Listen | Nicola Banks on youth poverty in Arusha, Tanzania
The Global Development Institute’s Dr Nicola Banks spoke about her latest research into youth poverty in Arusha, Tanzania. The lecture looks at what the experience of urban poverty means for young people and their social and economic development, highlighting the need to look beyond these narrow indicators to understand what it means to be young and poor in a city context.
You can also read Nicola’s blog post: Tackling Youth Unemployment in Arusha: From Knowledge to Action.
What are the ESID findings on Ghana?
So the Effective States and Inclusive Development (ESID) team are back in Manchester following a great week in Ghana. It was a hot and steamy 30 degrees in the vibrant city of Accra and during a brief power cut we realised how thankful we were for the AC! Debate and discussion on the politics of development in Ghana was heated and Ghanaians were particularly engaged in the pressing issues affecting their lives and livelihoods. These included public sector reform, structural transformation, natural resources, education and health.
Working with our fantastic hard working partners, CDD, we held an intense few days of events at GIMPA, UGBS, The World Bank and ISSER. We also attended a packed schedule of appearances on Ghana’s TV and radio and at one point we were right across Ghana’s airwaves. Discussion and debate continued into the evening and some of us are now vowing to stick to lettuce after consuming copious amounts of the heavyweight specialities banku and fufu.
The week was also a vital opportunity to get feedback on our research. We based our presentations and discussions on four briefing papers and from discussions and questions were able to consolidate our findings. These can be divided into four key areas:
- Competitive clientelism has undermined the long-term vision and capacities required for structural transformation in Ghana, including short-termism, electoral imperatives, and patronage. The problem is not competition itself, but that in Ghana everything is up for competition. Systemic changes may be required, for example going past the winner-takes-all model. However, our focus is on how democracy can be safer for development in Ghana. Our research shows how you can navigate the political space that you have. There’s a need to take advantage of the democratic dividend that is civil society, the media space, etc., the commitment to being rule-bound around elections.
- There needs to be a balance between top-down capacity and bottom-up accountability. Neither is robust enough to work without the other in the context of Ghana’s competitive clientelist political settlement.
- Our evidence on ‘what works’ suggests that there is a strong case for approaching the promotion of state capacity in Ghana with a more realistic agenda of supporting ‘pockets of effectiveness’ in a range of key areas. There needs to be coordination and coherence in the full sector to get the best out of these pockets of effectiveness.
- Coalitions need to mobilise around these pockets of effectiveness. Given the extent to which Ghana’s governance problems flow from the constraints that its political settlement places on elite and non-elite players acting collectively to resolve binding constraints, the role of coalitions that can bring together the ideas and agency of multiple stakeholders is critical. These coalitions need to combine top-down and bottom-up, informal and formal, political and bureaucratic.
Read the four briefing papers on Ghana
This blog originally appeared on the ESID website.
What is politics, commodification and capitalism? Tania Li visits the Global Development Institute
By Judith Krauss
What is politics? A loaded question which might draw any number of diverse and partly conflicting answers. Yet if you were indeed going to open this particular can of worms, it would be extremely helpful to have Tania Murray Li available to offer her perspective.
The Global Development Institute (GDI) did just that this week, inviting the Professor of Anthropology from the University of Toronto to give a Masterclass on ‘What is politics?’ and a public lecture on ‘Commodification, capitalism and counter-movements’. The high level of interest from staff, students and the general public in Tania Li’s visit evidences the breadth and depth of her contributions.
Two of her best-known ideas include ‘rendering technical’, which means framing problems and their solutions in a way that lends itself to technical fixes without addressing root causes, and the ‘will to improve’ capturing a host of social development aspirations. Her reflections, drawing particularly on ethnographic research in Southeast Asia, resonate with scholars and practitioners in anthropology, geography, political economy, development studies and beyond.
Given her diverse work, the Masterclass brought together postgraduate researchers and staff from GDI and beyond whose research interests are just as multi-faceted as the person they had come to exchange with, ranging from mining and CSR to youth activism in Ethiopia. It was the second Masterclass organised by the Rory and Elizabeth Brooks Doctoral College, following a previous exchange with Branko Milanovic on inequality and its links to migration.
Given GDI’s focus on communicating research to stakeholders, Tania Li’s thoughts on the interface between researchers and practitioners, outlined in a 2013 paper in ‘Anthropologie et développement’, proved of particular interest. She identified three types of engagement between anthropological research and development practitioners, ranging from research in the service of big D development programming via an outright critique of such programmes, to an in-depth engagement with small d development, historically specific conjunctures and political struggles. The conversation raised questions such as whether pressures to ‘render technical’ may limit a priori the types of problems and potential solutions considered, the matter of framing research in the language of or delineation to certain stakeholders, and also yielded a wider engagement with issues of researcher positionality.
This question of researchers’ role and the politics of research proved another key interest for the early-career and postgraduate researchers assembled, with questions arising on insider-outsider relationships between researchers and stakeholders and managing expectations. Tania Li drew on her diverse experience in interacting with a broad range of stakeholders to emphasise the difference between critical engagement and passing judgement, highlighting the importance of contextualising stakeholder situations and thus engaging in critical, but non-judgemental analysis. A second key insight she raised, drawing also on David Mosse’s work, was the need to remember that taking a step back to write analytically about stakeholder behaviour is inherent in the research process and in scholars’ function of thinking critically. Howeverit also creates a distance which neither researchers nor interlocutors may have anticipated.
Tania Li’s public lecture, drawing especially on her latest book Land’s End , emphasised the need for critical reflection especially on all assumptions habitually associated with commodification, capitalism and counter-movements. Illustrated vividly through examples from two decades of ethnographic research in Sulawesi, Indonesia, she challenged the audience to engage critically with what commodification, capitalism and counter-movements actually mean and to what degree they constitute new phenomena. For instance, she emphasised that commodification, the purchase and sale of e.g. products, land or labour, is not at all a recent invention.
However, the difficulty arises when such exchanges are no longer voluntary transactions from a position of autonomy, but become compulsory for survival in the absence of any alternative. This distinction, drawing partly on Wood and Brenner, is highly relevant in differentiating commodification from involuntary forces often inherent in capitalist relations.
She vividly supported this distinction using her ethnographic research in communities living in mountainous areas in Sulawesi. Over a 20-year period, as land resources grew scarcer and pressure increased to make the most of existing plots, she witnessed first an increasing shift from food production to cash-crop cocoa cultivation and then a process of land concentration in the hands of the most capable farmers, leaving many now landless families struggling to find alternative livelihoods. Finally, she highlighted that bottom-up counter-movements against land commodification would be predicated on the presence of social organisational structures which are unlikely to exist everywhere:. actual counter-movements tend to be top-down to accommodate privileged land access vested elite or colonial interests.
Tania Li’s inspiring Masterclass and public lecture doubled as imperatives never to stop engaging critically and questioning one’s own and others’ assumptions, a call worthy of application throughout academic life and beyond.
The next Global Development Seminar is Wednesday 20 April, on ‘Understanding youth poverty in Arusha, Tanzania: Capturing economic, social and psychological dimensions’ with Dr. Nicola Banks and you can also see a full listing of our events.
Finding the business case for CSR
This post critiquing an article in Harvard Business Review article caught my attention recently. I’m catching up on old reading here but this article rehashes the perennial debate about ‘the business case for CSR’. The HBR article basically argues we’re asking too much of CSR if we’re asking it to make money:
“There is increasing pressure to dress up CSR as a business discipline and demand that every initiative deliver business results. That is asking too much of CSR and distracts from what must be its main goal: to align a company’s social and environmental activities with its business purpose and values. If in doing so CSR activities mitigate risks, enhance reputation, and contribute to business results, that is all to the good. But for many CSR programs, those outcomes should be a spillover, not their reason for being.”
The response of CSR consultant Richard Hardyment is that “This is dangerous talk” and accuses HBR (not the authors, oddly) of “winding back the clock”. That if such arguments are entertained seriously all the good work of those arguing that there is a business case would be undone. If nothing else, this demonstrates a lack of conviction that the business case is a solid one that can stand some testing and scrutiny. One of the best (titled) articles on the subject makes the argument that the fact that the business case has been debated for so long (they survey decades of research) without conclusive evidence being presented only further undermines the argument for its existence.
There is a quite remarkable volume of literature about whether CSR initiatives make money or not, and the response summarises many of the arguments, but in my experience, the business case is a central if difficult to quantify argument. And when I say central, many think that, without it, CSR initiatives in the mining industry are pretty much dead in the water. However, things are a little more complex than a simple black/white argument.
In Aseem Prakash’s pioneering work on companies going ‘beyond compliance’ in the US pharmaceuticals industry, such policies were often adopted without a clear business case being presented. In my own research in the mining industry, the language of ‘risk’ fills this gap between fuzzy, complex social world and hard numbers on the balance sheet. If you have to give away a massive mine as BHP did with OK Tedi in 2001 then CSR initiatives (and tailings management) were clearly a sensible investment. If you can get away without doing this and skirt the potential high costs of conflict, then there’s not really a ‘business case’. It’s not black and white and cannot be given a final answer, however much we may wish one. The ‘business case’ remains quite elusive and in David Vogel’s words, “niche”.
The tone of the response seems a little hysterical to me and stirs up my skepticism about whether there is something of the emperors new clothes about the universal push for CSR. The question of whether there is a business case is a perfectly legitimate one to be asked by any scholar (even those who choose overblown article titles like ‘The Truth About CSR’). That it is an uncomfortable one for those who’s livelihoods depend on it should surprise no one.
This post was first published on Tomas’ Mining and CSR blog.
GDI at the Development Studies Association Conference
The Global Development Institute is helping to convene seven panels at the annual DSA conference in September. The focus of the conference is politics in development.
For full details of each session and to proposed a paper, click on the title.
Power, politics and digital development [Information, Technology and Development Study Group]
Convenors: Richard Heeks (University of Manchester), Mark Graham (University of Oxford), Ben Ramalingam (Institute of Development Studies)
The panel will cover the broad intersection of power, politics and digital development including both directionalities – the impact of power and politics on design, diffusion, implementation and outcomes of ICT application; and the impact of ICT application on power and politics – and their mutual interaction.
Challenging media representations of refugees and exploring new forms of solidarity
Convenors: Tanja Müller (University of Manchester), Uma Kothari (University of Manchester)
This panel explores the diverse representations of the current movement of refugees into Europe. Through an examination of the politics of representations the panel explores the extent to which representations have the potential to create spaces of resistance and forge new forms of solidarity.
The politics of public sector transformations
Convenor: Pablo Yanguas (University of Manchester)
The public sector remains an inescapable component of development. Moving beyond the limited agenda of public sector reform, this interdisciplinary panel addresses public sector transformation as a contentious and transnational process of organisational and political change.
China and the rising powers as development actors: looking across, looking back, looking forward [Rising Powers Study Group]
Convenors: Khalid Nadvi (University of Manchester), Alex Shankland (Institute of Development Studies), Jennifer Hsu (University of Alberta)
The emergence of China and fellow ‘rising powers’, such as Brazil, India, South Africa and Russia, is having a profound impact on international development. This panel examines the multiple interrelated ways in which rising powers are (re-)shaping international development trajectories.
The politics of the migration-development nexus: re-centring South to South migrations [Migration, Development and Social Change Study Group]
Convenors: Tanja Bastia (University of Manchester), Kavita Datta (Queen Mary)
This panel aims to re-frame the migration-development nexus from the perspectives of regional South-South migrations and interrogate the potential for a more expansive migration-development nexus which extends beyond financial and economic priorities to consider wider political concerns.
Global production networks and the politics and policies of development
Convenors: Rory Horner (University of Manchester), Matthew Alford (University of Manchester), Fabiola Mieres (Durham University)
Global value chains and production networks constitute the backbone of global trade and are subject to attention by both policymakers and political contestation. This 2 session panel explores the economic, social and environmental challenges of GPNs and their developmental policy ramifications.
Beyond the ‘new’ new institutionalism: debating the real comparative politics of development
Convenors, Kunal Sen (University of Manchester), Sam Hickey (University of Manchester)
The panel addresses how politics shapes economic/social development through a focus on the findings of the Effective States and Inclusive Development research centre. The presentation of the findings will be followed by a discussion of their implications for rethinking the politics of development.
Would increased migration reduce global inequality?
By Daniele Malerba
Inequality is a topic of major interest nowadays, with recent reports showing that the richest 62 individuals possess more wealth than the bottom half of the global population. But this attention has not always been there.
One the main drivers of this new “inequality movement” has been the recent recession, coupled with the stagnant incomes of the middle classes. But Branko Milanovic, one of the pioneers of this movement, discussed also the importance of data improvements in the recent trend of inequality analysis.
During a masterclass with PhD students at the Global Development Institute, he argued that the increased availability of household level data has been impressive. This is especially true for Africa where the coverage rate increased by more than 20% in the last 20 years. Current advancements in the availability of data also includes: fiscal information to complement household surveys, the use of top incomes in inequality estimates (as they are not represented in common household surveys) and information on inequality of wealth. Improvements in the amount of information available is also helping to develop new fields of inquiry, such as the concept of inequality of opportunities as opposed to inequality of outcomes, the decomposition of inequality and growth, and historical inequalities.
Moreover, the increased coverage of data and the effects of globalisation, has enabled the study of global inequality, the inequality between all individuals in the world, regardless of country. In his public lecture, Milanovic, who has been assembling data from different countries in order to build a global income distribution, explained his findings and the policy implication for some of today’s main issues, such as migration and the future of the middle class.
Inequality between and within countries
To better understand global inequality, it is important to separate it conceptually it into inequality within nations and inequality between nations.
Inequality within countries, measured by the national Gini coefficients, increased in most nations between 1988 and 2008. The increase was mainly driven by market inequality (wages and returns from financial assets), which was cushioned by the use of redistributive capacity to make final disposable income less unequal.
More interestingly Milanovic pointed out that the majority of countries experiencing increasing inequality, such as the US, might be on a second Kuznets curve. On the other hand countries like Brazil (and many other LACs) and China are still moving along the first Kuznets curve. Their experience of decreasing inequality is the result of increased spending on social transfers, reduction of the education premium and minimum wages.
Inequalities between nations, which is usually conceptualized as looking at differences between country’s mean incomes, has decreased in the past 20 yearsmainly due to growth in Asian countries. Despite this, some facts remain striking. The figure below shows, for example, that not only is the mean income in Denmark’s remarkably higher when compared to a group of African countries; but there is also no overlap between the income distributions. This means that the poorest group in Denmark is richer than the richest group in Uganda (excluding billionaires which are not represented in household surveys). Similar patterns can be found comparing many rich and poor countries.
Finally, what if we look then at global inequality as a whole? First of all 1988-2008 was the biggest reshuffling on incomes since the industrial revolution. Decline in global inequality was accompanied by four main features: the large gains captured by the top 1% of the global distribution, the growth of the Asian middle-class, the “zero-growth” of the middle class of many western states such as the US, and the stagnant incomes of the bottom of the global distributions. The second and third points brought the emergence of what Milanovic calls the “global middle class” who earn between $10 and $100 US dollars a day. The size of the rising Asian middle class also meant that the global median income has been rising at a faster rate than the global mean income.
Secondly, the major driver of inequality is still location (between countries), meaning the country where you are born largely determines your income. As shown previously using the example of Denmark and African countries, the poorest group in one country might be richer than the richest group in another country. This is a change from 1850, when inequality was more prevalent between class (within country inequality) and location, representing Marx’s “world of classes”. The projections for the future, with the rise of Asia suggest the continuation of the current trend of diminishing importance of the location component, which might translate into further reduced global inequality (as well as structural change of the inequality decomposition).
The implications for migration
Milanovic outlined a number of policy implications that could reduce global inequality. The first possible solution is to increase growth in poor countries (and their mean incomes). The second tool is migration.
When people migrate from poor to rich countries their income increases. Given the importance of the location as a determinant of inequality, the gains are potentially large. In addition to this, the costs associated with travelling are reducing, meaning that labour supply is increasingly being globalized – in a way that hasn’t happened previously.
Does this mean advocating for growth in the rate of migration from poor to rich countries? Milanovic proposes trade-offs between migration and citizenship rights; this means allowing intermediate cases of partial citizenship, in order to mitigate migration flows. Regardless of the specifics, his proposals suggest one important thing: we need to get serious about global inequality and its consequences.
You can listen to Branko Milanovic’s lecture ‘Globalization, migration and the future of the middle classes‘ in full here:
Watch | Uma Kothari ‘Is water safer than the land? Public perceptions of Syrian refugees and the power of a warm welcome’
Professor Uma Kothari’s lecture was part of ‘Your Manchester Insights’.
Listen | Branko Milanovic on globalisation and the middle classes
Professor Branko Milaonvic spoke at the Global Development Institute on ‘Globalization, migration and the future of the middle classes’.
Branko is a leading scholar on income inequality. He is Presidential fellow at City University of New York, Visiting Presidential Professor and Senior Scholar in the Luxembourg Income Studies Center. He previously served as Lead Economist in the World Bank’s research department. He is the author of The Haves and the Have-Nots: A Brief and Idiosyncratic History of Global Inequality, as well as numerous articles on methodology and empirics of global income distribution and effects of globalization.
Call for Abstracts: “Big and Open Data for International Development” workshop
Big and Open Data for International Development workshop
Tuesday 12 July 2016, Centre for Development Informatics, University of Manchester, UK
This is a call for abstracts/presentations on big and open data for international development, with an initial deadline of 30 April 2016.
In recent years, there has been growing activity around the “data revolution” in international development including formation of the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data. As ever-more and ever-faster data is available about trends, patterns and processes, then related decision/action systems will be significantly affected. Growth in research in this field has been slower and much remains to be done, particularly in bringing a socio-technical perspective to the creation, processing and use of new forms of data in development.
The aim of this workshop is to share socio-technical, socio-organisational and critical research on “data revolution” trends: most notably big data and open data. We hope the workshop will shape a future research agenda and form the basis for future research partnerships.
The following timeline will be observed:
- 30 April 2016 – prospective presenters to submit an abstract of 200-400 words outlining their proposed presentation to: cdi@manchester.ac.uk
- 8 May 2016 – presenters to be notified of response to abstract
- 8 July 2016 – draft papers (desirable but not essential) to be circulated to workshop participants
- 12 July 2016 – workshop in Manchester for presentation and discussion of papers
If you have any queries prior to abstract submission, do please ask.
Anita Greenhill, Richard Heeks, Jaco Renken, Pedro Sampaio
Centre for Development Informatics, University of Manchester, UK
We acknowledge funding support for this workshop from the Alliance Manchester Business School and Global Development Institute of the University of Manchester
Uganda field trip by GDI students
Some of our Master’s students are currently on fieldwork in Uganda. This video, of the March 2015 trip, gives an insight into their visit.
Last year three of our students also wrote blogs about the fieldwork they carried out. You can read them now.