我国欠发达地区民营企业家成长环境研究

民营企业家的生成模式可以分为外援生成和内生生成两种。从外援生成来看,扶贫没有形成欠发达地区的内生能力,内迁企业也无法“催生”大量的民营企业家;从内部来看,封闭性的文化及山区地形造成的市场分割,以及人力资本和物质资本的大量外流,大大削弱了欠发达地区内生民营企业家的土壤。但是,外援生成模式的低效性决定了欠发达地区的民营企业家成长模式应该以内生为主。     

Mutual Aid During a Pandemic: A Group Work Class Example

ABSTRACT

The pandemic of 2020 had faculty pivoting quickly from face-to-face to remote teaching. Many of us had to manage this herculean task with little know-how and within a short time-frame. Best practices were unclear given the highly individualized circumstances in which students were now living. Group work within an educational framework is possible and can help students effectively manage the stresses resulting from sudden crisis situations. The key to group work as practiced by social workers is mutual aid and it was this process that emerged in an online class for undergraduate students. It was not planned yet evolved in large part due to students’ capacity for caring, empathy, and connection.     

Practising politics: Technical project templates and political practice in a DFID country office

Development agencies including the UK Department for International Development (DFID) increasingly agree that if aid is to be effective, it should be politically smart and locally led. However, both the critical and the reformist literature have argued that development agencies persist with technical, template‐driven programming: political analysis and practice have not been widely institutionalized. This study aims to identify why development representations are persistently technical in their form, and what blockages have existed for developing locally grounded and politically aware programmes. The article presents an ethnography of the process of developing the core elements of the governance portfolio in an (anonymized) DFID country office. Focusing on a key design workshop, the study is situated within a wider organizational ethnography. The persistently technical justifications for programmes are a result of the bureaucratic form itself, its accountability and approval processes. Political analyses represent countries in such a way that officials can prioritize selection from a repertoire of technical models. However, scepticism about the tractability of governance problems to such analyses and programming has led to an emerging understanding of politics that creates space within the bureaucratic form for politically aware practice. Politically aware programming should emphasize good operational practice over explicit analysis and should continue to emphasize technical models like the adaptive management models which create room for such practice.     

Disasters as Learning Experiences or Disasters as Policy Opportunities? Examining Flood Insurance Purchases after Hurricanes

Flood insurance is a critical risk management strategy, contributing to greater resilience of individuals and communities. The occurrence of disasters has been observed to alter risk management choices, including the decision to insure. This has previously been explained by learning and behavioral biases. When it comes to flood insurance, however, federal disaster aid policy could also play a role since recipients of aid are required to maintain insurance. Using a database of flood insurance policies for all states on the Atlantic and Gulf coasts of the United States between 2001 and 2010, this article uses fixed effects models to examine how take‐up rates respond to the occurrence of hurricanes and tropical storms, as well as disaster declarations and aid requirements. Being hit by at least one hurricane in the previous year increases net flood insurance purchases by 7.2%. This effect dies out by three years after the storm. A presidential disaster declaration for floods increases take‐up rates by 6.7%. When disaster aid grants are made available to households, take‐up rates increase by 5%; this accounts for the majority of the increase in policies after occurrence of a hurricane. When the models are estimated taking into account which policies are required by disaster aid, hurricanes are estimated to lead to only a 1.5% increase in voluntary purchases. This overlooked federal policy that disaster aid recipients insure is responsible for a majority of insurance purchases postdisaster.     

Dichotomy of development aid’s ambition and neoliberal imperatives: A case‐study of private‐sector development in Bangladesh

Development in the twenty‐first century (“neo‐liberalism”) is a tool and its success and sustainability depend on how this tool is applied on a specific grounded reality. This article investigates how this modernization process continually co‐creates globalized Bangladesh through private sector development. While this field report highlights the challenges development aid donors can face in Bangladesh’s post‐colonial culture, it also unveils the dichotomous traction between globalization and inequality as well as the friction poverty reduction, through private sector development, can generate in impoverished countries. Finally, this report attempts to reconsider the ways in which the aid development ambitions of equality and liberty can find a workable balance with the neo‐liberal Imperative for private sector development. This article calls for improving quality control to generate greater impact of development aid resources in developing private sectors.     

Constructing Humanitarian Selves and Refugee Others

Contributing to ongoing debates about what happens when feminism is institutionalized in global governance, this article examines how gender equality is given meaning and applied in humanitarian aid to refugees, and what the implications are with regard to the production of subjectivities and their positioning in relations of power. Drawing on Foucauldian and postcolonial feminist perspectives, the analysis identifies two main representations of what it means to promote gender equality in refugee situations. Gender equality is represented as a means to aid effectiveness through the strategic mobilization of refugee women's participation, and as a project of development, involving the transformation of “traditional” or “backward” refugee cultures into modern societies. The subject positions that are produced categorically cast refugees as either passive or problematic subjects who need to be rescued, protected, assisted, activated, controlled and reformed through humanitarian interventions, while humanitarian workers are positioned as rational administrators and progressive agents of social transformation. In effect, gender equality is used to sustain power asymmetries in refugee situations and to reproduce global hierarchies.