Citizenship Quality: A New Agenda for Development?

Abstract

Contemporary work on citizenship questions the classic liberal version of citizenship as a legal status belonging to citizens of a particular nation-state. It recognizes the contingencies of political membership and the nature of citizenship as a mechanism for making claims upon different kinds of political communities, especially the state. Until recently, this was not a domain contemplated in mainstream development models. Even if issues such as governance have entered development agendas, the overall tone of the debate still focuses on technical rather than political questions. In this article, I argue that citizenship ideas can bring a particular politics and ethics into ‘development’, possible because of tensions between normative notions of citizenship and competing claims for more radical versions. I begin with an exploration of transformations in ‘development discourse’ that have brought questions of citizenship to  centre stage. I then examine two aspects of citizenship, namely universality and quality, to argue that it is these in particular which might enable claims phrased in terms of citizenship to break through mainstream development discourses and articulate demands for deeper democracy and economic justice. Thus, through a focus on the quality of citizenship in specific contexts, it may be possible to radicalize the concept of ‘citizenship’ in development, both as an analytical category and as a means of promoting particular ethical values, different from those in the mainstream.

Keywords:

• Citizenship
• development
• governance
• development ethics

Notes

This is not to imply that questions of citizenship have not been addressed within development before, but to say that citizenship and associated ideas have gradually moved to greater prominence within radical, progressive, and mainstream development discourses since about the mid-1990s. See Hickey and Mohan's (2004b) introduction to their edited volume on participation for a discussion of the longstanding relationship between participation, development, and citizenship.

http://www.pagebypagebooks.com/Harry_S_Truman/Inaugural_Address/Inaugural_Address_p1.html (accessed 30 January 2012), http://www.bartleby.com/124/pres53.html (accessed 30 January 2012). Video clips are also available on YouTube.

He was a national security advisor to Kennedy and Johnson, and a prominent advocate of the Vietnam War.

Neoliberalism is often taken to be much more than the Washington Consensus, but the Washington Consensus itself is a good summary of neoliberal economic policy prescriptions.

For example, the gendered social impact of the removal of subsidies and funding for social programmes, the unequal liberalization of trade, and so on.

Stiglitz (2002) also points to political changes in the USA from Reagan–Bush to Clinton, among other domestic US factors. In the meantime, advances in economic theory gave greater prominence to market imperfections, for example, with respect to imbalances in information.

The extent to which it might be applicable to countries of the global South is debatable.

http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/survey/so/2012/NEW012812A.htm (accessed 30 January 2012).

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-16771939 (accessed 30 January 2012).

He bases this analysis on a discussion of policy papers published by the World Bank, DFID (Department for International Development), and the Dutch (Ministry of Foreign Affairs).

From Lazar, S. (n.d.) Of autocracy and democracy, or discipline and anarchy: When organizational structure meets political ideology in Argentinean public sector trade unions. Article currently under review, based on an earlier version presented at a research seminar, Latin American Centre, University of Oxford, 25 February 2011.

http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/ (accessed 31 January 2012).

Although this is not true across the whole region. For example, in Brazil an indigenous adult was considered a minor for the purposes of their legal representation in court until 2003.

http://freeofviolence.org/citizensrights.htm (accessed 31 January 2012).

Other popular policies have been the nationalization of natural gas and hydrocarbon resources, and the ‘bono Juana Azurduy’—a conditional cash transfer to mothers of young children.

I do not wish to imply that all social movement activism shares in the discursive move I point to here. Of course, not all social movements are the same; as Bebbington et al. (2010) point out, while some may be for the poor, they are usually not of the poor, and involve alliances between activists of diverse backgrounds. Some years ago now, Alvarez (1998) also pointed out the dangers of ‘NGOization’ of politicized social movements such as feminism. Thus, I caution that I am not referring to all social movements in general, but to a specific and emergent phenomenon within some parts of some social movements today.