The Routledge Handbook of Global Development

Kearrin Sims, Nicola Banks, Susan Engel, Paul Hodge, Jonathan Makuwira, Naohiro Nakamura, Jonathan Rigg, Albert Salamanca, Pichamon Yeophantong, Kearrin Sims, Nicola Banks, Susan Engel, Paul Hodge, Jonathan Makuwira, Naohiro Nakamura, Jonathan Rigg, Albert Salamanca, Pichamon Yeophantong

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000516104
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Ciencias físicas
• Categoria: Geografía

This Handbook provides a comprehensive analysis of some of the world's most pressing global development challenges – including how they may be better understood and addressed through innovative practices and approaches to learning and teaching.

Featuring 61 contributions from leading and emerging academics and practitioners, this multidisciplinary volume is organized into five thematic parts exploring: changes in global development financing, ideologies, norms and partnerships; interrelationships between development, natural environments and inequality; shifts in critical development challenges, and; new possibilities for positive change. Collectively, the handbook demonstrates that global development challenges are becoming increasingly complex and multi-faceted and are to be found in the Global 'North' as much as the 'South'. It draws attention to structural inequality and disadvantage alongside possibilities for positive change.

The Handbook will serve as a valuable resource for students and scholars across multiple disciplines including Development Studies, Anthropology, Geography, Global Studies, Indigenous and Postcolonial Studies, Political Science, and Urban Studies.

The Introduction of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Part 1Changing development configurations

doi: 10.4324/9781003017653-2

1IntroductionChanging development configurations

Susan Engel and Kearrin Sims

DOI: 10.4324/9781003017653-3

This section on ‘Changing Development Configurations’ sets some of the key context for development debates about the structures and configurations that shape the sector. The Handbook takes a broad, multidisciplinary approach to the difficult concept of development. Cowan and Shenton’s (1996) idea of ‘little D’ and ‘big D’ development offers a useful guiding frame for this section, as it highlights the difference between ‘little D’ development as broad forces of societal change, and ‘big D’ development as specific practices or interventions to promote development. The global system that has built up around the latter is substantial, and some of its key ideological and structural aspects – as well as the inter-relationships between ideology and structure – are discussed in this section.

Walden Bello’s chapter on deglobalization provides an important critical framing for this section as it both outlines the major forces shaping global development for countries all around the world and how we might think about a more just, sustainable global vision. Bello highlights how corporate globalization and neoliberalism became dominating global forces from the 1980s and deepened over time through liberalization, deregulation, and privatization to produce a profoundly inegalitarian planet. Even seemingly centre-left or ‘third way’ governments have promoted neoliberal agendas with the result that the far- and centre-right have now detached themselves from this agenda, and are promoting a xenophobic version of deglobalization that is out of step with the original agenda.

An emancipatory agenda, in contrast, is based on ethical cooperation, solidarity, community, and ecological stabilization. Despite the emphasis on community, deglobalization prioritizes locally specific responses and visions of sustainability along with local production and consumption (subsidiarity) and related industrial, trade, and financial policies that would facilitate this. It demands redistributive justice in both land and income. It demands precedence be given to the quality of life over economic growth, while creating a healthy balance between population and ecology. Deglobalization does not reject industry and manufacturing but demands they and agriculture are ecologically and socially sensitive, thus providing an important link to the food sovereignty movement. Some adjustments to growth and consumption are required and these need to fall disproportionality on the Minority World, as improvement in life quality in the Majority World are essential. Overall, Bello’s chapter provides the case for constant rethinking of progressive ideas to ensure that key issues like gender, indigenous paradigms, and more are properly addressed.

Murray and Overton’s chapter on retroliberalism encourages us to think about the state of development thinking today. The Global Financial Crisis, the rise of China and the centrality of the Millennium and Sustainable Development Goals (MDGs and SDGs) in development debates has led many scholars and practitioners to argue that neoliberalism is dead. Murray and Overton show that neoliberalism has in, fact, evolved and argue that retroliberalism is a better term to describe today’s development paradigm. Given path dependence, some key elements of neoliberalism have persisted, in particular the primacy of the markets and limiting the size of states, but development thinking today is drawing on some older traditions too. It has echoes first, of the mercantilist use of state-supported, private companies used to expand operations; second, the age of imperialism’s focus on nationalist self-interest; third, Modernization theory’s prioritization of economic growth facilitated by the state through infrastructure investment; and fourth, the neostructuralist or Third Way agenda of the 2000s, which saw poverty reduction and increased grant aid budgets for a short time head the global consensus on aid. We think the focus on neostructuralism may be a little overstated because, as Murray and Overton note, the MDGs and SDGs were a globalization friendly project and were dominated by an income-based measure of absolute poverty set at an absurdly low level. Still, there was a sense for a time that that aid agenda had changed, but that optimism had, as they suggest, disappeared by 2010 with the beyond aid or retroliberal agenda. This is an important argument as there has been too little focus on development paradigms of late.

Etienne Nel’s chapter reflects the Handbook’s philosophy that thinking about big and little D development processes needs to be global. It is dichotomizing to talk of development in the North and South, although sometimes still useful as a political device and parsimony does facilitate thinking. Still, it is problematic and Nel’s chapter effectively demonstrates how much thinking about development in the North has changed since the Second World War in parallel with changes in development economics. Examining the issue of regional development strategies in the North, Nel shows how they shifted fundamentally from the Bretton Woods era where state strategies to assist ‘lagging regions’ included state subsidies for economic activity, infrastructure support and indirect support through comprehensive public welfare. With the rise of neoliberalism, markets were meant to solve this problem of lagging regions but when they did not, governments could not ignore the spatial inequality, so focused on promoting strategies based on so-called regional comparative advantage and devolution of power. Regions were expected to promote local innovation, creativity, and leadership, and more. Critical human geography has challenged the premises and practices of such strategies, showing how resilience, history, and path dependence all shape regional paths but are influenced by both endogenous and exogenous factors.

Debt relations are another key issue in contemporary development configurations, with large increases in global debt in the 2010s leaving reduced space for states to borrow in the face of the fallout from the COVID-19 crisis. In his somewhat polemical but powerful chapter on debt, Éric Toussaint argues that the outcomes of debt crises are directed by the big banks and the governments that support them. Toussaint begins with a historical overview of debt, providing a number of examples of imperial debt burdens during the late 1800s (Tunisia to France, Egypt to Britain, etc.), before considering debt relations in the post-colonial period in more detail. He argues that the imposition of debt has been a central means by which imperial powers regained controlling influence over their former colonies following independence movements. Traversing the 1980s debt crisis and onwards through the 1990s–2000s to the 2008 Global Financial Crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic, he brings us into what he describes as a looming debt crisis for the Global South, which began in 2016–2017 and has accelerated since. The chapter also summarizes the debt profiles of Africa and Latin America and the Caribbean, to reveal some of the detrimental development effects of debt repayments. Toussaint introduces the concept of ‘odious’ and/or illegitimate debt and demonstrates historical precedents of countries opposing such debt.

The chapter by Heiner Janus provides an overview of the mainstream donor system framed by the emergence of providers of non-traditional development assistance or South-South Cooperation (SSC) as a challenge to that system. The 30 members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) Development Assistance Committee (DAC), while still significant donors, are being challenged to first, think about what counts as development assistance or Official Development Assistance (ODA). The increases in ODA that accompanied the MDGs and SDGs seem to have reached their peak, indeed a number of DAC donors are reducing aid. SSC also seems to have reach a nadir for the time being, nevertheless, its rapid emergence saw the DAC start to redefine development cooperation. Second, recipient, or partner countries are questioning donors’ approaches to aid priorities, channels, and modalities; they are asking that donors actually address partner countries’ needs and goals. As a result, we have seen donor programs that emphasize results-based management, thinking and working politically and doing development differently and, as Janus notes, it will be important to see which of these, or mix of them, will become the new standard for donors. Still, such ideas are competing with an increased emphasis on national interests in both donor and partner countries.

While Janus does not discuss this issue, we think that COVID-19 has brought into stark relief the limitations of the shift away from grant aid and toward debt-based development cooperation. The increase in ODA appears limited and SSC providers, in particular China, have reduced their footprint, yet many countries in the Majority World, even those regarded as middle-income, simply do not have the resources to adequately respond to the health and economic impacts of the pandemic.

A further vital piece of the development cooperation system is the multilateral development banks (MDBs). While not all of their loans count as ODA, they are counted in the DAC’s revised broader approach to development finance discussed by Janus. As Susan Engel and Patrick Bond outline, the MDBs are not only very major providers of development finance, the largest banks, and in particular the World Bank, have had an outsized influence on development thinking and discourse. There are now 32 or so MDBs and they all have similar mandates and structures. Their mandate reflects the Keynesian, modernization, welfare thinking that predominated at their founding, but their structure as banks meant they always prioritized economic growth and markets over welfare and statist development. The two new MDBs, the China-backed Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (established 2015) and the New Development Bank (2014) have duplicated the structures of the old MDBs, which in itself indicates they are not a major threat to the current neo- or retro-liberal order, though their founders are certainly interested in expanding their place in their global order and their extraction of capital to their own benefit. MDBs are a key source of finance for countries in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic but the World Bank and others are again imposing neoliberal conditions on their lending. This is even clearer in the growing number of states that defaulted on debt in 2020 and early 2021, and have hence turned to the World Bank and International Monetary Fund for support.

Laura Trajber Waisbich and Emma Mawdsley give the collection a sophisticated engagement with SSC, which they define broadly as an array of transfer and exchange modalities, including resources, technologies, and knowledge, between ‘developing’ countries. Reviewing the ‘critical turn’ in South-South Cooperation (SSC) research, they discuss how SSC research has evolved in tandem with changes in SSC practices, leading to what they consider to be the current (post-2015) ‘consolidation and politicization’ phas...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Endorsements Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Introduction
• PART 1 Changing development configurations
• PART 2 Sustainability and the environment
• PART 3 Inequality and inequitable development
• PART 4 Game changers of Global Development?
• PART 5 Reimagining futures
• Index