Development and Change

Nature(s) have been commodified since the early days of capitalism, but through processes and socio-natural relationships mediated by their times, histories and localities. While the conditions under which nature's commodities are being trademarked today may be new, their potential for commodification is not. Commodifications of nature should not come as a surprise to environmental social scientists and activists. In this article, I argue that commodification of ‘nature's products, places and processes’ produces new sorts of socio-natures...

This article explores the tensions between aid funding and grassroots development goals in the context of post-disaster fisheries reconstruction in Aceh, Indonesia. We argue that both short- and long-term grassroots goals are distorted by upward accountability requirements which lead to unsatisfactory aid outcomes. Our analysis employs the concept of aid webs and draws on fifty-one formal interviews with stakeholders in Aceh in 2007/2008. The findings initially concentrate on the impacts of upward accountability on project cycles, with a particular focus on the problematic incorporation of private boat-building contractors and commercial values during the implementation phase...

This article examines the relationship between birth masculinity and socio-economic levels in China. Both 2000 and 2005 data suggest the presence of a non-linear relationship between the sex ratio at birth and socio-economic status, with a lower sex ratio at birth observed among both the poorest and the richest households. This inverted-U pattern is significantly different from what is observed in India and what has been assumed previously for China. Multivariate analyses indicate that this pattern persists after the introduction of several other covariates of birth masculinity such as ethnicity, fertility, migration status, age or parity...

The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) is generally considered to be making adequate progress towards meeting Target 10 of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which calls for halving the proportion of the population with inadequate access to drinking water and sanitation. Progress towards achieving Target 10 is evaluated by the Joint Monitoring Programme (JMP), run by UNICEF and WHO. This article shows that the assessment methodologies employed by the JMP significantly overstate coverage rates in the drinking water and sanitation sectors, by overlooking and ‘not counting’ problems of access, affordability, quality of service and pollution...

This article reflects on two experiences of applying qualitative life course research in development studies. The first methodology centred on the elicited narratives of older people in Buenos Aires exploring their lifetime relations with their children and their current well-being. The second employed semi-structured interviews with young adults in Zambia to investigate their trajectories towards economic empowerment. In both methodologies, the roles of linked lives and of wider social, economic and political changes were central...

This article critically examines the contours of ‘care transnationalization’ as an ongoing social process and a field of enquiry. Care transnationalization scholarship combines structural understandings of global power relations with an emphasis on social interactions between defined actors in ways that keep sight of human agency, material welfare and wider social development. It has, however, tended to privilege particular forms, dynamics and sites of care transnationalization over others. The body of research on care labour migration, which is otherwise the most developed literature on care transnationalization to date, contains a number of biases and omissions in its coverage of border-spanning relations and their mediation across country contexts...

In recent years, several middle-income countries, including Chile, Mexico and Uruguay, have increased the availability of early childhood education and care (ECEC) services. These developments have received little scholarly attention so far, resulting in the (surely unintended) impression that Latin American social policy is tied to a familialist track, when in reality national and regional trends are more varied and complex. This article looks at recent efforts to expand ECEC services in Chile and Mexico. In spite of similar concerns over low female labour force participation and child welfare, the approaches of the two countries to service expansion have differed significantly...

This article explores the political and social economy of care in India through a focus on childcare practices, from the viewpoint of the care giver — a perspective frequently ignored or touched on only generally in earlier discussions on development or social policy. It is argued that the care regime is an ad hoc summation of informal, stratified practices. It is shaped by the institutional context, in particular the economic and social inequalities of work and livelihoods, as well as trends and absences in state economic and social policy...

This article claims that welfare states modelled on a contributory basis and with a system of entitlements that assumes stable two-parent families, a traditional breadwinner model, full formal employment and a relatively young age structure are profoundly flawed in the context of present-day challenges. While this is true for affluent countries modelled on the Bismarckian type of welfare system, the costs of the status quo are even more devastating in middle-income economies with high levels of inequality. A gendered approach to welfare reform that introduces the political economy and the economy of care and unpaid work is becoming critical to confront what may very well become a perfect storm for the welfare of these nations and their peoples...

In Latin American countries with historically strong social policy regimes (such as those in the Southern Cone), neoliberal policies are usually blamed for the increased burden of female unpaid work. However, studying the Nicaraguan care regime in two clearly defined periods — the Sandinista and the neoliberal eras — suggests that this argument may not hold in the case of countries with highly familialist social policy regimes. Despite major economic, political and policy shifts, the role of female unpaid work, both within the family and in the community, remains persistent and pivotal, and was significant long before the onset of neoliberal policies...

This article examines how social policies and programmes implemented in Argentina shape the political and social organization of childcare. The author seeks to analyse how welfare institutions are currently responding to emerging needs, and to what extent they facilitate the defamilialization of childcare for different social classes. Because Argentina lacks a truly unified ‘care policy’, four different kinds of facilities and programmes are examined: employment-based childcare services; pre-school schemes; social assistance care services; and poverty reduction strategies...

China's economic reforms over the past three decades have dramatically changed the mechanisms for allocating goods and labour in both market and non-market spheres. This article examines the social and economic trends that intensify the pressure on the care economy, and on women in particular in playing their dual roles as care givers and income earners in post-reform China. The analysis sheds light on three critical but neglected issues. How does the reform process reshape the institutional arrangements of care for children and elders? How does the changing care economy affect women's choices between paid work and unpaid care responsibilities? And what are the implications of women's work–family conflicts for the well-being of women and their families? The authors call for a gendered approach to both social and labour market policies, with investments in support of social reproduction services so as to ease the pressures on women...

This article draws together unusual characteristics of the legacy of apartheid in South Africa: the state-orchestrated destruction of family life, high rates of unemployment and a high prevalence of HIV/AIDS. The disruption of family life has resulted in a situation in which many women have to fulfil the role of both breadwinner and care giver in a context of high unemployment and very limited economic opportunities. The question that follows is: given this crisis of care, to what extent can or will social protection and employment-related social policies provide the support women and children need?...

Recent social policy reforms in South Korea indicate a progressive shift by a conservative government to modify the familialistic male breadwinner model that informs its welfare regime. The Korean government has demonstrated support for women through an increase in the provision, regulation and coordination of childcare and workplace support programmes for working parents. At the same time, labour market reforms have also created more pressures on women to seek and maintain paid work outside the home. Conflicting social and economic policy objectives have resulted in a confusing mix of policies, advancing and impeding gender equality at the same time...

This article analyses two instances of abortion law reform in Latin America. In 2006, after a decades-long impasse, the highly controversial issue of abortion came to dominate the political agenda when Colombia liberalized its abortion law and Nicaragua adopted a total ban on abortion. The article analyses the central actors in the reform processes, their strategies and the opportunity contexts. Drawing on Htun's (2003) framework, it examines why these processes concluded with opposing legislative outcomes...

This article shows how poor people living with HIV/AIDS in Tanzania navigate a myriad of actors, agencies and organizations to obtain the aid they need to survive. It focuses on community-based organizations which establish networks of care through which people obtain care, treatment and financial support. A case study of a roadside town in Tanzania illustrates that these community-based networks of care — essential to the survival of many — are partly the product of the AIDS industry, which encourages the establishment of community-based organizations and voluntary service delivery rather than more formalized systems of care...

Dystopian accounts of climate change posit that it will lead to more conflict, causing state failure and mass population movements. Yet these narratives are both theoretically and empirically problematic: the conflict–environment hypothesis merges a global securitization agenda with local manipulations of Northern fears about the state of planetary ecology. Sudan has experienced how damaging this fusion of wishful thinking, power politics and top-down development can be. In the 1970s, global resource scarcity concerns were used locally to impose the fata morgana of Sudan as an Arab-African breadbasket: in the name of development, violent evictions of local communities contributed to Sudan's second civil war and associated famines...

Critical changes are underway in the domain of grain utilization. With the large-scale diversion of corn for the manufacture of ethanol, the bulk of it in the USA, there has been a transformation of the food–feed competition that emerged in the twentieth century and characterized the world's grain consumption after World War II. Concerns have already been expressed in several quarters regarding the role of corn-based ethanol in the recent food price spike and the global food crisis. In this context, this article attempts to outline the theoretical tenets of a food–feed–fuel competition in the domain of grain consumption...

Inasmuch as women's subordinate status is a product of the patriarchal structures of constraint that prevail in specific contexts, pathways of women's empowerment are likely to be "path dependent." They will be shaped by women's struggles to act on the constraints that prevail in their societies, as much by what they seek to defend as by what they seek to change. The universal value that many feminists claim for individual autonomy may not therefore have the same purchase in all contexts. This article examines processes of empowerment as they play out in the lives of women associated with social mobilization organizations in the specific context of rural Bangladesh...

Famine, like poverty, has always been with us. No region and no century has been immune. Its scars — economic, psychological and political — can long outlast its immediate impact on mortality and health. Famines are a hallmark of economic backwardness, and were thus more likely to occur in the pre-industrialized past. Yet the twentieth century suffered some of the most devastating ever recorded. That century also saw shifts in both the causes and symptoms of famine. This new century's famines have been "small" by historical standards, and the threat of major ones seemingly confined to ever-smaller pockets of the globe...