Showing papers in "Development and Change in 2013"

Governing Global Land Deals: The Role of the State in the Rush for Land

Abstract: List of Contributors vii 1 Governing Global Land Deals: The Role of the State in the Rush for Land 1 Wendy Wolford, Saturnino M. Borras Jr., Ruth Hall, Ian Scoones and Ben White 2 State Involvement, Land Grabbing and Counter-Insurgency in Colombia 23 Jacobo Grajales 3 Road Mapping: Megaprojects and Land Grabs in the Northern Guatemalan Lowlands 45 Liza Grandia 4 Land Regularization in Brazil and the Global Land Grab 71 Gustavo de L.T. Oliveira 5 Negotiating Environmental Sovereignty in Costa Rica 93 Dana J. Graef 6 Building the Politics Machine: Tools for Resolving the Global Land Grab 117 Michael B. Dwyer 7 Indirect Dispossession: Domestic Power Imbalances and Foreign Access to Land in Mozambique 141 Madeleine Fairbairn 8 Competition over Authority and Access: International Land Deals in Madagascar 163 Perrine Burnod, Mathilde Gingembre and Rivo Andrianirina Ratsialonana 9 Regimes of Dispossession: From Steel Towns to Special Economic Zones 185 Michael Levien 10 The Political Construction of Wasteland: Governmentality, Land Acquisition and Social Inequality in South India 211 Jennifer Baka 11 Chinese Land-Based Interventions in Senegal 231 Lila Buckley 12 Identity, Territory and Land Conflict in Brazil 253 LaShandra Sullivan Index 275

Regimes of Dispossession: From Steel Towns to Special Economic Zones

Abstract: This article compares land dispossession for industrial development under state-developmentalism and neoliberalism in India. Drawing on interviews, ethnography and archives of industrial development agencies, it compares earlier steel towns and state-run industrial estates with today's Special Economic Zones (SEZs) and argues that they embody different regimes of dispossession. While steel towns and industrial estates reflected a regime of land for production with pretensions of inclusive social transformation, SEZs represent a neoliberal regime of land for the market in which ‘land broker states’ have emerged to indiscriminately transfer land from peasants to capitalist firms for real estate. The present regime has been unable to achieve the ideological legitimacy of its predecessor, leading to more widespread and successful ‘land wars’. The article argues more broadly that variations in dispossession across space and time can be understood as specific constellations of state roles, economic logics tied to class interests and ideological articulations of the ‘public good’.

Indirect Dispossession: Domestic Power Imbalances and Foreign Access to Land in Mozambique

Abstract: Rather than treating the global land grab as a top-down phenomenon driven by global markets or foreign states, this article instead highlights the crucial mediating role played by the host state and domestic elites through a case study of Mozambique. I first introduce the domestic institutional framework, particularly the national Land Law and the institutions that determine the economic value of land. I then argue for an analysis of large-scale land acquisitions that brings into focus the effects of domestic power imbalances on determining the outcomes of foreign demand for land. I examine the ways in which domestic inequality may shape foreign land acquisitions through a typology of the sources of power that give domestic elites a privileged role in relation to foreign investors. The five sources of domestic power considered are: traditional authority, bureaucratic influence, historical accumulation, locally-based business knowledge and networks, and control over the development agenda. Finally, I conclude that the emphasis placed on the actions of the foreigner by both opponents (via framings of land acquisitions as neocolonialism or imperialism) and proponents (via solutions rooted in corporate codes of conduct) may obscure the ways in which pre-existing domestic inequality conditions the outcomes of these deals.

The Global Moment of 2011: Democracy, Social Justice and Dignity

Abstract: In this contribution, we argue that post-2010 activisms, ranging from the Arab revolts to the Occupy movement, the Indignados and anti-austerity protests in Europe, and the pro-democracy protests in Russia and Mexico, exhibit three kinds of commonalities. These are a common infrastructure of networks and meetings that facilitate rapid diffusion; a generational background shaped both by the precarity of paid work and by exposure to and participation in global information streams; and, most fundamentally, a shared articulation of demands and practices. We further argue that three interconnected concepts have been at the core of both demands and the identity of these movements: democracy, social justice and dignity. Flowing from these three shared values and practices, post-2010 activisms also share a mistrust of institutional politics and a determination not to become corrupted by power, which run deeper than in previous generations of activists and which pose an ongoing challenge to their involvement with formal politics.

Wildlife Management in Tanzania: State Control, Rent Seeking and Community Resistance

Abstract: Despite a decade of rhetoric on community conservation, current trends in Tanzania reflect a disturbing process of reconsolidation of state control over wildlife resources and increased rent-seeking behaviour, combined with dispossession of communities. Whereas the 1998 Wildlife Policy promoted community participation and local benefits, the subsequent policy of 2007 and the Wildlife Conservation Act of 2009 returned control over wildlife and over income from sport hunting and safari tourism to central government. These trends, which sometimes include the use of state violence and often take place in the name of ‘community-based’ conservation, are not, however, occurring without resistance from communities. This article draws on in-depth studies of wildlife management practices at three locations in northern Tanzania to illustrate these trends. The authors argue that this outcome is more than just the result of the neoliberalization of conservation. It reflects old patterns of state patrimony and rent seeking, combined with colonial narratives of conservation, all enhanced through neoliberal reforms of the past two decades. At the same time, much of the rhetoric of neoliberal reforms is being pushed back by the state in order to capture rent and interact with villagers in new and oppressive ways.

The Political Construction of Wasteland: Governmentality, Land Acquisition and Social Inequality in South India

Abstract: Through a micro-level study of a biofuel-related land acquisition in rural Tamil Nadu, India, this article reveals how state–subject relations are shaping modern land deal politics. Through its political construction of the concept of ‘wasteland’ and its associated wasteland development programme, the Indian state has facilitated a series of questionable land acquisitions, reshaping agrarian livelihoods in the process. A class of land brokers has emerged to help carry out the state's project of converting ‘wastelands’ to more ‘productive’, state-defined uses such as biofuel cultivation and industrial expansion. Those whose lands have been acquired as part of these programmes have undergone a transition to wage labour, increasing the prolitarianization of agrarian communities. By documenting the mechanics of this ‘wasteland governmentality’, this study contributes to a political sociology of the state by unpacking the linkages between the state and agrarian subjects in the context of the ‘global land grab’.

Rethinking Power and Authority: Symbolic Violence and Subjectivity in Nepal's Terai Forests

Abstract: Recent work on authority, power and the state has opened up important avenues of inquiry into the practices and contexts through which power is exercised. Why certain forms of authority emerge as more durable and legitimate than others remains a challenge, however. In this article we bring together two bodies of thought to engage this issue, feminist theories of power and subjectivity and Bourdieu's ideas of symbolic violence, in order to explore how power and authority are reproduced and entrenched. Our purpose is to advance theorizing on power and authority in the context of contentious political situations and institutional emergence. This unusual theoretical synergy allows us to illustrate how power is exercised in relation to natural resource management and the ways in which the conflict/post-conflict context creates institutional forms and spaces which simultaneously challenge and reinforce antecedent forms of authority. To animate our theoretical concerns, we draw on work in community-based forestry in Nepal, with a focus on some of the conflicts that have arisen in relation to the valuable Sal forests of the Terai, or lowland plains.

The Arab Spring and its Surprises

Abstract: The occurrence, speed and spread of the ‘Arab revolutions’ took almost everyone by surprise, including the protagonists. But the real surprise lies, this essay suggests, not in how or why these revolutions came to fruition; it rather lies in revolutions’ particular attributes — their ideological orientations and political trajectories. The essay discusses the revolutions’ key (unexpected) characteristics, arguing that the Arab uprisings occurred in new ideological times.

Competition over Authority and Access: International Land Deals in Madagascar

Abstract: Despite the well-publicized abandonment of Daewoo Logistics' gigantic agricultural project, large-scale land appropriations continue in Madagascar. Drawing on three case studies, this article analyses how relations between entities governing land access shape, and are shaped by, agribusiness-related land deals. State representatives and local elites generally welcome agribusiness investments but find themselves competing over the corresponding benefits and over land management more generally. In a context of legal pluralism, competition occurs between state officials, between state and local actors and also within the local arena. Both state and local elites may seek to reassert their authority by imposing new constraints on investors' access to land. Within the state, officials draw on different legal provisions to impose new procedures on investors but rarely enforce the 2005 land laws that recognize local rights and decentralize land management. Within the local arena, some local leaders seize upon investors' land claims to extend their territory at the expense of other communities, awakening or exacerbating local land conflicts. As a consequence, investors struggle to obtain land-use rights, whether legally formalized by state institutions or socially recognized by local entities, while the future of local land rights also remains uncertain. (Resume d'auteur)

Beyond the Enclave: Towards a Critical Political Economy of China and Africa

Abstract: This article provides a political economy framework for analysing China's engagements with Africa. It situates the rise of China in the context of the changing balance of power in the world system and particularly China's re-entry into spheres of influence in Africa that have been the purview of the former European colonial powers for two centuries or more. It begins by arguing that current approaches to China, Africa and international relations are fragmented in particular ways which prevent the development of a more critical political economy. It then examines a pervasive theme in China–Africa relations, which assumes that the Chinese work through enclaved investments to secure the resources of low-income economies, though in this sense the Chinese are no different from other investors. Where they do differ is in their bundling of aid, trade and FDI and their use of imported labour, which has been termed ‘surgical colonialism’. The article does not dispute the existence of Chinese enclaves but argues that we need more empirical evidence on the levels of labour importation in relation to local labour market conditions. This requires a more nuanced understanding of state–capital dynamics in those countries where the Chinese operate although the model appears to be one of elite brokerage. However, the enclaved investments and inter-elite bargaining are only part of the story and the closing sections of the article analyse the role of independent Chinese businesses in Africa's social and political development, which moves us beyond the enclave.

State Involvement, Land Grabbing and Counter‐Insurgency in Colombia

Abstract: This article examines the linkages between organized armed violence, land grabbing and the Colombian state, where paramilitary groups are key actors in recent large-scale land transfers. The author argues that institutional and violent mechanisms of land grabbing must be understood as historical processes of state formation and market reconfiguration. As such, crime and violence are not considered as extraneous factors, separated from political institutions and the market; they are instead analysed as constitutive components of political competition, accumulation and economic development. This article provides an analysis of these processes through an examination of agribusiness-related land grabs in the Lower Atrato Valley in northwestern Colombia, illuminating the relations between private counter-insurgent violence, criminal networks and state incentives to agribusiness.

‘Voluntary’ Poverty Alleviation Resettlement in China

Abstract: Current conceptualizations of resettlement in China as either voluntary or involuntary are too rigid. New guidelines and policies, particularly around Poverty Alleviation Resettlement (PAR), are emphasizing the importance of voluntarism. Little is known, however, about how the principle of voluntary relocation of villagers has actually been implemented. This study explores this process by examining local implementation and experiences of PAR in Linfen Prefecture, Shanxi. It introduces China's nationwide PAR programme, and then identifies the spatial and temporal characteristics of PAR in Linfen from 1997 to 2010, highlighting the factors that contribute to widespread voluntary resettlement.

In Praise of Organization: Egypt between Activism and Revolution

Abstract: This article considers the nature of activism and revolutionary process in the twenty-first century by examining some of the dilemmas involved in Egypt's ongoing process of transformation. Over the course of only a couple of weeks Egyptian activists who, for over a decade, had protested against Mubarak and his neoliberal policies, found themselves transformed from protestors, demonstrators and strikers, members of loosely structured networks, to the status of ‘revolutionaries’. These newly-minted revolutionaries were suddenly expected either to capture or renegotiate state power, provide a vision for the future emanating from the iconic image of Tahrir Square and transform both polity and society. The article argues that the characteristics of New Social Movements (NSMs), especially the absence of sustainable organizational structures, although well suited to the phase of mass protests in the lead-up to the ousting of Mubarak, now pose one of the main challenges to the prospects of genuine revolutionary change in the post-Mubarak era.

Gender Equality Policies in Rwanda: Public Relations or Real Transformations?

Abstract: This article examines Rwanda’s gender equality policies with the intention to contribute to the ongoing debate in the literature on the meaning of gender equality initiatives in authoritarian states. The article evaluates the transformative potential of Rwanda’s gender equality policies with reference to deep-rooted societal norms and practices within which gender inequalities are embedded. To this end, the article draws on in-depth interviews conducted in Rwanda with a range of stakeholders, as well as on documentary research. First, we explore the factors informing the Rwandan commitment to gender equality. Second, we discuss the positive developments this has brought about. We then distinguish five trends that threaten the transformative potential of Rwandan gender equality policies. We conclude that while a strong political will and target-driven policies offer opportunities for promoting gender equality, the transformative potential is jeopardized by (1) the dominance of an underlying economic rationale; (2) the neglect of the ‘invisible labour’ of women; (3) the formalistic implementation of gender policies and their focus on quantitative results; (4) the limited scope for civil society voices to influence policy; and (5) the lack of grassroots participation.

The Financialization of Micro-Credit

Abstract: The financial crisis which crested in 2008/2009 sparked much debate regarding the future of global financial governance. Echoing the ways in which that crisis entailed a particular intrusion of ‘high finance’ into everyday lives, the main contention of this article is that critical analyses of finance would benefit from training attention onto the intersections between global finance and the level of the everyday and the mundane. To explore this intersection, this article reviews the increasing ways in which micro-credit has been financialized. This process of micro/financialization, I argue, has been accomplished in very particular ways which have brought micro-credit networks and their borrowers more fully into the spaces of global capital markets. This development, however, confronts vulnerable populations of micro-borrowers with serious risks of various sorts. Most importantly, micro/financialization risks exporting — and globalizing — some of the riskiest parts of financial practices to the ‘poorest of the poor’. I conclude the article by noting the ways in which this involves a particularly dangerous extension of what some commentators have referred to as the ‘democratization of finance’.

Land Regularization in Brazil and the Global Land Grab

Abstract: This article investigates the seemingly contradictory policies adopted by the Brazilian state to prevent land grabs in one region while encouraging agribusiness investments in another The government recently initiated a programme intended to regularize titles of 300,000 homesteaders in unassigned public land in the Amazon region This effort in state making over a largely illegible landscape is aimed at offsetting large-scale illegal land grabs and ongoing (though significantly curtailed) deforestation In contrast, legal large-scale agribusiness investments are exacerbating deforestation and the concentration of land ownership in the Cerrado region through well-established state mechanisms While the imposition of legibility may regulate land concentration and degradation, legible landscapes also facilitate investments that drive both concentration and degradation The author argues that the regularization programme undertaken in the Amazon structures land grabbing nationally — not because large amounts of public land are in fact being privatized through regularization, but because it actively undermines land redistribution programmes elsewhere in the country and consolidates transportation and production infrastructure in the Amazon–Cerrado transition zone The state-making framework developed here captures the heterogeneity of global land grab processes, indicating the ways in which these are obstructed but not discarded by different government agencies, stalled but not yet overturned by Brazilian civil society

Transforming Activisms 2010+: Exploring Ways and Waves

Abstract: The waves of civic activism unfolding since late 2010 at a global level are striking. In major cities of the world, streets and squares have been filled with self-organized citizens demanding attention for social and political rights. The protest images have been televised, downloaded and quickly distributed - seemingly diverse sites and types of activisms being rapidly connected and speaking to each other. Does this scale and momentum signal a tipping point in a 'globalization of disaffection'? Are we witnessing the emergence of a new age-cohort of activists, similar to the '1968 generation'? What were the common elements, and what energy was driving the activisms of the squares and the blog spots? This Introduction to the Forum Debate section will try to position the notion of 'Activisms 2010+' in terms of its nature and relevance to current debates about citizen-led socio-political change. We argue that contemporary activisms constitute a distinct shift in the character of civic engagement as they surf on waves created by the increased availability and use of social media, and by a common set of rights-based demands.

Building the Politics Machine: Tools for ‘Resolving’ the Global Land Grab

Abstract: The recent proliferation of transnational land deals has put the long-fraught relationship between international cooperation, national development and local dispossession back in the political spotlight. This article argues that transnational land access cannot be resolved as a political question without a better understanding of the material, legal and administrative geographies that accompany and enable it. Using evidence from Laos, the paper illustrates two tools for ‘resolving’ the global land grab geographically: first, a biographical or trajectory-based approach that connects specific land grabs to larger development landscapes (e.g. of urban infrastructuring); and second, genealogies of property formalization that interrogate and deconstruct the legal geographies of land access, both on and off the map. The paper concludes by suggesting that these tools have purchase elsewhere as well.

Globalization with Chinese Characteristics: Externalisation, Dynamics and Transformations

Abstract: This article introduces a special issue on globalization ‘with Chinese characteristics’, but also makes its own contribution to the debates. It does so by focusing on the implications of China's rise for the nature and consequences of globalization as a distinct formation. It argues that globalization needs to be understood, in part, as the externalization of particular national forms of capitalism in particular historical periods. In this context, it explores the Chinese form in some detail, arguing that this form is likely to provide much of the initial character of a new, emergent version of globalization now in train. The ways China (and other ‘rising powers’) are beginning to impact other parts of the developing world presages the need for a new approach to the analysis of ‘development’. This article is critical of traditional discourses, and argues that innovation around the concept of ‘transformation’, including a focus on ‘conjunctures of critical transformation’, may lead to more appropriate and adequate analyses of development and open up those analyses more effectively to ‘non-Western’ voices. The authors discuss the ‘vectors’ by which China's externalization is transforming the developing world. They mobilize arguments from the other articles in the special issue, in order both to introduce their contributions to the relevant debates and to use their arguments as materials for the particular contribution this article provides.

The rise of social assistance in Brazil

Abstract: The rise of social assistance in Brazil has been remarkable. The 1988 Constitution signalled a renewed ‘social contract’ leading to citizenship-based social assistance providing guaranteed income to older and disabled people in poverty. Municipal activism in the 1990s extended the provision of direct transfers to all households in poverty through Bolsa Escola and other programmes later consolidated into Bolsa Familia. This article studies the origins and evolution of social assistance institutions in Brazil, paying due attention to the role of ideas and politics.

UN Water Report 2012: Depoliticizing Water

Abstract: The Fourth Edition of the World Water Development Report (henceforth WWDR4), the intellectual and political water equivalent to the successive reports of the inter-governmental panel on climate change, was published last year. As with its precursors, the three volume, four part, 909 pageslong report is a mine of information and analysis for all those centrally or even only remotely interested in any aspect of the hydrological cycle and its multiple relations to a wide and ever-expanding range of development issues. The tri-annual Water Report has indeed become the authoritative voice of the international community summarizing and exploring expertly the state, use and management of the world’s freshwater resources. The WWDR4’s main objective is to encourage all sorts of ‘stakeholders’ to engage in water-related decision-making processes and, in doing so, enhance the quality of decision making and improve implementation. The underlying assumption, untested as it may be, is that involvement by all water users, experts, managers, policy makers and financiers, would lead to better outcomes for all. However good this objective sounds, it remains a largely unexamined hypothesis and subject to serious critique. While earlier reports focused primarily on the assessment of the world’s water resources, the fourth instalment has significantly expanded its horizon and focuses more directly on the interaction between water and ‘drivers of change’ (such as increasing risk and uncertainty, financing, urbanization, institutional configurations, health, ecosystem services, and the like) and explores a series of case studies in greater depth. It would, of course, be futile to attempt to review exhaustively such a rich and diverse document, compiled by some of the world’s leading water experts. What I would prefer to do in this Assessment is to delve into some of the key issues thrown up by the WWDR4 and the insights generated by

Road Mapping: Megaprojects and Land Grabs in the Northern Guatemalan Lowlands

Abstract: From IIRSA (Integration of Regional Infrastructure in South America) to the PPP (Puebla to Panama Plan, later renamed the Mesoamerica Project), development banks are sponsoring a renewed wave of mega-infrastructure projects across the Americas to support corporate trade and commerce. Concurrent with these are donor-led efforts to modernize land administration systems, including a US$ 31 million World Bank loan (1998–2007) to survey and legalize settler claims in the northern Guatemalan department of Peten. Contrary to project planners’ stated goals of sustainable development, infrastructure projects have coincided with widespread land grabbing (up to 46 per cent of smallholder lands) by cattle ranchers, African palm plantations, narco traffickers, and other imbricated elites. Documenting the crossings and conjunctures of the PPP with market-led agrarian reform, this ethnographic study suggests that the Guatemalan military may be a shadow beneficiary of new power assemblages emerging from the narco/cattle/agro-industrial land concentration occurring in Peten.

Political Economies of Extractive Industry: From Documenting Complexity to Informing Current Debates

Abstract: The literature on extractive industries has grown rapidly in recent years both because the empirical significance of resource extraction has increased and because resource extraction necessarily invokes other questions of wider purchase in development studies. This virtual issue brings together articles published in Development and Change on mining, oil and gas extraction since the early 1980s that explore these inter-connections. They focus on certain interfaces: extraction and rural political economy; extraction and policies of economic adjustment; and extraction and development politics. The articles often document the complexity and contextual specificity of these interconnections, but we draw particular attention here to the insights they offer on broader issues such as the relationship between resource extraction, adjustment and neoliberalization.

Social Struggles as Epistemic Struggles

Abstract: markdown____ This contribution offers a view on social struggles as epistemic struggles to critically engage with the Activism 2010+ debate. Our core idea is that social struggles that stand up against depoliticization, economic exploitation and cultural alienation cannot be adequately understood through the same rationality that underlies the processes that they are breaking with. We invite a reading of social struggles as open questions to the dominant ways of thinking and ordering of the real. Our way of doing this is by developing a view of the Zapatistas uprising in Chiapas, Mexico, and the Battle of Seattle, USA, as political events that have challenged the epistemic hegemony of modernity, its instrumental rationality and its chronological temporality. In so doing, we establish a relation between the political ideas of Hanna Arendt and those of decolonial thought, as a means to connect traditions of critique that belong to different genealogies (Western critical thought and Latin American decolonial thought) and which correspond to different conceptions of modernity and social justice. Bringing together these different traditions of critique is a key analytical step to move beyond one-sided universalisms into forms of argumentation that are built on the possibility of dialogue across a plurality of epistemic locations. This is a modest move in the much-needed search for epistemic justice.

China and the South : objectives, actors and interactions

Abstract: China has stepped up its engagement of developing countries through both bilateral interactions and the establishment of more formal multilateral fora. To achieve this, China's leaders have established a clear state policy designed to secure much needed resources and to establish an identity as a new and different type of ‘great power’. China has also become a proactive provider of development aid which, when combined with other forms of economic engagement, have raised concerns in the West that China is undermining the promotion of a liberal global order. But we need to take care in considering who, or what, is driving Chinese policy. The institutional weakness of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs means that commercial and financial agencies have dominated the agenda; major state owned enterprises and increasingly large numbers of small, often private enterprises are pursuing their own commercial agendas overseas, which are often not controlled by Beijing. The result is a patchwork of different types of relationships with developing countries, more often driven by the commercial concerns of economic actors than by a coherent diplomatic strategy.

Enclosing Ethnic Minorities and Forests in the Golden Economic Quadrangle

Abstract: Ethnic minority farmers in the infamous Golden Triangle were first incorporated into the nation states of China, Laos and Thailand, and later into the economic region called the Golden Economic Quadrangle. This article traces policies in each country for minorities, development and the environment, followed by an analysis of agrarian transitions under economic regionalization. Using the framework of powers of exclusion and racialization, our findings show the changes for ethnic minorities who, with the exception of those in the lowlands, face environmental enclosures that dispossess them from lands on which livelihoods are based. Ideological legacies from the Golden Triangle, including ‘backward’ minorities, the fight against drugs, and threats to national security, continue to inform policies and development projects. While some farmers have become entrepreneurs planting cash crops, most face increasing marginalization under deepening regional capitalism.

Sustainable Graduation from Social Protection Programmes

Abstract: Efforts to reduce extreme poverty by assisting poor people to cross income or asset thresholds are receiving increasing attention in social protection programming. Livelihood-promoting interventions aim to reduce vulnerability, so that participants can manage moderate risk and ‘graduate’ from social protection provision. This article elaborates the theory of change underpinning the notion of graduation and explores the range of enabling and constraining factors that facilitate or undermine this change process, drawing on case studies from Bangladesh, Ethiopia and Rwanda. The authors distinguish ‘threshold’ graduation from ‘sustainable’ graduation and argue that multiple factors operating beyond the household level — such as market conditions, community investment and scale effects — have significant implications for the graduation potential of social protection programmes.

Renminbi Internationalization: A Journey to Where?

Abstract: The renminbi is currently undergoing a process of internationalization which has raised fundamental questions about the evolution of the international monetary system and the dominance of the US dollar. In this article, we assess how far the renminbi has travelled down the internationalization road and analyse the possibilities for it challenging the role of the US dollar in the future. We utilize Cohen's (1971) taxonomy to document the current dimensions of renminbi internationalization. Looking forward, we briefly summarize three common approaches to analysing currency internationalization, and propose a new approach. We argue that renminbi internationalization should be seen as a response to crises, first the Asian financial crisis and then the global financial crisis. As such, we argue that current internationalization has been driven by short-term problem solving rather than a coherent long-term strategy. The current path of RMB internationalization is best described as one of ‘currency normalization’ rather than ‘currency dominance’.

What Contribution Can China Make to Inclusive Growth in Sub‐Saharan Africa?

Abstract: Despite rapid economic growth, the numbers living in absolute poverty in Africa have grown. China's rapidly expanding presence in Africa is widely considered to be a prime source of this unequalization. However, at the same time, its presence also supports countervailing and unrecognized processes of equalization, although this varies by country, class, gender and age grouping. China has the capacity to help Africa move to a more sustainable and less unequal growth path by providing low-cost consumer and capital goods, new market opportunities which can be accessed by small-scale producers and new, more appropriate capital goods. Taking advantage of the China-induced commodities price boom to promote more equal patterns of growth will depend on the capacity of African actors to promote linkages effectively. The extent to which Africa is able to take advantage of opportunities opened up by China to move to a new, more inclusive growth path will largely be determined by political developments in Africa. But these political dynamics are not independent of China's increasing economic and political footprint, both globally and in its direct relations with Africa.

Social Capital and Post‐Conflict Reconstruction in Burundi: The Limits of Community‐based Reconstruction

Abstract: Using an examination of three NGO interventions in post-conflict Burundi, this article questions community-based reconstruction as a mechanism to rebuild social capital after conflicts, particularly when direct livelihood support is provided. The authors demonstrate a general shortcoming of the methodology employed in community-based development (CBD), namely its focus on ‘technical procedural design’, which results in what may be termed ‘supply-driven demand-driven’ reconstruction. The findings suggest the need for a political economy perspective on social capital, which acknowledges that the effects on social capital are determined by the type of economic resource CBD gives access to. Through the use of a resource typology, the case studies show that the CBD methodology and the potential effects on social capital differ when applied to public and non-strategic versus private and strategic resources. This has particular consequences for post-conflict situations. A generalized application of CBD methodology to post-conflict reconstruction programmes fails to take adequate account of the nature of the interventions and the challenges posed by the particular post-conflict setting. The article therefore questions the current popular ‘social engineering’ approach to post-conflict reconstruction.