Gender trouble in paradise

Berliner Journal für Soziologie - Die Untersuchung setzt sich kritisch mit der in der geschlechterbezogenen Stadtforschung verbreiteten Betrachtung von Suburbia als der antifeministischen...     

Local effects of the new land rush: How capital inflows transformed rural Russia

Rising global prices for agricultural commodities have led to the inflow of capital to rural economies and to transfers of land ownership to new agricultural operators (NAOs) in developing and post‐Soviet countries. How capital inflows affect rural communities is often explained with the variable of institutional strength, an explanation aligned with the good governance approach to economic development: Capital inflows have positive developmental effects, if strong domestic institutions vet land deals and regulate NAOs. Contra the focus on institutional parameters as exogenous variables, this article highlights the role of political projects in shaping local outcomes and driving institutional change. Evolving political priorities are important to understand domestic rural transformations because they lead to interventions that privilege some actors as agents of change, while others are sidelined—hence transforming local economies. This theoretical suggestion is based on a study of Russia's rural transformation that followed a significant influx of capital.     

Trading in the secretive commodity

Over the past century and a half, a handful of transnational corporations have built fortunes trading commodity crops such as corn, soy and wheat. Graded and standardized, these commodities are considered uniform and therefore fungible; information about their origins need not accompany them to market. But in recent years major food brands, as part of broader ‘sustainable sourcing’ commitments, have begun to ask about the places and practices that produce these crops. Their inquiries have exposed the limits of the commodity traders’ supposedly unrivalled market intelligence. They also raise questions about how the advent of agricultural grades and standards made knowledge of crop origins seem unnecessary in certain commodity supply chains, and about how those supply chains might henceforth change, now that lack of such knowledge has become a liability.     

Assets in the age of tourism: the development of heritage planning in Ghanaian policy

Heritage planning in Ghana is mainly governed by the idea of sustainable pro-poor tourism, but is only marginally integrated with general planning programmes and fragmentally addressed by policy-makers. Motivated by the general lack of research on heritage policy in Ghana, this paper examines the role of heritage planning in national socio-economic, cultural and tourism policy and highlights various ambiguities in terms of concepts, objectives and approaches. The major findings show gaps between rational and communicative planning ideals, between informal management systems and wider democratic concerns, and between delimited and comprehensive planning perspectives. The central argument is that the lack of coherence among different development planning perspectives is an issue that future heritage policy-making needs to consider in order to balance tourism development with concerns such as social stability, community development and local pride of place.     

American empire and ‘excluded states’: the millennium challenge account and the shift to pre-emptive development

In March 2002 President George W Bush announced the creation of what many insiders have heralded as a revolutionary development initiative: the Millennium Challenge Account (mca). The latter seeks to provide assistance to 79 of the world's poorest countries—many of which have been often equated with the term ‘failed states’—so that they may reap the benefits of neoliberal-led globalisation. One of the most novel, and coercive, features of this development compact is the ‘pre-emptive’ method in which it will administer aid. Under the mca, only countries that govern justly, invest in their people, and open their economies to foreign enterprise and entrepreneurship will qualify for funding. To this end the Bush administration has devised 16 eligibility criteria—ranging from civil liberties to ‘days to start a business’—that each country must successfully pass before receiving aid. Despite its impact on normalising, and thus legitimating, the tendency towards the privatisation of aid and militarisation of development, there has been very little critical work on the mca. This paper sets out to fill this gap in the literature by attempting to understand historically the mca as a moment of American empire.1 This article builds on the wider arguments developed in my forthcoming book, Contesting Global Governance: Empire, Class, and the New Common Sense in Managing Globalisation, London: Pluto Press. View all notes In doing so, I suggest that, while the form of the mca represents an unabashed articulation of US-led imperialism vis-a`-vis the poorest regions in the South, the content of this allegedly novel strategy reflects the same goals and interests that underlie the neoliberal agenda, namely, that the path to increased growth and prosperity lies in countries' willingness and ability to adopt policies that promote economic freedom and the rule of law.