The hares,the hounds and the African National Congress: on joining the Third World in post-apartheid South Africa

The utility of framing questions of global inequality in relation to a ‘First World’ and a ‘Third World’, a North and a South, or developed countries and developing (or underdeveloped) countries, has been much debated since the end of the Cold War. This article addresses the issue of the perceived weaknesses and possible continued strengths of the notion of the ‘Third World’ in general terms, and then grounds such a discussion through an analysis of the way that the African National Congress (anc) government in post-apartheid South Africa has approached the question of global inequality. Since its election in 1994, and more particularly since Thabo Mbeki succeeded Nelson Mandela as president, the anc has presented itself as having an especially important leadership role on behalf of the Third World. The profound contradictions inherent in the anc's effort both to retain its Third Worldist credentials and to present itself as a reliable client to the Bretton Woods institutions and foreign investors provides insights into how to design alternative strategies for overcoming world-wide poverty, strategies which might be more effective than those chosen by the anc. Since the anc was elected to government in 1994 it has pursued a brand of deeply compromised quasi-reformism, analysed here, that serves primarily to deflect consideration away from the options presented by other, much more meaningfully radical international and South African labour organisations, environmental groups and social movements. At the present juncture a range of increasingly well-organised grassroots movements in South Africa find that they have no choice but to mobilise in active resistance to the bankrupt policies of the anc. The increasing significance of these efforts points to the possibility that they might eventually be able to push South Africa—either through a transformation of the anc itself or through the creation of some new, potentially hegemonic, political project in that country—back into the ranks of those governments and groups that seek to use innovative and appropriately revolutionary approaches to challenge the geographical, racial and class-based hierarchies of global inequality.     

The Asian Development Bank and Developmental Regionalism in East Asia

The Asian Development Bank (adb) has made increasingly important contributions to Asia's (and particularly East Asia's) regionalism over recent years, and especially since Haruhiko Kuroda became the Bank's president in February 2005. This paper argues that the adb's role here has become more significant because of the strong ‘developmental’ characteristics of East Asia's new regionalism. This is not least because, as a regional development bank, the adb has a predilection for linking development, regionalism and capacity-building together when promoting regional co-operation and integration (rci) in Asia. We may refer to this as ‘developmental regionalism’, where rci activities are particularly orientated to enhancing the economic capacity and prospects of less developed countries with the view of strengthening their integration into the regional economy, and thereby bringing greater coherence to regional community building overall. This analysis is partly based on field research undertaken by the author involving a series of research interviews conducted amongst adb officials and with outside analysts of the organisation. It first examines the evolution of the Bank's stance and policies on rci, and the impact made by President Kuroda and the newly formed Office of Regional Integration (orei) in this regard. The main developments of East Asia's new regionalism are then outlined from finance and trade perspectives. Thereafter, an evaluation is made of the adb's contributions toward the emerging developmental regionalism in East Asia.     

Bono's Product (RED) Initiative: corporate social responsibility that solves the problems of ‘distant others’

The Product (RED) initiative was launched by Bono at Davos in 2006. Product RED is ‘a brand created to raise awareness and money for the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria by teaming up with iconic brands to produce RED-branded products’. With the engagement of American Express, Apple, Converse, Gap, Emporio Armani, Hallmark and Motorola, consumers can help HIV/AIDS patients in Africa. They can do so simply by shopping, as a percentage of profits from Product (RED) lines goes to support the Global Fund. In this article we examine how the corporations that are part of this initiative use RED to build up their brand profiles, sell products and/or portray themselves as both ‘caring’ and ‘cool’. We also show that, more than simply being another example of cause-related marketing (like the pink ribbon campaign or the ubiquitous plastic armbands), RED engages corporations in profitable ‘helping’ while simultaneously pushing the agenda of corporate social responsibility (CSR) towards solving the problems of ‘distant others’.     

Participatory development,complicity and desire

Abstract

This article is an attempt at rethinking participatory development (pd) in terms of empire, undertaking a postcolonial and psychoanalytic reading. Postcolonialism helps point out that our discursive constructions of the Third World say more about us than the Third World; while psychoanalysis helps uncover the desires we invest in the Other. Thus, to the question, ‘why do neo-imperial and inegalitarian relationships pervade pd?’, the article answers, ‘because even as pd promotes the Other's empowerment, it hinges crucially on our complicity and desire’; and ‘because disavowing such complicity and desire is a technology of power’. The argument, in other words, is that complicity and desire are written into pd, making it prone to an exclusionary, Western-centric and inegalitarian politics. The article concludes with possibilities for confronting our complicities and desires through pd's radicalisation.     

Lebanon in the context of regional politics: Palestinian and Syrian involvement in the Lebanese crisis

This article focuses on the negotiation of Economic Partnership Agreements (epas) which form the central focus of the commitments made in the Cotonou Agreement, signed in 2000 by the European Union and the African, Caribbean and Pacific (acp) states. epas are part of a much wider trend witnessed since the creation of the World Trade Organization (wto), characterised by the proliferation of bilateral free trade agreements. The article argues that both the material and ideational interests of the EU need to be considered alongside the historical context of EU–acp relations. The EU is making a concerted effort to ‘lock in’ neoliberalism across the seven different sub-regions of the acp group by negotiating epas that include both reciprocal trade liberalisation and various ‘trade-related’ issues. In this way epas will go beyond the requirements for wto compatibility, resulting in a reduction of the policy space for acp states to pursue alternative development strategies. The article then considers the potential developmental impact of epas with reference to the negotiations with seven of the 15 member states of the Southern African Development Community (sadc). It is argued that the EU is promoting ‘open regionalism’, which poses a threat to the coherence of the regional project in southern Africa.     

When ‘development’ devastates: donor discourses,access to hiv/aids treatment in Africa and rethinking the landscape of development

If globalisation is the mighty tremor shaking the landscape of the ‘project of development’, then, in certain regions of the world, hiv/aids is surely its epicentre. Nonetheless, for all the burden of the disease, Western donor policy on hiv/aids still remains largely silent about the provision of anti-retroviral treatment. This paper seeks explanations for this pervasive medical neglect and donor preference for prevention programmes over treatment. The postcolonial approach taken in the paper is to regard donor policy on hiv/aids—as illustrated by the UK's Department for International Development and the Norwegian Agency for Development Co-operation—as cultural and political exchanges framed by prevailing representations of Africa. The different ‘logics’ which skew policies towards prevention are identified. For donors and African states alike, hiv/aids policies—like development interventions more generally—would benefit immensely by foregrounding the human right to health, including, critically, promoting treatment within a genuine ‘prevention–care–treatment’ policy continuum.     

Intellectual Property Rights and the Potential for Universal Access to Treatment: trips,acta and hiv/aids medicine

Where hiv/aids is concerned, the twin goals of ‘zero new infections’ and an ‘aids-free generation’ are now, due to advances in treatment (and treatment as prevention), a realistic possibility. However, these goals can only be achieved through the scaling-up of treatment to the point of universal access. It is inevitable that the success of any scaling-up will be predicated on cost, particularly of hiv/aids medicines. This article argues that recent changes in the global intellectual property landscape—effected by way of bilaterally- and plurilaterally-negotiated trade agreements initiated by developed countries—jeopardise the target of universal access. Enhanced protection of international intellectual property rights increasingly poses a threat to the development of, and international trade in, generic medicines. Unless developing countries move to reinvigorate moribund multilateral institutions, particularly the wto, they will lose control of the intellectual property agenda, and thus the ability to impose an alternative vision regarding universal access.     

The Geography of Participation

Revisiting the critique of participatory development and one of its core political technologies, Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA), this paper suggests that participation in the form of PRA creates ‘provided spaces’ that dislocate ‘development’ from politics and from political institutions of the postcolonial state. PRA thereby becomes what Chantal Mouffe calls a post-political aspiration through its celebration of deliberative democracy (although this is largely implicit rather than explicit in the PRA literature). What makes this post-political aspiration dangerous is that its provided spaces create a time–space container of a state of exception (the ‘workshop’) wherein a new sovereign is created. In combination with other developmental techniques, PRA has become a place where a new order is being constituted—the state of exception becomes permanent and nurtures the ‘will to improve’ that undergirds ‘development’.     

Livelihoods as Intimate Government: Reframing the logic of livelihoods for development

Recent donor discourse points to the potential of faith-based organisations (fbos) as ‘agents of transformation’, mobilising the moral energy of faith communities in support of the Millennium Developments Goals (mdgs). This new donor-driven agenda, however, invites scrutiny of complementary processes of organisational change within donor institutions. This article therefore examines donor policy and practice concerned with engagement with fbos. While considering the work of a number of donors, it focuses on the UK Department for International Development (dfid) and traces the reasons for dfid's growing interest in fbos from 1997. It examines the challenges which dfid faces in further developing this engagement and considers whether it and others donors can themselves become ‘agents of transformation’, embracing a less material and less secular vision of well-being and a more culturally inclusive approach to partnership. In contrast to recent scholarship, which presents a benign view of the emerging ‘faith and development’ interface, this article considers it as a controversial new Zeitgeist in development policy and discourse.     

The New Biopower: Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers and the obfuscation of international collective responsibility

As successors to structural adjustment programmes, Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (prsps) were introduced in 1999 as preconditions for World Bank and imf concessional financing and for debt relief. prsps now serve as the basis of negotiations for a variety of development financing and have influenced the design of other aid instruments. This paper considers the impact of the prsp framework on the constitution of global economic governance, in particular its effect in foreclosing possibilities for a radical revision of the rules and institutions of international economic law. The paper argues that the prsp project not only reframes fundamental tenets of international co-operation and global communal responsibility but also establishes a new disciplinary framework for Third World state engagement with the global economy and the international law which sustains it. In this way the discourse and methods of resistance against the injustices of the international order have been appropriated to distil such dissent through qualified operationalising of contestable notions of ‘participation’, ‘ownership’, ‘partnership’ and ‘poverty reduction’, disabling the resurgence of any form of emancipatory politics in the international economic order, whether through a state-led nieo-style revival or cosmopolitan social movement.     

Defining morality: dfid and the Great Lakes

This article examines the work of the UK government's Department for International Development (dfid) in the Great Lakes region of central Africa. It traces the formulation of policy and compares it with dfid's operations in Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) from 1997 to 2001. Drawing on research from the region and the UK, the article argues that dfid's ‘new humanitarianism’ offers little new, and that the spoken poverty agenda is misleading. It concludes that, while dfid's moral terminology suggests that there is a framework for response, in fact dfid defines what is ‘good’ and redefines events—including its own activity—to fit with it.     

Global and Local Health Governance: Civil society,human rights and hiv/aids

From the outset in the mid-1980s the international response to hiv/aids has been characterised by an emphasis on the human rights aspects of the pandemic, and on recognition of the pivotal role of civil society actors (csos). But how the rights-based conception of hiv/aids and the international legitimation of csos play out at the local level depends not only on the vertical coordination between global and local levels but also on government–cso relations and the understanding of the pandemic in individual countries. South Africa and Cambodia provide comparative examples of ‘glocalised’ responses to hiv/aids. Both countries were among the hardest hit in their respective regions. But, while the South African government was slow to acknowledge the severity of epidemic, the Cambodian leadership quickly initiated a comprehensive response to it. The two cases illustrate how opportunity structures at the international and national levels created different local responses to hiv/aids, with significant consequences for the epidemic over time.     

Assessing the G77: 50 years after unctad and 40 years after the nieo

This article views the history of the Group of 77 through the lens of its relations with unctad’s establishment in 1964, its unsuccessful struggle for the nieo in the 1970s, and the subsequent loosening of ties. The debt crisis of the 1980s, the Uruguay Round negotiations, and the arrival of the wto are seen as crucial forces unravelling the previously close links. Growing differentiation among developing countries and the changing leadership of the G77 are also cited as important influences on its current relationship with unctad.     

South–South cooperation and the future of development assistance: mapping actors and options

International development cooperation is undergoing fundamental changes. New – or often re-emerging – actors have gained importance during the past two decades, and are increasingly challenging the traditional approach to development cooperation associated with the members of the Development Assistance Committee of the oecd. Their supposedly alternative paradigm, ‘South–South cooperation’ (ssc), has been recognised as an important cooperation modality, but faces contradictions that are not too different from those of its North–South counterpart. ssc providers are highly heterogeneous in terms of policies, institutional arrangements, and engagement with international forums and initiatives. This article contributes to current debates on ssc by mapping the diversity of its actors – based on illustrative case studies from the first and second ‘wave’ of providers – and by presenting and discussing some possible scenarios for the future of ssc within the international aid system.     

Colonial Amnesias,Photographic Memories,and Demographic Biopolitics at the Royal Museum for Central Africa (RMCA)

This article provides readers with a biopolitical critique of the recent debates that have swirled around the renovations at the Royal Museum for Central Africa (rmca) and the ‘Memory of Congo’ exhibits. The author argues that the rmca has become a contested site of memory, where some older photographs that were once used in Congo Reform Movements have been reappropriated in (post)colonial disputes about the epistemic and demographic features of what Adam Hochschild has called the forgotten Congolese ‘holocaust’.     

The ‘girl effect’: liberalism,empowerment and the contradictions of development

The ‘girl effect’ – the idea that investment in the skills and labour of young women is the key to stimulating economic growth and reducing poverty in the global South – has recently become a key development strategy of the World Bank, the imf, usaid and dfid, in partnership with corporations such as Nike and Goldman Sachs. This paper examines the logic of this discourse and its stance towards kinship in the global South, situating it within the broader rise of ‘gender equality’ and ‘women’s empowerment’ as development objectives over the past two decades. Empowerment discourse, and the ‘capability’ approach on which it is based, has become popular because it taps into ideals of individual freedom that are central to the Western liberal tradition. But this project shifts attention away from more substantive drivers of poverty – structural adjustment, debt, tax evasion, labour exploitation, financial crisis, etc – as it casts blame for underdevelopment on local forms of personhood and kinship. As a result, women and girls are made to bear the responsibility for bootstrapping themselves out of poverty that is caused by external institutions – and often the very ones that purport to save them.     

A New Frontier in Development? The use of cause-related marketing by international development organisations

This paper examines cause-related marketing (crm) initiatives where the purchase of a product by a North American consumer triggers a donation from a corporation to an international development organisation. crm is quickly gaining in popularity within the non-profit sector. It is now a common means for raising funds and awareness and as such has been deemed a ‘new frontier in development aid’ yet this ‘new frontier’ has received little academic attention outside of the business management and marketing literatures. The paper extends these literatures using insights from development studies. This approach is used to analyse empirical research on the use of crm by development-focused organisations in North America. The paper argues that the crm model raises particular challenges within international development that require further analysis. These challenges include the coupling of development funding to consumption and the simultaneous marketing of products and development causes as a means of awareness raising.     

Shaping the Future of Mid-range Northern ngdos: ten challenges,ten proposals

In recent years the financial crisis in traditional donor countries, the aid effectiveness debate and the approaching end of the Millennium Development Goals agenda have opened the door to new goals, instruments and actors in development. This is shaping a new and more complex global aid system. As a consequence, traditional actors like mid-range Northern ngdos (nngdos), born and raised in an oda-based development system, face a challenging scenario. This paper has two aims. First, it aims to summarise the 10 most important challenges nngdos face today. As will be shown, such a complex landscape calls for adaptation, especially if nngdos want to keep playing a key role in the development aid system. The second aim therefore is to present 10 proposals which could help nngdos to overcome these threats, shaping the future this relevant actor could play in the new global aid system.     

Security Sector Reform and State Building

This article argues that there is a close link between security sector reform (ssr) and state building. Focusing on UK approaches to state building and ssr, it argues that these are an extension of liberal models containing a number of assumptions about the nature of states and how they should be constructed and that any analysis of ssr approaches needs to be seen within a broader framework of the international community, which tends to see the replacement of ‘dysfunctional’ societies as desirable both for the people of those states and for the international community. As a result, state building has largely been carried out as a ‘technical-administrative’ exercise focusing on the technicalities of constructing and running organisations rather than on the politics of creating states, leading to a lack of overall political coherence in terms of where ssr is, or should be, going and of what kinds of state are being constructed. Politics is frequently cited by practitioners as representing a set of obstacles to be overcome to achieve ssr rather than a set of assumptions about actually doing it. The effect of development and security policies working closely together in insecure environments is an overarching emphasis on security at the expense of the harder, more long-term process of development.