Aid and power: the World Bank and policy-based lending

Essays in sociology

Employment, Incomes, and Equality-a Strategy for Increasing Productive Employment in Kenya.

This article addresses the question of why social networks have failed to promote economic development in Africa when they have been associated with economic growth in other parts of the world. Detailed field research traces the role of social networks in the economic organization of two dynamic informal enterprise clusters in the town of Aba in south-eastern Nigeria, an area renowned for the density of its popular economic networks and for the rapid development of small-scale manufacturing under Nigeria’s structural adjustment programme. Focusing on the role of embedded social institutions and their restructuring amid the competitive pressures of rapid liberalization, I consider the extent to which social networks in Aba constitute ‘social capital’ capable of promoting economic development in the context of ongoing liberalization, ‘social liabilities’ that undermine accumulation through a social logic of redistribution and parochialism, or ‘political capital’ through which popular forces are incorporated into the ‘shadow structures’ of predatory states. This article challenges the essentialism of much of the contemporary literature on African social networks, arguing for a sharper focus on the specific institutional capacities of indigenous economic institutions. It calls for greater attention to the role of rapid liberalization and state neglect in explaining the developmental failures of African informal enterprise networks.

Social capital, social liabilities, and political capital: Social networks and informal manufacturing in Nigeria

This article describes how cross-border trade in West Nile, north-western Uganda to a large extent takes place outside of the legal framework. This does not mean that this trade is unregulated. We make use of the concept of 'practical norms' to show the existence of regulation within this trade, which diverges both from official norms and social norms ('moral economy'). The article describes how these practical norms emerged and how they are enforced. First, it is shown how the moral economy of cross-border trade plays an important role in their articulation. Second, we ask which practical concerns play a role in sustaining these norms and how deviations from them activate open power struggles. And third, we show how concrete events have played a role in their emergence. Cet article decrit la maniere dont le commerce transfrontalier se deroule dans une large mesure en dehors du cadre juridique dans la region du Nil occidental situee au Nord-Ouest de l'Ouganda. Ceci ne veut pas dire que ce commerce n'est pas reglemente. L'article utilise le concept de « normes pratiques » pour montrer l'existence d'une reglementation, au sein de ce commerce, qui diverge a la fois des normes officielles et des normes sociales (« economie morale »). Il decrit l'emergence de ces normes pratiques et leur mise en œuvre. Tout d'abord, il montre le role important que joue l'economie morale du commerce transfrontalier dans leur articulation. Ensuite, il etudie les preoccupations pratiques qui jouent un role dans le maintien de ces normes et les luttes de pouvoir ouvertes que declenche le non-respect de ces normes. Enfin, il montre le role qu'ont joue des evenements concrets dans leur emergence.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0001972000095255

Regulation, cross-border trade and practical norms in west nile, north-western uganda

the realisation that the unfaltering rate of urban expansion coupled with the dramatically enhanced purchasing power of the naira at the height of the oil boom had profound implications for the organisation of rural producers as they switched from cultivating export cash crops, such as cocoa, to provisioning urban markets with food produce. These studies were predicated on the realisation that the models of analysis used in the first phase of post-independence development efforts, which distinguished between moder and traditional sectors (Boeke, 1953; Rostow, 1960), were rapidly becoming inadequate for describing socio-economic processes in both urban and rural areas. Intervention in the market for the benefit of politically volatile urban consumers (Bates, 1981), the intrusion of transnational companies, imported technology and the consequences of changing consumer patterns (Beckman and Andrae, 1986), and the agility of some farmers in meeting new marketing opportunities (Guyer, 1987; Clough, 1981) demonstrated the complexity of Nigeria's food economy. Successive World Bank studies went to great lengths to substantiate the widely held assumption that Nigeria's agricultural sector was suffering a sharp decline throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Yet, following a comprehensive reinterpretation of the data, it emerged that Nigeria's farmers had in fact expanded their production during that period (Forrest, 1993). This article deals with another area of food production which registered dramatic, yet entirely under-reported, increases throughout the 1970s and on into the Structural Adjustment-stricken 1980s: fisheries. It is a first attempt at sketching the conditions of artisanal fisheries along the Nigerian coastline and, on the basis of these insights from the fishing sector, a contribution to the debate on the character and quality of Nigeria's political economy. While the use of the term 'traditional sector' has been largely expunged from academic discourse, the persuasive power of contrastive dichotomies has resurfaced in different models, one of which was gaining wide circulation in the 1970s. It originated in two simultaneous studies, one by an anthropological researcher in Ghana, the other by the International Labour Office in Kenya, on employment patterns in African cities (Hart, 1973; ILO, 1972). Both concluded that, in spite of massive structural unemployment, the bulk of the working population in Accra and Nairobi were not idle, and indeed could hardly afford to be. Instead, people eked out

Axel Klein

Papers

The barracuda's tale: trawlers, the informal sector and a state of classificatory disorder off the Nigerian coast.