering but as the staging of a social fantasy in which the constitutive antagonisms of capitalist development are concealed. In this fantasy space, the MDGs function to fill the gap between the promise of development and the impossibility of capitalism without poverty.     

Special Forum on the Millennium Development Goals: Introduction

Abstract

The United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), eight time-bound targets aiming, amongst other issues, to reduce extreme poverty, address school enrollment and the prevalence of HIV/AIDS, expire in September 2015. World leaders, civil society organisations, philanthropists, and the private sector are all frantically negotiating and consulting over what will follow them. This special forum in Globalizations is dedicated to questions which explore the politics of the MDGs, and the subsequent discussions which are framing their successor development framework, the Sustainable Development Goals. Most research into the MDGs tends to be technocratic, addressing issues of how we might achieve the goals better, faster, and more efficiently. Questions of what kinds of societies might be created by the achievement of the goals, and what alternative societies people living in poverty might wish to build for themselves tend to get left aside, as do questions which address the fundamentally capitalocentric logics which underpin the MDGs. This special forum introduction briefly explores some of these issues before introducing the contributors, who include leading scholars on the critical politics and international political economy of international development, such as Suzan Ilcan, Philip McMichael, Kathleen Sexsmith, Carl Death, Japhy Wilson, Anita Lacey, Maia Green, and Heloise Weber.     

Sexual Violence and the MDGs

ABSTRACT

Sexual violence is multi-faceted. Three (overlapping) categories can be distinguished: violence that is sexual in nature, gender-based violence, and sexuality-based violence. The latter refers to violence against persons because of their sexuality and/or their (presumed) sexual behavior. Being female, young, poor, and living in a sexually conservative culture and/or in conflict areas appear to be important risk factors for sexual violence. Sexual violence is widespread (one in five girls worldwide are sexually abused in childhood and up to three-quarters of women in some countries have been victimized by a partner), but prevalence figures around the globe are hard to compare. Both the individual and society suffer from sexual violence. The eradication of sexual violence is directly relevant to achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) related to infant and maternal health and mortality, and combating HIV/AIDS. And certainly no less important, it is very closely linked to the MDGs related to gender equality and the empowerment of women, poverty, and primary education for all. Campaigning against sexual violence against women has been presented as one of the ‘quick wins’ in progress towards achieving the MDGs by the UN Millennium Project. Many good practices have been employed in political-legal, awareness raising, prevention, and health care domains, but important setbacks are noteworthy as well. Priority number one for the World Association for Sexual Health now seems to be to adequately and strategically contribute to the continuous efforts to integrate sexual health into the Millennium Development framework.     

Millennium Development Goals: Impact on national strategies and spending

This study reviews the post‐2005 national development strategies of 50 countries from diverse income groups, geographical locations, human development tiers and official development assistance (ODA) levels to assess Millennium Development Goal (MDG) absorption into development planning. Reviewing Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs) and non‐PRSP national strategies, the majority of the development plans have either adopted the MDGs as planning tools or ‘localized’ them in a meaningful way, using diverse adaptation strategies. A high correlation is detected between the income group, PRSP status and ODA reliance of countries, and their propensity to incorporate MDGs in their planning instruments. However, MDG alignment is not coterminous with greater pro‐poor or MDG‐oriented policies. Countries that have not integrated MDGs into their national plans were as likely to allocate government funds to social sectors as MDG aligners.     

Asset Accumulation: An Alternative Approach to Achieving the Millennium Development Goals

The United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are unlikely to be achieved by 2015, owing to conceptual flaws in their design as well as the structural and political constraints faced during implementation at the country level. While criticism of the MDGs is widespread, innovative ideas on addressing these operational challenges are still scanty. By reviewing a number of experiences, including those of the Foundation for the Promotion of Local Development (PRODEL) in Nicaragua and the Ministry of Cities in Brazil, this article highlights the importance of incorporating an asset‐accumulation perspective into MDG‐related policies and programmes as a way of generating an enabling environment that opens up new opportunities for poverty reduction in the cities of low‐ and middle‐low‐income countries.     

Reproducing Inequalities through Development: The MDGs and the Politics of Method

Abstract

This article is a critical inquiry into particular methodological means underlying analyses of development, inequalities, and poverty in the context of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) discourse. A populist approach to poverty reduction, the MDG initiative has gained much exposure at the expense of a closer scrutiny of the specific methodological premises (and their implications) underlining the development frameworks through which the goals were to be realized. A critical examination of premises of this kind demonstrates the way in which the application of specific methods in analyses of development and poverty is carefully crafted to serve discernible ideological ends. In order to explicate this by way of an example, I draw on MDG1 (and target 2 with reference to hunger), which I discuss in relation to its integration with the overarching development objective of realizing economic growth. My aim is to demonstrate how dominant explanations and understandings of poverty and hunger, social struggles for fundamental entitlements, and ultimately ‘development’, are construed in ways that are premised on abstractions from actual social and political relations; they are framed as ‘independent variables’ external to the very policies and strategies of international development. The critical engagement offered in my analysis is timely, given the extent to which the MDG initiative and the post-2015 Sustainable Development Goals agenda have been presented without any attempt to answer to decades (and more) of critical arguments that offer more rigorous and sustained understandings of inequalities, including deprivations of basic life sustaining needs and fundamental entitlements.     

RISK,MARRIAGE, AND NEOLIBERAL GOVERNANCE: Learning from the Unwillingly Excluded

Drawing from my ethnography of one prominent same‐sex marriage rights organization, I consider how activists' appropriation of a risk‐based political rationality blends utilitarian claims for equal access to self‐governance with moral assertions that posit the conjugal couple as a superior context for governing problems endemic to populations. When constructed according to risk‐based rationalities, marriage operates as a compulsory system that orients subjects to neoliberalism by promising to decrease danger for all of the “gay community,” not just same‐sex couples who marry. Articulating marriage according to a risk‐based political rationality yields a sense of urgency that makes nonconjugal intimacies and alternatives to a neoliberal ethic of care appear untenable. I add to the literature on governmentality by utilizing qualitative methods that uniquely capture the diffusion of governance from experts to social activists who are unwillingly excluded from a form of neoliberal governance.     

Neoliberalism and altered state developmentalism in the twenty-first century extractive regime of Indonesia

ABSTRACT

This article examines neoliberal leverage, states and ‘deep marketization’ in relation to resource extraction in Indonesia. The concept of ‘altered’ state developmentalism within a world-historical analysis of the semi-peripheral zone of the world-economy is introduced to address how much and in what ways resource extraction persists and even continues to expands. While most theories of development assume either that natural resource extraction will gradually fade or that the ‘curse’ of natural resources requires institutional reform, Indonesia’s ‘extractive regime’ persistently and under different political systems relies on extraction of land, forest, and mineral resources. Altered state developmentalism occurs, from this perspective, within a world-historical cycle of resource nationalism (CRN) as US hegemony declines. In contrast to the A first CRN’s put more emphasis on nationalizing ownership, e for progressive redistribution aims and industrial transformation. In contrast to the first CRN's emphasis on nationalizing ownership, empirical evidence from the oil, mining, and oil palm sectors illustrate how the advance of neoliberalism is tempered in the second CRN by altered developmentalism that aspires for growth and poverty reduction in a more market-oriented direction pushed by neoliberal leverage. While accommodating some pressures for land rights against the expansion of extractive frontiers, the overall thrust expands the conditions for yet more deep marketization.     

Kiva's Flat,Flat World: Ten Years of Microcredit in Cyberspace

While microcredit has been widely praised as a new, powerful tool for enabling development and empowering the poor, this form of ‘development from below’ does not exist in a vacuum. Rather, microcredit programs are inseperable from a host of neoliberal political, cultural, and economic practices and projects. These contexts are, however, systematically missing from Kiva.org, the largest and most popular peer-to-peer microlending portal. Instead, Kiva.org presents a placeless perspective on development and poverty, where borrowers’ skin color, native dress, and picturesque backgrounds seem to vary, but the ‘fix’ of microcredit remains universal. This ‘flat’ approach is problematic for two reasons. First, Kiva.org naturalizes the financialization of poor people's disadvantage in the coercive form of debt. Second, lenders are encouraged to channel their desire to help alleviate poverty through Kiva.org's lending portal based on an illusory sense of connection, transparency and beneficence in lending, thus potentially displacing other forms of less problematic development aid and intervention.     

The power to transform? Mexico’s ‘Fourth Transformation’ under President Andrés Manuel López Obrador

ABSTRACT

We engage in a conjunctural analysis of political change (Gramsci; Hall), power (Lukes) and transformation (Polanyi) to inquire into López Obrador’s political project; ‘The Fourth Transformation’ from July 2018 until December 2019. We analyse characteristics and consequences of the use of power by López Obrador as concerns the ‘power to do what?’ in the name of the 4T, shadowed by structural constraints. Additionally, inquiring the paradox of neoliberal ideas underlying changes in the Federal Public Administration in the name of austerity and the fight against corruption. We conclude that López Obrador is not exploiting this historical conjuncture to bring about ‘the primacy of politics over economics,’ and that signs have yet to emerge of a comprehensive transformation of the neoliberal economic foundations, from a structural analysis perspective. The paradox of neoliberal ideas underlying the 4T is coupled with a peculiar, backward-looking vision for national transformation; a ‘retro-formation’ in the making.     

“Politics have shown that the malays can change”: Corporate anthropology and the governing of entrepreneurial subjectivities in Malaysia

This paper analyses the interplay between anthropological epistemologies, industrial development and labour market policies, and the human technologies seeking to develop entrepreneurial subjectivities in Malaysia. It is argued that the ease with which conceptions of Malay subjectivity interacted with a series of mundane and practical managerial devices depended on the recast of the understanding of Malay subjectivity informed by developmental rationalities and anthropological epistemologies. This paper moreover addresses the apparent contradiction between the neo‐liberal and authoritarian political rationalities inscribed in the programs and human technologies seeking to develop entrepreneurial subjectivities.     

Poverty as a Form of Violence

Abstract

This paper advances the theory that poverty is one of the deadliest forms of violence. Together, poverty and violence are a potent force that is antithetical to the collective well-being of our society. Existing data reveal that the correlation between poverty and violence is statistically significant. The vast discrepancy between the prosperity of the rich and the profound deprivation of the poor in this country suggest that a structural perspective may be particularly instructive. Poverty as a form of violence will be examined in terms of four interrelated variables and a set of recommendations for change will be proposed.     

Safe Motherhood in the Context of Nepal

ABSTRACT

Nepal ranks low on the Human Development Index and has a high maternal mortality rate. Various factors contribute to the high rate of maternal mortality and include a shortage of health care professionals, limited access to basic maternal health care, poverty, illiteracy, women's low social status, a poorly developed transportation system, a limited communication system, political conflict, and a diverse population. Interviews with pregnant women, observational data, and national statistics provide the basis for suggestions provided by the author. These include upgrading and opening new maternal care facilities, integrating midwives into local health services, providing education on women's health needs during pregnancy, and improving public awareness of the availability of maternal care services.     

Queer Selfhoods in the Shadow of Neoliberal Urbanism

This article explores the political and performative shift in representations of same-sex desire within the context of neoliberal urbanism in Bengaluru, India. The affective shift from labile sexual practices to defiant assertions of sexual identity over the past two decades warrants a conjunctural analysis that tracks the intersections between neoliberal cultures of consumption and liberal rhetorics of equal rights and freedom of choice. Focusing on the queer subject in Mahesh Dattani's dramatic oevre, this article considers progressivist accounts of same-sex desire in neoliberal Bengaluru over the past two decades. By examining how non-normative sexual practices are disciplined into the epistemological categories of LGBT identity politics, the essay charts the itineraries of “queer” as it travels to India.     

Authoritarian neoliberalism and capitalist transformation in Africa: all pain,no gain

ABSTRACT

As a region of the world capitalist political economy, Africa has been the epitome of neoliberalism as a universal project to remake societies in its image. In Africa, the neoliberal project encountered a region already ensconced in state-forms that were authoritarian, albeit very often weaker than their analogues in Latin America or Southern Europe. In these circumstances, neoliberalism both reconstructed and relied upon authoritarian state practices: reassertions of law and order, rising technocracy, re-built bureaucracies, and ‘choiceless democracy’. Liberal advocates of neoliberalism indulged authoritarian governance in the belief that economic liberalization would generate economic growth and transformation. Reviewing these authoritarian neoliberal constructions, one is struck by how poorly they performed as vehicles for market-based capitalist transformation. In a phrase, the pain of neoliberal adjustment was accompanied by no palliative of sustained economic ‘gain’. Liberalization, executed by top-down and undemocratic governance, has generated fragile growth, instability, some enrichment and no economic transformation. This conjuncture is pivotal to an understanding of moves by some governing elites to explore and at times implement non-neoliberal development strategies. The article concludes by suggesting that neoliberalism is currently a somewhat besieged orthodoxy. However, the exploration of unorthodox development strategies has taken place within an authoritarian political shell.     

Uneasy passages between neoliberalism and feminism: Social inclusion and financialization in Israel's empowerment microfinance

This article focuses on feminist non‐governmental organizations advocating for economic empowerment of women (EEW) through microfinance, using Israel as a case study. Through fieldwork, interviews and documents, we investigate the institutional practices, cultural discourses and struggles that EEWs develop in order to expose the particular ways in which feminist organizations interact with the world of finance and state institutions. Our analysis points to the complex power dynamics of mediation, suggesting that there are ‘uneasy passages' between neoliberalism and feminism, ones that help re‐signify the meaning of financial discourses while re‐politicizing women's social and economic exclusions. Simultaneously, however, this relation induces a series of compromises, whereby EEWs adopt neoliberal modes of governance. Rejecting the notion that contemporary feminism has simply been co‐opted by neoliberalism or the perception of EEW microfinance as a mere expansion of neoliberal rationalities, we reveal new sites and ways in which feminism both colludes and collides with neoliberalism.     

Digital technologies and the biomedicalisation of everyday activities: The case of walking and cycling

Walking and cycling have been transformed by digital technologies, which range from mapping apps for wayfinding, through ‘wearables’ which monitor activity, to social media apps for comparing activity within social groups. Some technologies are explicitly orientated to health projects, others are not, yet all have potentially profound effects on bodies, health‐orientated identities, and understandings of health. This paper uses the concept of biomedicalisation to explore emerging literature on the intersection of digital technologies with everyday mobility, focusing on walking and cycling. Beyond simply ‘medicalising’ mobility (by bringing it into the realm of public health), digital technologies contribute to various transformations of health: encouraging some health practices, inhibiting others; creating or excluding individual and collective health‐related identities; and reconfiguring health and well‐being. There is research evidence on the contingent and multiple relationships between digital technologies and social practices, with specific themes including quantification; the role of apps in framing walking as extraordinary, cycling as competitive; enabling users to perform as healthy, neoliberal citizens; and digital careers. There has been less attention on how social divisions are reproduced or disrupted by the mediation of mobility through digital technologies. Further research should consider the impact of digital technologies on political economies of health.     

Self as enterprise: digital disability practices of entrepreneurship and employment in the wave of ‘Internet + disability’ in China

ABSTRACT

Situated in China’s neoliberal context and its rapid development of information communication technologies (ICTs), this study aimed to examine how disabled people in China transformed themselves into new self-enterprising subjects in the wave of ‘Internet?+?Disability.’ In order to answer this question, this study tried to develop an analytical framework to illustrate the disability practices that situated in the ICTs and neoliberal context, underpinned by the discourse of ‘self as enterprise,’ and demonstrated by the practices of entrepreneurship and employment. Based on the research design of case studies and methods that included ethnographic participant observation and in-depth interviews, this study explained how a disabled entrepreneur, Mr. Yuan, took advantage of the wave of ‘Internet?+?Disability’ to realize his dream of entrepreneurship and face the uncertainties of a precarious entrepreneurship. It also explained how Mr. Yuan’s employees achieved their dreams of employment but suffered the precariousness of enterprising subjects.     

Putting old heads on young shoulders: helping social work students uncover the neoliberal hegemony

This paper explores the suggestion that younger students and social workers are more accepting of neoliberal social work practices than their older counterparts, understanding social problems more readily as failings of individual behaviour rather than as produced by societal forces such as inequality, poverty, and punitive social policy. The suggestion is made that the acceptance of a hegemonic view of people in poverty and other difficulties, which is simple and reductionist, and therefore, easy to grasp, can only be challenged by sophisticated critical thinking. Assignment results from two modules within one social work programme which significantly correlate marks attained and student age are considered in the light of the suggestion that younger students are struggling with critical thinking, and therefore, with deconstructing the neoliberal hegemony.     

Politics by numbers: poverty reduction discourse,contestations and regime legitimacy in Ethiopia

There are contradictory statistics about the number of poor people and changes in number of poor people in Ethiopia with statistics ranging from 26 to 86% of the total population in 2013. This paper analyzed how such contradictory statistics feed into national politics focusing on who uses which statistics and based on what justifications of authoritativeness. Drawing from data collected from print newspapers, blogs, websites, published articles, party publications, and interviews with four key informants and combining an actor’s centered discourse analysis (ACDA) with Van Dick’s (1997) approach of identifying and analyzing political discourses, the paper deconstructed the poverty statistics debate in Ethiopia to understand the basic contestations. Synthesis of the data shows that poverty numbers are being used as tools for, and manifestations of, ongoing power struggles in Ethiopia whereby different actors selectively use poverty statistics that promote their political agenda. While doing so, the underlying rationale of actors for choosing one statistics over another was not based on the merit of their preferred set of statistics over the others but on the suitability of the data for their political purpose. As such, the government disregards statistics except its own which portray rapid poverty decline in the country while opposition groups actively use and promote statistics coming from international organizations that depict increasing poverty or a slow rate of reduction of poverty. The paper argues that the underlying cause of such politicization of numbers is linked with the developmental statism ideology of the ruling party in Ethiopia and how it tries to justify its rule in Ethiopia – claiming that it is reducing poverty and bringing development in Ethiopia and therefore should be allowed to continue in power. Therefore, in debating poverty numbers what is being debated is not just the statistics but the legitimacy of the government, hence politics by numbers.