Theses - Centre of Development Studies

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A Humanist Perspective on Economic Policy: Ecuador's Economic Reforms and Industrial Policy, 2007-2017
Estevez, Laura
This dissertation assesses Ecuador's economic policies during the Correa administration (2007 - 2017) from the perspective of human development. It aims to accomplish two objectives —one conceptual and one empirical. At the conceptual level, it brings together two intellectual traditions that are often seen as antagonistic: on the one hand, classical development theory with its focus on structural transformation as the central concern of development and, on the other hand, the humanist development tradition, which asserts the centrality of human wellbeing as the ultimate objective of policy interventions. Combining the normative gaze of the human development approach with classical development theory's insights about the centrality of industrial policy as tool for achieving sustained per capita growth, I build a framework for evaluating economic policies in general, and Ecuador's economic policies in particular, in terms of their direct and indirect contributions to human wellbeing. At the empirical level (Part II), I apply the framework developed in Part I to analyze Ecuador's economic policies during the Correa administration. Though my analysis identifies manifold successes and failures, it concludes that —with some notable exceptions— the administration's economic policies were largely conducive to enhancing economic and human development. Moreover, many of the policies that most effectively contributed to the expansion of human development —particularly public investment, macroeconomic and regulatory policies— were those that most markedly broke with the policy regime of Ecuador's Washington Consensus period (1982-2006). However, in the realm of industrial policy, the government notably fell short of the speed, scale and precision required to achieve a significant change in its commodity-dependent pattern of productive specialization. This prevented the country from achieving a level of diversification that could have provided a buffer against the boom and bust cycles of commodities markets and stimulated long-term development of higher-value added productive capabilities. As a result, when the price of oil suddenly fell, the government was unable to sustain the public investments that enabled its upward development trajectory. Thus, the ineffectiveness of the Correa administration's industrial policy truncated a successful process of expansion of human development that could have become sustainable had the imaginations of policy makers been able to escape the ideational constraints of orthodox economic prescriptions and standard human development discourse, which either directly undermine or neglect industrial policy. Ecuador's experience highlights the risks of seeing development policy as little more than a collection of measures for 'getting along with a little assistance' and underscores the need for developing countries to take more proactive structural measures to achieve sustained improvements in economic and human development.
Open Access
Girl Incorporated. Corporate Empowerment Programmes for Women Workers: What Drives them and Who Benefits?
Hengeveld, Maria
The past two decades have seen a surge in partnerships between multinational corporations and women’s rights organizations professing to empower women and girls in the Global South. This trend – dubbed ‘Transnational Business Feminism’ (TBF) by feminist political economist Adrienne Roberts (2012) – has generated a lively debate amongst feminist social scientists around the ideological characteristics, limitations, benefits and effects of these alliances, and the extent to which they signal the ‘co-optation’ of certain feminist strands. This dissertation identifies and addresses three gaps in the TBF literature, namely: the perspectives of influential feminist groups participating in TBF projects; the effects of these initiatives on their beneficiaries in the Global South; and the rise of supply chain focused TBF projects targeting women workers. A contribution to this debate, this dissertation examines the logics, functions, and effects of worker-focused TBF projects from the perspectives of those who design these projects in the Global North, and explores the effects of such projects on two groups of women workers in the Global South. What lies behind the rise in supply-chain focused TBF partnerships? How do feminist professionals who design and promote these projects make sense of the impact, limits, and ideological implications of their work? How might the experiences of some small groups of beneficiaries illuminate the broader politics of TBF? These are the main questions animating this dissertation. A qualitative case study methodology is used to answer these questions. The selected case studies are the New York based United Nations agency UN Women, the International Center for Research on Women (ICRW) in Washington DC, and the partnerships of these organizations with fashion corporation The Gap (Gap) and the household goods company Unilever. Data has been gathered through: in-person and online interviews with feminist professionals in the United States, India, and the United Kingdom; group interviews with Gap workers in India, and phone interviews with former Unilever tea workers in Kenya. Additional interviews were held with feminist professionals at CARE International, Women Deliver, Business for Social Responsibility (BSR) and the UN Global Compact. Textual data has been obtained through the websites, social media pages, promotional literature, and annual reports of the organizations under study, Freedom of Information requests at the European Commission and court records capturing workers testimonies. I have gathered additional data by attending multiple TBF-related webinars and conferences.
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Living in Parallel Worlds: Understanding Patani Malayness and Ethnonationalism Among Youth in Thailand’s Deep South
Siriwat, Pakkamol
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To what extent and how has the behaviour of SOEs in Russia and China changed under evolving government-SOE relations?
Makarchev, Nikita
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Open Access
Essays on the Political Economy of Democratization and Democratic Backsliding
Van Noort, Sam
This four-paper dissertation addresses three fundamental questions in the political economy of democracy. First, does economic development cause democratization? Second, to what extent are citizens willing to defend democracy after it has been established, but is then threatened from within by an anti-democratic state executive? Third, what influence has the recent episode of democratic backsliding within the United States had on America’s soft power abroad? In the first paper, I provide a new theory of the relationship between economic development and democracy. I argue that a large share of employment in manufacturing (i.e., industrialization) makes mass mobilization both more likely to occur and more costly to suppress. This increases the power of the masses vis-à-vis autocratic elites, making democracy more likely. Using novel manufacturing employment data for 145 countries over 170 years (1845–2015), I find that industrialization is strongly correlated with democracy, even after accounting for country and time fixed effects, time trends, theoretically grounded controls, and other economic determinants of democracy (e.g., income and inequality). Unlike with other economic determinants, the effect occurs on both democratic transitions and consolidations, and is equally large after 1945. Importantly, the data suggests that many potential outliers (e.g., China, the USSR, and Latin America during import substitution industrialization) have in fact never reached the level of industrialization that existed in the West, South Korea, and Taiwan before democratization. In the second paper, I exploit a unique quasi-experiment in 19th- and early 20th-century Norway to test whether the correlation between manufacturing employment and democracy is causal. Using novel roll-call data from the Norwegian national parliament, I study whether MPs that represented more rapidly industrializing districts were more likely to vote for suffrage extensions over the 1891 to 1906 period. For causal identification, I exploit the fact that Norwegian districts with a greater geographical potential for hydropower generation were significantly more likely to industrialize after the nationwide introduction of hydroelectricity in 1892. In line with the first paper, I find that industrialization tended to induce democratization in Norway. In the third paper, I turn to the contemporary period and study whether politicians who clearly violate democratic norms lose significant public support, or whether voters tend to form little constraint on democratic backsliding. To examine this fundamental question, I study a novel natural experiment created by the fact that Donald Trump’s incitement of the January 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol unexpectedly occurred while Gallup was conducting a nationally representative public opinion survey using random digit dialing. Comparing party identification among respondents who happened to be interviewed just before, and just after, January 6, 2021, suggests that the Republican Party retained 78% of its pre-insurrection support base during the first 1.5 weeks after the January 6 insurrection. Even this modest loss was only short-lived---in February 2021 the Republican Party already stood at 93% of its pre-insurrection support level. In the last paper, I examine the consequences of democratic backsliding within the United States on America’s standing abroad. To do so, I exploit the fact that the January 6 insurrection unexpectedly occurred while Gallup was conducting nationally representative surveys in India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Romania, and Vietnam using random digit dialing. In contrast to many soft power theories in international relations, I find that the January 6 insurrection had no effect on U.S. leadership approval abroad.
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Nature, Nurture and Values in Development: Water as a Resource in Kazakhstan
Kuermanaili, Shatanati
Often, water as an element of the commons, is studied in the field of Resource Economics as common-pool resources (CPRs), a specific type of good. Even if efforts have been made to take an integrated approach (e.g., the two dominant and frequently used concepts – the Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) and the Water-Food-Energy and Ecosystem Nexus), they are designed for policy makers to select relevant elements in keeping with the models, thereby relegating the local understanding of the key concept to the background. This way of effectively keeping the social-cultural complications in the background is indeed a paradigm that focuses on the utility that subjects to markets and formal constraints without paying attention to the informal and its interactions with the formal institutions and markets. In reality, the commonly shared resources – physical, institutional and cultural – formal and informal, interact with and reinforce each other through commoning. Thus, there is a necessity to widen our understanding of CPRs, in its original meaning of the communal sharing of assets of collective interest and uses it as a mechanism to connect with shared human-made systems. Then, what could be included in this widened understanding of the commons? Three objectives are regarded as collective goods in this integrated understanding of the commons: tangible commons of water, intangible commons of shared identity and culture, and the institutional commons of welfare and security. Empirically, besides archives and online database (the Transboundary Freshwater Dispute Database (TFDD) and the International River Cooperation and Conflict database (IRCC)), this study has conducted two stages of multi-sited fieldwork in Kazakhstan (mainly in Almaty and Taraz) in 2018 and 2019 respectively where the empirical evidence presented shows that informal institutions can also be a viable means of governance in serving the common interests. The main body begins with examining the nature of water related conflicts in Central Asia where a general political-economic approach with an assumption of water scarcity tends to write a water war thesis given the current context of incompatibility between the respective demands of the downstream and upstream states. However, if you closely examine, all of five Central Asian countries are not short of water, and more importantly, these studies did not tell us about conflict that are categorized as water conflicts, but are not systematically, or uniquely related to water. After analysing the historical cross-border water interactions, both conflict and cooperation, in the Aral Sea Basin where all Central Asian countries get involved, it suggests that water-related factors (e.g., water scarcity, water allocation, infrastructure etc.) may have created obstacles for cooperation, the linkages between water and other non-water-related factors of the political economy have the potential and capacity to cause conflicts over cross-border river water. Under these circumstances, the Central Asian republics have also managed to forge cooperation over cross-border waters on a bilateral or multilateral basis, each in their own manner. Thus, it argues that rather than fetishizing water conflicts thought, more efforts should be placed to revise the growth of water conflict thoughts and to explore how to govern and address both water-related and non-water-related factors properly and promptly to avoid potential conflict. It then zooms into its ethnographic context – Kazakhstan – to explore why the dichotomy between ‘strategy discourse’ and ‘practice discourse’ regarding water persists in Kazakhstan. Or why do ‘massive’ state water development programmes in Kazakhstan keep failing? It suggests that in Kazakhstan, the existing ‘strategy discourse’ as a top-down process focusing on market and formal constraints only creates claims on property rights, which does not effectively put together all the necessary factors to serve the common interests. Translating the statement into the language of governance, at the centre of current freshwater management system in Kazakhstan is what has been done by the state that does not effectively connect with the local community-possessed socio-cultural resources. Therefore, even if tremendous efforts have been made, the governing government has failed to achieve its strategic aims on the ground. It suggests that socio-cultural resources are community possessions, and thus, it is only at the ‘community level’ that they can have an impact. Only when decision-making over development projects, programmes and implementation is at this community level, can citizens participate and employ their socio-cultural resources in making and ensuring the success of strategic development goals. The proposed, ‘Oртақ’, people’s own understanding of the commons, naturally involves both formal and informal institutions, that is well-positioned to connect to the local community with the government. The explanation proceeds in three chapters corresponding to the proposition: Chapter 4 outlines current strategic guidance of the central state at macro-level where major transformations in the institutional and macroeconomic conditions have been reviewed within which water resources are governed in the country. It follows Chapter 5 examines local responses to these new changes and opportunities both in popular society and among local intellectuals. Particularly, at local level, when it examines local residents’ experiences of ongoing water supply services and the actual outcomes of outsourcing water services to private companies, it reveals the consequence of ‘strategy discourse’ as a top-down process that governs water resources by merely relying on the formal governing structures. It then suggests in Chapter 6 that informal institutions at local level can also be a viable means of governance for public welfare, which might also ensure the success of state’s development projects. Last, the Kazakh state has responded to global call to bring gender’s perspective in developing water policies. This chapter approaches the topic by exploring how the actual happening shifts in gender relations in the region have implications for water development projects that is unlike conventional studies that explore how the changes in water development discourses have specific gendered implications. Therefore, an examination of relatively recent Soviet policies on women and the current ongoing transitions are all of relevant concern. After examining the implications of the actual happening shifts in gender relations for water development projects in the region, it argues that this actual happening shifts in the construction of gender that have added values to water’s development projects, not vice versa as proposed. In sum, this thesis not only provides a holistic picture of water resources governance in Kazakhstan and the relationships between central and local forces and formal and informal institutions but also reveals the upshot of the collapse of socialism to its sequent implementation of neo-liberal policies within both public and domestic spheres.
Open Access
The politics of social protection in Bangladesh: The making of the National Social Security Strategy
Idris, Nabila
Social protection has gained rapid prominence in the global development agenda in the past two decades. Numerous countries across the global South have enacted national social protection strategies in a bid to build state of the art programme portfolios. Bangladesh joined their ranks in 2015 with its National Social Security Strategy (NSSS). This study takes the NSSS as its point of departure to open the ‘black box’ of policymaking in Bangladesh. It particularly focuses on the politics of the food vs. cash debate, the targeting vs. universalism debate, and the role of bureaucrats, donors, NGOs, and labour in Bangladesh’s social protection politics. The thesis aims to critically understand how the wide-ranging, historically-entrenched political contestations in the country underpin the seemingly apolitical decisions in the NSSS. It is based on over sixty in depth qualitative interviews with key informants, weeks of participant observation in meetings and organisations, as well as analysis of hundreds of internal government documents. First, the study finds that labour has fallen victim to the institutional machinations of neoliberal global capitalism, which deliberately and systematically excludes it from policies of social protection. Second, the persistence of colonial era institutions and the power imbalance between producers and consumers in the rice market is shown to tilt the NSSS in favour of food transfers in the short term and cash transfers in the long term. Third, whilst Bangladesh is lauded for the strength of its NGO sector, this study finds NGOs to be a weak actor dependent on idea transfer to protect rental streams. Fourth, the study reveals how donors employ both coercive and ideational means to promote their favoured policies but succeeds where there is a receptive domestic political environment that supports the donors’ ideas, such as by favouring targeted programmes over universalism. And finally, national bureaucrats are seen to be powerful actors engaged in rent-seeking for both personal and organisational gains. The key contribution of the thesis is its critical analysis, which reveals the political nature of several significant social protection debates in Bangladesh, with potential lessons for other developing countries. At the theoretical level, it contributes to a growing body of political settlements analysis of social protection policies by proposing that the unit of analysis be narrowed down to the issue-level. At the methodological level, the thesis brings the vantage point of the state’s bureaucratic machinery to the fore, thereby providing a counterpoint to many studies on Bangladesh that centre non-state actors.
Open Access
Knowing fish: a cultural case study and portrait of resource understandings in Caspian Eurasia
Berman, Callie
This research seeks to establish the deductive premises of the contemporary sustainability concept by building a cultural case study. Beginning with mainstream resource definitions formulated under the sustainability concept which emphasize market evaluations, this case study explored the limitations of such resource interpretations in Caspian Eurasia. Using Caspian sturgeon as the object of analysis, this research’s inductive approach demonstrated how the sustainability concept was mobilized according to certain interpretations of the natural world, knowledge traditions, and a development history specific to western societies. It did so by recording resource meaning-making processes within Caspian cultural life, and how these were reflected in modernized aquaculture production in Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and Turkmenistan. The IPBES Framework was tested as a representative tool for current sustainability formulations to assess the extent to which these formulations could explain local forms of sturgeon appreciation. By accounting for Caspian Eurasia’s development history, this research demonstrates how the physical geography of the Eurasian steppe conditioned distinct human relations with the environment which continue to inform modern day processes. Accounting for the region’s development history and the role sturgeon played as a key food source to support the livestock economy, this research produces alternative resource definitions that more accurately explain Caspian Eurasia’s contemporary relationship with sturgeon fish. These resource definitions fill conceptual gaps to update the sustainability framework by incorporating the important modes historically engaging Eurasia’s geography and people.
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Negotiating power over oil and gas resources in Senegal: The political economy of oil and gas in a ‘new producer’ country.
Ramirez, Ana Francisca
Negotiating power over oil and gas resources in Senegal: The political economy of oil and gas in a ‘new producer’ country. Ana Francisca Ramirez. Since its independence from France in 1960, Senegal has displayed relative political stability and institutional capacity, as well as peaceful democratic transitions. Yet, when important oil and gas discoveries were made offshore between 2014 and 2016, Senegal settled for a small share of the potential oil and gas ‘pie’. Why did Senegal, a country with a relatively robust economy, strong political leadership and stable institutions not take a more assertive stance on oil and gas governance? To answer this question, I look to the universe of ‘pre-oil’ politics. Drawing from archival evidence of exploration and production negotiations from the colonial period in Senegal, as well as contemporary primary evidence from interviews with international oil and gas industry specialists and government officials, I explore the specific set of historical, institutional and political constraints, international and domestic, within which oil and gas resources are negotiated. Including Senegal’s upstream oil regulations, tax incentives, legal and fiscal conditions, exploration and production contracts. In my chapters, I analyse the history of oil and gas exploration under colonial rule, the evolution of Senegal’s political settlement since independence, the country’s contemporary oil and gas upstream governance framework, the specific offshore oil and gas project developments as they were agreed at final investment decision between government and companies, and the role played by donors and narratives in shaping key notions of risk and capacity among government and companies. I find that the fiscal and legal frameworks that were inherited by newly-sovereign Senegal at independence were in fact drafted by the colonial-oil company complex. Yet, these laws were never reformed to improve investment terms for Senegal but on the contrary terms deteriorated since the immediate post-colonial period. Senegal is now an emerging exploration and production country with proven resources and development potential. A series of interconnected domestic political factors and international forces have prevented Senegal from doing away with this imbalanced historical legacy and redefining terms in a way that creates more benefits for its economy, and political elites. I show that negotiation processes between government and international oil companies shape contractual and project agreements and reveal foundational power asymmetries that are key to our understanding of oil and gas resource management, politics and economics. Further, I argue that the nature and origins of the state-marabout domestic political settlement helps explain political elites’ complacency with suboptimal investment terms. This work contributes to enriching the existing debates on the political economy of oil and gas governance in emerging producer countries in Africa. It provides insights that draw on the multiple dimensions (historical, technical, legal, political) of oil and gas governance in a country that holds significant (35 Tcf natural gas and 2.7 billion barrels of recoverable oil reserves) but not colossal enough resources to transform its entire political economy. If and when the three development phases of GTA and SNE projects are in production, Senegal would produce about a quarter of Angola’s present day production.
Open Access
Identity, Resilience and Social Justice: Peace-making in a Neoliberal Global Order
(2021-12-06) Wilson, Emma
Over the last decade ‘inclusivity’ – or the selection of a broad range of armed and non-armed social actors to participate in peace processes – has emerged as the fundamental principle of peace process design. As external international peace mediation theoretically no longer seeks to dictate liberal peace outcomes, but merely aims to facilitate participatory processes of locally-driven social change, the question of ‘who gets a seat at the table?’ has become of vital importance for the success and outcome of peace processes. The broad theoretical rationale behind ‘inclusivity’ is that a process that includes the views of a wide range of local stakeholders is more likely to address the social needs of conflict societies, produce resilient social systems and have legitimacy at the local level because it is ‘owned’ by those who have contributed to and made the decisions. The principle of inclusive peace process design has been operationalised through the inclusion of unconventional violent non-state actors, women, civil society, youth, opposition political parties, ethnic minorities, religious actors, business actors and other actors such as indigenous communities, internally displaced people, diasporas and refugees. Focusing on the social exclusion issues of misrecognition and maldistribution as the primary driver of violence in the fragmented and localised neoliberal conflict zone, this thesis argues that inclusive peace process design has had limited success in achieving its objectives of legitimacy and empowerment of marginalised actors to place issues of social inclusion on the negotiating agendas of peace processes. In many peace processes, social inclusion strategies are actively resisted by elites and the general public. The peace and conflict studies literature lacks theoretical frameworks and concepts to explain why social inclusion strategies face elite resistance and despite small successes in elevating the voices of elite women and civil society groups, has largely failed to engage intersecting race, gender and class issues in the politics of peace processes. This reflects an emphasis on normative approaches to inclusivity grounded in the international human right to political participation at the expense of the power politics of inclusion/exclusion characteristic of neoliberal societies that limit the participation of some social groups in inclusive peace processes. The normative approach has produced scholarship on the discourse of inclusivity in international organisations or the inclusion of singular identity groups such as women or youth in peace processes. Where the conflict context is considered it is focused on the interaction of illiberal elites with liberal human rights frameworks. Drawing on critical social theory and mixed methods research, this thesis develops a critical framework to understand the politics of social inclusion in peace processes by placing the ‘hype’ around inclusivity within the context of the global international security paradigm of inclusion/exclusion that permeates and structures peace process design and the conflict societies that peace mediation seeks to support. It argues that the politics of inclusion – or the setting of the boundaries of the ‘political’ in peace processes -- is a dynamic interplay between dominant liberal political inclusion and liberal security exclusion narratives of elites, and resistant social justice discourse, which consists of the class politics of redistribution and the identity politics of recognition of unconventional violent non-state actors, social movements and subaltern actors. It argues the structural power of the politics-crime binary that underpins both inclusion/exclusion and inclusivity narratives operates to persistently criminalise and exclude class politics, unconventional violent non-state actors and marginalised actors from the political sphere, leaving the social exclusion that promotes conflict in the neoliberal era to apolitical community mediation to increase resilience. It outlines a new social inclusion strategy based on the values and objectives of social justice and sociological conflict analysis as a pathway to expand the politics of peace processes to include social issues of recognition and redistribution. It demonstrates the relevance of the critical framework with empirical evidence from four peace processes – Myanmar, Colombia, Mali and San Salvador (gang truce).
Open Access
A Reign of Burnt Wounds and Crowded Cells: Exploring how political power is upheld at street level through observations of the municipal police in Mexico City
(2022-01-31) Garciadiego Ruiz, Emilio
Recent studies of police, particularly those that have followed an ethnographic approach in diverse settings across the Global South, have unmasked policing as an everyday exercise of power, a source of mediation between state and non-state actors and an apparatus that enforces the status quo. But if these findings entail a conceptualisation of the police as a political actor, then how does it enact politics at street level? Moreover, how are political elites upheld through police practices? This dissertation follows the methods and aim of the aforementioned ethnographic studies in order to explore whether policing in Mexico conceals answers to these questions. For that purpose, this dissertation draws on eight months of participant observations conducted within a municipal police precinct located in the outskirts of Mexico City. Through this method, I examine how municipal police officers and detectives operate through gendered assumptions and racist logics. Indeed, the practices, words and gestures of municipal police officers and detectives exposed how their way of conceiving and reacting to crimes and violence unearthed the systematic reproduction of a hegemonic masculinity. Concurrently, their treatment of alleged suspects revealed the enforcement of a long-established social hierarchy that is based on privileging whiteness. As this dissertation argues, the exercise of street level power on gendered and racial terms points to why these police officers and detectives represent a political elite that has ruled over that area of the city – and until recently, over the entire country - for nearly a century. Crucially, these exercises of power are largely obscured by everyday policing techniques that systematically produce arrested subjects, therefore creating a façade of law enforcement that allows for the police to be justified in a moment when its role is increasingly questioned and scrutinised, moreover in the face of ever-expanding violence and the incipient militarisation of municipal policing.
Open Access
Fiscal Policy and Economic Growth at Different Stages of Development: An Eclectic Approach
Basbay, Mustafa; Basbay, Mustafa [0000-0002-2776-8592]
This study investigates if and how the economic growth effects of fiscal policy depend on the stage of development. In particular, it analyses the effects of different fiscal policy compositions (i.e. taxes on income and consumption, public spending on investments and consumption, and different modes of redistribution) on long-term growth and how these effects systematically change in countries with different levels of capital stock, population growth, capital market conditions, distance to technological frontier, etc., most of which can reasonably be captured by a country’s stage of development. The study includes the claim that different theoretical paradigms better guide us in the analyses of fiscal policy at different stages of development; namely, developing countries fit better to the assumptions of the Classical theory, whereas developed country conditions are better explained in the Keynesian theory. The main argument can be summarised as follows: in developing countries, where the capital-labour ratio is very low and most productivity growth comes from capital formation, capital accumulation is the key mechanism for accelerating growth. In these economies, fiscal policies aiming to maximise savings are more supportive of growth as this raises investible funds for capital accumulation (Lewis, 1954). Developed countries, where the capital-labour ratio is high, however, are usually adversely impacted by a savings glut (Hansen, 1939). In these economies, savings capacity often far exceeds investment demand due to capital saturation, so fiscal policies designed to support effective demand are more effective in driving investments and thus growth. Furthermore, in developing countries, where investment demand is high but access to credit is limited, accumulation of resources by the capitalist class tends to have trickle-down effects, whereas in developed countries, where investment demand is low and capital markets are advanced, it contributes to the savings glut more than investments. Therefore, in developing countries, modes of taxation which suppress consumption and public spending on capital investments are more supportive of growth because they accelerate capital accumulation, whereas in developed countries, taxation of income and public spending on consumption/services are more growth-enhancing as they support effective demand. Similarly, in developed countries, redistributive policies that increase effective demand by giving more purchasing power to lower classes increases growth more, whereas in developing countries, channelling more resources towards the investor class, are more growth-enhancing.
Open Access
Energy Justice from the Bottom Up: A Capability Approach to Community Acceptance of Wind Energy in Southern Mexico
Velasco Herrejon, Paola; Velasco Herrejon, Paola [0000-0002-8019-7784]
Adopting ambitious renewable energy targets has profound social, economic, and environmental implications, at local and global scales. Indeed, these targets have raised deep questions about social justice in capitalist societies attempting to pursue clean energy transitions. To understand how these transitions occur, we must understand dynamics of community acceptance that are linked to the politics of local approval of siting Renewable Energy Technologies (RETs). As a result, it is vital to identify links to justice as an important explanatory factor affecting community acceptance of RETs. Wind energy offers an emblematic case of these dynamics, highlighting the tensions between the technical and the social. At a technical level, the efficiency of wind energy technologies has rapidly improved, becoming a relatively cheap renewable resource central to many energy transition and climate change mitigation strategies. Nonetheless, despite widespread public support for wind energy, low success rates in planning applications are threatening the expansion of wind energy production. This is because wind farm developments often face strong social opposition. While this puzzle has been studied in high-income settings, there is little work that adequately explains the sources of this resistance in developing countries. This research thus explores the factors affecting whether and how communities accept wind energy developments in Southern Mexico. It does so by drawing together three lenses: the energy justice framework, the capability approach, and power analysis. These lenses help examine how shifting actions and power relations maintain or transform conflicts around RETs in developing contexts. This study looks at the case of wind energy siting in three Indigenous communities neighbouring wind installations in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, Oaxaca state, Mexico. The three localities offer a valuable comparison, as they have low, medium, and high levels of wind farm community acceptance. The study draws on fieldwork conducted between September 2017 and June 2018, primarily consisting of 103 semi-structured interviews and a medium-size questionnaire-based survey (N= 382). Operationalising the capabilities approach, this data helps understand local perceptions and concerns regarding capabilities and wellbeing, and links this to three elements of energy justice: distribution, recognition and procedures. Two intertwined findings emerge from this research in the case of wind energy in Southern Mexico, with broader significance. Firstly, just energy transitions require recognition of locally-valued forms of justice. Energy infrastructure siting processes and outcomes must incorporate these understandings of well-being. Secondly, it is essential to understand the power relations in renewable energy processes. Community acceptance entails bundles of changing actions and positions, shaped by internal power relations and those between communities, the state, and wind energy developers. Importantly, these power dynamics can create barriers to expanding valuable capabilities for some stakeholders, thereby reducing the social acceptance of wind energy, and diminishing the possibility for a just energy transition. Together, these findings contribute to Latin American case studies on social dynamics around wind energy, which has significant implications for theorising about energy justice and sustainability pathways from the Global South. This study offers a bottom-up perspective to just transitions by emphasising the capabilities that local people have reason to value, in the context of power dynamics between developers, governments and communities.
Open Access
Essays on the economic and financial challenges facing South Africa's commodity sector
Baskaran, Gracelin
This thesis is comprised of three standalone articles, each exploring a different dimension of South Africa’s platinum group metals (PGM) sector. The PGM sector is an insightful case study given that it is a microcosm of a deeply unequal country, marked by distrust between three distinct spheres – political, business and labor. The first article explores the governance dimension, by examining the extent to which PGM resources revenues have been used to advance economic growth and development. The second article takes an organizational economics approach, examining how firms have responded to endogenous and exogenous supply and demand shocks by shifting their strategies to both protect their core business activities while also meeting the expectations of stakeholders to improve shared-value outcomes. The third article examines the labor economics dimension by exploring how quantitative and qualitative job security vary amongst different sociodemographic groups as the PGM mining sector shifts from labor-intensive to capital-intensive mining through adoption of automated technology.
Open Access
The Nexus of State Regulation and Economic Development in Transition Economies (An empirical assessment using Central Asian countries)
Khudaykulov, Adham
Abstract The role of the state in the market affairs has been one of the most debated, yet highly controversial topics of discussion throughout recent history. Particularly, the economic impact of the state regulation evokes a spirited debate and splits the scholarship into various contesting groups. However, majority of studies investigating the nexus of state regulation and economic performance seem to have yielded overly ambiguous results due to the conceptual shortcomings. State regulation is often understood as simply an issue of the technical design of the regulatory framework and/or formal institutional arrangements. However, the current research argues that state regulation is a far more complex policy phenomenon, and actual regulatory environments could be considerably different from the formal de jure regulatory framework that the regulator establishes. Hence, success or failure of the regulatory policy depends not only on the capacity of the state to create a good regulatory framework and institutional arrangements, but also to deliver and enforce regulations effectively and efficiently. By examining the regulation and growth nexus in the case of Central Asian economies, this research demonstrates how a more broader conceptualization of the notion of state regulation can contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of the issues and yield somewhat different outcomes than the standard literature. In doing so, the research adopts mixed-method analysis: quantitative technique is employed to assess the relationship between variations in the quality of regulatory policy and economic outcomes in regional countries; qualitative research is used to complement and increase the robustness of the quantitative findings. The study concludes that despite having sound regulatory frameworks and appropriate institutional arrangements, regulatory policies’ contribution to the economic growth have been insignificant in Central Asian countries due to the ineffective regulatory compliance and enforcement.
Open Access
The Making of a 'Crisis': Syrian Refugees and the Politics of Health in Jordan
Lupieri, Sigrid
In recent years, the pace at which apparent refugee and health ‘crises’ – and their humanitarian responses – are being subsumed within foreign policy agendas appears to be accelerating. From the Syrian ‘refugee crisis’ in Europe in 2015, to the outbreak of Ebola, the Zika virus and, more recently, Covid-19, attempts at tackling these ‘crises’ have not only conflated cross-border mobility with illness and disease, but have also served as a justification for sealing national borders. Yet there has been surprisingly little research on the intersection between forced migration, global health, and humanitarian assistance, particularly in the context of refugee hosting countries in the Global South. Building on scholarship on refugee and forced migration studies, global health security, and international relations, this thesis provides a new perspective on how the politics of health care undertaken by donors, host states, and non-governmental organizations affects the priorities of refugee health responses. This thesis considers the case study of Jordan, a country in the Middle East which hosts one of the largest refugee populations relative to its national population in the world. Based on six months of fieldwork, I investigate the ways in which the arrival of an estimated 650,000 Syrian refugees between 2012 and 2019 transformed Jordan into an arena in which large- scale national and international interests, foreign policy objectives, and power dynamics collide. Findings show that health policies affecting refugees have been increasingly co- opted within the foreign policy agendas of both donor and refugee receiving states, with wide-ranging effects on the allocation of humanitarian assistance. Such effects include a disproportionate focus on infectious diseases at the expense of more prevalent chronic diseases, and gendered and racialized constructions of ‘vulnerable’ refugees. As a result, I contend that some refugee groups – mainly women and children – are championed by certain powerful actors, while other groups within the same refugee population – such as older people and young men – are consistently overlooked.
Open Access
The moments of, and movements for national accounts: contextualising changes to British national accounting during the 1930s to 1950s
(2021-07) Fright, Matthew
The moments of, and movements for national accounts: contextualising changes to British national accounting during the 1930s to 1950s Matthew Philip James Fright Abstract Despite a renewed interest in the origins of national income accounting, and increasing scholarship on the relationship this has to the State, there is further scope for us to better understand the context of how this came about. We do not fully understand how institutional factors shaped them or what the numbers themselves meant to the researchers. This thesis adopts a historical approach informed by the works of Geoffrey Hodgson and Quentin Skinner to better understand a critical juncture in national accounts transformation – the 1941 publication of White Paper Command Paper 6261 An analysis of War Finance and an Estimate of National Income and Expenditure – and how it was influenced by wider intellectual and institutional changes from the 1930s. The thesis is organised in two parts. In the first part, the Moments of National Accounts, Chapter 3 argues that 1930s economics drew on heroic figures from the distant past to justify new approaches to economics. Chapter 4 zooms out to consider the influence of international bodies such as the League of Nations and the Rockefeller Foundation during the 1930s upon a new data-driven, “realistic” approach to economics. Chapter 5 looks at how wider pressures for new wartime finance approaches justified new technocratic approaches which led to the publication of the first official national accounts. The second part, the Movements for National Accounts, examines the institutionalisation of this new technocratic national accounting approach through two case studies. Chapter 5 considers the way Keynes and Stone founded the Department of Applied Economics in Cambridge as a research centre for furthering a “realistic” research agenda. Chapter 6 examines a confluence of interests between the Colonial Office’s desire to export national accounts public finance, the researchers of the DAE and the colonial government of Nigeria led to the publication of the National Accounts of Nigeria in 1951. The contribution of the thesis is twofold: 1) showing how context matters to the idea of National Accounts culminating in the 1941 publication; and 2) showing why and how ideas became institutionalised after World War II. By unpacking both, this thesis shows how different bases of thought, rationale and contextual factors informed what National Accounts became in the UK, importantly, in ways that differ from thinking about National Accounts today.
Open Access
Race & Mobility in the Digital Periphery: New Urban Frontiers of Migration Control
Mahmoudi, Matthew
Global movement and information technologies are changing practices of bordering, globally. Such matters are now also substantially urban. As cities of refuge rely increasingly on tech companies to develop digital urban infrastructures for accessing information, services, and socioeconomic life at large, they are also inviting the border closer to cities and migrant bodies. This marks a convergence of Silicon Valley logics, austere and xenophobic migration management practices, and racial capitalism. In New York City, infrastructural technologies such as sophisticated public Wi-Fi, smart ID cards, and digitalised city services, in an environment prone to deportation raids, has led to deep information “panics”. In Berlin, a combination of civil society and private sector technology initiatives have produced a deluge of largely unused or distrusted information services, job-matching, house-sharing, social credit, and identity management tools in the name of refugees. In lieu of mitigating conditions of displacement, these practices compound analogue borders by engaging in a practice of digitally fusing borders to racialised characteristics, resulting in symbolic, material, and epistemic forms of technological marginalization. Through following and documenting how migrant communities navigate and experience these digital urban interventions, and the logics of those who develop them, this dissertation 1) highlights how migrant bodies and urban spaces become contested spaces in the battle for racial capital – a frontier in which technology actors are chiefly concerned with reconstituting conceptions of race for power and profit, and; 2). unveils how digital urban infrastructures interact with subtle practices of racialised bordering. Drawing on an analytical lens rooted predominantly in the Black radical tradition, critical development and migration studies, and science and technology studies, it challenges the paradigms of techno-solutionism and techno-chauvinism, as well as critical digital studies that has tended to treat race and racialism as a symptom of, rather than as integral to, the technology industry. By extension, the field of migration has also tended to impart greater weight to the positive affordances of technology in contexts of displacement, in absence of the critical voice of would-be recipients and “users”. By attending to the frontiers of racial capitalism and increasing technology deployments, I advance the idea of the ‘digital periphery’ to make sense of how urban migrant environments and subjectivities are commodified and ‘datafied’. As a concept, the digital periphery allows for the rapid advance of technology upon displaced populations to be disaggregated. It reveals an inseparable and mutually constitutive entanglement of race, borders, and migration, advancing racial capitalism beyond its conventional physical and spatial limitations.
Embargo
Industrial Upgrading and China’s Electric Vehicle and Wind Turbine Industries
Liu, Yunxiang
This thesis studies the mechanism of industrial upgrading and examines the cases of China’s two renewable high-tech industries, the electric vehicle industry and the wind turbine industry. The thesis firstly explores the relevant literatures in the fields of economics, politics and business, given the multidisciplinary nature of industrial upgrading. For the industrial level and firm level study of industrial upgrading, Peter Nolan’s study of global business revolution and the cascade effect and Gary Gereffi’s study of global value chains are two important theoretical and framework guides of this thesis. One important originality of this thesis is that it identifies the bottom-up industrial upgrading pattern of Chinese electric vehicle battery industry which has upgraded from making low value-added consumer electronic batteries to high value-added vehicle-used batteries and then to electric vehicles. For the wind turbine industry, it is more like a top-down approach initiated by the Chinese government which helped to nurture the Chinese wind turbine industry from the ground up. This thesis enriches Peter Nolan’s study of cascade effect. In the electric vehicle industry, there is a window opportunity for Chinese companies to cut in the automobile value chain and form a new round of cascade effect. As in the wind turbine industry, this thesis shows a variant cascade effect that Chinese sub-system integrators tend to provide more standardised products and the relationship between the system integrators and the sub-system integrators is not as deep as the case in the Europe. The Chinese government’s industrial policies to support the upgrade of these two industries have been flexibly changed back and forth between protection and openness based on different industrial development stages and different market competitive degrees. This is because either too much protection or too less protection in the beginning is not beneficial for industrial upgrading. However, evidences show that the whole trend of Chinese government’s policies in electric vehicle and wind turbine industries is now indeed towards a more open and market driven approach. The results of the industrial upgrading of the two industries are mixed. Although it is remarkable that Chinese electric vehicle and wind turbine companies have already occupied the biggest market share of the world, there are still many challenges facing them. Much of the supporting material and data in this thesis are collected from the fieldwork conducted in 16 cities in the US, China, Germany and the UK, and the institutions that have been visited include companies, governments, universities, electric vehicle factories and wind farms.
Open Access
The Myth of Paradise: A Reappraisal of Commonwealth Caribbean States' Sovereignty and Development Sustainability within the Transnational Anti-Money Laundering and Counter-Terrorist Financing Legal Order
Clarke, Rohan
From the global wars on drugs and terror to the ‘Paradise Papers’ scandal, the Commonwealth Caribbean has been discursively stigmatised as a mythical island paradise of ‘rogue’ States. Not infrequently, their exercise of regulatory self-determination has been reduced to the selling of their economic sovereignty to facilitate shady business deals and financial crimes. Resultantly, these small jurisdictions have been subjected to coercive and intrusive extraterritorial regulation and surveillance within the transnational legal order for combating money laundering and the financing of terrorism and proliferation (TAMLO). Adopting a Constructivist epistemological lens, the study historicises and deconstructs these hegemonic discursive practices since the 1980s. It critiques how powerful policy elites such as the Group of Seven (G7), the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), and the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) have deployed highly politicised labelling practices along the ‘Onshore/Offshore’ axis. It empirically traces how these discursive practices have constituted, normalised, and reproduced narratives of Commonwealth Caribbean States as among the ‘weakest links’ within the TAMLO, while simultaneously foreclosing critical engagement with the latent geopolitical interests and legitimacy claims of powerful onshore regulatory elites. It is compellingly argued that these discursive practices have been both constitutive and causative of the precarious diminution of Commonwealth Caribbean States’ sovereignty, exclusive AML/CFTP regulatory autonomy, and right to legitimately determine their sustainable development trajectories. Using the Bahamas, Jamaica, and Trinidad and Tobago as primary sites of analysis, the thesis substantively explores the region’s legal and regulatory policy experiences within the TAMLO with respect to corrupt politically exposed persons (PEPs) and their professional facilitators, offshore Internet gambling services, and the coherence of the FATF’s risk-based approach to combating money laundering (RBA) in developing country contexts. The study’s primary contribution to existing scholarship lies in its advocacy for the reconstitution of the transnational AML/CFTP regulatory discourse as development discourse. This anti-hegemonic stance is proffered as a potentially pragmatic solution for reaffirming the sovereignty and sustainable development of Commonwealth Caribbean States within the TAMLO. In this regard, the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) have been posited as a principled basis on which to reconstitute the TAMLO as a more just, democratic, and anti-hegemonic project.

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