‘Fragile States’: introducing a political concept

The special issue ‘Fragile States: A Political Concept’ investigates the emergence, dissemination and reception of the notion of ‘state fragility’. It analyses the process of conceptualisation, examining how the ‘fragile states’ concept was framed by policy makers to describe reality in accordance with their priorities in the fields of development and security. The contributors to the issue investigate the instrumental use of the ‘state fragility’ label in the legitimisation of Western policy interventions in countries facing violence and profound poverty. They also emphasise the agency of actors ‘on the receiving end’, describing how the elites and governments in so-called ‘fragile states’ have incorporated and reinterpreted the concept to fit their own political agendas. A first set of articles examines the role played by the World Bank, the oecd, the European Union and the g7+ coalition of ‘fragile states’ in the transnational diffusion of the concept, which is understood as a critical element in the new discourse on international aid and security. A second set of papers employs three case studies (Sudan, Indonesia and Uganda) to explore the processes of appropriation, reinterpretation and the strategic use of the ‘fragile state’ concept.     

The oecd’s discourse on fragile states: expertise and the normalisation of knowledge production

The concept of legitimacy has been highly influential in policy recommendations concerning state building in ‘fragile states’. Indeed, depending on how ‘legitimacy’ is conceived, the actions and practices of state builders can differ substantially. This article discusses what is at stake in the conceptualisation of ‘legitimacy’ by comparing the academic literature with the normative production of the oecd. Looking at two approaches to legitimacy – the institutionalist or neo-Weberian approach focusing on institutional reconstruction, and the social legitimacy approach emphasising the importance of social cohesion for successful state building – the article shows that both these conceptions are present in most reports, but also that the neo-Weberian approach tends to prevail over the social legitimacy perspective. Through a series of interviews with oecd officials and scholar-practitioners who have participated in the writing process of oecd reports, we hint, finally, at future research avenues on the social conditions of knowledge production and its normalisation.     

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.     

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.     

The Stop Climate Chaos Coalition: climate change as a development issue

After the Working Group on Climate Change and Development recognised the challenge that climate change poses to development, a number of environmental and aid, trade and development organisations formed a new politically active coalition, Stop Climate Chaos (SCC), to demand that stronger climate laws be adopted in the UK. The coalition now frames the issue of climate change as a ‘global climate justice’ one, emphasising the severity of the issue for people in poor countries, who will suffer the worst consequences, but have contributed least to it. The extent to which SCC member organisations address climate change as a global justice issue is explored through a content analysis of their websites, and a survey of participants in the SCC I-Count march, London, 3 November 2006. There is certainly evidence that environmental organisations are ‘facing South’, just as aid, trade and development organisations are ‘turning green’.     

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 Asian Development Bank as a Global Risk Regulator in Myanmar

The Asian Development Bank (adb) is engaged in development projects throughout the Greater Mekong Subregion, although for most of the past two decades it has boycotted Myanmar (Burma) because of donor government sanctions. Despite being criticised for its neoliberal focus and its lack of transparency and accountability, the adb’s operations compare favourably to those of the Myanmar government and many transnational corporations constructing and financing projects there. This article engages with the concept of risk, which increasingly frames how development in fragile states like Myanmar is understood, to critically analyse the adb’s nascent re-engagement in Myanmar according to the risks this poses for five constituencies: the adb itself; donor states; the Myanmar government and military; private capital; and marginalised communities. While deeper engagement in Myanmar poses different risks for each group, critical analysis suggests that the adb must increase the genuine participation of civil society actors in its activities to address the most significant risks of all, those facing marginalised communities.     

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.     

Feature review Corruption eruption: Development and the international community

Abstract

‘Tied’ or ‘in-kind’ international food aid has been criticised as an implicit form of export subsidy that governments use to circumvent export subsidy restrictions. In addition to displacing agricultural exports, food aid is less efficient than untied aid and depresses local agricultural production in recipient countries. I argue that tied food aid is not protected by the Uruguay Round Agreement on Agriculture and could consequently be challenged under the World Trade Organization's dispute settlement mechanism as a prohibited or actionable subsidy contrary to the Subsidies and Countervailing Measures (scm) Agreement. As the USA is both the largest donor of international food aid and most consistently ties its food aid to domestic agricultural producers, this paper focuses on US policy to describe the challenge that might be advanced under the scm Agreement.     

Gender Equality as Smart Economics? A critique of the 2012 World Development Report

Business now plays an increasingly prominent role in development. While the implicit links between private actors and international development institutions have been widely debated, the explicit role of financial corporations in shaping official development policy has been less well documented. We employ a feminist Marxian analysis to examine the material and discursive landscape of the 2012 World Development Report: Gender Equality and Development. Its exclusive focus on gender equality as ‘smart economics’, and the central role accorded to leading financial corporations like Goldman Sachs in the formulation of the key World Bank recommendations enable us to explore the changing landscape of the neoliberal corporatisation of development. We argue, first, that the apolitical and ahistorical representation of gender and gender equality in the wdr serves to normalise spaces of informality and insecurity, thereby expunging neoliberal-led capitalist relations of exploitation and domination, which characterise the social context in which many women in the global South live. Second, the wdr represents the interest of corporations in transforming the formerly excluded segments of the South (women) into consumers and entrepreneurs. The wdr thus represents an attempt by the World Bank and its ‘partners’ to deepen and consolidate the fundamental values and tenets of capitalist interests.     

Measuring and managing ‘state fragility’: the production of statistics by the World Bank,Timor-Leste and the g7+

Indicators are currently being widely used in international policy making to substantiate analyses and justify decisions on the basis of their alleged scientific objectivity. This article analyses the role of indicators and statistics in the labelling and managing of ‘fragile states’, examining the powerful consequences of these classifications but also discussing the untraceable nature of numbers and the difficulties in attributing ownership of numerical claims and assigning responsibility for their many unforeseen impacts. Focusing on the education sector in Timor-Leste and on the World Bank’s Country Policy and Institutional Assessment (cpia) programme, the article shows how accountability and ownership are negotiated within the context of the g7+ group of self-labelled ‘fragile states’, encouraging an examination of the power relations involved.     

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.     

South–South cooperation and the international development battlefield: between the oecd and the UN

This article discusses the transformation in development architecture, focusing on the role of emerging powers and the growing relevance of South–South cooperation (ssc). Drawing on a conceptual toolkit based on the work of Pierre Bourdieu, it aims to approach ssc as a narrative and to understand the processes of contestation that have turned international development into a battlefield since the end of the 1990s. The article argues that the emergence of ssc has contributed to decentring the field of international development, both in terms of the agents authorised to play and the practices considered legitimate. Within this process the Global Partnership for Effective Development Cooperation, led by the oecd’s Development Assistance Committee, and the United Nations Development Cooperation Forum have become two sites on the battlefield on which the borders of international development are being redrawn.     

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.     

Civil war and the coalition government of democratic Kampuchea

This article explores the relationship between the politics of international development and the reproduction of global inequality. I argue that contemporary discourses about— and the practices of—‘development for developing countries’ represent an attempt to reconstitute the political utility of the ‘Third World’. In an era of globalisation the deployment of the notion of a Third World of ‘developing countries’ which require immediate, systemic attention through the discourse and practice of international development continues to provide a way of both disciplining and displacing the global dimension of social and political struggle. I refer to this dynamic in terms of the political utility of the Third World, which, I argue, has been conducive to the organisation of global capitalism and the management of social and political contradictions of inequality and poverty. I develop this argument by drawing on the historical implications and legacy of ‘international development’ as practised in and on the Third World and through a critical analysis of the methodological premises that constitute international development. I illustrate this by drawing on a key strategy aimed ostensibly at development: the Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (prsp) approach, promulgated by the World Bank and the imf, which I discuss in relation to the ‘development agenda’ inaugurated during the 1999 wto meeting in Doha (Qatar). I argue that the ideology and practice of the global politics of international development reinforce the conditions of global inequality, and must be transcended as both an analytical framework and an organising principle of world politics. While the prsp and related approaches are currently presented as key elements in the building of the ‘architecture for (international) development’, what is emerging is a form of governance that attempts to foreclose social and political alternatives.     

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.     

India,developmental multilateralism and the Doha ministerial conference

Despite its growing status as an ‘emerging’ power, perceptions of India’s current and future role in multilateral organisations continue to be overshadowed by its reputation for blocking rather than supporting progress in multilateral negotiations on grounds of national sovereignty and Third Worldism. In this article we suggest a more positive interpretation of India’s role through a close analysis of its diplomacy during the 2001 Doha Ministerial Conference of the World Trade Organisation (wto). The Indian delegation attempted proactively to shape the agenda of the negotiations and to promote a form of developmental multilateralism that might correct the perceived imbalances within the substantive commitments to and structure and processes of the wto. India failed to get its way at the time, but the ongoing deadlock at Doha demonstrates the continuing salience of such alternative conceptions of global justice.     

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.     

Globalisation and Power in Weak States

Both academic literature and popular ideas focus on the ways in which globalisation might be leading to convergence in the ways in which societies are governed. This is misleading. There are marked differentiation processes. Patterns of governance are diverging. These divergences are concentrated in smaller, poorer countries outside the ranks of the oecd and bric/emerging economies category. This article focuses on the ways in which these divergences are driven by changes in sources of government and elite revenues (‘political revenues’). As a result of late 20th century globalisation, fewer governments are funded by broad general taxation, and elites in poor countries face increased incentives to use their power for personal profit rather than the collective good. The emergence of ‘failing’ or ‘weak’ states is not an isolated or random phenomenon, but an aspect of a broader shift in the character of public authority. That understanding has direct implications for the policies employed to combat the problem.