The Data Revolution Will Fail Without A Praxis Revolution
By Richard Heeks
Pose the following to data-revolution-for-development activists: “Show me an initiative of yours that has led to scaled, sustained development outcomes”.
If – as likely – they struggle, there’s a simple reason. We have not yet connected the data revolution to a praxis revolution for development. The data revolution takes advantage of technical changes to deliver new volume, speed, and variety of data. The praxis revolution makes changes to development processes and structures in order to turn that data into development outcomes.
Unequal power dynamics in landscape approaches must not be ignored, expert warns
By Kate Evans
NEW YORK—Social inequality is also part of the landscape—and so must be accounted for in landscape approaches to managing agriculture and forests, a development economics expert urges.
Beyond integration into global lead firms’ production networks
By Rory Horner
Rory Horner observes in an article in the current issue of Journal of Economic Geography how better development opportunities can be available outside global lead firms’ production networks, and how some regions and countries may benefit from restricting engagement with global lead firms.
Integration into the global economy has widely been regarded as a necessary component of economic development strategy since the 1980s. Often drawing on the successful East Asian experience, much research has emphasised how industrial upgrading can depend on participating in the value chains/production networks of the most significant lead firms in an industry.
Give me the money, now! But what will happen tomorrow? Ebola as a symbol for the ‘moral bankruptcy of capitalism’
By Tanja R. Müller
Speaking about one of the latest current global humanitarian crises, the Ebola epidemic in (mainly) Western Africa, Justin Forsyth, Chief Executive of Save the Children is on the BBC flagship radio four Today Programme demanding ‘urgent action’. He continues to say that some money has been pledged but not enough, speed is the answer of the day, time to think is later, act now, we are in a ‘race against time’, we need to do something ‘much more quickly’, ‘we need to get a lot of doctors in’ – those tropes are used repeatedly in a short interview sequence of less than three minutes – on the same day a Defeating Ebola in Sierra Leone Conference was being held in London on 2 October 2014.
Temporary workers in the electronics industry: consequences and potential solutions
By Dr Gale Raj-Reichert
The global electronics industry is one of the largest industrial sectors in the global economy. It is highly competitive, innovative, and fast changing with short product cycles. Some estimate that the industry employs the most workers and generates more revenue than any other sector in the world. In 2010, it was estimated the industry had 18 million workers worldwide. Many if not most of the jobs in the electronics industry take place in factories in developing countries that have been outsourced by companies, in particular brand firms, from developed countries.
Breaking through the Restrictions of Disciplinary Divides
By Rory Horner
Rory Horner observes in a recent Area article how disciplinary divides between geography and development studies can impede understanding of contemporary phenomena, and how those problems can be effectively addressed.
The world economic, social and political map and consequent geographies of development are rapidly changing, as a result of such trends as the growing influence of rising powers and simultaneous forms of crisis in both global North and South.
The Importance And Value of Aid
by David Hulme
It looks, thankfully, like DFID has survived the brunt of austerity savings made since the financial crash of 2008. While backroom costs have been cut, the government has stuck to its commitment to earmark 0.7% of Gross National Income for Official Development Assistance. Though critics instinctively point to the development budget in suggesting where we need to cut public spending, the truth is there is a rare consensus among the main parties that our spending on overseas aid plays a valuable role.
Celebrity advocacy and post-democracy
We have seen, in the first and second parts to this series, that development NGOs have systematically organised and professionalised their work with celebrity advocates, and that this does not necessarily resonate well with British publics. What we have yet to see is how well, and how effectively celebrity can work with political and corporate elites. To understand it properly however, we have to see how well this form of advocacy fits with current democratic trends. Specifically, celebrity advocacy is tailor-made for post-democratic societies, which tend to favour inegalitarian elites, even as it lobbies against international inequality.
Bringing Social Theory back into issues of Development
Tim Jacoby and Uma Kothari, both from IDPM at the University of Manchester, have edited a special edition of the journal Progress in Development Studies which has just been published. It showcases emerging research from early career colleagues at the Institute.
By Tim Jacoby and Uma Kothari
I dream about those German sausages
By Tanja R. Müller
The above sentence was the message I received the other day from a Facebook-friend, together with a black and white photograph showing some African kids in a classroom with a tall, Germanic looking woman-teacher, and some German sentences on the big blackboard in the background. The picture was taken around 1984, in a small town in what was then East Germany, Staßfurt. My Facebook friend was one of a cohort of almost 900 Mozambican children who completed the long years of secondary schooling and adolescence in East Germany in order to become homem novo, a specific type of ‘new socialist man’, upon their return to Mozambique.