The legacies of John Loxley

Photo credit: University of Manitoba

Remembering John Loxley, 1942–2020

A. Haroon Akram-Lodhi

Department of International Development Studies, Trent University, Peterborough, Canada

Email: [email protected]

John Loxley, who was one of the most active people involved in the foundation and operation of the Canadian Association for the Study of International Development during its first two decades, as well as being a long-standing and engaged member of the Editorial Board of the Canadian Journal of Development Studies, died in July 2020. John Loxley was born in Sheffield in the United Kingdom in 1942, the middle child in a family of 12 children, and it was Sheffield that shaped him. His father worked in the steel mills for which the city was renowned but died at the age of 59 from work-related lung disease. His mother was a seamstress. From a young age, John was aware that the social protection provided at that time to working-class families by the Labour Party-led Sheffield Council—educational opportunities, access to healthcare and social housing—were essential to the family's capability to ensure that all the children thrived. Moreover, the council estate on which John lived had a very strong sense of social solidarity. This setting formed the basis for his deep commitment to social justice and community service.

John was one of only a few children from Sheffield's council estates to secure a place in a grammar school, which paved the way for him to be the first in his family to go to university. At Leeds University he studied economics; under the tutelage of Walter Newlyn, who at the time was also Director of Economic Research at the East African Institute of Social Research in Kampala, Uganda, he became aware that the economic and social issues faced by his working-class community were often very similar to those witnessed in developing countries. With Newlyn as his doctoral supervisor, John obtained a Junior Fellowship in African Economic Development and arrived in Uganda in 1965 to research the East African monetary and financial system, completing his doctorate in 1966 while teaching at Makerere University. From Kampala, he moved to Tanzania in 1967, where he remained until 1974. In Tanzania John initially worked as Chief Economist at the newly established National Bank of Commerce, a state-owned entity. Two years later he took the post of Senior Lecturer in the economics department at the University of Dar Es Salaam. In 1972 he became Director of the Institute of Financial Management at the University of Dar Es Salaam.

It is fair to say that just as John was a notable figure in Tanzania in his time there, Tanzania became a defining experience in his life. His work on monetary policy meant that John worked closely with Tanzania's senior political leadership as they sought to throw off the vestiges of colonialism, facilitate growth that improved people's well-being, and explicitly committed to the building of socialism. Beyond his paid employment he also held a number of other posts that were central to the economic transformation sought by Tanzania's leadership; most notably, as a Director of the Tanzania Sisal Corporation—at the time, sisal was the country's principal export. John also made active contributions to the lively debates about African socialism that was so central to the political and intellectual milieu of Dar Es Salaam at that time. In the process, he became close friends with a number of the activist academics that were closely involved in the effort to build socialism in Tanzania: Giovanni Arrighi, Lionel Cliffe, Reg Green, Gerry Helleiner, Kighoma Malima, Lars Osberg, Cranford Pratt, Justinian Rweyemamu, John Saul, Ann Seidman and Issa Shivji, to name a few.

In 1985, when I first met John, I asked him what was his understanding of “development.” He replied that he had learned a great deal from the Guyanese economist Clive Y. Thomas while he was in Tanzania. Thomas (1974) had argued that development is a process of economic and social transformation in which a population's needs had to converge with the supply of available resources. Thus, the economic, social and political realities of specific situations must be understood if greater self-reliance is to be built by communities. Like John, Thomas understood “needs” broadly to include decent work based on a living wage, a sustainable environment, improved education, high-quality healthcare and other mechanisms of social protection. From this underlying understanding arose the need to recognize what policy must be: feasible; tailored to the circumstances; selective rather than blunt; and finely attuned to the distributional implications that it engenders. At the same time, though, policy was not the domain of experts; it was the domain of those that would have to live with its consequences, and people had to be intimately involved in the policy process for it to be democratic.

In 1974 John was recruited by the incoming New Democratic Party government led by Ed Schreyer to become Deputy Minister of the Canadian province of Manitoba's Research and Economic Development Cabinet Sub-Committee: the so-called RED Secretariat. Relying heavily upon the insights he had learned in Tanzania, John had a significant input into the ambitious Great Northern Plan, which sought, in a fiscally responsible way, to promote the economic development of the more northern, poorer areas of the province by more closely aligning available local resources to people's needs. As a result, he began his long involvement with Indigenous organizations in Manitoba and in Canada.

In September 1977 John moved to the University of Manitoba, where he remained for the rest of his professional life. As professor of economics and later as Chair of the Department of Economics, John was an instrumental figure in the development of one of the few diverse economics departments in Canada's universities. He taught a generation of activist heterodox economists from within Canada and from around the world, many of whom went on to significant public careers. John's academic work fell into three main areas: international money and finance, international development, and community economic development. Behind these areas lay, for John, the broader issue: the economics of social transformation. His work is notable for its rigorous formulations, accessibility and very strong concern for social justice, for his view that national and international policies should be analyzed for their distributional impact on all segments of society, and for his position that all people should have an informed voice in determining those policies. John shaped academic debates through his membership of several professional associations and his participation on the editorial boards of several journals, perhaps most notably the Review of African Political Economy. His main areas of research, as well as his principled understanding of the need for feminist analysis, and his recognition of the need for a political economy-based interdisciplinary analysis, made him a sought-after supervisor of graduate students, including myself.

At the same time as he undertook his academic work, John continued to work closely with several governments in Africa and other developing countries. He was one of the earliest critics of the structural adjustment programmes that were introduced by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank in the early 1980s, and one of the first to analyze and document the impact of such programmes. John worked as an economic advisor on macroeconomic reform or worked on structural adjustment policies and economic planning reports for the governments of Ghana, Zambia, Ethiopia, Mozambique, Madagascar, Guyana, the Seychelles, St. Kitts, and Nevis, Tanzania, and the first post-apartheid government in South Africa, led by Nelson Mandela, a man he greatly admired. John also served as economic advisor on macroeconomic reform to international institutions such as the International Development Research Centre, the United Nations Development Programme, the International Labour Office, and the Commonwealth Secretariat. He also was on the Board of the North–South Institute in Ottawa during its heyday. John's approach to these various roles was always the same: to work with community groups and national governments, to analyze the impact of policies on all segments of the population, and to develop a feasible alternative approach with people in mind. Indeed, John had the unusual ability to discuss and debate financial and economic policy with national leaders, finance ministers, chairs of banks and international institutions, and then to talk with equal effect to local community groups and unions about the same issues.

John's work with community groups reflected his commitment to broad-based and solidarity-based community economic development. Between 1983 and 1987 he served as a member of the Board of Directors and Executive Committee of the Society for Manitobans with Disabilities and assisted the organization's transition from the charity-focused “Society of Crippled Children and Adults” to a client-oriented and -run organization. Concurrently, he served as an economic advisor to the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs, as economic advisor to the Canadian Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, as advisor to the Manitoba Métis Economic Development Corporation, and to the Alberta Métis Settlements. From 1993 John was also a member of the board of SEED Winnipeg, a primary instrument of community economic development, serving as its chair for many years. He also continued to work with labour unions and the labour movement, providing analysis, research papers, presentations and seminars; mediating; and commenting on behalf of union positions in the media, at policy commissions, and at public meetings. His analysis and positions while on the bargaining team or supporting the bargaining team of the University of Manitoba Faculty Association were always concerned with the interests of those earning the least pay and benefits, and with the long-term interests of the university and its students in mind.

In 1991, in response to the devastating policy decisions being made by the austerity-minded Winnipeg City Council and the Government of Manitoba, social activists in Winnipeg and Manitoba formed CHO!CES: A Coalition for Social Justice. John was one of the first co-chairpersons. With their grassroots community organization and their analysis of options, CHO!CES' reputation spread throughout Manitoba and Canada and was soon replicated in other provinces. One of its major contributions to provincial, national and international forums was the development of alternative budgets. John worked with other CHO!CES members and community groups to produce a democratically developed, fiscally coherent but more socially just alternative to the budgets that were being brought down by austere governments. As a consequence, between 1995 and 2000, John was the coordinator of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives' CHO!CES Alternative Federal Budget. The Alternative Federal Budget brought together university scholars, labour representatives and members of community groups across Canada in a broadly consultative process designed to produce socially inclusive budgets. In addition to the budget documents, the Alternative Federal Budget group published several collections of essays on social and economic policy, training materials on popular economic education, and ran workshops. In part because of this activism, for many years John was a board member for the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.

In 2001 John's community economic development work shifted gear with the inception of the Manitoba Research Alliance (MRA), of which he was a key driver. A group of academic and community members, together with provincial government policy advisors, came together under the name of the MRA. They submitted a proposal to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for funding, and were successful, thus beginning a two-decade-long engagement in action-oriented community research aimed at improving the conditions facing the marginalized communities of Manitoba.

During the 2010s John developed a strong critique of both public-private partnerships (PPPs) and social impact bonds (SIBs). PPPs are public infrastructure projects that are privately financed and built-in exchange for the private consortium undertaking the delivery of the public infrastructure receiving lease payments from the government, as well as, often, user fees. Working with his son Salim Loxley, John demonstrated how PPPs resulted in higher-cost projects and higher profitability for the private companies undertaking the delivery of the public infrastructure. SIBs are payment-by-results contracts, where a government or public sector entity enters into a contract with a private sector consortium for it to deliver on a predefined social policy objective. Again, John demonstrated how SIBs did not represent value for money while at the same time enhancing the profitability of the private sector consortium delivering the social policy. Thus, both PPPs and SIBs represented transfers from the public sector to the private sector: forms of implicit corporate subsidies, as it were.

The range of John Loxley's professional interventions were so broad, and his engagements with like-minded activists so significant to so many people, that a short remembrance cannot do justice to his life and work. It is inadequate to talk about John's legacy, for he has a multitude of legacies. Therefore, the Canadian Journal of Development Studies invited some of John's collaborators and friends to reflect on John's life and work for the Journal. The 12 reflections brought together in this tribute are arrayed chronologically and are by design selective. They are nonetheless a testimony to the tapestry that was John's work. Readers who desire a more systematic assessment of the legacy of John Loxley are strongly advised to read John Serieux, Robert Chernomas and Ian Hudson's (2021) excellent “John Loxley: Radical Academic Activist.”

John Loxley was a scholar of global significance, but he was also a strategically brilliant lifelong activist “who devoted his life to teaching and research directed to changing lives for the better wherever he was” (Lawrence 2020, 469). He was consistently concerned with public and community welfare, and, in particular, the welfare of those most marginalized within society. His was a life that was defined by a spirit of generosity in offering his time and expertise to diverse organizations and individuals in order to effect progressive change. John was always able to make the time to talk to student groups, summer camp programmes, community organizations, unions and church meetings. So John's was also an extremely busy life, but one in which he was proficient and efficient, practical and committed. For those that knew him, John had the ability to make us all better. Perhaps that was because John Loxley was the best of us; and we are all the poorer for losing him too soon.

John Loxley: Understanding Tanzania and the Tanzanian state

Peter Lawrence

Emeritus Professor of Development Economics, Keele Business School, Keele University, UK

Reflecting on John Loxley's practical and intellectual contribution to understanding Tanzania and the Tanzanian state is not an easy task after the almost five decades since the two of us were working in the country. As a doctoral student at Leeds University my supervisor, Walter Newlyn (formerly at Makerere University and a specialist in monetary economics), who had also been John's, instructed me to contact John as soon as I arrived in Tanzania in 1968 to do my fieldwork on the rationalization and diversification of the newly nationalized sisal plantations grouped under the Tanzania Sisal Corporation (on whose board John sat). Sisal was then responsible for up to 60 per cent of Tanzania's export earnings.

When I got to know John, he had already been in neighbouring Uganda for two years and then in Tanzania for almost a year, having been recruited to be the economic adviser to the General Manager of the newly established National Bank of Commerce. This was the country's only commercial bank, formed from the nationalization of seven foreign-owned banks and two local banks. John, whose doctoral thesis was on the development of the colonial East African monetary system, was one of the very few people who knew anything about banking in East Africa. Tanzania, with its new policy of socialism and self-reliance, badly needed such a person to assist the new Tanzanian senior management to develop the new bank's policies. With this job came board membership of some of the other newly nationalized “parastatals” resulting from the proclamation of the Arusha Declaration by President Julius Nyerere.

John's position brought him into contact with both Tanzanian leaders and foreign advisers. My first meeting with him was in his spacious office in what had been Barclays Bank and then to his beachside house, which had also belonged to that bank. The other lunch guest was Reg (Reginald Herbold) Green, the Canadian economist who had advised Kwame Nkrumah and who, with the US economist Ann Seidman, also by now in the Economics Department of the University College (later University) of Dar es Salaam, had written the classic Africa: Unity or Poverty? (Green and Seidman 1968). Reg was economic adviser to the Minister of Finance and talked most of the time. John listened carefully to him, and I, somewhat in awe, listened to them both. To listen to two people so close to government policy-making was an education in practical development economics. If only I had been able to take notes! What I noted about John was his interest in everything talked about that day, which covered economic policy, the state of the economy, the position of the main players and advisers to the government's leaders, and probably many other topics about which I have forgotten.

That wide interest in everything that was going on in Tanzania was reflected in John's writing in the late 1960s and early 1970s, in which he was able to observe decision making at the highest level, and then after he moved from the bank to the University, to teach beyond his specialist subject in such areas as socialist economic planning and develop an ability to get to the heart of the issue at hand. I hardly remember anything of our conversations during that time, but his writing then confirms what I do recall about his approach to issues. He wrote about money and banking, of course, but more broadly about planning, and the organization of financial resources to effect successfully the development plans for a socialist Tanzania. This did not only cover financial planning for industrial and infrastructural development but also for the rural areas, where he advocated changes in credit arrangements so they benefited peasants and supported the strategy of building ujamaa villages. He was sympathetic to the socialist objectives of President Julius Nyerere and, coming from a working-class family in the Labour-dominated steel city of Sheffield in the United Kingdom, this was not surprising. He would often make the argument that if socialism is the objective, there had to be a clear strategy to achieve this. He knew at first hand the need for the rapid education of “high level manpower” and in any case his background as the first family member to go to university strengthened the belief that Tanzania needed to grow its own experts and not continue to depend on foreign advisers like himself. In the meantime, however, the government could only do what its current capacity allowed. So in that sense, his was the practical and pragmatic approach to achieving a socialist Tanzania. That approach included an awareness of the political economy issues associated with issues of power and class that were central to many of the debates at the time. His article with John Saul on the political economy of the state-owned companies—the parastatals—is an example of his recognition of the need to understand the nature of the Tanzanian state and the degree to which particular class interests determined the ways in which decisions were taken about where to invest and how much of that investment would come from the multinationals and serve the latter's interests and those of the Tanzanian petty, including bureaucratic, bourgeoisie, rather than the growing industrial working class and small-scale agricultural producers.

His appointment as the first Director of the Institute for Financial Management enabled him to do something practical about the lack of Tanzanian expertise in finance. The Institute was set up to train bankers and finance officers in the wider political economy of Tanzania and global capitalism, and also train them in more advanced financial management so that the public sector would not only be financially efficient but that these newly trained cadres would also be politically aware and committed to socialism. John argued that through financial control and planning the government could develop a physical investment plan, but he also made clear that this physical planning process had to be more than a shopping list of desirable projects. However, given the lack of appropriate data, there was no way that the planning ministry could construct either a workable input-output table, or if it were to adopt the Soviet planning methodology, a set of material balances. I recall discussing part of my research with John, in which I had mentioned having obtained detailed data on the quantities of labour, capital machinery and land used to produce sisal output for each estate. He immediately proposed that we construct a sisal production function. We never did it, but he was clearly thinking how useful this would be as an example of basic data needed to construct a physical plan. This was typical of the way John thought—in this case, how could a methodology not normally associated with socialist economics be used to develop a concrete data-based socialist plan. And so it was with everything John turned to: how, given the realities on the ground, could objectives be fulfilled by whatever resources and methods were available. In the case of Tanzania, it was his understanding of the realities of state capacity and class formation that informed his analysis of what could be done that would push the country in the progressive direction that Nyerere and his allies wanted to go and limit the possibilities of those who wanted an outcome that benefited themselves and international capital.

John Loxley: Convergence in theory and practice

Roy Culpeper

Chair, Group of 78, Nepean, Ontario, Canada

John Loxley was an extraordinary human being, as a social activist, a political economist, a colleague and a friend. In this brief reflection, I focus on the formative period of his career in the late 1970s when I worked with Loxley in the planning secretariat of the Manitoba provincial government, as a member of the Resources and Economic Development Secretariat, Government of Manitoba, from 1975 until 1977. Subsequently when I was President of the North–South Institute (1987–2010) Loxley was a Director on its Board (1996–2002) and the Board Chair (2000–2002).

Loxley's unique gift was to bring together a progressive vision of society, rooted in left-wing and social justice perspectives, with a pragmatism that enabled him to work with governments, non-governmental organizations, and communities that did not necessarily share his ideology but also sought to advance the agendas of workers, the poor and marginalized populations. He was also able to bring together his understanding of social and economic development in newly independent African countries, his grasp of the political economy of development in the very different context of Canada, and his analysis of debt and the insidious nature of finance capitalism. He typically did so by situating his many endeavours, whether practical or academic, into an intellectual framework that both helped to explain the issues he examined and pointed to possible policy solutions.

The “Great Northern Plan” was his signature undertaking when he served as Secretary to the Resources and Economic Development Cabinet Committee in Manitoba's New Democratic Party (NDP) provincial government from 1975 to 1977. This initiative was based on the provincial government's vision for its vast northern territory, sparsely populated by Indigenous communities confronted by chronic poverty, unemployment and a number of social challenges. On the heels of eight years working as an economist and lecturer in Tanzania and Uganda, Loxley was enlisted by the Manitoba provincial government to create a plan to resolve these deep and longstanding issues.

As a practitioner he brought to his work a sharp theoretical lens. Northern Manitoba was particularly rife with the contradictions of a capitalist economy. On the one hand, abundant natural resources (minerals, forestry and hydroelectric power) generate considerable wealth, while on the other, Indigenous communities in the region suffered high rates of poverty, unemployment, and social deprivation.

To explain and help resolve these contradictions Loxley found the theoretical framework of the “convergence” development strategy propounded by C.Y. Thomas (1974) particularly apposite. Essentially Thomas' strategy is premised on the belief that development, viewed as a process of economic and social transformation, is dependent on the convergence of the population's needs with the supply of available resources. In this context, it is important to note that “needs” go beyond economic “demands,” encompassing the need for better education, health and other social services, and a sustainable environment, as well as the need for well-paying jobs and decent incomes.

However, in Northern Manitoba, the harvesting of its rich natural resources helps drive “development,” viewed as job and income creation, a tax base for health, education and social development, an abundant supply of hydroelectric energy, and capital accumulation for producers. But the beneficiaries are primarily outside the region. In other words, there is convergence to some degree at the provincial and national level, while many are left behind in disadvantaged regions (like the North) and communities (Indigenous communities in the North and impoverished areas in cities like Winnipeg in the South, in which Indigenous people loom large).

It is not surprising that, in a capitalist economy, albeit under the administration of social democratic governments such as Manitoba's NDP, the notion of appropriating resource rents from the privately-owned mining and forestry sectors, and even from the provincially owned hydro-electric utility, for investment in local economic and social development, was a non-starter. Accordingly, such investment was left almost entirely to the province, which was subject to increasing fiscal constraints, and in any case not too keen to get involved in transformative socio-economic development initiatives, which are regarded as the preserve of the private sector. Of course, the private sector is motivated by profit rather than socio-economic transformation. The Churchill Housing Plan was an example of the kind of project envisaged by the “Great Northern Plan.” Utilizing Northern materials (lumber from Northern forests) and local labour (with few if any employment alternatives) it produced good-quality affordable housing (in short supply) for local residents. And education was also a by-product: workers engaged in the project were able to acquire or upgrade their skills. This project would not have been commercially viable; it depended on support from the province. It was defended by the planners, on the basis of its social net benefits using the relatively novel tools of social cost–benefit analysis.

The Great Northern Plan was therefore never implemented, and it led to the departure of Loxley from the provincial government. However, it had a marked impact on those engaged in community economic development in the ensuing decades, in Manitoba and elsewhere. The strategy of convergence between local needs and local resources turned out to have far more traction at the community level, where Loxley, as an academic and, increasingly, a community activist, turned his formidable analysis and his personal energies from the 1980s until his death.

In retrospect the Great Northern Plan was a seminal period in the arc of Loxley's thinking and activism. It engendered and tested his conceptual framework focused on the strategy of convergence. This framework was applied, and honed, in his work and those of others on community economic development over the next four decades, work that remains as a living testament to Loxley's notion that community empowerment and control can be a powerful force for transformative change.

John Loxley and the RED Secretariat

Neil Tudiver

Formerly of the Faculty of Social Work, University of Manitoba, and former Assistant Executive Director at the Canadian Association of University Teachers, Ottawa, Canada

John Loxley was a visionary. He pictured possibilities where others saw barriers. He advocated for the dispossessed. These qualities and values carried through all aspects of his very rich life. I knew him as a good friend and as my boss/colleague in the Resources and Economic Development (RED) Committee of Manitoba's New Democratic Party Cabinet.

John's commitment and ideals infused our small working group. From the moment he arrived fresh from Tanzania John established purpose, direction, and camaraderie. We were excited by his ideas and openness to our views. Intense policy work usually spilled over at the end of the week to a local pub for more discussion of politics, policy and soccer, and much laughter. John could be simultaneously animated, serious and funny.

His ethical standards applied to the everyday and to major principles. From time-to-time John placed a packet of postage stamps on his administrator's desk, “for personal correspondence.” He fearlessly defended important principles to the Ministers in charge. And all of us knew that John had our back, regardless of consequences for himself.

At the outset of his tenure in early 1975 as Secretary of RED, John targeted the extreme inequities in Northern Manitoba. Impoverished Indigenous communities were excluded from the North's wealth in mining, forestry and hydropower generation. Thus, despite their extremely low incomes residents of the North's non-urban centres paid prices for food and other necessities that were 20–50 per cent higher than that in Winnipeg (Loxley 1981, 152). Surplus from these extractive industries accrued outside the region. Nickel, copper, zinc and lumber were exported for processing elsewhere. High-voltage power lines served the mines and larger towns in the North, southern Manitoba, Ontario, Saskatchewan, and the United States, bypassing local communities almost entirely. Most of the jobs were filled by whites, most of whom were recent migrants from southern Manitoba and other places.

Government and industry reinforced Northern underdevelopment. Their blaming-the-victim posture was rooted in racist premises (Loxley 1981, 154). They painted the North as a poor region and a drag on public resources, despite the considerable wealth exported from the region. John initiated a strategy “to map out a comprehensive economic and social development project … aimed at transforming the living conditions of one of the poorest sections of Canadian society” (Loxley 1981, 151). The “Northern Manitoba Development Strategy”—the Great Northern Plan—adapted work by C.Y. Thomas designed to meet the needs of a small, underdeveloped economy in the transition to socialism (Loxley 1981, 151; Thomas 1974). The strategy proposed profound economic shifts. Use of the North's resources should be redirected to primarily benefit Northerners. Local sawmills would provide lumber for construction and manufacturing, thereby reducing the need for costly imports. Self-sufficiency in basic foodstuffs could be achieved within a decade. The plan set out all the elements to make it possible. Local ownership and participation were fundamental to the strategy. Despite some initial support the strategy was not implemented. Unlike so many who prefer to blame third parties, John examined how the planning team, of which he was so centrally a part, underestimated the economic and political forces that they faced.

Ever the optimist and pragmatist John remained committed to Northern, First Nations and inner-city development. His academic work was always rooted in community. Years later he led the Manitoba Research Alliance (MRA), a coalition of academics, advocacy groups and community organizations. He never forgot the principles embedded in the Northern Manitoba Development Strategy. The last project he ran for the MRA, Partnering for Change: Community-based Solutions for Aboriginal and Inner-City Poverty (2012–2020), continues with very able successors at the helm.

Far from being a failure the Northern Manitoba Development Strategy laid the foundation for more than a generation of progressive praxis.

John Loxley and the international financial institutions

Ray Bush

Professor Emeritus of African Studies and Development Politics, University of Leeds, UK

John Loxley helped educate a generation of radical scholars and activists. He did this particularly with regard to developing critical knowledge about the international financial institutions (IFIs), notably the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, and their attempts to enforce economic reform in Africa. Reform meant structural adjustment, liberalization of the economy and retrenchment of the public provision of goods and services. The IFIs declared intent was to modernise, streamline and enhance the functioning of African economies. John was at the forefront of informed and measured critique. His was not the style to rant and rage at the injustice advanced by the chief advocates of global capitalism—although there were moments when he did that too. John's style was instead to offer two major lines of critique. The first was to challenge the simple-mindedness of the IFIs. He painstakingly noted the disjuncture between the declared policy of the IFIs and the actual outcomes. Remember: the late 1980s and early 1990s were a time when the IFIs insisted that poor policy performance in Africa was the result of poor policy implementation, not the policy itself of structural adjustment and economic reform. John highlighted the pitfalls of IFI policy, and of the Washington-based institutional nonsense of offering the same economic medicine irrespective of a specific country's economic malaise: the continent was tarred with a familiar neo-liberal brush, and economic crisis throughout Africa was deemed to be the result of internal failings, corruption, state enlargement and authoritarian politics. John noted, however, that weaknesses in international commodity markets, inadequate international financial flows, and persistent unpoliced external corporate intervention had differential impacts on the lives and well being of Africans in different parts of the continent.

John's critique of the technical incompetence of the IFIs (and unlike some on the left he did not argue that all those in the IFIs were reactionary racist bigots) was informed by his second major critique. This was the need to develop detailed and specific knowledge of the different country cases in Africa where economic reform was being implemented. John argued, somewhat ahead of his time, for sovereign decisions by sovereign states and for decisions to be informed by detailed research and local knowledge production. John's entire adult life was shaped by his experience of working-class injustice, grounded by his upbringing and roots in what at the time was Europe's largest housing estate in Sheffield in the United Kingdom. The importance of experience was not just a naïve empiricism, for he was an immensely gifted technical economist, able to confront representatives of the Washington elite in their own methodological and theoretical terms. John instead advocated the importance of field knowledge and connectivity with workers and farmers in Africa; his life was dedicated to the enrichment of our collective knowledge and engagement with the findings from grounded research. Unlike many academics and activists John was always able to convey the findings from his radical analysis with immense clarity and wonderful humour.

John Loxley and adjustment in Africa

Bonnie Campbell

Professor Emerita, Université du Québec à Montréal, Canada

While I am honoured to write this short contribution, I do so knowing that it will come nowhere near to the tribute that is warranted by the exceptional person and friend we have lost. John Loxley was an inspiring, brilliant and committed intellectual, and an incredibly kind, as well as a generous and unassuming, person.

In 1989 we co-edited Structural Adjustment in Africa (Campbell and Loxley 1989). As in John's countless other initiatives, he brought to the project meticulous editorial skills, generous oversight, enormous rigour and, above all, his intimate knowledge of the issues. At the time of publication, he had developed considerable expertise working as an economic advisor on structural adjustment policies to the governments of Tanzania, Uganda, Madagascar and Mozambique—expertise which expanded in the years that followed. What a privilege to be able to write and publish with such a colleague!

During the decade preceding the publication of the book, almost forty African governments had turned to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for balance of payments support, while half this number had received World Bank structural adjustment loans. The volume appeared at a time when the number of critical empirical studies on the impact of specific policy measures designed to achieve structural adjustment remained very limited. As will be recalled these included, among other policies, devaluation, price liberalization, fiscal restraint and privatization. John's chapter in the book revisited the devaluation debate in Tanzania, where he had been intimately involved in advising on policy formulation between 1981 and 1984. As a result, he was exceptionally well placed to share little known aspects of the internal debates which went on within Tanzania on the appropriate negotiating position to be taken with the IMF. Underlying the overall consensus that the IMF package should be rejected rested the key issue as to whether or not exchange rate depreciation was necessary or desirable as a tool of economic stabilization and adjustment. Thanks to his profound understanding of the debates which had taken place and the manner in which these debates had unfolded, John was able to show how the delays in devaluation led to the government's pursuing what he described as quite inequitable adjustment policies. He concluded that the implacable opposition to exchange rate adjustment, which had become identified in Tanzania with a “left-wing” perspective and in the process blinded its proponents to the distributional and growth consequences of this position, would prove quite costly to ordinary Tanzanians. With an unbending honesty for which he will always be remembered, John avoided any trace of a polemical tone or of self-satisfaction when events proved him right.

The volume examines the complex interactions between the economic and political dimensions of structural adjustment policies in an attempt to make them intelligible to a lay person. Without John's expertise, the case studies which bring together examples from eastern, western, northern, and southern Africa could never have been presented in such a concise, convincing, and accessible manner.

A loyal friend, full of humour and pranks, an ardent football player (we still have the football he offered our son) a man of uncompromising principles, a brilliant intellectual and yet so modest and unassuming—thank you John for all you brought us. How you are missed.

John Loxley as a structuralist

John Serieux

Department of Economics, University of Manitoba, Canada

John Loxley's contributions to development economics spanned a wide range of topics, but his most influential contributions in that discipline relate to the role of international financial institutions (IFIs; those referred to here are primarily the IMF and the World Bank) in developing country debt resolution and the implementation of stabilization and structural adjustment programmes. In the latter area, Loxley deployed the structuralist approach in offering a critique of stabilization and adjustment programmes and, uniquely, a framework for the implementation of alternative programmes.

The structuralist perspective was not a mainstay in Loxley's academic work. For example, he favoured a Marxist perspective in his critique of Tanzania's socialist experiment and in his work in community economic development (Loxley 1978 and 1981). However, clear-eyed as he always was, Loxley recognized that, for developing countries, access to IFI stabilization or structural adjustment funding necessarily meant working within the global capitalist system overseen by these institutions. In that context, the challenge was not one of a “transition to socialism” but one of obtaining: “some room for manoeuvre … to help countries with more progressive or nationalistic orientations deal more easily with balance of payments problems” (Loxley 2010, 5). Structuralism offered a robust, heterodox, critique of the monetarist perspective that underpinned these programmes and a toolbox of policies that might allow countries to address their balance of payment problems efficaciously while preserving the progressive elements of domestic policies.

Loxley's critique and proposed alternative framework was first presented at a symposium in Nairobi, Kenya in 1985 (Loxley 1986a) and was further elaborated in Debt and Disorder (Loxley 1986b). He sought to demonstrate how the two key elements of the IFIs stabilization programmes—demand management and attempts to “get prices right”—had limited efficacy in developing countries where particular structural attributes mitigated against the responses presumed by these programmes. That critique was a study in balance. While, correctly, attributing external disequilibrium largely to external shocks, and the failures of stabilization programmes due to inappropriate policy prescriptions, Loxley was willing, nevertheless, to acknowledge domestic policy failures as well as the inherent imprecision in gauging the variation in structural features across countries. In later empirical work, he employed structuralist economic analyses masterfully in offering comprehensive pictures of the structural adjustment experiences of Ghana and Zambia—in the process elucidating the reasons for Zambia's persistent failures and Ghana initial success but unsustainable debt accumulation (Loxley 1990, 1991; Young and Loxley 1990).

Loxley's alternative framework also drew on structuralist perspectives. “The policy package would be tailored to the specific structural characteristics of the economy in question” (Loxley 1986b, 45). Policy choice would emphasize sectoral over broad economy-wide impacts, favour gradualism, and take cognisance of distributional implications. He described his reason for marrying his critique with an alternative programme thus: “The impetus behind this attempt to outline a possible alternative approach lies in a belief that all too frequently the critique of the orthodoxy is an entirely negative exercise which is not very helpful to countries experiencing economic crisis” (Loxley 1986b, 44).

John Loxley's contribution to alternative budgets

Greg Selinger

Former Co-chair of the 1995–96 Canadian Alternative Federal Budget in Winnipeg, Canada

Shirley Lord

Independent advisor and former CHO!CES activist in Winnipeg

Tom Simms

Co-director of the Community Education Development Association in Winnipeg

John Loxley's contributions to alternative budgeting were foundational. They were grounded in his experience as a post-World War 2 child of a large, working-class family in Sheffield, UK. The Labour government set out to implement the welfare state to build a country that was free from the five giant evils: ignorance – through universal secondary and post-secondary education; want—through social insurance and income security; disease—through a universal health care system based on need not wealth; squalor—through social housing and urban renewal; and idleness—through a policy of full employment.

As a young PhD in economics John learned how to do progressive budgets in Tanzania, and he carried this into his time as a senior economist in the Executive Council of Manitoba's first New Democratic Party government of Premier Ed Schreyer. From there, he took this lived experience and knowledge into the Department of Economics at the University of Manitoba. There he championed a heterodox perspective based on the values of social justice and equality.

John's commitment to alternative budgets arose from the recession, and resulting austerity budgets, of the late 1980s and 1990s. These came from the provincial government of Progressive Conservative Premier Gary Filmon; and the long-ruling Independent Citizen Election Coalition of centre-right city councillors in the City of Winnipeg. But John's contribution to alternative budgets was more than an intellectual understanding of the role of government in supporting people to be able to lift up their lives. It was more than a political understanding on how to challenge the dominant narrative of austerity and cutbacks in the name of fiscal probity. John's contribution was to bring alternative budgets to life through his love of being with people. This came together through regular North End Neighbours Pub Nights, where people socialized and built solidarity that nurtured their activism. A culture of working together for change emerged. John was also adamant about listening to the voices of people who were most impacted by the politics of austerity. John loved to use community theatre to popularize the issues. This humility to listen to those who were often left out was fundamental to how alternative budgets were constructed.

These participatory partnerships meant that the process of alternative budgeting was as critical as the outcome. The Manitoba experience was hard fought for, and it became integral to the first Alternative Federal Budget (AFB) in 1995–1996. The Liberal government of Prime Minister Jean Chrétien and Finance Minister Paul Martin cut health and social transfers to the provinces by 30 per cent. They also ended the Canada Assistance Program, which contributed half of all the Province's expenditures on daycare, social assistance, community development and legal aid services. This left those most at risk in the hands of provincial governments and their austerity policies. So, John's approach to and efforts on behalf of alternative budgeting ensured that the voices of those most impacted by these government choices were heard. At the height of the AFB there were more than 50 launches of it across Canada.

John's spirit of inclusive, respectful relationships, and community building around a hopeful and achievable set of polices in a progressive alternative budget is as relevant today as ever. And many progressive organizations such as the Canadian Center for Policy Alternatives are continuing to carry on the work.

John Loxley and the alternative budgeting movement

Jim Stanford

Economist and Director of the Centre for Future Work, Manuka, ACT, Australia

John Loxley's life work reflected an outstanding combination of world-class academic work with consistent engagement with grass-roots movements and campaigns. One of his most enduring contributions in the latter of these categories was his personal role in initiating and developing a community-based “alternative budgeting” movement. This work started small, in his home city of Winnipeg, Canada, but was then taken up by progressive coalitions and campaigns across Canada, and in other countries.

Loxley's initial work on alternative budgets began in Winnipeg in the early 1990s. He was a key member of CHO!CES, a progressive civic coalition that took on many progressive fiscal causes – including resisting city budget cutbacks, opposing public aid to a professional ice hockey team, and launching an innovative legal challenge against tax loopholes for rich families (Matthews 2000). To mobilize grassroots opposition to fiscal restraint, and show that viable budgetary alternatives existed, CHO!CES organized community and advocacy organizations to develop their own, alternative city budgets. This strategy allowed the coalition to go beyond merely resisting cutbacks, to instead propose a complete and comprehensive alternative vision for the city's finances.

Loxley's expert input to these alternative budgets, and the public credibility which he brought (as a respected economist) to the project, were important. But he was fiercely committed to a participatory, democratic process in developing these budgets. After all, the goal of this movement was to empower communities’ capacities to set their own priorities and make their own economic decisions. A process dominated by experts (even progressive ones) could not fulfil that goal. So Loxley worked successfully to balance his own important intellectual and technical contributions to the project with developing the confidence and capacities of the broader movement. Loxley summed up this approach in an introduction he wrote for a “how-to” manual on alternative budgeting:

Opening up the [budgeting] process enables people to see how budgets are put together, how trade offs are made and to appreciate the real versus imagined budgetary constraints that governments have to work within. (CHO!CES 1998, 7)

The strategy was successful in showing that credible alternatives to harsh fiscal austerity were viable—and also that community organizations, advocates and ordinary citizens could contribute credibly to budget processes. Soon the practice was replicated at a provincial level (with progressive groups proposing an alternative provincial budget for Manitoba) and for Canada as a whole. Loxley played a vital role, in partnership with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA, Canada's major progressive think tank), in initiating an annual Alternative Federal Budget (AFB) for Canada.

The first AFB was critical in building progressive opposition to a historically austere federal budget, tabled by then-Finance Minister Paul Martin in 1995. Since then, the AFB has been published annually by the CCPA (Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, various years). It consistently combines an emancipatory and transformative economic and social vision with the nitty-gritty detail of a budget that actually “adds up” (Stanford 2005).

The project became more comprehensive and sophisticated as it developed over time. The AFB commissioned conventional macroeconomic modellers to simulate the impacts of its proposed budget measures on overall economic activity, labour markets and fiscal balances—verifying that the proposed policies were coherent and internally consistent. Some editions of the budget engaged in debates about monetary policy, as well as fiscal policy, highlighting the extent to which harsh anti-inflation policies in the 1990s contributed needlessly to the fiscal constraints faced by governments. The AFB also experimented with a gender accounting framework to consider the impacts of budgetary decisions on women. The “table” of movements and advocacy groups contributing to the process grew over time. Some of those discussions were challenging, because they involved trading off scarce resources and trying to make the project more than a “wish list” of progressive demands. In short, both the product and the process were genuine, multi-dimensional efforts to construct a “real” budget.

The Canadian alternative budget process influenced the adoption of participatory budgeting practices by several local governments and public agencies in Canada in subsequent years (Lerner and Van Wagner 2006; Friendly 2016) and complemented the growth of participatory budget processes internationally—including initiatives in Brazil, Europe and Africa (Wilhelmy 2013).

The motto of the alternative budget movement is simple but powerful: “Budgets are about choices.” By concretely highlighting that there are always options in deciding how budgets are designed, governments function, and communities are served, this movement plays a critical role, both political and pedagogical, in strengthening progressive campaigns for stronger public services, fairer taxes, and economic and social equality. Through his immense personal contribution to this movement, John Loxley is still helping us make better choices.

John Loxley, mentor and friend

Wanda Wuttunee

Department of Native Studies, University of Manitoba, Canada

I met John in 1992 as members of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (RCAP). We were on an expert panel brought together to discuss the Economic Development chapter in the final report. At that time, I had three degrees, was a member of Red Pheasant Cree Nation, Treaty 6 and lived with my family in Calgary. Over the course of our RCAP work, John invited me to consider a tenure-track posting at University of Manitoba in Native Studies. My work is in Indigenous economic development, I had never taken any Native Studies courses, I did not have a PhD, and both sets of grandparents to my two kids lived in Calgary. A big leap of faith, and I was hired in 1994 on condition that I complete my PhD. John stepped up and became my advisor. That was John. There when you needed him, and always demonstrating genuine interest. He saw me through a tumultuous six years with these key words of advice: “you know what to do, so go do it.”

We remained friends after the completion of my PhD up until his passing. Early on, John and I worked on an article supporting casinos as part of Indigenous economic strategies. Neither of us thought it was a good idea but agreed that we should share the lessons learned from casino operations in the United States, in a true acknowledgment that communities and their leaders know what is best. As academics we can offer ways to support their decisions for success without pretentious judgment. This attitude and recognition of Indigenous sovereignty and ultimate faith in good choices was the foundation for our work in further Indigenous projects.

John volunteered tirelessly on projects that were close to his heart regarding Indigenous people and communities. Neechi Commons, a local Indigenous social enterprise, benefited from his expertise. His work with the court case that disputed the Canadian government's underfunding of Indigenous programming for children on reserve included his expert testimony in a very acrimonious process. He was ever the professional and shared only a few words with me once the court case was decided in favour of the children. He drew me into his Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council-funded community economic development work. The last email that I received from him asked me if I was teaching the next term and whether I was interested in a course release as part of the work for this project.

John and I were co-leads in a project called Poverty Action Research Project for eight years. We drove to Misipawistik Cree Nation, Manitoba to meet with the Community Advisory group, 4½ hours north of Winnipeg. We did the round trip in one day and met two to three times a year. It was an awesome opportunity where both of us, with our type A-personalities, had a chance to totally support community-identified needs at their pace and in their time. We were part of a national team that included conferences to support community members in showcasing the work that was done. Community came first, for John and I.

He was my mentor, a dear friend, and a man with a big heart and appreciation for my relatives!

John Loxley's contributions to community economic development in Manitoba

Lynne Fernandez

Formerly the Errol Black Chair in Labour Studies at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, Winnipeg, Canada

Shauna MacKinnon

Associate Professor and Chair, Department of Urban and Inner-City Studies, University of Winnipeg, Canada

As an economist and academic, John Loxley was committed to developing a theory of Community Economic Development (CED) that would advance its study by academics and policy makers (Loxley 2007). He was driven by an understanding of how CED could improve people's wellbeing and strengthen entire communities.

John was no ordinary academic. He was just as likely to be working in the community as in a classroom. Ever the pragmatist, he studied and taught how to design a real-life policy to improve the lives of those who are left behind by the status quo. Being a heterodox economist, he deeply understood capitalism's many deficiencies and contradictions and was unwavering in his efforts to overcome those deficiencies and improve the lives of marginalized individuals.

While his values aligned best with those fighting for social justice on the streets and picket lines, he did not shy away from corporate board rooms. At the same time that John was working with the late Larry Morrisette on the board of the grassroots groups Ogijiita Pimatiswin Kinamatwin (OPK), an Indigenous organization supporting marginalized Indigenous young adults and their families, he sat on the board of the Manitoba Hydro crown corporation. On any given day John might be found bringing his financial acumen to help the small local cafés, hardware stores and pubs that he frequented or advising cabinet ministers and premiers. He believed strongly in electing strong progressive politicians and contributed many hours in support of political candidates in municipal, provincial and federal elections. No task was too great or too small. He simply rolled up his sleeves and did what needed doing. Regardless of where he was, he was always working on behalf of people and community.

In the video The Inclusive Economy John defines CED as the “community mobilizing to change its economic base and to provide wellbeing for as many community members as possible” (Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives 2018). He acknowledged that CED could deliver two different results: a support for those who were unable to thrive in a capitalist system; or a means to transition to a new system that better shares wealth while protecting the environment and human dignity.

He had no illusions as to the difficulty of realizing systemic change, especially because he understood the need for government subsidies to get a CED strategy up and running, and the political challenges in promoting such support (Loxley 2010, 245–251). But he taught his students in concrete ways how CED could at least make incremental and important improvements in people's lives and shared his hope that these changes could sow the seeds of ever-broader change.

John combined the convergence theory of development with Harold Innis’ staple theory to develop his own ideas on how CED could work in Manitoba. Designed by economist C.Y. Thomas, a convergence strategy would have a community producing what it needs and consuming what it produces, in contrast to a divergent economy that exports what it produces and imports what it consumes (Lamb 2007). A convergence strategy stops the leakage of profits from the community and makes them work locally. It produces a range of goods in order to develop as many of Innis’ backward, forward and final-demand linkages as possible. These goods should also display high growth elasticities so that as many jobs as possible are generated and the local economy thrives (Loxley 1985, 51).

John's first formulation of how a CED strategy could work in Manitoba appeared in 1981, when “The Great Northern Plan” was published (Loxley 1981). The paper describes the conditions in Northern Manitoba in the 1970s, when John was a senior policy advisor for the New Democratic Party (NDP) government, and lays out a concrete regional development plan that modified Thomas’ convergence strategy to fit the North (Loxley 2010, 93). The plan was never operationalized, but vestiges of it—although disappearing under the current Conservative government (Fernandez and MacKinnon 2019)—can still be found in Manitoba today.

A remarkable aspect of John's scholarly work was its praxis in government policy and in the CED eco-system in Manitoba. His ideas took life under the 15-year tenure of the NDP (1999–2016) in Manitoba and its adoption of the CED lens in its policy development. This government “buy in” was the culmination of several factors, including a long tradition, going back to the 1950s, of government support of CED; the ideological bent of the government of the day; the understanding that some high-level bureaucrats (some of whom had been John's students) had about CED and its practical application; and a strong CED community, including a regional office of the Canadian CED Network.

The NDP government incorporated the Neechi Principles in its CED framework. The Neechi Principles were put forward by the Neechi Foods Co-op Ltd in their 1993 It's Up to All of Us guide (Loxley 2010, 169). They have their origin in “The Great Northern Plan” (Wray Enns 2018), and to this day these 11 tenets orient and direct Manitoba's CED practitioners who strive to:

1. use locally produced goods and services;

2. produce goods and services for local use;

3. re-invest profits back into the local economy;

4. create long-term employment of local residents;

5. develop local skills;

6. encourage local decision making;

7. consider the physical and mental health of community residents;

8. encourage development that makes neighbourhoods attractive and safe, and protects the environment;

9. improve neighbourhood stability through long-term residency and decent housing;

10. spread human dignity for all;

11. support other CED initiatives such as cooperatives and social enterprises (Wray Enns 2018, 5).

The Neechi principles were embedded in provincial initiatives such as Neighbourhoods Alive!, the Communities Economic Development Fund, the Community Choices Program and the Northern Development Strategy. Funding applications for these and other initiatives were evaluated based on their alignment with these principles.

Recognizing the importance of supporting organizations aligning with CED, the province of Manitoba, through its Neighbourhoods Alive! initiative, provided core funding to community groups including Neighbourhood Renewal Corporations (NRCs), which, guided by the Neechi principles, provided service to low-income communities (Fernandez 2015). By 2015 there were thirteen NRCs in eight towns and cities receiving core funding from the province to leverage com­munity support for social enterprise and build capacity for residents in a variety of ways (Fernandez 2015).

The NDP's CED framework proved vulnerable to a change in government and the successful Neighbourhoods Alive! initiative did not survive the rule of the provincial Conservative government, which started in 2016 (MacKinnon 2019). Core funding for organizations doing CED work has been either reduced or eliminated completely. Nonetheless, having developed capacity during the NDP's tenure, some organizations continue to survive through the policies, institutions and complementary legislation that helped the province's CED and social enterprise sector to get established (Fernandez 2015).

While John was not directly involved in implementing the NDP government's CED policies from 2000 to 2016, his influence is unmistakeable. Whether through his earlier work that inspired the articulation of the Neechi principles, or through the work of former students who crafted provincial CED policies and programs, John made an important mark on public policy supporting CED in Manitoba.

Beginning in 2001, John's leadership in the CED movement in Manitoba moved into a different stage with the inception of the Manitoba Research Alliance (MRA). A group of academic and community members, together with provincial government policy advisors, came together under the name of the MRA. They submitted a proposal to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) for a three-year, CAD$800,000 Innovation in the New Economy (INE) grant. The proposal—called “Community Economic Development in the New Economy”—was successful and with John as the Principal Investigator a coordinated research programme rolled out to study how CED could improve conditions in marginalized communities in Manitoba. Grants were awarded to community groups, academics, and to undergraduate and graduate students, culminating in a series of monographs, dissertations, theses and books. Several conferences, including two organized by and for students, were held in Winnipeg's Inner City.

Ever the community supporter, John insisted that the grant be administered by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA). Having the money flow through the CCPA allowed the organization to build capacity and in 2007, once again with John at the helm, the MRA was awarded a five-year Community University Research Alliance grant from SSHRC, worth CAD$1 million. The CED theme remained strong in this grant, with part of the budget dedicated to the study of CED.

John led the MRA through two more successful SSHRC applications, both of which flowed—and flow—through the CCPA. The last two grants are Partnership Grants, worth CAD$2.5 million each, for a duration of seven years. The projects are comprised of four research streams, including a CED stream. The last two grants circled back to the spirit of the INE grant to include northern communities and First Nations. The MRA collaborated with communities including Nisichawayasihk Cree Nation (NCN) and Fisher River Cree Nation, and conducted research more broadly on issues identified by the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs and other Indigenous-led organizations. Nearing the end of the previous grant, John identified the importance of examining the role of CED in the Northern city of Thompson. Thompson has a large Indigenous population and services several northern First Nations. John felt it important to examine the role that NCN and other Northern First Nations played, and could further develop, to ensure that resources were owned and operated by those Nations and were used to train and employ First Nations members (Deane and Szabo 2020).

John never claimed credit for these accomplishments. Nonetheless, there is no doubt that the long thread of CED in Manitoba can be traced back to his intellectual leadership and the great respect he garnered in the academy, government and the community. He left behind many community activists and academics who use his ideas in their research, teaching and community development work.

And so John lives on, in the Neechi Principles, in the classroom, in the work of the MRA and in the community. And when political fortunes turn, a new generation of policy makers may take up his ideas again.

John Loxley and social impact bonds

Jesse Hajer

Department of Economics and Labour Studies Program, University of Manitoba, Canada

Social Impact Bonds (SIBs) are payment-by-results contracts, where an outcomes funder, usually a government or public sector entity, enters into a contract with a private sector consortium to deliver on a predefined social objective. The consortium includes private investors whose financial return is contingent on the targeted outcomes being achieved.

John Loxley authored and co-authored several publications examining SIBs, with his analysis drawing heavily on his public–private partnerships (PPP) expertise (Hajer and Loxley 2021; Loxley 2013a; Loxley and Hajer 2019; Loxley and Puzyreva 2015). Loxley (2013a) was among the first to highlight the parallels between SIBs and PPPs, and the questionable benefits of such quasi-privatization models. The noted similarities include a reliance on private finance capital, generally at a greater cost than conventional government borrowing; the transfer of work and in turn jobs, discretion and responsibility from the public to the private sector; and the reduced transparency these models entail, making it difficult to determine whether any benefits are being realized over conventional delivery methods. Loxley (2013a) emphasized key problems in the analysis of SIBs of continued relevance today, including the incentive to neglect those most in need to more easily meet targets; the lack of proper public sector comparators; high transactions costs; and the negative implications for workers. He also predicted the realized on-going need for public subsidies to allow SIBs to proliferate, over and above government being the final outcome payer.

Early on, Loxley spotlighted the SIB model penetrating development aid policy (recast as the Development Impact Bond (DIB)), and that DIBs would likely end up only re-profiling existing development aid, as opposed to generating any new incremental resources (Hajer and Loxley 2021; Loxley 2013b). Rather than focusing on the delivery model, John suggested we should be more concerned with the insufficiency of aid flows more generally, and the debilitating effect of unchecked capital flight on developing countries.

John's writing on SIBs, like his work in other areas, meshed a radical critique with public service and a pragmatic eye towards progressive public policy change. While consistently recommending public funding models, John was sympathetic to constraints faced by funding starved community-based service providers and made himself available as an advisor to non-profit organizations reluctantly engaging in SIB projects. When the provincial government in his home province of Manitoba announced its SIB initiative and noted child welfare as a target, John produced an assessment of SIBs in this policy area (Loxley 2017, 2020). John's well-earned respect amongst child welfare experts, practitioners and reformers helped ensure this research would be influential. There is little doubt that John's contributions helped lead to the first Manitoba SIB being one with modest financial returns to investors, while supporting a fundamentally progressive programme response aimed at keeping Indigenous newborns safely with their mothers, as opposed to in the care of the state (Hajer 2019).

John Loxley: compassion and economics

Cindy Blackstock

First Nations Child and Family Caring Society and School of Social Work, McGill University, Montréal, Canada

In 2014 John Loxley was on the witness stand in a legal case filed in 2007 by the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society (Caring Society) and the Assembly of First Nations (AFN) versus the government of Canada. The case alleged that Canada's choice to underfund child welfare and other children's services, thus not implementing Jordan's Principle, on reserve and in the Yukon, amounted to racial discrimination. His impressive curriculum vitae filed, John was sworn in as an expert witness for the Caring Society and AFN. Canada's lawyers were grilling him under cross-examination trying to discredit the work he had done with First Nations children's experts to cost out the inequity in federally funded child welfare services on reserve and in the Yukon. In a 2005 report that John co-authored, it was found that despite their higher needs owing to residential schools First Nations children were getting 70 cents on the dollar compared to other children in Canada. The report also proposed a detailed needs-based funding approach developed with First Nations experts and informed by a survey of all First Nations child and family service agencies, detailed case studies, and economic modelling of proposed reforms. Importantly, the approach reflected best practices in First Nations child welfare and included data collection to better calibrate the funding approach over time.

Canada had a problem. They had no expert witnesses to counter John's testimony. Quite the contrary; in their efforts to discredit John's work, they hired KPMG to do a forensic audit of John's costing work only to find that KPMG's calculations came within .025 per cent of his calculations. We filed the KMPG report on our side of the case. This epic evidentiary backfire, coupled with the testimony of First Nations experts, resulted in a landmark 2016 decision by the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal ordering Canada to immediately cease its discriminatory treatment.

Typically, the federal government publicly accepted the results and then stonewalled. The Tribunal has issued several non-compliance orders resulting in First Nations children receiving over 250,000 public services and products that they would have otherwise been denied. The litigation continues to drag the federal government into compliance and one of the last things John did before he passed was to work on a report with his daughter Raina Loxley to inform a new funding approach for First Nations child and family services.

Before meeting John, I thought compassion and economics stood in opposition to one another. I know now that they can be the same thing. He had strong values and the moral courage to stand by them as he generously gave his knowledge and mentorship to many of us. Just a few weeks ago, a First Nations Chief who had survived residential schools told me that he never thought he would ever see First Nations children start to get the help they need in his lifetime. He sees it every day in his community, and more help is coming, thanks to John and everyone who has stood for justice in this long fight for equality for First Nations children, youth and families. It was a small mercy that John was able to see the children benefiting from his great work before he passed, and, thanks to John, numbers now make me smile.

Acknowledgements

This curated tribute to John Loxley would not have been possible without the additional contributions of Aurelie Mogan, John Serieux, Peter Lawrence, Robert Chernomas and Ian Hudson as well as all those who have provided their personal remembrance here.