New actors and alliances in development

Abstract

‘New actors and alliances in development’ brings together an interdisciplinary group of scholars exploring how development financing and interventions are being shaped by a wider and more complex platform of actors than usually considered in the existing literature. The contributors also trace a changing set of key relations and alliances in development – those between business and consumers; ngos and celebrities; philanthropic organisations and the state; diaspora groups and transnational advocacy networks; ruling elites and productive capitalists; and ‘new donors’ and developing country governments. Despite the diversity of these actors and alliances, several commonalities arise: they are often based on hybrid transnationalism and diffuse notions of development responsibility; rather than being new per se, they are newly being studied as practices that are now coming to be understood as ‘development’; and they are limited in their ability to act as agents of development by their lack of accountability or pro-poor commitment. The articles in this collection point to images and representations as increasingly important in development ‘branding’ and suggest fruitful new ground for critical development studies.

Keywords:

• actors
• alliances
• relations
• critical development studies

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the participants in the eadi/dsa conference panel on ‘New actors and alliances in development’, University of York, 20 September 2011 and Jan Nederveen Pieterse for feedback on this introduction.

Notes

1. Corbridge, “The (Im)possibility of Development Studies,” 202.

2. Woolcock et al., “How and Why does History Matter?”

3. See Crush, Power of Development; Escobar, Encountering Development; Nederveen Pieterse, Development Theory; Sachs, The Development Dictionary; and Sylvester, “Development and Postcolonial Studies”.

4. Ferguson, The Anti-Politics Machine, xv.

5. Schuurman, “Critical Development Theory.”

6. Ferguson, The Uses of Neoliberalism.

7. Kothari, “Critiquing ‘Race’ and Racism,” 67.

8. See, inter alia, Tierney et al., “More Dollars than Sense.”

9. See Corbridge, “The (Im)possibility of Development Studies.”

10. Kothari, “Commentary”, 69.

11. See Corbridge, “The (Im)possibility of Development Studies.”

12. Banks and Hulme “New Development Alternatives”.

13. “Investing Wisely in hiv/aids.” Lancet Infectious Diseases 12, no. 1 (2012): 1. http://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3099(11)70357-7/fulltext?rss=yes.

14. http://stats.oecd.org/glossary/detail.asp?ID=6043; and imf, External Debt Statistics.

15. Adelman, “Global Philanthropy and Remittances,” 27.

16. Ibid.

17. Tierney et al., “More Dollars than Sense.”

18. Ibid., 1893–1894.

19. For detailed literature reviews, see also Hansen and Tarp, “Aid Effectiveness Disputed”; and Tarp, Foreign Aid and Development; Riddell, Does Foreign Aid Really Work?

20. Tierney et al., “More Dollars than Sense,” 1891.

21. See, inter alia, Sachs, The End of Poverty; Calderisi, The Trouble with Africa; Easterly, The White Man’s Burden; and Moyo, Dead Aid.

22. Adelman, “Global Philanthropy and Remittances,” 24.

23. Wartick and Cochran, “The Evolution of the Corporate Social Performance Model.”

24. Carroll, “Corporate Social Responsibility.”

25. See http://ec.europa.eu/.

26. Blowfield, “Reasons to be Cheerful?” Newell and Frynas, “Beyond csr?”

27. Idemudia, “Corporate Social Responsibility and Developing Countries.”

28. Newell, “csr and the Limits of Capital.”

29. Among many others, see Gibbon et al., Global Agro-food Trade and Standards.

30. Berglind and Nakata, “Cause-related Marketing.”

31. King, Pink Ribbons, Inc., 9.

32. Ibid., 11.

33. Richey and Ponte, Brand Aid.

34. Prahalad, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid.

35. Ibid., 5.

36. Ibid.

37. Collier, The Bottom Billion.

38. Prahalad, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid.

39. Ponte and Richey, “Buying into Development,” show that, while in bop initiatives the poor are being cast as active market actors, in Brand Aid ‘deserving others’ are used as marketing tools to sell products to Western consumers. The ‘poor’, ‘African’ ‘women and children’ in these initiatives are passive receivers, who have no agency.

40. Carrier, “Introduction,” 1.

41. Clarke et al., “Globalising the Consumer”; Clarke, “From Ethical Consumerism to Political Consumption”; Barnett et al., Globalizing Responsibility; and Carrier and Luetchford, Ethical Consumption.

42. Miller, The Dialectics of Shopping; Barnett et al., “Consuming Ethics.”

43. Devinney et al., The Myth of the Ethical Consumer.

44. Slater, Consumer Culture and Modernity.

45. Bandelj and Wherry, The Cultural Wealth of Nations.

46. de Waal, “The Humanitarian Carnival.”

47. Hood, “Celebrity Philanthropy.”

48. See also Brockington, Celebrity and the Environment.

49. Cooper, “Beyond One Image Fits All.”

50. See Boykoff and Goodman, “Conspicuous Redemption”; Goodman and Barnes, “Star/Poverty Space”; and Littler, “‘I Feel Your Pain’”.

51. See Richey and Ponte, Brand Aid.

52. See also Trentmann, “An Introduction.”

53. Schuurman, “Critical Development Theory.”

54. See also Rodrik, One Economics, Many Recipes.

55. See Cimoli et al., Industrial Policy and Development; and Lin, New Structural Economics.

56. Noman and Stiglitz, Good Growth and Governance in Africa.

57. See, for example, Mills, Why Africa is Poor; Sandbrook and Barker, The Politics of Africa’s Economic Stagnation; and van de Walle, African Economies and the Politics of Permanent Crisis.

58. Keck and Sikkink, Activists beyond Borders, 12.

59. Ibid.

60. Wade, “Accountability Gone Wrong”, 26.

61. Harrison, “Debt, Development and Intervention in Africa.”

62. Blowfield and Dolan, “Business as a Development Agent.”

63. Khotari, “Trade, Consumption and Development Alliances.”

64. Whitfield and Buur, “The Politics of Industrial Policy.”

65. Kragelund, “‘Donors Go Back Home’.”

66. McGoey, “The Philanthropic State.”

67. For notable exceptions, see Smith and Yanacopulos, “Special Issue: The Public Faces of Development”; and Nair, “Governance, Representation and International Aid.”

68. See Alhassan and Chakravartty, “Postcolonial Media Policy”, for a critical review.

69. See Hall, “The West and the Rest”; and Crush, Power of Development.

70. See Kapoor, Celebrity Humanitarianism; Harrison, “Campaign Africa”; Nederveen Pieterse, White on Black; Kothari, “Commentary”; and Richey and Ponte, Brand Aid.

71. Wade, “Accountability Gone Wrong”.

72. Budabin, “Diasporas”.

73. Keck and Sikkink, Activists beyond Borders, 19.

74. Brockington, “The Production and Construction of Celebrity Advocacy.”

75. Butt, “The Suffering Stranger”; and Fassin, When Bodies Remember, 22.

76. Andreasson, “Orientalism and African Development Studies.”

77. Robbins, “Beyond the Suffering Subject.”

78. Ponte and Richey, “Buying into Development?”

79. Corbridge, “The (Im)possibility of Development Studies,” 201.

80. Lorde’s famous essay, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House”, 10, actually suggests that fundamental critique cannot be based upon existing categories, such as ‘woman’; however, our argument is based on the conduct of a practice-based critique. See, for example, Adler and Pouliot, International Practices.

81. This collection offers a more practice-based interrogation of development than Nederveen Pieterse’s notions of hybridisation as the ‘rhizome of culture’, drawing a middle ground in descriptions of the effects of cultural globalisation on developing countries. Nederveen Pieterse, Globalization and Culture.