The notion of development influences and is influenced by all aspects of human life. Social science is but one representational option among many for conveying the myriad ways in which development is ...conceived, encountered, experienced, justified, courted, and/or resisted by different groups at particular times and places. This wide-ranging collection from a diverse group of academic and non-academic authors engages with the broad field of development through twelve chapters that deal with music, theatre, fiction, photography, festivals, computer games, the arts, blogging, and other media. It explores three broad areas of alternative forms of knowledge about development, organized around the three themes of ‘translation’, ‘advocacy’, and ‘engagement’. The first of these is concerned with how popular representations of development can successfully compete with and complement formal social scientific representations; the second relates to the politics of popular representations of development, and the way that popular productions shape debates; and the third asks whether popular representations of development can generate alternative critiques that allow for the articulation of views that would be unacceptable to more orthodox means.
The notion of development influences and is influenced by all aspects of human life. Social science is but one representational option among many for conveying the myriad ways in which development is ...conceived, encountered, experienced, justified, courted, and/or resisted by different groups at particular times and places. This wide-ranging collection from a diverse group of academic and non-academic authors engages with the broad field of development through twelve chapters that deal with music, theatre, fiction, photography, festivals, computer games, the arts, blogging, and other media. It explores three broad areas of alternative forms of knowledge about development, organized around the three themes of ‘translation’, ‘advocacy’, and ‘engagement’. The first of these is concerned with how popular representations of development can successfully compete with and complement formal social scientific representations; the second relates to the politics of popular representations of development, and the way that popular productions shape debates; and the third asks whether popular representations of development can generate alternative critiques that allow for the articulation of views that would be unacceptable to more orthodox means.
Time and Trauma Anindita Sarkar
Open rivers,
05/2022
Issue 21: Spring 2022
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
Through interviews, surveys and focus group discussions with 258 households in Mathare during 2016 and 2017, I found that women faced huge challenges and trauma in collecting water. Besides the woes ...of finding a running tap and wasting valuable time waiting in queues, procuring water entails physical hardship that often leads to mental agony that sometimes even threatens the women’s safety.
In Development, Security, and Aid Jamey Essex offers a sophisticated study of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), examining the separate but intertwined discourses of geopolitics ...and geoeconomics. Geopolitics concentrates on territory, borders, and strategic political and military positioning within the international state system. Geoeconomics emphasizes economic power, growth, and connectedness within a global, and supposedly borderless, system. Both discourses have strongly influenced the strategies of USAID and the views of American policy makers, bureaucrats, and business leaders toward international development. Providing a unique geographical analysis of American development policy, Essex details USAID's establishment in 1961 and traces the agency's growth from the Cold War into an era of neoliberal globalization up to and beyond 9/11, the global war on terror, and the looming age of austerity. USAID promotes improvement for millions by providing emergency assistance and support for long-term economic and social development. Yet the agency's humanitarian efforts are strongly influenced, and often trumped, by its mandate to advance American foreign policies. As a site of, a strategy for, and an agent in the making of geopolitics and geoeconomics, USAID, Essex argues, has often struggled to reconcile its many institutional mandates and objectives. The agency has always occupied a precarious political position, one that is increasingly marked by the strong influence of military, corporate, and foreign-policy institutions in American development strategy.
This article offers an international development perspective on project management. A brief history of the ambitious and controversial role that projects have played over seven decades of development ...assistance in diverse operational contexts evokes many of the themes vividly articulated by the flourishing contemporary project management literature. They highlight the limitations of conventional project management practices dominated by Management by Objectives principles. Development experience also stresses the promise of adaptable approaches to project design and management in complex and turbulent operating environments and it suggests that projects conceived as experiments can contribute to sound decision making at the higher plane of strategy formulation and policy-making. Beyond confirming the soundness and utility of contemporary project management scholarship, the article puts forward six recommendations grounded in development experience that may be worth consideration by the nascent ‘New Project Management’ movement.
•Current Project Management (PM) approaches need reconsideration.•They are narrowly conceived, too goal-achievement oriented, and excessively rigid.•They would benefit from lessons drawn out of development projects experience.
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GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UILJ, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK, ZAGLJ, ZRSKP
An international development framing is increasingly ill-fitting to a 21st century characterized by interconnected globalized capitalism, the challenge of sustainable development, as well as the ...blurring of North–South boundaries. While the term global development is increasingly employed, and appears more suited, it is used with different implicit meanings and is often conflated with international development. This article explores the potential of an emerging paradigm of global development as applicable to the whole world. A relational global development approach is advocated here, acknowledging the need for critical attention to the enduring tensions between universalization and geographic variation.
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DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, OILJ, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
Summary Background Millennium Development Goal 5 calls for a 75% reduction in the maternal mortality ratio (MMR) between 1990 and 2015. We estimated levels and trends in maternal mortality for 183 ...countries to assess progress made. Based on MMR estimates for 2015, we constructed projections to show the requirements for the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) of less than 70 maternal deaths per 100 000 livebirths globally by 2030. Methods We updated the UN Maternal Mortality Estimation Inter-Agency Group (MMEIG) database with more than 200 additional records (vital statistics from civil registration systems, surveys, studies, or reports). We generated estimates of maternal mortality and related indicators with 80% uncertainty intervals (UIs) using a Bayesian model. The model combines the rate of change implied by a multilevel regression model with a time-series model to capture data-driven changes in country-specific MMRs, and includes a data model to adjust for systematic and random errors associated with different data sources. Results We had data for 171 of 183 countries. The global MMR fell from 385 deaths per 100 000 livebirths (80% UI 359–427) in 1990, to 216 (207–249) in 2015, corresponding to a relative decline of 43·9% (34·0–48·7), with 303 000 (291 000–349 000) maternal deaths worldwide in 2015. Regional progress in reducing the MMR since 1990 ranged from an annual rate of reduction of 1·8% (0·0–3·1) in the Caribbean to 5·0% (4·0–6·0) in eastern Asia. Regional MMRs for 2015 ranged from 12 deaths per 100 000 livebirths (11–14) for high-income regions to 546 (511–652) for sub-Saharan Africa. Accelerated progress will be needed to achieve the SDG goal; countries will need to reduce their MMRs at an annual rate of reduction of at least 7·5%. Interpretation Despite global progress in reducing maternal mortality, immediate action is needed to meet the ambitious SDG 2030 target, and ultimately eliminate preventable maternal mortality. Although the rates of reduction that are needed to achieve country-specific SDG targets are ambitious for most high mortality countries, countries that made a concerted effort to reduce maternal mortality between 2000 and 2010 provide inspiration and guidance on how to accomplish the acceleration necessary to substantially reduce preventable maternal deaths. Funding National University of Singapore, National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, USAID, and the UNDP/UNFPA/UNICEF/WHO/World Bank Special Programme of Research, Development and Research Training in Human Reproduction.
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GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK, ZRSKP
•ID NGOs are project-based organizations faced with a number of developmental issues.•Social and knowledge resources represent the biggest challenges for ID NGOs.•Key social capital drivers for ...knowledge management have been identified.•A project knowledge management model is proposed integrating the social capital drivers.•Management can see what social resources are spread across their project know-how.
Nonprofit, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) are important actors in international development (ID) who implement trillions of dollars’ worth of projects annually. As with other organizations delivering projects, ID NGOs seem to be failing many stakeholders due to poor delivery of results. Lack, and mismanagement, of social links and knowledge resources have been identified as the biggest challenges of ID NGOs in reaching vulnerable beneficiary populations. We have explored ID NGOs’ social capital and knowledge management systems in order to propose an integrated model to optimize ID NGO project management through social resources embedded into organizational structures. The integrated model we propose enables multi-stakeholder engagement in all phases of project life cycle, building a culture of accountability and respect. This model also helps promote smart and flexible solutions to the “wicked” problems ID projects often grapple with, as well as timely adaptation to changed circumstances and unforeseen or challenging events.
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GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UILJ, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK, ZAGLJ, ZRSKP
•Rich countries rely on a large net appropriation of resources from the global South.•Drain from the South is worth over $10 trillion per year, in Northern prices.•The South’s losses outstrip their ...aid receipts by a factor of 30.•Unequal exchange is a major driver of underdevelopment and global inequality.•The impact of excess resource consumption in the North is offshored to the South.
Unequal exchange theory posits that economic growth in the “advanced economies” of the global North relies on a large net appropriation of resources and labour from the global South, extracted through price differentials in international trade. Past attempts to estimate the scale and value of this drain have faced a number of conceptual and empirical limitations, and have been unable to capture the upstream resources and labour embodied in traded goods. Here we use environmental input-output data and footprint analysis to quantify the physical scale of net appropriation from the South in terms of embodied resources and labour over the period 1990 to 2015. We then represent the value of appropriated resources in terms of prevailing market prices. Our results show that in 2015 the North net appropriated from the South 12 billion tons of embodied raw material equivalents, 822 million hectares of embodied land, 21 exajoules of embodied energy, and 188 million person-years of embodied labour, worth $10.8 trillion in Northern prices – enough to end extreme poverty 70 times over. Over the whole period, drain from the South totalled $242 trillion (constant 2010 USD). This drain represents a significant windfall for the global North, equivalent to a quarter of Northern GDP. For comparison, we also report drain in global average prices. Using this method, we find that the South’s losses due to unequal exchange outstrip their total aid receipts over the period by a factor of 30. Our analysis confirms that unequal exchange is a significant driver of global inequality, uneven development, and ecological breakdown.
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GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UILJ, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK, ZAGLJ, ZRSKP
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