Enacting the Millennium Development Goals: Political Technologies of Calculation and the Counter-calculation of Poverty in Namibia

Abstract

This paper advances that the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) act as a governmentality that brings with them assemblages of international and national policies and practices of poverty reduction. These assemblages are characterized by neoliberal rationalities that shape relationships and practices with and of the poor themselves by repositioning and deploying the values and norms of the market as the principal means for the establishment of development aid partnerships. Such rationalities, we argue, are exercised through political technologies that make visible and operable certain governing schemes such as calculative practices. Drawing on extensive interview, policy, programme, and archival documents, the paper advances the argument that the MDGs and the national development plan for Namibia, Vision 2030, shape ideas of poverty reduction through political technologies of calculation and via multi-scale partnership arrangements. These technologies emerge from diverse elements, subsume the shaping of social and political spaces, and have diverse effects on the lives of the poor. Our analysis also highlights an approach to poverty reduction in Namibia, that of BIG, a Basic Income Grant scheme. We view BIG as a potential counter-calculation of poverty, and counter-partnership to poverty reduction efforts, which can develop into a more socially just and sustainable means to reduce poverty and lead to an overturn of contemporary neoliberal assemblages of poverty reduction.     

At the intersection of idealized youth and marginalized almost-adulthood: how girls negotiate young motherhood in London,Ontario

This article discusses how young mothers in London, a mid-size city in Canada, utilize a drop-in centre service while attending an alternative programme to acquire secondary school credits. The central arguments made here are informed by key concepts in the field of girlhood studies. With its attention to the interconnections between gender, age, and generation as well as other aspects of social identity, girlhood studies provides crucial insight into the lived experiences of young mothers who straddle the space between girlhood and adulthood. We interpret the experiences of the young mothers who participated in this study in light of shifting meanings and expectations of girls and girlhood in the neoliberal era. Drawing on the concept of the ideal neoliberal girl subject embodied in the ‘can do’ and ‘at risk’ girl, this paper highlights the tensions in accessing a drop-in centre, which functions as both a site of security and surveillance, for a group of young mothers receiving social services. The findings revealed how girls who are mothers struggle to live in the present to assert a legitimate maternal identity even as they are prepared for the future through neoliberal public policies and other disciplinary practices.     

“A bulletin board of dreams”: corporate empowerment promotion and feminist implications

This article examines the premises of corporate solutions to gender inequality in the Global South. In feminist debates, businesses’ increasing emphasis on women’s empowerment has been discussed both in terms of increasing feminist impact and the co-optation of feminist demands. To explore the ideological effects of corporate gender practices, focus is placed on the Coca-Cola Company’s global “5by20” campaign, which has the stated aim to empower five million women as small-scale entrepreneurs around the world and, in a “win–win” fashion, to double sales by 2020. Based on interviews and participatory observations in Mexico, this article traces a particular narrative of empowerment, envisioned as a transition from dependency to self-sufficiency and threatened by psychological and cultural restraints rather than material conditions. It shows that self-help and positive thinking are essential affective drives, thus reinforcing market-based, individualized development strategies. In response to feminist debates, the article concludes that corporate gender practices can be seen as part of a neoliberal transposition of equality concerns from a political to an economic domain. In effect, when initiatives such as 5by20 promote the accumulation of “human capital” to enhance gender equality, they simultaneously work to legitimize the inequalities that are necessarily entailed in competitive capitalism.     

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.     

Global Processes, Local Consequences: Gender Equity and Health Sector Reform in Peru

This article brings into relief the gendered tensions and contradictionsthat have resulted from Peru’s neoliberal health sectorreforms. Previous studies were clear that economic adjustmenthad a negative impact on women and gender relations. I showmore nuanced effects of neoliberal policies when applied tohealth sector reforms. To evaluate these policies, I utilizethe distinction between redistribution and recognition. I departfrom the supposition that policies serve either redistributiveor recognition ends and show that single policies can have bothtypes of effects. I conclude that policies based on neoliberalprinciples in some instances have a negative impact on women,in other instances reify existing unequal gender relations,while in still others open up spaces for positive change. Onthe whole, however, neoliberal health reforms have had a negativeimpact on gender equity.     

Troubling the ‘Happy Family’: US Liberalism and Narratives of Transnational Adoption and Immigration from China

This essay connects adoption and immigration from China by considering the relationship between the adoptee and the Chinese nanny hired to care for her. I examine news media alongside Wendy Lee’s 2008 novel, Happy Family, which portrays the adoptive family through the perspective of a Fujianese immigrant domestic worker. Transnational adoption from China emerged in the early 1990s as undocumented immigration from the Fujian province rose, representing a major shift in Chinese immigration. These practices have been apprehended divergently in mainstream discourses. This essay approaches the family as a site of neoliberal privatization that frames adoption in terms of inclusion into US national ideologies of race, gender, and class, while undocumented immigration from China has been framed through exclusion. I argue that the nanny destabilizes the construction of the family as a space of depoliticized inclusion through her labor, revealing the neoliberal inequalities that shape both adoption and immigration.     

Sharp Right Turn: Globalization and Gender Equity

Research on trends in globalization, particularly its neoliberal variant, has exploded but sources linking these trends to gender equity are difficult to uncover. Discussed mainly in the context of development, gender issues tend to be marginalized from the larger globalization picture. With World Bank as a backdrop, this article disentangles development from the process to inspect the connection between neoliberal globalization (NLG) and gender equity. This is accomplished through three cost‐benefit analyses: an overall evaluation of NLG; how gender equity unfolds under NLG; and how it unfolds under NLG in China. Macroeconomic trends supplemented with examples documenting the plight of women under NLG policies, including garment industry workers in Bangladesh, suggest heightened gender peril ushered in with NLG. China's “state capitalism” modification of NLG, however, tends to mitigate negative consequences for women. A paradigm shift from hegemonic NLG to state capitalism models may offer successful global economic policies that are especially beneficial to women. I conclude with an epilogue reflecting on my original remarks in light of the horrific factory collapse that occurred in Bangladesh less than a month after this address.     

“I am a Worker-Professional”: Teachers and their Classes in Puerto Rico

This article examines economic and cultural capital in the lives of public school teachers in Puerto Rico across the last half of the twentieth century to examine the processes through which their class relations have formed and reformed with shifts in Puerto Rican political and economic conditions from the early days of United States rule through neoliberal school reforms of the 1990s. It traces the historical development of the “teacher class” as a female-identified, poorly paid, professional workforce, and examines the impact of class and gender ideologies in this process.     

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.     

Disconnections and exclusions: professionalization,cosmopolitanism and (global?) civil society

In this article, we address the ways in which theories and practices of cosmopolitanism and professionalization intersect in the sphere of global civil society. We emphasize the experiences of grassroots development activists, arguing that although they have so far been pivotal to the legitimacy of these spaces and discourses, such activists are increasingly absent from the practices of global civic spaces. We explore this process of change over time using the example of grassroots health promoters in Peru, explaining it in terms of the articulation of neoliberal processes of professionalization with a particularly neoliberal version of cosmopolitanism. We argue that the two are mutually reinforcing and produce a particularly narrow, and arguably less cosmopolitan, rendition of global civil society, with implications for the possibility of building critical and transformative encounters across difference as a foundation for more equitable ideas and practices of development and democracy.     

Les rouages du genre. La différenciation des pratiques de travail chez les juges des enfants

When women and men occupy apparently identical positions, do they develop exactly the same working practices? Based on a survey of youth court judges, the article directly tackles this tricky question, one rarely raised in relation to the highest professions. After showing that gender contributes to differences in judicial practices, but not in the sense of gender stereotypes, it identifies the mechanisms through which it operates. Far from acting in isolation, uniformly and independently of the contexts of practice, it works through complex and sometimes contradictory processes, always closely linked with the other dimensions of professional and social pathways. In this case, gender produces its effects through two primary mediations: one, the attitudes of each judge to psycho-educational norms, and two, their attitudes to gender stereotypes.     

Neoliberal disorientations: changing landscapes of disability and governance in India

This article delves into questions of neoliberal disorientations experienced by disabled people in the context of a participatory development self-help group project from the World Bank in south India. I explore ways in which neoliberal development regimes produce exclusionary forms of inclusion by producing subjects who are ‘able-disabled’. I ethnographically examine ‘who gets counted’ and ‘what gets counted’ within the neoliberal governance framework, and what remains outside. Deconstructing participatory development approaches from a critical disability perspective, the article sheds light on processes of inclusion through exclusion in the neoliberal framework of governance. It highlights what is at stake for disability futures in the context of austerity in the Global South.     

Gendered Self-Improvement: Autonomous Personhood and the Marriage Predicament of Young Women in Urban China

How does gender shape the experience and imaginaries of self-realisation? This article explores practices of self-improvement among young women in China, namely workshops for interpersonal skills. These practices direct participants to express themselves as autonomous persons, disembedded from social hierarchies and familial responsibilities. Unmarried women who attend workshops conceive of marriage as an unavoidable impediment to their self-realisation. This is due to a prevailing gender inequality in marriage, as well as the ongoing expansion of an ideal of individual autonomy in China through economic reforms. In this article, I do not centre my analysis on a cultural clash between this ideal and local cultural practices. Instead, it is the possibility of this ideal, which is always shaped and restricted by socio-economic imperatives, that induces women’s frustration with their local culture. The fact that this ideal promises universal attainment highlights for women the gender roles that limit their autonomy.     

Bureaucratic encounters “after neoliberalism”: Examining the supportive turn in social housing governance

It is well established that encounters between welfare bureaucracies and their clients have been reconfigured under neoliberalism to address the problem of “welfare dependency.” Contemporary bureaucratic encounters therefore entail measures to activate clients’ entrepreneurial/self-governing capacities, and conditionality/sanctioning practices to deal with clients who behave “irresponsibly.” Despite the dominance of the neoliberal model, recent research has identified a counter-trend in the practices of housing services away from entrepreneurializing and punitive strategies and towards a more supportive approach. This paper examines this counter-trend and its implications for neoliberal welfare governance. To do this, it presents findings from research into social housing governance in Queensland, Australia, where the neoliberal focus on welfare independence, conditionality and sanctioning has been tempered by a new supportive approach focused on assisting vulnerable clients to maintain and benefit from access to welfare/housing support. Following Larner, we argue that this shift signals the emergence of an “after neoliberal” governmental formation, wherein key features of neoliberal governmentality are replaced by, or redeployed in the service of, progressive initiatives that address neoliberalism’s failings at the street level, but leave broader neoliberal policy settings undisturbed. We also challenge recent sociological accounts that construe supportive welfare practices as a function of an all-encompassing neoliberal project, arguing instead for appreciation of the contingency of these developments and the progressive political affordances that they entail.     

Embodied Women at Work in Neoliberal Times and Places

In this article five women explore (female) embodiment in academic work in current workplaces. In a week‐long collective biography workshop they produced written memories of themselves in their various workplaces and memories of themselves as children and as students. These memories then became the texts out of which the analysis was generated. The authors examine the constitutive and seductive effects of neoliberal discourses and practices, and in particular, the assembling of academic bodies as particular kinds of working bodies. They use the concept of chiasma, or crossing over, to trouble some aspects of binary thinking about bodies and about the relations between bodies and discourses. They examine the way that we simultaneously resist and appropriate, and are seduced by and appropriated within, neoliberal discourses and practices.     

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.     

New insights in reproducing transnational corporate elites: the labour market intermediation of executive search in the pursuit of global talent in Singapore

In this article, I provide new theoretical and empirical insights into the reproduction of transnational corporate elites through the process of people moving between firms’ internal labour markets rather than from expatriation. Theoretically, the article advances understandings of the reproduction of transnational corporate elites by drawing on a pioneering engagement with global talent, transnational elites and labour market intermediary discourses. I generate these new theoretical insights through an original case study of how global executive search firms in Singapore create pipelines for the recruitment of transnational corporate elites between firms’ internal labour markets. The findings also highlight the vital role of Singapore's neoliberal labour market practices, as well as its foreign talent programme to ‘win the war for talent'. By situating this research on the agency of executive search in reproducing Singapore's transnational corporate elite, the article's key contribution is to decentre North American and Western perspectives on the reproduction of knowledge on transnational corporate elites.     

Rights of Love: the State and Intimate Relationships in Canada and the United States

This article puzzles through the contrasts and paradoxes arisingfrom state practices of relationship recognition in Canada andthe United States. In the Canadian case, the focus is on theassignment of legal status to common-law relationships, regardlessof whether the parties to the relationship desire that status.In the United States, in contrast, legislative attention hasbeen directed at the reinforcement of heterosexual marriage.These differing postures provoke questions regarding the rolesof intimate relationships in governing projects. In particular,what do these postures mean for the autonomy of individualsto construct their personal lives and how do they complicatethe designation "neoliberal" to Canadian and US regimes of governance.     

Governing through accountability: Gendered moral selves and the (im)possibilities of resistance in the neoliberal university

Drawing on Judith Butler's early work on gender as performance and her later work on the ethically accountable subject, this study examines the production of gendered moral subjects under neoliberal governance in contemporary academia. The analysis of 40 semi‐structured in‐depth interviews with postdoc researchers and assistant, associate and full professors in a Belgian university reveals how in academics’ narratives of their ethical relations of (non‐)accountability towards multiple stakeholders, gendered subjects are performed along the heterosexual matrix reproducing the gender binary. The conjunction of gendered and ethical demands imposed through relations of accountability further opens up distinctively gendered possibilities of consent and resistance under neoliberal governance. We advance the extant literature on gender in academia which largely focuses on women's symbolic struggle to (dis)identify with a masculine professional norm. By locating power in the gendered relations of accountability towards multiple others, it re‐conceptualizes gender as an ontological struggle in the constitution of the self as moral along gendered norms. The study rejoins recent scholarship that calls for the recognition and elaboration of a relational ethics by showing how such ethics enables the emergence of open and responsive subjectivities in relations of accountability.