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Philip Alston: Tax as a human rights issue — Center for Economic and Social Rights (cesr.org)

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Philip Alston, UN Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights and former CESR board chair, addresses the International Strategy Meeting 'Advancing Tax Justice Through Human Rights' in Lima, Peru, 29 April 2015.

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Philip Alston: Tax as a human rights issue

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Philip Alston, UN Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights and former CESR board chair, addresses the International Strategy Meeting 'Advancing Tax Justice Through Human Rights' in Lima, Peru, 29 April 2015.

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Inequality kills | Oxfam International

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The wealth of the world's 10 richest men has doubled since the pandemic began. The incomes of 99% of humanity are worse off because of COVID-19. Widening economic, gender, and racial inequalities-as well as the inequality that exists between countries-are tearing our world apart.

This is not by chance, but choice: "economic violence" is perpetrated when structural policy choices are made for the richest and most powerful people. This causes direct harm to us all, and to the poorest people, women and girls, and racialized groups most. Inequality contributes to the death of at least one person every four seconds.

But we can radically redesign our economies to be centered on equality. We can claw back extreme wealth through progressive taxation; invest in powerful, proven inequality-busting public measures; and boldly shift power in the economy and society. If we are courageous, and listen to the movements demanding change, we can create an economy in which nobody lives in poverty, nor with unimaginable billionaire wealth-in which inequality no longer kills.

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The wealth of the world's 10 richest men has doubled since the pandemic began. The incomes of 99% of humanity are worse off because of COVID-19. Widening economic, gender, and racial inequalities-as well as the inequality that exists between countries-are tearing our world apart.

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Note: Figures are Estimateshttps://youtu.be/JRlndgfIpb4

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Resisiting Neoliberalism  - The role of Development Education

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Policy and Practice: A Development Education Review - Key Journal Articles on Neoliberalism 

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Policy and Practice: A Development Education Review - Key Journal Articles on Neoliberalism 

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Global Debt Slavery | Financial Justice Ireland

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"Must we starve our children to pay our debt?"
- the late Julius Nyerere, former President of Tanzania

Overview

In this session we take a closer look at debt. Ireland is not the first country to become heavily indebted. The session highlights the new trends in indebtedness, particularly the rise of private debt around the world and its implications. It asks why these countries are in debt, and what were the particular circumstances of different cases. We ask if debt is a tool of oppression within unequal power relationships.

Learning Outcome

That participants will gain an understanding of the role of debt in the current financial crisis, and also gain a global and historical perspective on the topic. Participants will also explore the concept of debt justice.

Resources

1. Video: ODG, 3000 sandwiches

This video employs a simple metaphor to help visualise the mechanics of debt, while also effectively explaining how countries become indebted.

2. Report - Life and Debt: Global studies of debt and resistance

This report demonstrates the realities of debt around the world, employing a global perspective in familiar tales of debt and resistance. Read the introduction and comparison on case studies; pages 1-10. Read here.

3. The New Debt Trap - Jubilee Debt Campaign

Debt crisis are becoming dramatically more frequent. This report from UK-based Jubilee Debt Campaign looks at how the response to the last global financial crisis has laid the ground for the next, which is already starting in some countries. Read the executive summary; pages 3-4.

4. Video: Thomas Sankara's 'Against Debt' Speech (1987)

In 1987, President of Burkina Faso, Thomas Sankara, made a revolutionary speech to African leaders in Addis-Ababa. Months later he was assassinated in a military coup.

5. Blog: A Really Really Special Case Requires a Really Really Special Solution - Michael Taft

In this blog post, economist Michael Taft works out the cost of the financial crisis per capita in Europe, finding that Ireland has "paid 42 percent of the total cost of the European banking crisis".

6.Video: Debt and Morality - When it is OK not to Pay Debt?

At the opening plenary session of the Life Before Debt Conference at SOAS, London, Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams discusses the morality of debt crises from a faith-based approach.

7. Blog: Are Financial Crises a New Problem? - Alan Cibils

The history of capitalism shows that in the absence of strong state regulation of economic activity, financial crises are inevitable and endemic. The greatest financial crisis before the one currently unfolding in Europe began in 1929. Even though the crisis of 1929 started in the U.S, its effects were felt world-wide with a decade-long depression (known as the Great Depression) that left millions of people destitute around the world...
Read more

Discussion Questions

1. When it is ok to refuse to repay a sovereign debt?

2. Do you think Ireland should have been given a debt write-down?

3. How do you feel about what Rowan Williams has to say about ownership and the exploitation of others' misery, in relation to themes explored in previous sessions?

4. In resolving debt crises, do you think different standards should apply depending on whether the country is 'poor' or 'wealthy'? Why?

5. What role does debt play in global finance?

Learning Journal

Is debt a tool of oppression?

How has the debt crisis had an impact on life in Ireland?

How, as far as I am aware, has debt crises effected other countries?

Extra Resources

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Global Debt Slavery | Financial Justice Ireland

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"Must we starve our children to pay our debt?" - the late Julius Nyerere, former President of Tanzania In this session we take a closer look at debt. Ireland is not the first country to become heavily indebted. The session highlights the new trends in indebtedness, particularly the rise of private debt around the world and its implications.

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During the coronavirus pandemic, many women around the world have struggled harder than ever to find the money to survive. Both the formal and informal economies have been affected by lockdowns, women’s income has dropped more than men’s, and their unpaid domestic and care work has increased.

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NGOs and the Political Economy of International Development and Development Education: An Irish Perspective | Development Education Review

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Abstract: In Ireland the role of development non-governmental organisations (NGOs) is rarely interrogated. There is, rather, a shared discourse across the government, NGO and academic sectors which does not really encourage critical enquiry. One of the reasons is, arguably, the reduction of support for development education that would have kept that critical lens more active. In light of the recent Oxfam and Goal scandals, we must ask if development NGOs are now 'part of the problem' rather than 'part of the solution' to use a 1960s phrase. After a brief context-setting section Why Now? which discusses recent events around the NGOs, we start our enquiry with a set of Deconstructions of relevant terms such as 'development', 'civil society', 'human rights' and the term 'NGO' itself, too often referred to in reverential or uncritical ways in the NGO literature and more widely. We then move on to consider whether it is a case of Irish exceptionalism which explains why the political economy of development and NGOs debate in Ireland seems so insulated from international debates. Finally, we open up a Discussion which tries to pose some of the main matters arising from our enquiry. We understand our discussion might seem challenging to some, but we hope to spark an open debate on whether NGOs are part of the solution or, rather, part of the problem. This debate is too important to be left to the NGOs alone and requires the critical engagement of development education we would argue.

Key words: NGOs; Oxfam; Goal; International Development; Development Education; Colonialism; Neoliberalism.
Why now?
Reports broke in early 2018 that senior Oxfam GB officials had sexually exploited young (possibly underage) girls during the Haiti emergency of 2010-2011. The UK Charity Commission has since reported on these events and its overall conclusion, in the dry language of enquiries, is that:

"No charity is more important than the people it serves or the mission it pursues. The charity's governance and culture with regard to safeguarding has repeatedly fallen below standards expected and failed to meet promises made" (Charity Commission, 2019: 32).

What was noticeable when the scandal broke was that there was not really a shocked reaction in the 'development sector'. Shaista Aziz - a past aid worker with Oxfam and other organisations declared that 'I wasn't surprised. Nor was I surprised when it became clear that it had been covered up and that further allegations of sexual abuse, bullying, harassment and intimidation in the aid sector soon followed' (Aziz, 2018). Was there then a shared and accepted understanding that the power relations between the big NGOs and the 'developing' countries would probably lead precisely to such abuses? It transpired as revelations followed that this was clearly not an individual case of abuse but, rather, a structural, and indeed sector-wide, feature of these large, well-funded, well-connected and still widely respected organisations. NGOs are part of the problem it would seem at first glance, from both a gender and a majority world perspective.

In Ireland we have had the quite different, but equally damaging in its impact, débacle in relation to Goal, the third largest development NGO in the state, which has to some extent been 'buried'. A United States (US) government report in 2016 had expressed concerns around three areas: 'procurement system weaknesses, mishandling of conflicts of interest and inadequate financial function' (MacCormaic, 2017). The story which emerged of collusion and bid-rigging in Southern Turkey, where the aid operations in Syria were centred, eventually went far beyond these seemingly innocuous phrases. In fact, the US Office of the Inspector General was investigating 'actors alleged to be directly engaged in corruption and conflict of interest [that] included both field office staff and members of Goal's senior management team' (ibid). In the event both the US and Irish funders of Goal decided to accept the resignation of a senior officer (as happened in the Oxfam case linked to sexual abuse) and a commitment to 'put their own house in order' as sufficient remedy. We might well surmise that Oxfam and Goal were deemed by governments to be 'too big to fail' as were the major banks in Ireland and elsewhere when the 2008-09 financial crisis broke. Again, this points towards NGOs being clearly part of the problem of unregulated contemporary globalised capitalism (see Wallace, 2004).

To understand the underlying dynamics of the politics of development NGOs we need to examine critically the overall discursive structures and power relationships related to the aid infrastructure. This is a more specific question than that raised by Dambisa Moyo in her influential critique of development aid from a very different position to our own, namely a pro market 'neoliberal' perspective (Moyo, 2009) which questions whether aid 'works' as it were. We are, rather, asking whether aid systems, including control apparatuses such as monitoring and evaluation (M&E) systems, are silencing or oppressing the voices of marginalised people rather than promoting equality, ownership and accountability for those affected by poverty and voicelessness as they claim. Those voices might help reduce power abuses, whilst power-blind M&E systems would tend to re-produce or worsen the top-down features of the aid sector and hence function oppressively.

Social transformation and empowerment to achieve social justice are important goals of development and critical discourse analysis alike, the latter seeking to establish the role of discourses in creating unequal power relationships. Hence we will now apply critical discourse analysis to 'deconstruct' some of the key terms such as development, civil society and NGOs in order to confront these concepts with development practice. The Oxfam and Goal scandals around sexual and financial abuse respectively must be seen as part of this broader set of structural issues and cannot plausibly be seen as mere aberrations. They highlight the general power dynamics of the NGO/majority world relationship, the macho modus operandi most of the more aggressive ones adopt, their cavalier attitude towards due process, and the prioritisation of the organisation above development goals, which explains the denials and cover-ups that have occurred in both cases. We see the events described in a nutshell above as just the tip of the iceberg, not an anomaly, and symptomatic of a much wider structural malaise that is not really acknowledged (at least openly) in the NGO milieu. We would argue that the many sincere members and supporters of the development NGOs deserve the type of open, self-critical analysis we are trying to foster here. Indeed, our research involved a number of conversations (we would not call them interviews) with present and past Irish NGO workers that, necessarily have been anonymised.
Deconstructions
Deconstruction does not mean the same as to destroy, rather it is a double movement of simultaneous affirmation and undoing (see Derrida, 1981). It was originally deployed in philosophy and, for example, by feminist theorists to expose the male bias of the European intellectual tradition. Deconstruction has also been deployed in relation to development studies (e.g. Crush 1995, Munck, 1999) opening them up to post-modernist perspectives. It seeks to expose the fault lines, the ambiguities in key concepts and to reveal the contradictions inherent therein. The influence of discourse studies has been quite influential in critical development studies, for example with the emergence of the 'post-development' school. A fundamental insight was to consider the way the inter-connected power, knowledge and discourse of what we call 'development' has served to establish the dominance of the West over the Third World after the end of formal colonialism (see Cooper and Packard, 1997).

'Development' can, without much exaggeration, be seen as the dominant central organising concept of our era. It is a concept that emerged in the social sciences as a means to deal with the disorder created by progress towards modernity in Europe. The development of capitalism out of the old feudal order led to the twin processes of urbanisation and industrialisation which led to poverty, unemployment and social exclusion. The source of disorder was seen to lie in laissez faire economics; essentially meaning the operation of a free market regardless of its impact on nature and society. For Auguste Comte, progress was 'the development of order under the influence of love' (cited in Cowen and Shenton, 1995: 34). Positivism was a system of thought developed by Comte and transmitted into modern science which guided developmental knowledge as an altruistic system: sociology would guide 'development' to establish 'order and progress', thus acting as a trustee for the development of society.

A quite distinct discursive construction of development and its Other, namely 'underdevelopment', emerged in the aftermath of the Second World War and the decline of classic colonialism. As the United States, the now dominant global power, moved to consolidate its hegemony, it articulated a new notion of 'underdevelopment'. By declaring the post-colonial regions of Africa, Asia and Latin America as 'underdeveloped', the US set in motion a neo-colonial strategy to systematically change this 'Third World' and achieve progress towards the US model of development. This new development project offered a universal blueprint for national economic development under US tutelage. The modernisation project was replaced in the 1990s by the globalisation project, which turned away from national development towards a new global development model based on privatisation, the retreat of the state and the freeing up of Third World markets to the now dominant North Atlantic corporations and their local allies in the Third World.

As to the role of the NGOs in relation to the above processes, the self-image of the NGO - and NGO activists in particular - is very different from the role NGOs actually play in the contemporary political economy of globalisation. Thus Dóchas - the Irish umbrella body for development NGOs - states that 'our work is driven by the belief that our support for people and organisations in developing countries can bring about real and positive change' (Dóchas, 2019). We, as authors/activists, know many development workers, and have no doubt whatsoever that most are committed individuals. So how do we square the ostensible aims and objectives of NGOs and their staff with the verdict of Hardt and Negri in their influential alter-globalisation text Empire that humanitarian NGOs such as Amnesty, Oxfam and MSF 'are in effect (even if it runs counter to the intentions of the participants) some of the most powerful pacific weapons of the new world order - the charitable campaigns and the mendicant orders of Empire' (Hardt and Negri, 2000: 36)? Their 'moral' intervention around development can actually be seen as a frontline force of imperial intervention; we need only think of the so-called 'humanitarian wars' of the 1990s (supported by many NGOs) or we could look back further to the role of the religious orders in the making of colonialism, an issue still very much of the present in the case of Ireland.

The NGOs in Latin America show an almost paradigmatic evolution from the radical rhetoric of the 1970s to fully compliant agents of neoliberal globalisation in the 1990s. In the 1970s, the NGOs in Latin America had provided humanitarian support for the victims of the military dictatorships and consistently denounced their abuses of human rights. With democratisation in the 1980s and 1990s, the NGO's began to shift their critique towards the state in general and in defence of a somewhat nebulous 'civil society' (see Biekart, 1999). The NGOs shared much of the discourse of neoliberalism in regards to the supposed evils of the state, especially when it was a left-of-centre government in power as in the 2000s. There is little reference to this evolution in Ireland nor, for that matter, to the parallel debates and critiques in the countries of Sub-Saharan Africa where the bulk of Irish Aid partner countries are located (see Amutabi, 2006; Shivji, 2007).

What happened then in the 1980s with the NGOs generally was a certain confluence between their anti-statist project and the hollowing-out of the state by the neoliberal technocrats. In part, the NGOs were facing the dilemmas of any social movement poised between the need to remain faithful to its objectives and the advantages of institutionalisation. It was also part of the price of success in so far as the NGOs had gained considerable influence and prestige which they now wanted to bring to bear in a more coherent way. But also, precisely at around this time, the state was beginning to retreat from some of its traditional roles in managing society, and the NGOs were presented with an opportunity (as well as the danger of co-option of course). The possible role of the NGOs in 'filling the gap' left by the retreating state was taken up explicitly by the World Bank in the 1990s. It was clear that, on the ground, development NGOs in particular were beginning to fulfil some of the functions abandoned by the state in the neoliberal 'revolution'. The World Bank became very concerned with the role of 'civil society' in holding together the atomised individuals (consumers) created by the neoliberal transformation. They began to see the need for structural adjustment 'with a human face' to avoid the worst effects of social disintegration and political instability. The NGOs became an integral element in this drive to create some degree of social cohesion and make up for the retreating state. From a progressive standpoint, the apparent co-option of the NGOs by neoliberalism was deeply disturbing, and for many activists in Latin America the NGOs were now seen to be openly 'in the service of imperialism' (see Petras, 1997). These conflicted experiences do not seem to have really impacted on the NGO world-view in Ireland and mainstream development education programmes tend to, rather, reinforce the charitable approach (Simpson, 2017).

The contemporary NGO scene more broadly was also shaped by the 'humanitarian wars' that followed the breakup of the old Soviet Union in the 1990s: development and security became inseparably linked as did the relationship between many international NGOs and the armed forces of the imperial powers. In the new era of 'biopolitics' - derived from Foucault's notion of biopower (Cisney and Morales, 2016) - and the extension of state power over both the physical and political bodies of a population - the NGOs moved into a crucial role in the new power paradigm of the neoliberal world order. From the liberal trusteeship of the past - that took rights and freedom as its reference points - there was a shift to an openly neoliberal movement under the guise of humanitarian emergencies. As Mark Duffield puts it:

"Emergency has provided a means of generating the world of peoples, ignoring existing laws, conventions or restraints; it has allowed the colonisation of new countries or increasing a presence where a foothold already existed" (Duffield, 2007: 48).

The US military-industrial complex that critics referred to in the 1950s, was being replaced by the military-NGO complex in the post-Cold War era. We note that Irish NGOs' humanitarian budgets increased during the past 5-10 years, whilst work on human rights and participatory political empowerment processes seem to be shrinking or simply 'mainstreamed' into livelihoods and humanitarian work.

The political terrain that the NGOs see themselves working on today is that of 'civil society' (see Kleibl, 2017). It is assumed that there is a shared understanding of what civil society is and it is also taken for granted that it is 'a good thing'. The romance with the concept of civil society had begun in Eastern Europe and Latin America in the 1980s under very different struggles for democratisation. By the time it was mainstreamed in the 1990s it had been co-opted into the new global governance architecture designed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, increasingly dominating the African continent (see DuBois, 1991) and across the global South. It entered development discourse as the underpinning for 'governance' which was arguably just another way of subjugating the Third World to the needs of imperialism. The virtues of 'empowerment' and 'bottom up' development were harnessed to assist the new free-market driven economic development strategy. We saw, in this period, a marked 'NGOisation' of the social movements that had played such a key role in the earlier democratisation struggles, not least in regards to the women's movements in many regions of the global South (see Alvarez, 1999).

In the post-Cold War era the already 'domesticated' concept of civil society was scaled up to the global level and a new concept of 'global civil society' emerged (see Chandhoke, 2005; Munck, 2006). Never clearly defined, it was variously taken to mean the international NGOs, transnational advocacy networks and/or global social movements. It was and is seen to coordinate civil society organisations in different countries within a new 'global' framework. It helped provide legitimation for the NGOs operating on humanitarian, environmental and rights-based issues. But global civil society describes a very heterogeneous grouping - ranging from non-profits to businesses, radical peasant movements to well-established INGO's, etc. - which is hardly captured adequately by the impressionistic definition that they were all, somehow, doing 'globalisation from below'. It is unclear what implications the term of 'global civil society' might have in relation to the established inter-state system, and its ambiguous and contested politics leave it at best as a liberal aspiration.

There are further reasons why 'global civil society' cannot have a transformative dynamic and at best can only act as a palliative for the unsustainable economics of neoliberalism. Because it values conversation as an objective in its own right it can never reach a consensus to act as a collective agency as that would bring dialogue to an end. It disallows and cannot comprehend mass movements for social change, be they the labour movements or the Islamist movements. Furthermore, even a cursory analysis of 'global civil society' (and its INGO constituents) show how they fail utterly any tests around representation and accountability which are, of course, key to any transformative social movement. The issue of representation is particularly relevant when dealing with movements around migrants, market traders, bonded labour or indigenous peoples given INGOs are most often based in the global North. There are no clear democratic mechanisms to ensure representivity, let alone accountability, which would entail a dismantling of the authoritarian bureaucratic structures of the INGOs themselves to start with.

The overarching paradigm most development NGOs operate within today is arguably the 'human rights' frame, also taken as a given and as an uncontested human good (see Bartholomey and Breakspear, 2004). Indeed, one of the defining features of the globalisation discourse was the global institutionalisation of human rights. They were to become the meta-narrative of the new era, part of the benign spread of Western modernity to the Third World under the aegis of the free market in capital, finance, land and people. There was very little reflexivity on the Western origins of human rights and their ambiguous impact. As Baxi reminds us 'overall human rights discursively were and still remain, according to the narrative of origins, the patrimony of the West' (Baxi, 2000:24). It legitimised the 'humanitarian wars' of the Balkans and more, giving cover for NGO integration with the imperial war machine. It generated and was based on, a comfortable liberal cosmopolitanism which, much like the concept of 'global civil society', had a direct parallel with the belief in the civilising mission of colonialism characteristic of an earlier period of 'North-South' relations called colonialism.
Irish exceptionalism?
Against the above backdrop we now consider whether there is a form of Irish exceptionalism that in the main (apart from Goal) seemingly insulated Ireland both from the scandals that have recently surfaced and the internationally accepted critical understanding of the political economy of development. Irish NGOs seem to operate in a political and discursive world that sees them as exempt from the colonial aura surrounding other European nations. Furthermore, the critical debates about the role of international non-governmental organisations (INGOs) in facilitating the extension of the harmonious and dialogue- orientated Western civil society model to the rest of the world remains mainly un-reflected on, whilst the structural violence producing inequalities and fuelling conflict in the global South continue unremarked on. Apparently unaware of the debates in Latin America in the 1980s and 1990s, some Irish NGOs seem to quite complacently bask in the progressive aura of Ireland's international image and aid policy in particular. There is a general sense we have found during interviews, that Irish NGOs in the main see themselves as faithfully implementing Catholic social thinking and influencing Irish Aid to maintain a progressive stance as compared to the openly neo-colonialist US or UK overseas aid models.

In brief, the Irish NGO world-view would very much see itself as part of the solution to development needs. There is not a particularly open attitude towards critical dialogue while the NGOs have 'a place at the table' as they see it, where they can talk with funders and policy makers on an equal footing (for an attempt to open just such a debate see McCloskey, 2012). So we now consider what justification there might be for such a Panglossian view of the political economy of development and the role of the NGO therein.

Many of the bigger Irish NGOs such as Trócaire, Concern and Goal frame their mission statements around principles of Catholic social teaching and/or the advancement of human rights. The implementation of their missions and poverty alleviation programmes are generally orientated by state policies and driven by results-based-management (RBM), a compulsory project management system adopted by Irish Aid and many other Western donors for grant receiving NGOs. In 2016, Irish Aid (2017) channelled over €165.6 million through civil society organisations, amounting to 23 percent of total overseas development aid (ODA). Whilst Irish Aid underlines that its partnerships with both international and local civil society organisations are integral to its work, it remains unclear if and how the above mentioned power relationships between international and national NGOs in a postcolonial context are understood and dealt with in practice. Or, put another way, how Irish Aid makes sure that it is local citizens and their respective organisational and community structures that are being strengthened and enabled to shape their own communities' development.

Irish Aid's largest civil society funding scheme is the Programme Grant, a competitive mechanism which provides multi-annual funding to Irish civil society organisations for ambitious programming aimed at long-term sustainable socio-economic change. In 2016, a new round of the Programme Grant was launched and a total of 13 organisations made successful applications (Irish Aid, 2017). The resulting grants range from €500,000 to €20 million per year for the 2017-2020 period. Whilst competition might be seen as a useful dynamic for economic growth, the move from previous institutional funding to specific programme funding based on NGOs' capacity to contribute to the achievement of Irish Aid's policy goals and the Sustainable Development Goals might have negative effects that might also go against the principle of solidarity.

Some Irish NGOs, that were previously known for their independent human rights based work, became competitors and became concerned about their own growth and this led to potential mergers with other NGOs. On 17 February 2017 an Irish Times article entitled 'Goal considered merger with Concern before Oxfam - Concern plan ended when Goal's board opted for a rival merger pitch from Oxfam Ireland', outlines the situation of the Irish NGOs which are now more in competition with one another rather than acting in solidarity (Irish Times, 2017). Or, to put it another way they were now acting as businesses would, not surprising given the large amounts of funding at stake. It seemed that Irish NGOs had to align their own development programmes and their respective focuses with Irish Aid priorities and they had to make sure to upgrade their results-based monitoring and evaluation capacities, leading to a shift in priority from politically empowering work to more technical and managerial work (see Khoo, 2018: 198-200). The price of 'being at the table' is that you have to follow the rules of the game. The NGOs know this of course but seldom openly acknowledge it, let alone allow an open debate amongst their supporters and the wider development community.

It is noticeable that over the last decade the amount of donor or institutional funding channelled through Irish NGOs has increased in relation to the overall NGO budget available for development and relief work. So, just by way of example, in 2017 Trócaire's unrestricted funds for development and relief work were half the amount derived from donor funds, that is €21 million compared to €40 million restricted funds (Trócaire, 2017). In the case of Goal, unrestricted funds made up only 3.4 percent of their overall income in 2017 (Goal, 2018). This means that by and large the majority of Irish development and relief NGO budgets are influenced and to a considerable extend controlled by institutional donors and their development priorities, Irish Aid being one of the more influential donors especially for Trócaire and Concern. We get to a point where we have to consider if an NGO is not really a GONGO (government organised non-governmental organisation) in practice.

The proportional increase in institutional funding creates the danger that donor policies, including RBM, fuse with unique Irish NGO organisational histories, values and missions and hence, influence their human-rights based orientation and certainly the amount of advocacy work that challenges Irish government decisions or policies. This might not be a linear, or observable change, it rather happens in a hidden and discursive manner. However, the consequences are concrete; they impact on NGO practices and ways of working.

Critical scholars such as Ziai (2015) have sought to problematise the system of donor policy conditionality, highlighting the fact that it confronts local partners or beneficiaries with Western development concepts and related hierarchies of social problems. Social problems and their root causes are quite complex and context specific. Applying external problem definitions, and in many cases solutions, to other regions of the world carries increased potential to colonise non-Western life-worlds with external thoughts and ideas of development (see Kleibl and Munck, 2016). RBM arguably reinforces this tendency and Irish Aid as well as Irish NGOs have not sufficiently reflected on the power dynamics this entails and the consequences it produces.

Talking with Irish NGO workers we gathered that RBM was initially perceived as an interesting process, designed to produce better results for the poor. Now, however, it is more likely to be seen as a rather inflexible management process that incorporates local social development into a set of 'global organisational indicators' that are defined in Ireland. These 'global organisational indicators' then frame the concrete development programmes implemented in countries of the global South. This top-down development process has little to do with participatory democratic development from below, or empowerment understood as a process that changes the nature and direction of systemic forces that marginalise women and other disadvantaged sectors (see Batliwala, 1994).

Results based management and the way it is applied through global indicators, tends to homogenise social and political problems affecting the lives of people living in the global South, as if they could be solved the same way everywhere, ignoring the historical, economic, social and political power relationships that created social inequality in an often violent way. Theories of change, which drive the objectives, expected outcomes and impact of RBM tend to reinforce Western hegemony and domination over the global South. Indeed, knowledge about 'development' presents itself as technical in the context of most results-based frameworks. Cooper and Packard remind us that 'development is fundamentally about changing how people conduct their lives, and the very claim to technical knowledge is in itself a political act' (Cooper and Packard, 1997:19).

The orientation of many Irish development initiatives hence appears fixed from the top, directed downwards through a results-based programme framework, to local partners and beneficiaries that implement or benefit from projects. This dynamic will not change naturally to a more desirable social justice orientated grassroots empowerment project that most Irish development NGOs in principle desire to carry forward. In reality, Irish NGOs, as most other INGOs, depend substantially on government funding which secures its employee's salaries and funding for partner's work. During an informal conversation with us, one Irish NGO worker explained the situation as follows: 'INGO funding exacerbates the North/South divide. If we would support our local partners in accessing funding from donors directly, we would do ourselves out of the job'. With this statement in mind, it appears clear that INGOs from their position in the aid chain tend to exclude local NGOs and social groups from accessing direct funding and hence decrease the potential for supporting locally grown initiatives for development. At the same time, Irish NGOs themselves are sharply restricted in terms of unrestricted funds and can only work within strict boundaries and procedures as defined by their institutional donors.

But what if, as most INGO's claim, their interventions do actually lead in practice to an improvement in the lives of their beneficiaries? What if the latter willingly accept the advice and control of the experts? Are our questions and deconstructions of the aid system then not unnecessarily critical in a context where good progress in the name of social development is being done?

But, what if all the upward looking accountability, monitoring and financing crowds out solidarity and reduces the power of decision-making of already marginalised citizens of the global South? We know some INGO staff on the ground who critically reflect on their part in upholding postcolonial North-South power relationships - trying to act as a 'protection zone' against directives articulated through potentially oppressive global organisational indicators from above - they have little space to turn the dynamics towards local development ownership. The situation is exacerbated through the positioning of INGO grant managers in overseas offices. The backdrop of this situation is that donors are increasingly channelling their development aid through local offices and embassies and INGOs, concerned about losing direct access to locally managed funds, further decentralise their fundraising and compliance staff as well.

An Irish NGO representative in an African country we talked to confirmed that within the overall budget of more than €4,000,000, only €20,000 represented free/voluntary funding which could be applied to development initiatives without the need to consider Western government donor priorities and RBM as its management tool. Hence, the great majority of programme funds applied from Irish NGOs in countries of the global South appear subordinated to Western donor priorities and related INGOs' 'global organisational indicators'. The question of whether Irish NGOs then remain part of civil society - clearly operating outside the government and private sector spheres - is at the very least highly debatable.

It is also no surprise that a more explicit business language is being applied as part of INGOs discourses and their practices; this includes for example the recruitment of business development advisors for international offices. Business advisors are the people making sure that INGO budgets grow or at least remain stable and that donor requirements are met. This situation further contributes to the difficult intermediary role INGOs play in an African context and raises questions about the relationship between INGOs and private sector actors and their joint impact on local development. What appears clear is that INGOs operating in the global South do not lead to the empowerment of local communities, a danger that Irish NGOs are clearly not immune to.

The dominant focus on donor fund raising and financial growth might ultimately affect INGOs partnership ethos and North/South solidarity, including their fight against gender based violence and corruption insofar as it subordinates their vision and mission to financial considerations. The subordination of solidarity to financial growth then makes the INGOs' mission equivalent to the mission of any private sector company where power abuses such as sexual harassment and financial wrong-doing happen all too frequently as part of the day-to day struggle to survive in the ever more demanding system of capitalist exploitation. From our analysis carried out so far, the opening statement of Shaista Aziz above, and her lack of surprise about the widespread sexual abuses recently uncovered within INGO structures make sense, and Irish NGOs are certainly no exception to this situation (see Power, 2018).

Standing back from the particulars of the research reported on above and reflecting on the troubled consciences of some of our interviewees we wonder if politics or the lack of politics is the underlying issue. Development, human rights and poverty reduction are somehow portrayed and felt as if in some way they are 'beyond' politics. As with faith- based organisations, and here the intimate connection between faith-based and development organisations in Ireland comes to the fore, politics is left outside in the mundane world. Yet as we have shown throughout, development is a highly political affair, as is something so seemingly innocuous and a 'good thing' as human rights. Until the Irish NGOs enter into a proper political conversation with other forces in civil society they will be dominated and constrained by the cosy pink glow of being on the side of good while refusing to engage with the contradictions of their mission. And, lest we forget, with the voices of the global South, the once colonised, enslaved and still exploited by the global structures of capitalism for whom the NGOs now form an integral part of soft power and governance modalities. Ireland is not in an exceptional position in this regard due to being a postcolonial country itself we would argue.
Discussion
We began by posing some current, very troubling, issues emerging with leading, even paradigmatic, development NGO's. We then proposed a fairly basic deconstruction of the terms being deployed - the terms 'development' and 'NGO' in particular - and those guiding much NGO and World Bank understanding of the world, namely 'civil society' and 'human rights'. This led us to a discussion of Irish exceptionalism, as in whether Ireland is in some fundamental way an exception to the broader international debate around development and NGO's. In terms of opening up a discussion we need to ask whether, in regards to development and NGOs, Ireland is different. Our own response will be both in the affirmative and the negative. Then, instead of seeking answers to all the difficult questions posed we are proposing a new approach to the study of NGOs - a cultural political economy - which we hope can establish a critically engaged research agenda.

Ireland is, indeed, different in terms of its engagement with development and the history of its NGOs. Much is made in Irish 'development work' that it is not a country with a colonial past, quite the contrary. That, supposedly, places it on a different political and moral plane compared to, say, British, French or Belgian, development agencies. Yet recent historiography of Ireland and the British Empire (see Kenny, 2004) shows that Irish participation in empire was not a paradox but a major feature that would be expected in terms of the nature of the link with Britain. Nationalist historiography would prefer to airbrush out this aspect of Ireland's subordination/colonial role but the evidence is steadily emerging, for example in relation to slavery. Irish participation in colonialism was consistent even if unrecorded by and large. The notion that 'Ireland is a Third World country' (Caherty, 1992) became common currency in the 1980s and is also equally off the mark. Today there is simply no way the European paragon of a 'market-friendly', tax evading, US subservient state can be seen as anything other than a neo-colonial state in relation to the Third World, complacent nationalist discourses notwithstanding.

Ireland is also 'different' in terms of the very large role played by the Catholic Church and human rights discourses. Yet this difference is largely taken for granted and never theorised or problematised. This contrasts, for example, with the vast literature in Latin America on the growing influence of the Protestant churches in civil society (see Stoll, 1991) which we understand as a political phenomenon deserving critical analysis. Even in relation to the political role of Argentina's Jesuit leader Jorge Bergoglio and his disputed human rights record under the dictatorship (see Chossudovsky, 2013), in Ireland, across the spectrum, there is a preference for the sanitised or sanctified version of Pope Francis with not a scintilla of critical thinking evident or even awareness of the debate in Argentina around him. Also on the question of sexual abuse it is assumed - as when the Oxfam scandal broke - that Ireland is immune to such problems. In a society where clerical sexual abuse (and its cover up) has been so prominent it could be seen as over confident to say the least (see, e.g Minister of Justice and Equality, 2009). In brief, it is hard to escape the conclusion that Ireland simply cannot be immune to any of the political issues we have raised about development NGOs, from their close relationship with governments and the private sector to their neo-colonial relationship with the Third World.

What we propose, in conclusion, is not a polemic, however, but a carefully crafted and openly debated research project involving the participation and engagement of the Irish NGO sector and, crucially, the critical development education sector. We believe that one thing is 'being at the table' with funders, another is engaging with one's own supporters, including critical ones. What the Oxfam/Goal scandals signal is an urgent need for honest self-reflection on where the Irish NGOs need to go now to fulfil their original missions. We can either listen to international experience, for example in Latin America, learn from it and change or bury our heads in the sand and hope the storm will pass. Business as usual is not an option as inevitably the status quo will prevail.

We are proposing, for our part, to move beyond the current impasse an action oriented analytical framework that seeks to synthesise the political economy approach and the critical analysis of discourse (see Sum and Jessop, 2012). While much of the critical literature on NGOs deploys a political economy approach - their relationship to global neoliberalism for example - less attention is paid to the 'meaning making' we can discern through a semiotic analysis. A cultural political economy appraisal is well suited to the study of how policy discourse and political imaginaries are constructed. It would help us analyse some of the issues raised above - from sexual abuse to the Catholic Weltanschauung - by looking afresh at the way in which policy-makers, NGO managers and academics construct meaning ('soft power') around development and the role of the NGO sector in Ireland.

In terms of how such an open enquiry might be organised we would argue that development educators have a key role to play in this process, not least given a shared interest and parallel concerns to our own. They could help us interrogate the issues raised above and participate actively in the proposed action research initiative. Furthermore, development education methodologies could augment and enhance the research by making it more participative and robust. We need to bear in mind, that since the 1990s the big INGOs have reduced their support for development education which has, in turn, weakened their capacity for public education and critical inquiry on global issues. This weakening internal and external engagement with global education practice is, perhaps, reflective of a growing corporatisation, and what Bryan (2011) describes as a 'declawing of development education', within NGOs. This may be the result of senior management positions being taken by executives from the private sector with a more tenuous relationship with development education values and practices. In a related argument Simpson (2017) points out that NGO fundraising activities in schools often reinforce the 'Band Aid' - donor-driven approach - to development, which can stereotype the global South and strengthen the 'Othering' of people in the South as charity cases, devoid of agency. In short, development education is in danger of falling in with neoliberal agendas (Selby and Kagawa, 2011) and thus this exercise could be useful to critically interrogate its own politics.

We need to ask if development NGOs are applying double standards when it comes to implementing their human resource policies, including gender and protection policies, in the global South and the North? Is their lack of accountability linked to the postcolonial continuation of 'othering', which facilitates these double standards based on categorisation and differentiation, followed by subordination of the 'other'? Might this in turn be linked to INGOs' educational programmes creating an environment where all poor men in the global South are categorised as patriarchal and women as disempowered and consequently sub-ordinated? In which case people from the global South are generally represented as uneducated and malnourished, basically, in need of 'our' help? Development education practice in INGOs can sometimes shift from a social justice orientated approach to a charitable approach which in turn carries the potential to enhance the myth of the North as the 'good guys' on a civilising mission and the South in need of 'saving'.

What has been the impact on development education of the reduction in official development aid since the 2008/09 financial crises and the consequent increase of INGOs efforts to increase direct fundraising? Is it a coincidence that these large, well-funded, well-connected and still widely respected organisations make some of their Northern staff believe they stand somehow 'above' their Southern colleagues, partners or target groups? Following Selby and Kagawa (2011) on INGOs engaged in development education, we need to ask ourselves: what values matter most to us, and why? What values, competencies and dispositions do we think will best realise the future, personal through global, that we are working for? Is anything we are doing or saying - or anything we are not doing or saying - selling out our worldview for short-term influence? If so, what are the attendant dangers and likely consequences? What should we do so as to better achieve a way forward congruent with our original values? To not take up this challenge means to condone a status quo that will lead, inevitably, to more Oxfams and Goals.
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Tanja Kleibl was born in Germany and worked for ten years in Mozambique and Ethiopia, followed by a position in Ireland, as Trócaire Programme Leader for Governance and Human Rights. She then completed a PhD at Dublin City University (DCU) on civil society in Africa and was Development Studies Association Ireland (DSAI) Civil Society Study Group Convenor. She now lectures on migration and diversity at the University of Applied Sciences Würzburg-Schweinfurt in Germany.

Ronaldo Munck was born in Argentina and has worked in Ireland and in South Africa. He was founding Chair of Development Studies Association Ireland (DSAI) and is currently Head of Civic Engagement at Dublin City University (DCU) and Professor of Political Sociology, University of Buenos Aires. He has written widely on critical development theory ( Handbook on Development and Social Change, with Honor Fagan, London: Edward Elgar, 2016) and, most particularly, on Latin America ( Contemporary Latin America, Palgrave, 2012) and labour issues ( Rethinking Global Labour: After neoliberalism, Agenda Publishing, 2018).

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NGOs and the Political Economy of International Development and Development Education: An Irish Perspective

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Abstract: In Ireland the role of development non-governmental organisations (NGOs) is rarely interrogated. There is, rather, a shared discourse across the government, NGO and academic sectors which does not really encourage critical enquiry. One of the reasons is, arguably, the reduction of support for development education that would have kept that critical lens more active.

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The Parlous State of Poverty Eradication

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The Parlous State of Poverty Eradication

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Have a Look at our Website to find out more about who we are, and the issues we are passionate about addressing.

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Financial Justice Ireland (formerly Debt and Development Coalition Ireland) is a global financial justice organisation.

We want a fair and just society for everyone.

We want a financial system that serves the needs of all people, rather than just some people, and which does not take the planet for granted.

We critically engage people to understand the structural causes of global inequality and power relations. We aim to empower people in Ireland to take informed action for greater economic justice globally. Tackling inequality and achieving a fairer society requires critiquing power structures in our society and globally - highlighting the causes of inequality, rather than the symptoms.

Structure & Membership

FJI is a membership-based organisation. Our members support the overall goals of the organisation.

Our membership is composed of organisations and individuals who share a deep concern about debt injustice and the injustice of the global financial system.

Membership is either Organisational Membership or Individual Membership. Full Membership is open to non-profit making non-governmental organisations groups and associations. New organisational members can be nominated for membership by members at the AGM. Membership is also open to individuals who receive all our publications and notifications of our events.

At an operational level, we have a small staff team, which is overseen by a Board of Directors.

History & Funding

FJI was established as Debt and Development Coalition Ireland in 1993 by a number of development, faith-based, and solidarity groups in Ireland who were concerned about the devastating effects of debt on Southern countries.

We are funded through member organisations, member individuals and donor organisations and grants from institutional funders.

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Financial Justice Ireland (formerly Debt and Development Coalition Ireland) is a global financial justice organisation. We want a fair and just society for everyone. We want a financial system that serves the needs of all people, rather than just some people, and which does not take the planet for granted.

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Have a Look at our Resources on Financial Justice, and share your thoughts below.

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This website was produced with the financial support of the European Union. It is the sole responsibility of Citizens for Financial Justice and Financial Justice Ireland and does not necessarily reflect the views of the European Union.

This website has also been developed with funding from Irish Aid's WorldWise Global Schools. Irish Aid's WorldWise Global Schools is the national programme for Global Citizenship Education (GCE) for post-primary schools in Ireland. The ideas, opinions and comments on this website are entirely the responsibility of its authors and do not necessarily represent or reflect WorldWise Global Schools and/or Irish Aid policy.

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The Global Financial System | Financial Justice Ireland

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This website was produced with the financial support of the European Union. It is the sole responsibility of Citizens for Financial Justice and Financial Justice Ireland and does not necessarily reflect the views of the European Union. This website has also been developed with funding from Irish Aid's WorldWise Global Schools.

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COVID-19 has Exposed Neoliberal-Driven ‘Development’: How can Development Education Respond?

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COVID-19 has Exposed Neoliberal-Driven ‘Development’: How can Development Education Respond?

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Abstract: The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the moral vacuum and economic failings at the heart of the neoliberal-driven 'development' template that has dominated global economic relations since the 1980s (Monbiot, 2016). It is an ideology that 'venerates the market and strips away the things that make us human' (Metcalf, 2017). Rather than placing the economy at the service of citizens, neoliberalism has forced workers to service the needs of the market. At the same time, neoliberalism has rendered public services, particularly healthcare, unequal to the challenges of coronavirus. And, yet, the nature of the pandemic has placed a premium on the kind of public-facing occupations that neoliberalism undervalues and poorly remunerates: nurses, drivers, carers and retail staff. COVID-19 has revealed that the 'tyranny of Gross Domestic Product (GDP)' - the metric of choice for neoliberalism - has failed the frontline workers upon which society now depends to negotiate the crisis. This is, perhaps, the starkest reminder that 'development', as Sachs (2020) suggests, is no longer a signifier of 'progress', but 'survival'. As a more radical sub-sector of international development with a commitment to critical enquiry and action, development education has an opportunity and, perhaps, a responsibility, to debate how the coronavirus crisis should be negotiated over the short and long-term.

Key words: COVID-19; Neoliberalism; Gross Domestic Product; International Development; Development Education; NGOs; Inequality.
Introduction
Five months ago, 9,000 nurses from the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) went on strike in the north of Ireland for the first time in the union's 103-year history (Carroll, 2019). Seeking pay parity with their colleagues in England, Scotland and Wales, the RCN estimated that nurses' pay in real terms had fallen by 15 per cent over eight years and they had 'had enough' (Ibid). For any nurse, going on strike is a last resort, but staffing shortages and low pay had created 'unsafe' services for patients. Fast forward to the midst of an unprecedented global pandemic, COVID-19, and we see nurses and other frontline health workers feted from their windows and doorsteps by a grateful public in lockdown (Lovett, 2020). The nurses' strike was one local example of a deeply flawed and unequal neoliberal model of 'development' driven by market-based economics rather than the social needs of citizens, particularly healthcare.

The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the economic shortcomings and moral emptiness of neoliberalism, which, as an ideology driving development, has been in the ascendancy since the 1980s but having deeper historical antecedents (Metcalf, 2017; Slobodian, 2018). This article discusses how neoliberalism's blunt economic metric - Gross Domestic Product (GDP) - under-values the socially cohesive occupations that have been critical to surviving COVID-19. It argues that the concept of 'development' should be revisited in the wake of COVID-19 and the ongoing climate crisis to become detached from neoliberalism and the growth imperative. It will consider how development education should respond to the coronavirus crisis over the short- and long-term.
The 'tyranny of GDP'
The coronavirus pandemic has placed an absolute premium on public facing occupations that the market economy's yardstick of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) under-values and poorly remunerates. As Elliot suggests, the 'tyranny of GDP' results in a moral vacuum which considers 'speculation, pollution and gambling as being good for the economy' because they turn a profit (2017). In 1968, United States (US) presidential candidate Bobby Kennedy said this about GDP in a speech that could have been written for today:

"It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile" (cited in Rogers, 2012).

And so, If GDP dictates what our talent deserves, then what price now should be put on the labour of a nurse, a carer, a driver, a bin man, a supermarket worker or a cleaner, all of whom have been indispensable to our surviving coronavirus? An Oxfam report published earlier this year calculated the monetary value of unpaid care work globally for women aged 15 and over at $10.8 trillion annually (2020: 6). Using the GDP metric, this labour holds no monetary value and, yet, it is priceless to the elderly, sick and disabled across the world lacking social care.

The COVID-19 pandemic has afforded us a long hard look at the absence of compassion, values, solidarity and inclusiveness in the neoliberal economy, which, of course has been critical to it being so profitable. In describing neoliberalism, the economist Paul Mason said:

"In neoliberal ideology, the market is depicted as an autonomous machine beyond human control which produces the best of all outcomes for human beings. Only when people tinker with it, or try to impose conscious decision-making on it, does it go wrong" (2019: 187).

Moreover, under neoliberalism, the market becomes a validator of truth which means 'all other values have the status of mere opinions; everything else is relativist hot air' (Metcalf, 2017). Despite having a human hand guiding their operations, the markets are often discussed in ethereal terms - akin to temperamental gods - leaving us to speculate as how they might 'react' to human-made crises. And, yet, 'neoliberal policies are everywhere beset by market failures', with the state forced to intercede when the market comes a cropper as it did spectacularly in 2008 (Monbiot, 2016; Chu, 2018). The coronavirus pandemic, therefore, is more evidence that the 'zombie' ideology of neoliberalism has to be jettisoned and the shrunken state, much of it hollowed out since the 1980s, restored to full powers of economic governance.
Rethinking 'development'
The pandemic should represent a line in the sand where we resist and rollback the marketisation of services that have no business in private hands, healthcare, education, utilities, and transportation. At the same time, we need to invest in the jobs that make these services central to our lives and wellbeing. The phoney neoliberal mantra that a rising sea of prosperity raises all ships has been cruelly exposed in the worst possible way as health sectors across the world, reduced in capacity by neoliberalism, have been overwhelmed by the scale of the pandemic (Gutiérrez, 2020). The World Health Organisation (WHO) has described 'an alarming failure' in the global supply of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) and coronavirus tests for nurses operating on the frontline of the virus at great personal risk (UN, 2020).

The concept of development first loomed into view in US President Harry Truman's inaugural address in 1949 when he coined the phrase 'undeveloped areas' (Sachs, 1992) to describe half the world's population. US post-war economic buoyancy and supremacy represented the template for 'development' and American economist and ideologue, Walt Rostow, described the five 'stages of economic growth' that developing countries needed to implement to reach the apotheosis of development, 'high mass consumption' (1959: 1). The 'development age' lasted around forty years and succumbed to rapid globalisation driven by neoliberalism's recklessly deregulated capitalism in the 1980s which spectacularly unravelled in 2008 (Rogoff, 2020). The post-2008 period of austerity, the gig economy, stagnating incomes and social polarisation has spawned a new era of nation first populism. This was a rejection of globalisation and multilateralism, and an assertion of 'national neoliberalism' designed to retain wealth within national elites (Mason, 2019: 23-24).
The populists' response to COVID-19
It is no accident that states controlled by populists have been found wanting in their response to the COVID pandemic. Their first instinct is to prioritise the needs of the market and reduce the capacity of the state. A public survey carried out in the United Kingdom (UK) by Ispos Mori found that 'two-thirds of the public think the government acted too slowly to control the spread of coronavirus' and forty per cent regarded the government's response as 'confused and inconsistent' (Hill, 2020). In the US, it was revealed that in 2017 the Pentagon not only anticipated a 'novel influenza disease' but warned about a shortage of ventilators, face masks, and hospital beds which the Trump administration did nothing about (Klippenstein, 2020). And, in Brazil, populist president Jair Bolsonaro has dismissed coronavirus as 'just a little flu', encouraging Brazilians to 'get back to normal' in a reckless and irresponsible prioritisation of profits over people ( The Guardian, 2020). Meanwhile, in another economic powerhouse in the global South, India, prime-minister Narendra Modi asked the 'nation's poor for forgiveness' when lack of forward planning over a 21-day national COVID lockdown forced millions of migrant labourers to flee the cities to walk home to their native villages without food or shelter ( Aljazeera, 2020). In all of these countries, the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases and deaths are high, particularly the US which is now the country with the highest number of cases/fatalities (Kommenda, Gutiérrez and Adolphe, 2020). Perhaps, an outcome of the COVID outbreak will be a political reckoning for tardy and irresponsible decision-making during the crisis and under-investment in key public services before it. It might also prompt a re-evaluation of what 'development' means in increasingly centralised states that relegate the needs of people behind those of the market.
Survival not progress
'Development', argues Wolfgang Sachs, editor of The Development Dictionary (2019), is 'a plastic word, an empty term with no positive meaning' (2020: 67). It is more 'about survival now, not progress' (Ibid: 68). While it still bears the imprimatur of the United Nations (UN) and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), 'development' in the post-COVID era will have to mean de-growth if we are to limit global warming to 1.5°C. above pre-industrial levels (IPCC, 2018). It will have to mean job security and decent wages in the low-paid occupations that we have learned we depend on so heavily. It will need to mean investment in public services that were shamefully denuded in the last ten years of austerity to disastrous effect. Should national governments respond to the post-COVID economic crisis with another belt-tightening decade of austerity and cuts to services it is likely to be met with widespread anger and resistance.

For development educators, the coronavirus lockdown has meant rapidly adapting our activities to online delivery, which is challenging for a sector that supports interactive learning and debate. In addition to the question of pedagogy is how we respond to the coronavirus crisis as a sector in the short and long-term. Some suggestions are proposed below.

There is an immediate, practical and hugely beneficial step that development educators can take to support low income countries lacking the capital and health infrastructure to tackle the COVID contagion. More than 200 civil society movements from the global North and South - including twelve from Ireland - have called for the cancellation of external debt payments in 2020 for 69 countries classified by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) as Low-Income Economies (JDC, 2020). This would save those countries $19.5 billion in external debt payments to bilateral and multilateral lenders in 2020 and, if extended to 2021, would save a further $18.7 billion (Ibid). Cancelling debt payments would free up valuable resources to 'tackle the urgent health, social and economic crises resulting from the Covid-19 global pandemic', and potentially benefit tens of millions of people (Ibid).

Challenge the myths of coronavirus

One of the great myths of coronavirus is that we're all in this together. It goes something like this: coronavirus is a great leveller that has plunged rich and poor into turmoil, insecurity and isolation. We are all equally susceptible to contracting the virus which doesn't distinguish between its victims in terms of class and occupation. The reality is a lot different. The better-off may actually increase their savings during the crisis as spending on forbidden activities falls. But poorer households spend much more of their limited income on necessities, leaving them vulnerable to sudden falls in their incomings (Jones, 2020). So, as development educators, we need to challenge this 'sickly myth' that we are all in this together. The poor are more vulnerable to the economic shocks of coronavirus and more likely to be working in an occupation that puts them at risk of exposure to the virus. At the time of writing, 19 health workers have died in the UK after contracting the virus (Walawalkar, 2020).

It's striking how much of our work in development education is invested in the SDGs and how limited is the discourse in the sector on neoliberalism. If, as Monbiot (2016) suggests, neoliberalism is 'the ideology at the root of all our problems', shouldn't we at least discuss it? It is challenging as a sector to take aim at an ideology which has so much traction in the Irish society, particularly in the education sector, but, as Mahon and Bergin (2018) suggest: 'We cannot write about social justice without working for its everyday implementation. We cannot critique neoliberalism and return to neoliberal practice behind our office door'.

Sachs suggests that 'shaping our destiny beyond development is the task that lies ahead of us' (2020: 71). With that in mind, civil society groups, governments and international NGOs need to look beyond the short-termism of overseas aid, emergency appeals, public 'clicktivism' and SDGs to focus on the long-term needs of humanity (McCloskey, 2019). Economies, to function properly, need to be put at the service of society's needs, not the needs of the market. The focus of development organisations in the future should be managing to make this possible and being advocates of de-growth to mitigate the climate emergency. That means critically interrogating the concept of 'development' in the light of coronavirus to debate what it means in a future that is likely to be clouded by recession, increased inequality and an ever-looming climate crisis.

Owen Jones (2020b) has posed a prescient question: 'why don't we treat the climate crisis with the same urgency as coronavirus?' The climate emergency has 'killed on a mass scale and threatens to send millions more to early graves. As its effects spread, it could destabilise entire economies and overwhelm poorer countries lacking resources and infrastructure' (Ibid). Yes, the coronavirus is amongst us as a terrible and immediate threat but we still, as Jones suggests, tend to present the climate crisis 'as an abstraction whose consequences are decades away' (Ibid). Yet, for countries in the global South, particularly, the climate emergency is very real. As Paul and Singh (2019) suggest about countries in the South: 'those who have done the least to cause the climate crisis are paying the greatest price'. The response to the coronavirus crisis has demonstrated that government resources can be mobilised, and public behaviour can be modified in an emergency. We need to respond to the climate emergency in the same way.
References
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Carroll, R (2019) 'Northern Ireland nurses strike over pay and patient safety', The Guardian, 18 December, available: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2019/dec/18/northern-ireland-nurses-strike-over-pay-and-patient-safety (accessed 7 April 2020).

Chu, B (2018) 'Financial crisis 2008: How Lehman Brothers helped cause "the worst financial crisis in history"', The Independent, 12 September, available: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/analysis-and-features/financial-crisis-2008-why-lehman-brothers-what-happened-10-years-anniversary-a8531581.html (accessed 15 April 2020).

Elliot, L (2017) 'We're being hurt by the fixation on economic growth at all costs', The Guardian, 30 November, available: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/nov/30/fixation-economic-growth-gdp-pollution-gambling (accessed 7 April 2020).

Gutiérrez, P (2020) 'Coronavirus world map: which countries have the most cases and deaths?', The Guardian, 10 April, available: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/10/coronavirus-world-map-countries-most-cases-and-deaths (accessed 10 April 2020).

Hill, A (2020) 'Two-thirds of public think UK coronavirus response too slow - poll', The Guardian, 9 April, available: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/09/two-thirds-of-public-think-uk-coronavirus-response-too-slow-poll (accessed 9 April 2020).

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Jones, O (2020a) 'Coronavirus is not some great leveller: it is exacerbating inequality right now', The Guardian, 9 April, available: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/apr/09/coronavirus-inequality-managers-zoom-cleaners-offices (accessed 15 April 2020).

Jones, O (2020b) 'Why don't we treat the climate crisis with the same urgency as coronavirus?', The Guardian, 5 March, available: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/mar/05/governments-coronavirus-urgent-climate-crisis (accessed 15 April 2020).

Jubilee Debt Campaign (JDC) (2020) 'A debt jubilee to tackle the Covid-19 health and economic crisis', 7 April, available: https://jubileedebt.org.uk/a-debt-jubilee-to-tackle-the-covid-19-health-and-economic-crisis-2 (accessed 10 April 2020).

Klippenstein, K (2020) 'The Military Knew Years Ago That a Coronavirus Was Coming', The Nation, 1 April, available: https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/covid-military-shortage-pandemic/ (accessed 9 April 2020).

Kommenda, N, Gutiérrez, P and Adolphe, J (2020) 'Coronavirus map of the US: latest cases state by state', The Guardian, 15 April, available: https://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/2020/apr/13/coronavirus-map-us-latest-covid-19-cases-state-by-state (accessed 15 April 2020).

Lovett, S (2020) 'Coronavirus: UK population urged to applaud NHS workers in mass display of support', The Independent, 24 March, available: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/health/coronavirus-uk-nhs-workers-applaud-support-clap-our-carers-a9421206.html (accessed 7 April 2020).

Mahon, A and Bergin, S (2018) 'Why Irish universities are in thrall to neoliberalism', The Irish Times, 19 June, available: https://www.irishtimes.com/news/education/why-irish-universities-are-in-thrall-to-neoliberalism-1.3536327 (accessed 15 April 2020).

Mason, P (2020) 'Will coronavirus signal the end of capitalism?', Aljazeera, 3 April, available: https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/coronavirus-signal-capitalism-200330092216678.html (accessed 7 April 2020).

McCloskey, S (2019) 'What INGOs can learn from Greta Thunberg and the global climate strikes', openDemocracy, 13 October, available: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/transformation/what-ingos-can-learn-greta-thunberg-and-global-climate-strikes/ (accessed 10 April 2020).

Metcalf, S (2017) 'Neoliberalism: the idea that swallowed the world', The Guardian, 18 August, available: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/aug/18/neoliberalism-the-idea-that-changed-the-world (accessed 10 April 2020).

Monbiot, G (2016) 'Neoliberalism - the ideology at the root of all our problems', The Guardian, 15 April, available: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/15/neoliberalism-ideology-problem-george-monbiot (accessed 15 April 2020).

Oxfam (2020) Time to care Unpaid and underpaid care work and the global inequality crisis, Oxford: Oxfam, available: https://oxfamilibrary.openrepository.com/bitstream/handle/10546/620928/bp-time-to-care-inequality-200120-summ-en.pdf (accessed 7 April 2020).

Paul, H and Singh, H (2019) 'How will the global South pay for Climate Change Damage?', New Internationalist, 3 May, available: https://newint.org/features/2019/05/03/how-will-global-south-pay-climate-change-damage (accessed 15 April 2020).

Rogers, S (2012) 'Bobby Kennedy on GDP: "measures everything except that which is worthwhile"', The Guardian, 24 May, available: https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2012/may/24/robert-kennedy-gdp (accessed 8 April 2020).

Rogoff, K (2020) 'The 2008 financial crisis will be seen as a dry run for Covid-19 cataclysm', The Guardian, 8 April, accessed: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/apr/08/the-2008-financial-crisis-will-be-seen-as-a-dry-run-for-covid-19-cataclysm (accessed 9 April 2020).

Rostow, W (1959) 'The Stages of Economic Growth', The Economic History Review, Vol. 12, No. 1, pp. 1-16, available: https://www.ufjf.br/oliveira_junior/files/2009/06/rostow.pdf (accessed 9 April 2020).

Sachs, W (1992) 'Development: A Guide to the Ruins', New Internationalist, 5 June, available: https://newint.org/features/1992/06/05/keynote (accessed 9 April 2020).

Sachs, W (2019) (ed.) The Development Dictionary: A Guide to Knowledge as Power, London: Zed Books.

Sachs, W (2020) 'The Age of Development: An Obituary', New Internationalist, February, pp. 64-71.

Slobodian, Q (2018) The Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

The Guardian (2020) 'The Guardian view on Jair Bolsonaro: a danger to Brazilians', 31 March, available: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/mar/31/the-guardian-view-on-jair-bolsonaro-a-danger-to-brazilians (accessed 9 April 2020).

United Nations UN (2020) 'COVID-19 highlights nurses' vulnerability as backbone to health services worldwide', 7 April, available: https://news.un.org/en/story/2020/04/1061232 (accessed 8 April 2020).

Walawalkar, A (2020) 'Matt Hancock says NHS staff death toll at 19 amid PPE row', The Guardian, 11 April, available: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/apr/11/matt-hancock-reveals-deaths-of-19-nhs-workers-amid-ppe-row (accessed 15 April 2020).

Stephen McCloskey is Director of the Centre for Global Education and Editor of Policy and Practice: A Development Education Review.

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COVID-19 has Exposed Neoliberal-Driven 'Development': How can Development Education Respond?

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Abstract: The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the moral vacuum and economic failings at the heart of the neoliberal-driven 'development' template that has dominated global economic relations since the 1980s (Monbiot, 2016). It is an ideology that 'venerates the market and strips away the things that make us human' (Metcalf, 2017).

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Global Learning and International Development in the Age of Neoliberalism

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Global Learning and International Development in the Age of Neoliberalism

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DOI link for Resisting the rise of populist nationalism

Resisting the rise of populist nationalism book

The role of development education and international development

DOI link for Resisting the rise of populist nationalism

Resisting the rise of populist nationalism book

The role of development education and international development

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Resisting the rise of populist nationalism | The role of development e

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DOI link for Resisting the rise of populist nationalism Resisting the rise of populist nationalism book The role of development education and international development DOI link for Resisting the rise of populist nationalism Resisting the rise of populist nationalism book The role of development education and international development

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The Foodbank is the Canary in the Coalmine of Neoliberalism

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The Foodbank is the Canary in the Coalmine of Neoliberalism

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A callous welfare system, wage poverty, austerity and, now, the COVID-19 pandemic have resulted in a 33 per cent increase in Trussell Trust foodbank use between 2019-20 and 2020-21. The Trussell Trust's network of 1,471 foodbanks in England, Scotland, Wales and the north of Ireland distributed 2.4 million emergency food parcels to 'people in crisis' from April 2020 to March 2021, 980,000 of whom were children. The extraordinary scaling up of foodbank use has seen the number of emergency food parcels increase from 61,000 in 2010-11 to more than two million a decade later.

This timescale coincided with the aftershocks of the 2008 global financial crisis when 'neo-liberal economic orthodoxy that ran the world for 30 years suffered a heart attack of epic proportions'. The austerity-driven response to the crisis in the UK saw the poverty gap widen, life expectancy stop growing, home ownership decline and household debt accelerate.

The foodbank has become a barometer of this acceleration of poverty and, the COVID-19 pandemic caused a spike in foodbank visits by 40 per cent in the middle of 2020. I visited the South-West Foodbank in my constituency of west Belfast which serves a cluster of local communities, that includes a Nationalist and Loyalist interface area. I aimed to find out how usage has changed during the pandemic.
The South-West foodbank
The Trussell Trust distributed 78,827 food parcels in the north of Ireland in 2020-21 which represented an increase of 33,693 on the previous year. 47,799 were distributed to adults and 31,028 to children. Belfast alone distributed 15,778 food parcels, up 4,144 on 2019-20. The legacy of conflict and a weak economy has contributed to high levels of poverty. Edel Diamond is manager of the South-West foodbank which is located at an interface between the Nationalist Lenadoon and Loyalist Suffolk communities which have suffered longstanding inter-communal violence and tension, and are still addressing the legacies of conflict. But the geographical catchment area of this foodbank includes a cluster of other communities that have high levels of poverty. Edel sits with two mobile phones in front of her that ring constantly as we meet. The calls are alternately from 'clients' or food suppliers. 'I hate that word', says Edel of the term 'client'. The cold neoliberal speak that deems a user a 'client' is out of step with the ethos of the foodbank. 'They are human beings', she says, 'looking for help'.

Edel manages fifty volunteers from the doorman who greets me on arrival to take my details for track and trace purposes to drivers, administrative staff, and those who prepare food parcels for distribution. A huge container at the rear of the building holds food supplies and the shelves inside are neatly labelled with a diversity of foodstuffs. The offices contain four types of pre-prepared food parcels ready to go: families of 2-4 members, 3-4, 5 plus and singles. Edel explains the referral system. A number of 'agents' that include social services, community organisations and mental health teams provide people in distress with red food vouchers each with a unique serial number. The vouchers are redeemed for 3-4 days' food offering three meals a day. The serial numbers are recorded on a database which contributes to The Trussell Trust's bi-annual reports on food supplies given to people in crisis. A maximum of three vouchers are meant to be offered but if the need for support continues then it is provided.

When the pandemic started, she began receiving calls from workers in hospitality suddenly made unemployed, taxi drivers unable to work, and workers in the gig economy which ground to a halt. Her foodbank also supports Syrian refugees re-settled by the government, single parents, the bereaved and people suffering from long-term illness. Many of the foodbank users are caught in a crisis created by the five week wait for Universal Credit. To enable users from falling into long-term debt, the foodbank sometimes provides short-term cash payments to help bridge the five-week gap to UC. She encourages users to avoid, if at all possible, from applying for bridge or crisis loans from government that will be deducted from future welfare payments and could ultimately create another crisis. When we discuss the impact of the pandemic, I'm told it not only sharply increased food emergencies but the way the foodbank operated as users could no longer access the building and food items had to be sanitised. This meant increases in deliveries, particularly as family food parcels included several bags of groceries that could not be carried by users.

Sometimes crises beget crises. Losing a loved one to COVID-19 can result in lost income and reduced circumstances that compound grief with increased poverty. A woman forced to leave the family home due to domestic violence will have to make a fresh claim for welfare support. A benefit sanction or an error in the intrusive and challenging application process can mean re-setting to the start of the five week wait for UC. For those trapped in the terrifying prospect of poverty and hunger, the foodbank is more than a temporary supply of food but a source of comfort, advice and signposting to support.
Artificial scarcity
If social security benefits are designed to help people in distress, then evidence from The Trussell Trust suggests that UC is compounding the causes and effects of poverty and punishing the poor for their own poverty. What is driving foodbank use is not food scarcity but an artificial scarcity created by an unfair benefits system and wages failing to keep pace with inflation. Margaret Kelly, the Northern Ireland Public Services Ombudsman, has recently reported that the introduction of Personal Independence Payment (PIP), a benefit for people aged between 16 and 64 with a long term health condition or impairment, has resulted in repeated failings that have led to 'many claims being unfairly rejected'. Capita, a private consultancy, carries out PIP assessments on behalf of the Department for Communities in Northern Ireland and was found by the Ombudsman to focus assessments more on entitlement to PIP rather than the 'complainant's medical condition'. This appears to be more evidence of a system designed to reduce the welfare budget than assist those in need.

But if the primary reason for food shortages isn't food scarcity but low pay, benefits cuts, the Gig economy, zero-hour contracts, and debt then are foodbanks able to address these structural causes of poverty? 'Food banks are becoming embedded within welfare provision', argues Beck, 'fuelled by corporate involvement and ultimately creating an industry of poverty'. The Trussell Trust argues that it provides a research base on which to campaign for welfare reform and carries out advocacy work to end the need for foodbanks. There is no desire, suggests the chief executive of The Trussell Trust, Emma Revie, for foodbanks to 'become the new normal' as a permanent part of the welfare architecture. Whether you see the network of foodbanks as an unofficial, corporate-backed appendage to the welfare system or an independent voice of tireless volunteers providing emergency support to those who need it most, there is no brooking the argument that their use is rapidly escalating. And, by monitoring that usage, The Trussell Trust and other networks provide invaluable evidence of the extent of government failings in meeting the welfare needs of the poor or addressing the structural causes of poverty. Moreover, should the government go ahead in September with an announced withdrawal of a £20 uplift to Universal Credit introduced during the pandemic, then this could push an additional 500,000 claimants below the poverty line, vulnerable to food poverty.

When asked why he decided to probe the impact of austerity in the UK in 2018, Philip Alston, the former UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, said it was "Primarily because it was a laboratory for neoliberal economic approaches to welfare', adding that "The food bank is the perfect indicator of failed government policies'. If the foodbank is the current canary in the coalmine of neoliberalism then the foodbank network is sending out worrying evidence of a widening contagion of poverty. We would be foolish to ignore it.

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The Foodbank is the Canary in the Coalmine of Neoliberalism

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A callous welfare system, wage poverty, austerity and, now, the COVID-19 pandemic have resulted in a 33 per cent increase in Trussell Trust foodbank use between 2019-20 and 2020-21. The Trussell Trust's network of 1,471 foodbanks in England, Scotland, Wales and the north of Ireland distributed 2.4 million emergency food parcels to 'people in crisis' from April 2020 to March 2021, 980,000 of whom were children.

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Give & Take - Mostly Take?

Every year, for the past 10 years aid given to the Developing World by non-governmental agencies (voluntary aid) has amounted to at least $5 billion. Estimates vary from a low of $5 billion to a high of $15 billion, so we have chosen the lower figure.

Every year for the past 10 years aid given to the Developing World by governments (official
aid) has amounted to at least $50 billion. The actual figures vary considerably year by year
from $50 billion in 2000 to $105 billion in 2007, so we have chosen the lower figure.

Every year over the past 10 years, the Developing World loses an average of $500 billion as a result of the operation of the current unjust international economic system. The figure for
2007 was $792 billion, the estimate for 2008 $895 billion, so we have chosen the lower figure.
The figures change from year to year but in 2007 (according to OECD and IMF figures), the actual ratio was 8:105:790. We have chosen to use the ratio 5:50:500 because it is on the conservative side of the estimates and because it graphically captures the degrees of magnitude involved in the unjust relationship between the 'Rich' and 'Poor' worlds.

So, in short, for every $55 billion transferred to the Poor World by the Rich World, $500 billion is transferred in the opposite direction.

WE GIVE $55 BILLION. WE TAKE $500 BILLION.

Download:

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Five Fifty Five-Hundred Deciphered - DevelopmentEducation.ie

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Give & Take - Mostly Take? The basic idea behind 5:50:500 is simple: Every year, for the past 10 years aid given to the Developing World by non-governmental agencies (voluntary aid) has amounted to at least $5 billion. Estimates vary from a low of $5 billion to a high of $15 billion, so we have [...]

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Policy and Practice: A Development Education Review - Key Journal Articles on Climate Justice

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Policy and Practice: A Development Education Review - Key Journal Articles on Climate Justice

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Housing Inequality, Finance and the Global South

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Housing Inequality, Finance and the Global South

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https://youtu.be/5UWS4d76r4Y

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Housing Inequality, Finance and the Global South

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Understanding Climate Justice: How we got Here

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Understanding Climate Justice: How we got Here

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The Breakdown - YouTube

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Share your videos with friends, family, and the world

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Climate Change & Economics: An Overview | Financial Justice Ireland

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The slides will progress automatically every 10 seconds. You can find the link with the speaker notes and video links here.

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During the Covid-19 pandemic, billions of people around the world have lost their incomes and became poorer, while billionaires have become richer by speculating on global financial markets. The poorest countries are increasingly trapped in debt, whereas rich countries are creating and spending new money. As well as explaining how the G20 dominates decision making on global financial issues and how their decisions lead to growing inequality, this paper offers  ideas about how the problem of increasing global financial inequality can be solved.

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To fix the climate crisis, we must face up to our imperial past | openDemocracy

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Image: Deforestation in Brazil. Rights: NASA/Wikicommons, CC 2.0
'The invading civilization[s] confused ecology with idolatry. Communion with nature was a sin worthy of punishment... Nature was a fierce beast that had to be tamed and punished so that it could work as a machine, placed at our service for ever and ever. Nature, which was eternal, owed us slavery' (1) - Eduardo Galeano
There are many ways to see colonialism. A breakneck rush for riches and power. A permanent pillage of life. A project to appropriate nature, to render it profitable and subservient to the needs of industry.

We can see colonialism as imposition, as the silencing of local knowledges, and erasure of the other. Colonialism as a triple violence: cultural violence through negation; economic violence through exploitation; and political violence through oppression (2).

Colonialism was not a monolithic process, but one of diverse expressions, stages and strategies. Commercial colonialism, centred around ports, differed from settlement colonialism. But its common factor is that colonialism took states to seek access to new lands, resources and labourers. Impelled by God, fortunes or fame, with almost limitless ambition, countries and companies scrambled to acquire control of land. New territories were seen as business enterprises. Local inhabitants were either obstacles to be removed or workforces to be subjugated.

The colonial-imperial era is fundamental to an understanding of how we have arrived here. As Eyal Weizman notes: 'the current acceleration of climate change is not only an unintentional consequence of industrialization. The climate has always been a project for colonial powers, which have continually acted to engineer it' (3).

What did colonialism seek? Wealth and power are the abstractions. But concretely it was commodities: metals, crops, minerals, and people. Political might, economic growth and industrialization required hinterlands to provide raw materials, food, energy supplies, labour and consumer demand. States sought expansion, appropriating territories and dominions. Between 1400 and 1917, the Russian empire expanded a thousandfold (4).

Gold and silver supplied the first vice, feverishly obsessing the early colonizers. From the 16th to the early 19th century, around 100 million kilograms of silver were hauled from the mines of Latin America to Europe. The Spanish writer Alonso de Morgado observed at the time that enough treasure had arrived on the shores of Seville by the 1580s to pave the entire city's streets with gold and silver (5).

Plant commodities - from sugar to spices, cotton to coffee - would follow, as empires arranged the world to satisfy metropolitan tastes. Nature would serve as the canvas, the prize, and the victim of colonialist dreams (6).

The impact on nature

Nature narrates the colonial story, through its vast mines, its desecrated rivers, and emaciated territories. Across continents, mangroves, grasslands, rainforests, and wetlands were cleared to make way for quarries, plantations, ranches, roads and railways.

As historian Richard Drayton explains, imperialism - the expansion of empire - was 'a campaign to extend an ecological regime: a way of living in Nature' (7). Entire landscapes had to be subjected to control and exploitation. Overuse, pollution and deforestation were the norm.

Colonies were arranged to maximize and facilitate extraction. Profit was the compass. French colonial planners divided 'useful Africa' from 'useless Africa' (8). Lands were surveyed, zoned, parcelled, and mapped. All these endeavours relied on a narrative of emptiness, of nothingness.

The New World's territories were vacant fields, lands of nobody, terra nullius - open for conquest and colonizing. The Arctic, the Outback, the Wild West and the Amazon were (and continue to be) enduring metaphors that allowed colonisers to depict territories as barren wastelands. But these lands were not empty. The fiction of negation, and discovery, was used to justify the clearance of native habitats and inhabitants.

Nature was a blank slate, to be reconfigured and rendered useful. Where colonizers arrived, maps were redrawn, inhabitants ousted, and new methods of production installed. Collective land management practices were shredded, as models of individual property ownership were imposed. New courts and laws governed the territory, handing lands over to concessionary companies and settlers. Long-term residents were now 'squatters' on their own land.

Time-tested and locally rooted agricultural traditions were trampled and stamped out (9). In Mexico, peasants were stripped of their milpa lands. In Madagascar, the tavy system was outlawed.

Rural areas were dragooned into ambitious imperial strategies, with villages forced to pay tribute or follow new production regimes. Local peasants were subjected to forced cultivation, compelled to grow what they were told. In French Equatorial Africa, the Mandja people were barred from hunting and pushed into work on cotton plantations (10). In 1905, communities living in the German-controlled Tanganyika (now part of Tanzania) revolted against policy forcing them to grow cotton for export. In response, as historian John Reader recalls: 'three columns advanced through the region, pursuing a scorched earth policy - creating famine. People were forced from their homes, villages were burned to the ground; food crops that could not be taken way or given to loyal groups were destroyed' (11). Around 300,000 people would perish.

From continent to continent, staples were replaced by cash crops. Plantation systems were installed, designed to maximize yields. In India, the British entirely reorganized the agricultural system. India's land, previously used for low-scale subsistence agriculture, would now be destined for cash crops such as cotton and tea, grown for export to international markets. The Portuguese empire installed cotton regimes across its Brazilian, Angolan and Mozambican colonies.

Communal water management techniques were replaced with enormous works of engineering and state regulation (12). Pseudo-ecological arguments were often used to discredit local peoples and justify the clearance of communities. Traditional pastoralist practices were framed as outdated, damaging and ineffective. French July Monarchy propagandists used Arab desertification of Algerian land as a justification for conquest: once in control, France would restore ecological order and change the climate (13).

Perhaps the most destructive agrarian practice involved sugar. In the Canary and Cape Verde islands, sugar production was imposed through deforestation, woodlands were cleared to end up as deserts (14). The forested Atlantic island of Madeira, which means wood in Portuguese, was virtually stripped of trees to make way for livestock and sugarcane plantations. Slaves, transported from the Canary Islands and Africa, dug thousands of kilometres of canal to irrigate the sugarcane fields. Once Madeira's forests were cleared, and the sugar industry could no longer burn wood to fuel its mills, plantations were replaced with vineyards (15).

In the Americas, millions of hectares were stripped of forest life and burned to allow for massive cane plantations, accelerating soil erosion. In the West Indies and Guyana, rainforests were demolished to make way for sugarcane cultivation. Haiti, whose name means 'green island' in Arawak, was stripped of trees (16). In Mexico, deforestation exploded with the arrival of the Spanish, as forests were cleared to supply sugar refineries with fuelwood.

The logic of sugar's monoculture was applied to a variety of commodities. The peripheries of the Amazon were cleared for coffee plantations. Using forced labour, Southeast Asia, southern Colombia and the Congo were deforested and converted into rubber plantations. Burma and Thailand saw their forests turned to mass ricefields, while Indian ecosystems were felled to make way cotton plantations.

In all these contexts, soils were exhausted and made sterile, degraded by deforestation and monoculture. In areas of Brazil and the Caribbean, the tree-bare terrains left by plantation economies became ideal incubators for mosquitos carrying malaria and yellow fever. Searing epidemics killed major segments of the population.

As historian Corey Ross recalls:

'One of the recurring themes in the history of plantations is the perennial cycle of boom and bust. Whether the crop is sugar, tobacco, or cotton, the basic pattern is often the same: an initial frenzy of clearing and planting is followed by either a precipitous collapse of production or a gradual process of creeping decline before eventually ending in soil exhaustion, abandonment, and relocation elsewhere' (17).

Since there was always more land to conquer and acquire, sustainability was irrelevant. The model was simple: exhaust the land, abandon it and clear new land. But the shortcomings of such short-termist thinking would become readily apparent, particular in the circumscribed territories in the Caribbean.

Beyond agriculture, intensive alluvial gold mining in the Caribbean, and silver mining in the Andes and Mexico's Sierra Madre mountains, devastated the local terrain. Trees were ripped out of the ground to fuel smelting furnaces, triggering erosion, flooding and major loss of soil fertility. Around the Bolivian mining city of Potosí, over 30 dams were built around Potosí to power its mills. But the hydraulic infrastructure installed to amplify production (as well as the local deforestation) caused constant flooding. In 1626, the major San Ildefonso dam broke; over 4,000 people were killed. Thousands of cubic tonnes of water contaminated by mercury effluent flooded into local rivers (18).

Loggers also wrought devastating impacts. India's Malabar coast was cleared of teak forests by British merchants. Burma's Tenasserim forest was raided next, stripped of teak over just two decades (19). Within only a handful of years, Fiji, Hawaii and the Marquesas Islands were cleared of sandalwood. In Canada, settlers set light to forests to provide a core ingredient of potash. In Australia, settlers predicted it would take centuries to clear the 'Big Scrub' terrain across New South Wales; it disappeared in just 20 years (20).

From territory to territory, life was swept away. Entire animal species were decimated through overhunting. The demand from European elites for fine furs drove hunters and trappers into Siberia and the Americas, carving open new frontiers. John Astor, founder of the American Fur Company, became the first multimillionaire in US history (21). Fishing fleets scoured the seas, slaughtering shoals. In less than 30 years, sea cows were harpooned into oblivion across the Bering Strait (22). Quaggas, thylacines, great auks, passenger pigeons, warrahs and hundreds of other species disappeared within decades. Industrial whaling, driven by demand for blubber, culled whales to the edge of extinction, removing all bowhead whales from the Beaufort Sea (23).

The impact on peoples

Just as environments and animal species needed to make way for productive 'civilization', so too did local inhabitants. The eradication and exploitation of nature was conjoined with the eradication and exploitation of peoples. Ecocide came hand in hand with ethnocide. The Guanches, Lucayas, Charrúa and Beothuk are just some of the many peoples massacred on the altar of lucre.

The methods were common: seize, dispossess, exclude, expel, extract, and extinguish. Martinican author Aimé Césaire would later note that between 'colonizer and colonized there is room only for forced labor, intimidation, pressure, the police, taxation, theft, rape, compulsory crops, contempt, mistrust, arrogance, self-complacency, swinishness, brainless elites, degraded masses' (24). The life of empire depended on the theft of life.

In the colonial realm, nature and those deemed inferior enough to be part of it, had to be removed or put to work. Governed by whips and watches, labourers were forced to work the earth: to slash, mine, break, cut, harvest, extract, carry and cart. Across its centuries, coerced labour found different incarnations, from formal slavery to convict-leasing, from indentured labour to peonage. Under systems of bondage, human beings were treated as chattel, expendable facets of the exploitation of expendable lands.
This is the first of two extracts from 'The Memory We Could Be', Daniel's new book published this Autumn by New Internationalist Books.

1. Eduardo Galeano, 'Mundo: Cuatro frases que hacen crecer la nariz de Pinocho', Servindi, nin.tl/Galeano#

2. Horacio Machado Aráoz, 'El territorio moderno y la geografía (colonial) del capital', Memoria y Sociedad, Vol 19, No 39, 2015; Vumbi-Yoka Mudimbe, The invention of Africa, Indiana University Press, 1988.

3. Eyal Weizman and Fazal Sheikh (photographs), Colonization as Climate Change in the Negev Desert, Steidl, 2015.

4. Susan Crate, 'Viliui Sakha of Subartic Russia and Their Struggle for Environmental Justice', Environmental justice and sustainability in the former Soviet Union, MIT Press, 2009, p 190.

5. Kendall W Brown, A History of Mining in Latin America, University of New Mexico Press, 2012.

6. This framing draws on the writings of Danilo Urrea and Tatiana Roa Avendaño on the role of nature in the Colombian peace process. See: 'La cuestión ambiental', Y sin embargo, se mueve, Ediciones Antropos, 2015.

7. Richard Drayton, Nature's Government, Yale University Press 2000, p 229.

8. James Ferguson, Global Shadows, Duke University Press, 2006, p 39.

9. David R Montgomery, Dirt: the erosion of civilizations, University of California Press, 2012, p 110.

10. Michael Perelman, The Invention of Capitalism, Duke University Press, 2000, p 52.

11. Robert H Nelson, 'Environmental Colonialism: "Saving" Africa from Africans', Independent Review, Vol 8, No 1, 2003.

12. William M Adams, 'Nature and the colonial mind', in William M Adams & Martin Mulligan, eds, Decolonizing Nature, Earthscan, 2003, p 25.

13. Diana Davis, Resurrecting the Granary of Rome, Ohio University Press, 2007, pp 4-6.

14. Per Lindskog & Benoit Delaite, 'Degrading land', Environment and History, Vol 2, No 3, 1996.

15. Jason W Moore, 'Madeira, Sugar, and the Conquest of Nature in the "First" Sixteenth Century', Review (Fernand Braudel Center), 2009.

16. David R Montgomery, op cit, p 231.

17. Corey Ross, 'The plantation paradigm,', Journal of Global History, Vol 9, No 1, 2014, p 49.

18. A Gioda, C Serrano & A Forenza, 'Dam collapses in the world', La Houille Blanche, Vol 4, 2002; Jason W Moore, 'Silver, ecology and the origins of the modern world, 1450-1640',Rethinking Environmental History, Altamira Press, 2007, p 132.

19. Clive Ponting, A New Green History of the World, Random House, 2007, p 189.

20. William M Adams, op cit, p 30.

21. John F Richards, The Unending Frontier, University of California Press, 2003, p 463.

22. Callum Roberts, The Unnatural History of the Sea, Island Press, 2007.

23. Andrew Stuhl, Unfreezing the Arctic, University of Chicago Press, 2016, p 7.

24. Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, Monthly Review Press, 2000, p 42.

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To fix the climate crisis, we must face up to our imperial past

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Image: Deforestation in Brazil. Rights: NASA/Wikicommons, CC 2.0 'The invading civilization[s] confused ecology with idolatry. Communion with nature was a sin worthy of punishment... Nature was a fierce beast that had to be tamed and punished so that it could work as a machine, placed at our service for ever and ever.

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Is colonialism to blame for dire situation with climate change?

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Is colonialism to blame for dire situation with climate change?

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Is colonialism to blame for dire situation with climate change? | TV Shows | Al Jazeera

An exhibition looking at the legacy of colonialism – and the role it played in the birth of climate change – has opened in London.

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Is colonialism to blame for dire situation with climate change?

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Exhibition looking at legacy of colonialism – and role it played in birth of climate change – has opened in London.

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Caribbean countries forced to borrow to pay for climate change damage | Loop Cayman Islands (loopnews.com)

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Caribbean countries forced to borrow to pay for climate change damage | Loop Cayman Islands

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Caribbean countries and other Small Island Developing States (SIDS) are being forced to borrow in order to recover from the effects of climate change disasters, a measure which former chief climate change negotiator for Saint Lucia, Dr James Fletcher

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What root causes of inequality does this video highlight? Did this video challenge your perspective at all? Reflect on one thing that surprised you in this video!

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What root causes of inequality does this video highlight? Did this video challenge your perspective at all? Reflect on one thing that surprised you in this video!

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https://youtu.be/uWSxzjyMNpU

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Global Wealth Inequality  -  What you never knew you never knew (See description for 2017 updates)

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The Wealthy Aren’t Paying Their Share. How Do We Get Rid of Tax Havens? | The Nib

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The Wealthy Aren't Paying Their Share. How Do We Get Rid of Tax Havens? | The Nib

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It's almost tax season...but not for multi-national corporations.

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It's time to tax for gender justice | openDemocracy

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This article is part of the 'Advancing gender just economies' series, presented by ourEconomy, ActionAid, FEMNET, Womankind Worldwide and Fight Inequality Alliance.
Last week, the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) convened a High-level Dialogue on Financing for Development (FFD). FFD is the process supporting the financing of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development made up of 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and other UN development and human rights frameworks and conventions including Beijing Platform for Action. This is the first high-level dialogue since the adoption of the Addis Ababa Action Agenda in 2015, where feminists, women's rights organisations and civil society campaigned for an inclusive intergovernmental body within the United Nations to reform international tax rules to finance public services and to realize gender equality.

Why do these financing decisions matter to gender equality and women's rights? With close to a decade remaining for the curtains to fall on Agenda 2030, this is where states show if they are putting their money where their mouth is and decide where the money for the SDGs is coming from and what actions will be prioritized. Women's voices go largely unheard in the policy debates dominated by global capital. While States accommodate corporate demands for tax incentives, the needs of women and demands to tax corporations fairly are neglected. Women face challenges due to inadequate financing for and provision of public services, as regressive tax policies and underfunded public services perpetuate women's disproportionate responsibility for unpaid care and domestic work.

In Agenda 2030 world leaders committed to recognising and valuing unpaid care and domestic work through the provision of public services, eliminating all forms of violence against women and girls and tackling inequalities. Where the money comes from to make this a reality and what areas are prioritised are quite telling. For example, UN Women estimated that National Action Plans for Gender Equality had funding gaps of up to 90% in 2017. Tax is a gendered issue, meaning unfair tax systems threaten the realisation of women's human rights and Agenda 2030. They further contribute to increasing levels of gendered socio-economic inequality-exacerbated by the global fiscal austerity trend. Progressive tax revenue through domestic resource mobilisation is critical to addressing structural and systematic global inequalities and making it possible for countries achieve women's human rights.

From tax avoidance to tax and development justice

The High-level dialogue includes prime ministers, finance ministers, high ranking representatives of international finance institutions, private sector and a few civil society 'experts', and aims " to renew global commitment to financing at the highest political level." It further aims to " encourage public and private investment to align with the 2030 Agenda, and promote new and innovative initiatives that target gaps in financing sustainable development." Yet, in spite of 'combatting illicit financial flows' (IFFs) being on the agenda, the private sector is seen to play a big role in addressing this financing 'gap', rather than as a source of progressive tax income.

Current rigged economic structures and systems allow corporates to dodge taxes, shifting income to tax havens and contributing significantly to the vast levels of IFFs leaving developing countries. These illicit financial flows allow multinational corporations and wealthy individuals to avoid paying their fair share in tax. More than 65 percent of IFFs are proceeds from commercial activities, with countries missing out on at least USD600 billion in public revenue annually and an estimated USD20-30 trillion sitting in tax havens. Africa loses 5.5% of GDP to IFFs, which is larger than the total of foreign direct investment and official development aid (ODA) combined.

Increasingly, states are favouring privatisation of essential services and infrastructure. The World Banks' 2015 Maximizing Financing for Development agenda, 'From billions to trillions', is directing public tax payer funds through development banks to the private sector to deliver services, more so in low income countries. The current trend in privatisation and its impact on the right to essential services is well documented, including how it undermines women's rights and the Sustainable Development Goals.

Tax is by far the most important revenue stream for developing countries, and is already dwarfing development aid in many contexts. In Africa in 2012, collected tax revenue was 10 times the amount of overseas aid received. Yet states could raise more to increase their budgets. In particular, it is critical for developing countries to raise taxes from Transnational Corporations (TNCS), as corporate income tax makes up 16 percent state revenue compared to just over eight percent in high income countries.

The Addis Ababa Action Agenda and Agenda 2030 'commit governments to take the necessary measures to raise resources for gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls'. Not only is financing for gender equality vital in its own right, it is a missing piece to the realisation of SDG 5 on Gender Equality and the rest of the UN's 2030 Agenda.

The impact of tax policies on women's human rights

Despite these commitments, austerity measures pushed by international financial institutions (IFIs) have been implemented around the world. Policies include changes to how taxes are collected, privatising public goods, freezing public sector wages, reducing social security and reforming pension systems. Such austerity measures widely impact the enjoyment of social and economic human rights, particularly for women who are the most affected by all forms of tax injustice, the privatisation of public services and unemployment.

The current system based on a neoliberal vision of a small state and low taxes has evidently led to a race to the bottom in terms of labour standards, safety and environmental regulations, and tax rates, not to mention the current climate crisis. Combined with the failure of decision-makers and states, especially in the Global North, to create binding corporate accountability frameworks, there is widespread environmental pollution, social insecurity, land grabbing and forced displacement, but also illicit financial flows and tax abuse. The impact of corporate impunity on women's lives is well documented. Low tax collection by governments means there are fewer resources to spend on public services and social security. It is more likely to be women who fill the gap with their bodies and time. This especially affects the most vulnerable women.

Women subsidize the economy with their unpaid work, performing the majority ( 76.2 percent) of global unpaid care and domestic work, estimated at $10 trillion a year worldwide or 13 percent of global GDP. Women's disproportionate unpaid care burden is a root cause and driver of gender inequality and has a profound impact on women's ability to earn an income and realise the full spectrum of their human rights.

Making taxes work for women

Meet international commitments to maximise available resources - notably through progressive and gender-just taxation.

Reform tax laws so that they do not discriminate against women and ensure tax and fiscal policies recognise and serve to represent, reduce and redistribute unpaid care work.

End harmful tax practices, illicit financial flows, and ensure that multinational corporations pay their share.

Support the establishment of an inclusive intergovernmental UN Global Tax Commission, where all countries have a seat at the table and equal say in determining international tax rules.

We need a just distribution of resources for a fair global economy. Fiscal choices have gendered impacts. Consequently, states should ensure resources are used to promote redistribution and do not increase the burden on women. Resourcing feminist and women's rights movements is also vital in supporting women's rights. To increase the amount of revenue raised from wealthy individuals and corporations we need national and global tax reform. In order for states to fulfil their obligations they must introduce progressive taxation using maximum available resources to achieve women's rights.

Global Alliance for Tax Justice* (GATJ), a growing movement of civil society organisations, activists and trade unions, states that 'Tax policies and systems manifest and exacerbate the patriarchal and other discriminatory structures that disadvantage, marginalise and disempower women.' It demand that states:

With 2019 being the 75th anniversary of the Bretton Woods Institutions, and the upcoming 25th anniversary of the Beijing Platform for Action and five years of progress made on the SDGs in 2020, this High-level Dialogue on FFD is an opportunity for states and the global community to address the barriers that prevent the economy working for all including all women and girls. Let's hope they take it.

If you are interested to learn more about how tax justice can support women's rights:

*The Global Alliance for Tax Justice is a growing movement of civil society organisations and activists, including trade unions, united in campaigning for greater transparency, democratic oversight and redistribution of wealth in national and global tax systems. We comprise the five regional networks of Africa, Latin America, Asia-Australia, North America and Europe, which collectively represent hundreds of organisations.

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This article is part of the ' Advancing gender just economies' series, presented by ourEconomy, ActionAid, FEMNET, Womankind Worldwide and Fight Inequality Alliance. Last week, the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) convened a High-level Dialogue on Financing for Development (FFD).

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Reading and Watching List: Tax Justice and Rights

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Reading and Watching List: Tax Justice and Rights

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https://docs.google.com/document/d/1mFYIvbFLNtQ7m0E8hvrICI6-Mv5lITV2RyqvL7v4fsw/edit?usp=sharing

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Teach-in resource list: Feminists organising globally on tax justice and women’s rights 

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Global Alliance for Tax Justice | (globaltaxjustice.org)

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Jubilee Debt Campaign UK

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Jubilee Debt Campaign is part of a global movement demanding freedom from the slavery of unjust debts and a new financial system that puts people first.

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The G20’s unfinished business: Don't let debt do us part - Atlantic Council

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When the finance ministers and central bank governors of the Group of Twenty (G20) meet in Bali this week-because Indonesia holds this year's G20 presidency -they'll focus on global health architecture, digital transformation, and sustainable energy transformation.

But there's a fourth critical task that the G20 can't afford to ignore: Preparing the world for a spate of debt crises in many low-income (LIC) and middle-income countries (MIC).

Initiatives aimed at addressing this challenge during the pandemic have largely failed, and unless these efforts are strengthened, sovereign debt crises will prevent vulnerable countries from fully bouncing back after the pandemic. This, in turn, would exacerbate the unevenness of the global economic recovery and make it less sustainable. Simply put, sovereign debt crises could stall the global economic recovery.

Here are some numbers underlining the key debt-related threats that the G20 must act on now to try and save the day:

$45.2 BILLION
That's how much seventy three LICs shelled out to service their debts in 2020, despite a G20-led effort that brought them significant relief from debt payments that year.
The G20 launched the Debt Services Suspension Initiative (DSSI) at its April 2020 virtual meeting, calling on official and private-sector creditors to temporarily suspend the interest and principal that eligible LICs owed them. The initiative, originally meant to last through the end of 2020, was extended to the end of 2021. The money due to creditors will be repaid in the following five years, with a one-year grace period.

In all, forty-eight countries applied for DSSI relief, receiving thirteen billion dollars of debt-service suspension. The relief was granted mainly by bilateral, official lenders led by the Paris Club-a group of twenty-two creditor nations-and China. In total, Beijing has negotiated $10.8 billion worth of relief with debtor countries over the past two years, mostly through reprofiling and rescheduling outstanding debt.

But the payout LICs needed to make in 2020 exposes the mismatch between the ballooning debt of vulnerable nations and what the DSSI can offer, unless the private sector and multilateral development banks (such as the World Bank) also step up and promise relief. The debt-service payment that year dwarfed the twenty-one billion dollars' worth of the new Special Drawing Rights (SDR) distribution allocated to those countries.
Chad, Ethiopia, and Zambia are the only countries to have applied for another of the G20's initiatives to help heavily indebted nations: the Common Framework (CF) for debt treatments.
With the termination of the DSSI at the end of 2021, these LICs face debt-service payments worth $11 billion more this year. Overall, the external debt-service obligations of LICs have increased to 14.3 percent of government revenues in 2020 from only 6.8 percent in 2010-threatening to crowd out urgently needed public spending on health, social services, and other development needs. The G20 should create new measures to alleviate the unsustainable and harmful debt-service burden on LICs.

THREE

It was adopted in November 2020 to encourage creditors and sovereign debtors to efficiently negotiate debt restructuring when debt becomes unsustainable, including through the use of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund's (IMF) Debt Sustainability Analysis. The CF is also designed to encourage bilateral lenders outside of the Paris Club (mainly China) to participate in multilateral debt restructuring. Most LICs, however, have avoided the CF due to fears of being downgraded by rating agencies and losing international capital market access.

Chad, which had $3.7 billion in external debt by the end of 2020, received a $570 million extended credit facility (ECF) from the IMF after engaging in debt-restructuring negotiations with an official creditor committee involving representatives from China, India, France, and Saudi Arabia. Zambia also reached an agreement with the IMF for a $1.4 billion ECF, though a final approval from the fund's board will depend on the country's progress in debt-restructuring negotiations with official creditors and private sector bondholders (the latter account for 40 percent of its external debt). Meanwhile, Ethiopia has held meetings with its official creditor committee, consisting of twelve countries chaired by France and China. The country's external debt stock reached $30.4 billion in 2020.
Nearly two-thirds of the total debt service (TDS) payment on risky public debt is borne by just one-third of countries-that's twenty-three nations-which are not eligible for the CF (despite the outsized debt burden they carry).
To get more countries to embrace the CF, the G20 should expand the debt standstill it offers to countries to also cover rating agencies. That would ensure that debtor countries aren't penalized with a downgrading when they apply for the CF debt treatment, encouraging them to use this initiative.
That was the level of LICs' external debt by the end of 2020, signaling the worsening debt troubles of these nations and serving as a warning beacon to the G20. As many as 60 percent of these nations are at high risk or are already in debt distress Hung Tran is a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council's GeoEconomics Center, former executive managing director at the International Institute of Finance, and former deputy director at the IMF. -twice the 30 percent recorded in 2015. That's despite the DSSI, CF, and a special $650 billion distribution of SDR from the IMF.
65 PERCENT

The G20 needs to urgently expand the CF's coverage to get rid of this bizarre anomaly. At the same time, debtor countries should be required to fully disclose their debt situation, including off-balance-sheet obligations. Finally, the role of private sector creditors and bondholders must be properly recognized in the CF, which currently doesn't give private creditors room for much negotiation on their terms when they participate in debt restructuring.

The CF should recognize private creditor committees as participants in the negotiating process to shape restructuring terms, if they represent a majority of debt or bond holders by volume. The CF also should enable the sharing of debt information collected in the Debt Sustainability Analysis process with private creditors. Without that, it's unlikely that private creditors will buy into the CF initiative.

$860 BILLION

Lessons learned

It's also important to recognize the evolving practical tools private creditors and debtor countries used to restructure the debt of Ecuador ($17.4 billion) and Argentina ($65 billion) in the past two years. Their restructurings have been facilitated by representative bondholder committees making use of enhanced Collective Action Clauses that prevent minority holdouts from torpedoing deals agreed to by a qualified majority of bondholders. These experiences should be used as reference points in sovereign debt restructuring involving private creditors.

All in all, the G20 has its work cut out for it. Yet it can start by bolstering its existing initiatives, partly by learning from the experiences of the past two years. The forum was created more than two decades ago for precisely this reason: dealing with global economic challenges of massive proportions. Now, it must now face up to its latest test.

Further reading

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The G20's unfinished business: Don't let debt do us part

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When the finance ministers and central bank governors of the Group of Twenty (G20) meet in Bali this week-because Indonesia holds this year's G20 presidency -they'll focus on global health architecture, digital transformation, and sustainable energy transformation.

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Debt data portal (jubileedebt.org.uk)

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This portal by Jubilee Debt Campaign compiles key statistics and analysis on the debts of countries and governments.

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Debt Audits | Financial Justice Ireland

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Debt audits and lessons from the global South… Debt audits are used by activists in the global South to inform people about the scale and nature of their country’s debts, which are often not …

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The Irish Debt Crisis - What Happened? 2015 | Financial Justice Ireland

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05 October 2021

PDF 1.53mb | Download Now

Collaboratively developed by DDCI (now Financial Justice Ireland) and The Spectacle of Defiance and Hope
The aims of the resource are to:

Educate people about what happened during the period of the banking crash and guarantee, paying particular attention to Anglo Irish Bank

Create links between people's own experiences, with what was (and still is) happening at the political level since 2008

Explore the justice aspects of what happened

Increase participants' economic literacy around key players in determining economic outcomes in Ireland (Central Bank, European Central Bank, Troika, etc) and also difficult terms we often hear in the media (bonds, bondholders, promissory notes, etc.)

Empower participants to feel informed and entitled to engage in discussions about economic issues

About this pack

What is this?

This is everything you will need to organize, carry out, and evaluate a workshop that explores the Irish banking crisis, with groups of at least 8 people. We hope it can be used with all sorts of groups; adults, teenagers, community workers, activists, volunteers - anyone who wants to understand the banking crisis and particularly the role of Anglo Irish Bank within this.

Why would I want to run this workshop?

This pack enables you, along with other people, to explore the banking debt from a justice perspective. This means taking the particular experience of communities into consideration. The idea is to write the stories of real people into the story of what happened with the banks.

Certain campaign groups ( Ballyhea Says No to Bondholder Bailout, DDCI, Anglo: Not Our Debt and others) are campaigning for debt justice in Ireland, and believe that people should not be held financially responsible for the bad investments made by bankers and investors. The Spectacle of Defiance and Hope agree with this and believe it is still possible to prevent many more years of debt repayments leaving the country - money that could be invested in communities who are suffering at the hands of austerity. The nationalisation of the Anglo debt is illegitimate, and should be written down completely.

How long will it take to run the workshop?

The workshop itself can be done in less than a day, or if you want over 2-3 sessions. You can decide how long you would like to take. This resource provides a five-part structure, which you can adapt according to the group you are working with. However, it requires at least three hours. The intention is that the workshop will lead to a positive action within the communities - that once we understand what is happening, we will talk and think about what it is we can do to stop the injustice, now that we are better informed.

What will I need to do the workshop?

You will need a group of eight or more people, two facilitators, this pack, flipchart, and markers. The optimum number of people for this workshop is about 20 people, but it is not possible to do it with less than 8 people, and we recommend that the group does not exceed 30. As you increase the number of participants, you will need to increase the number of facilitators.
Aim:
The aim of this workshop is to raise awareness on events that took place in Ireland from 2008 until now, relating to the banking crisis. Much of the emphasis is on the Anglo Irish Bank story and it is framed within an understanding of social justice - we think what happened was unjust and we want to reverse it.

It is hoped that people who complete this workshop will:

1. Have a better understanding of the banking crisis, bank debt and the importance of the role of Anglo Irish Bank.

2. Understand the role of key decision makers and power-holders in Ireland and Europe.

3. Link the banking crisis to the many cuts happening in communities and to community organisations.

4. Understand the banking crisis in relation to other cuts and taxes imposed.

5. Have a better understanding of common terms used when discussing the banking crisis.

6. Have explored ways in which individuals and communities can respond to the banking crisis and austerity to bring about change.

Learning methodology:

Though this pack provides facilitators with information needed to run the workshop, the exercise is designed to be highly participatory. Facilitators are not expected to have all the answers or to be the only ones with knowledge to share. The hope is that by participating in role-play and sharing experiences, each of us in the room will begin to know the language of bank debt, enabling us to think about working towards change.

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The Irish Debt Crisis - What Happened? 2015 | Financial Justice Ireland

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05 October 2021 Collaboratively developed by DDCI (now Financial Justice Ireland) and The Spectacle of Defiance and Hope The aims of the resource are to: Educate people about what happened during the period of the banking crash and guarantee, paying particular attention to Anglo Irish Bank Create links between people's

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How to achieve full decolonization | New Internationalist

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How to achieve full decolonization

Global South countries face an extraordinary dilemma. Mass poverty is real: more than half of the world population lives on less than what is required to meet basic human needs. People need livelihoods. They need houses. They need public services. How can these needs be met? According to the dominant economic framework, the answer is straightforward: growth. Grow the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), create jobs, and then tax income in order to pay for the things that are necessary to improve people's lives: healthcare, education, housing, transportation, decent food and so on. Every neoclassical economist will tell you the same thing: GDP growth is the precondition for development.

So how do you grow the economy? Here's where the dilemma appears. One might try to use the same tools of the affluent nations in the Global North - broadly speaking, the US, Canada, Western Europe, Australia, New Zealand/Aotearoa and Japan - which developed their national productive capacity to supply domestic needs and built industries capable of competing effectively on the world market. This strategy requires protecting one's economy with trade tariffs and nurturing it with subsidies, boosting wages and public investment, and nationalizing key resources and services. We know that this kind of industrial policy works. In fact, it was used successfully by progressive governments across the Global South in the decades immediately following decolonization.

But that path was closed off, beginning in the 1980s. Northern powers realized that the shift toward economic sovereignty in the South threatened access to the cheap labour, raw materials and captive markets they had enjoyed during the colonial era. So they intervened, using the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to impose structural adjustment programmes across the region (with the exception of China and a few East Asian countries), forcing governments to dismantle tariffs and subsidies, cut wages, and privatize public assets.

With their hopes of sovereign economic development crushed, most countries' only options for growth now are either to export raw materials (petroleum, coltan, palm oil, beef, fish, whatever) or export cheap labour (in the form of sweatshop output) to supply transnational companies and global commodity chains that service Northern consumers.

Export fallacy

Both of these routes are problematic. Extractivism is ecologically ruinous and socially destructive. And it's a raw deal because low-income countries lack bargaining power in the world economy so have to sell their resources for extremely low prices. Meanwhile, relying on sweatshop exports means poverty wages and permanent exploitation. Plus, in order to please the barons of international capital and attract the investment required to get these projects off the ground, you have to cut environmental regulations, labour protections and corporate taxes in a brutal race to the bottom. Under these conditions, the yields of growth are mostly captured outside the country, and precious little trickles down to ordinary people.

This arrangement works beautifully for international capital as it ensures a steady supply of cheap labour and raw materials. But for Southern governments, it's a terrible bind: in order to provide for their citizens' most basic needs they have to offer themselves up to be exploited by rich nations and transnational companies, which of course inevitably works against the very goals they are trying to achieve. This is why we have the absurd situation where countries that are fabulously rich in labour and resources remain mired in mass poverty. It's because their labour and resources are organized around the economic interests of the rich world.

We can see this clearly in the empirical record. Recent research shows that rich countries rely on a large net appropriation of resources and labour from the Global South, including 10 billion tonnes of raw materials, 800 million hectares of land, 23 exajoules of energy and 200 million person-years of labour . Let's put these giant sums into perspective: that amount of land could be used to grow nutritious food for four billion people; the energy would be enough to provide electricity and internet for the entire population of Africa as well as powering infrastructure for healthcare, education and public transport for all. In other words, an extraordinary amount of the South's productive capacity is used to supply food, tech gadgets and fast fashion to affluent Northern consumers, when it could be being used to meet local human needs.

This export-focused approach to 'development' will never work, because it is not designed to work. It is designed to maintain Northern access to cheap labour, raw materials, and markets in the Global South. This is why inequality between the Global North and South has exploded over the past few decades: our approach to development enables an extraordinary transfer of resources and profits from poor countries to rich countries. For people in the South, their incomes might increase by a little bit, but at an extremely slow rate - not nearly enough to bring people out of poverty measured by any meaningful threshold, and definitely not enough to compensate for the exploitation and environmental degradation they suffer in the process.

New monetary framework

Fortunately, there is another way. The central fallacy of international development is that you have to pursue GDP growth first in order to get what you actually want, namely things to meet people's basic needs. In reality, GDP is an unnecessary intermediary. The key insight of research in post-development and post-growth economics is to point out that what's actually required to meet people's needs is resources and labour. And there the South suffers no deficit. The problem, as Senegalese economist Ndongo Samba Sylla points out, is that they are either not being used (ie there's mass unemployment) or they are not being used in a way that actually benefits the population (ie resources and labour are appropriated to service Northern consumption).What Southern governments can do instead, then, is mobilize their resources and labour around meeting actual human needs and thus achieve their development goals directly.

How can this be accomplished? This is where modern monetary theory (MMT) comes in. MMT may seem complex at first, but in fact it is remarkably simple. As MMT economists have long pointed out, governments are not like households. They do not have to 'earn money' (through, say, taxing or borrowing) in order to spend. They can create money for public spending, simply by issuing currency and expanding the deficit. This is not a hypothetical scenario. It is how governments actually work. They fund public services and public employment by creating money. And they do not have to worry about 'balancing the budget', because they cannot become insolvent in their own currency.

Of course, there are limits to money creation. If you spend too much money into the economy, demand may overwhelm the country's productive capacity, which risks driving excess inflation. But if this happens there's a simple solution: you can use industrial policy to expand capacity where necessary, and you can tax excess money back out of the economy, starting with the richest in society. According to MMT, the purpose of taxation is not to fund government spending - as governments can fund spending simply by issuing currency - but rather to reduce excess demand, and, as an important side effect, to reduce corrosive inequality.

MMT opens exciting possibilities for an alternative economic model, where the national currency is used to mobilize domestic resources and labour to accomplish human development. To do this, governments can simply issue money and spend it on achieving four urgent goals:

(i) Universal public services. Develop generous, high-quality universal public services. Not just healthcare and education, but also public transportation, affordable housing, water, electricity and internet.

(ii) Food sovereignty. Focus on regenerative agriculture and fisheries to produce healthy, organic food for domestic consumption, reducing imports while restoring soils, biodiversity and marine life.

(iii) Energy sovereignty. Roll out renewable energy infrastructure - solar panels and wind turbines - to replace fossil fuels and reduce energy imports. It doesn't take much: high levels of welfare can be accomplished with minimal energy.

(iv) Public jobs guarantee. All of the above requires labour, so governments need to ensure that anyone who wants to can train to contribute to socially valuable projects - and be paid a living wage - such as building houses and infrastructure, staffing public services, expanding renewable energy, regenerating farmland etc.

This approach would ensure decent livelihoods for all, with universal access to clean energy, healthy food and public services. The age-old question of 'how do we get enough GDP to end poverty and meet our development goals' becomes much less relevant. Growth becomes an effect of development, rather than a precondition for it.

Now, I can hear your objection: MMT might work for rich countries like the US and UK but not for poorer countries, which rely so heavily on foreign finance and investment. Rich governments can only get away with printing money and expanding fiscal deficits because they have such extraordinary geopolitical and economic power, which means investors will be happy to buy their bonds and extend credit regardless of what their fiscal and monetary policy is, precisely because these countries are so dominant. But most Global South countries do not enjoy the same privileges.

Colonizers understood the key principle of monetary policy: whoever controls the currency gets to decide how labour and resources are used

This critique raises an important question. In theory, MMT applies to any government that issues its own sovereign currency. The vast majority of Southern governments have this power, with the exception of West African countries that rely on the Franc CFA, or countries like El Salvador and Timor-Leste that use the US dollar. But it's true that even countries with sovereign currencies face constraints because so many of them rely heavily on external finance: they are in debt to foreign creditors, in currencies (such as the US dollar) which they do not control. External debts have to be paid back, with interest, in foreign currency; and to get foreign currency governments have to organize their economies around the desires of foreign capital.

Colonial legacies

This arrangement is no accident. When the structural adjustment programmes of the 1980s dismantled domestic industries, they rendered Global South countries dependent on imports, and therefore also dependent on foreign currency and creditors. This is a problem not only because it requires them to render themselves exploitable but because it also limits their policy options. Foreign creditors require fiscal and monetary 'discipline'; governments cannot use deficit spending because their creditors (and the ratings agencies) will punish them, capital will flee, and borrowing costs will rise. Plus, deficit spending is against World Bank and IMF rules, so any government that is subject to multilateral debt has its hands tied.

Financial dependence is how the colonial relationship is maintained into the post-colonial era. It is the iron fist by which Northern capital continues to rule the South. And it's a vicious circle: because you rely on foreign currency, you cannot use deficit spending; and because you cannot use deficit spending you are forced to rely on foreign currency. And that means opening yourself to exploitation by rich countries.

This is a longstanding strategy of colonial power. During the colonial period, Europeans needed ways to compel people to work on their plantations and mines, or to shift from subsistence production to export production. One option was to use direct coercion, like enslavement; and certainly, they did plenty of that. But they also resorted to taxation: tax the local population in a currency they do not possess (any colonial currency will do), so that in order to get it they have no choice but to work in European industries for wages, or sell things to European buyers. In other words, the point of taxation - backed up by the threat of violence - was to induce an artificial scarcity of money, in order to compel people to hand over labour and resources. Colonizers understood the key principle of monetary policy: whoever controls the currency gets to decide how labour and resources are used.

When colonial powers withdrew their flags and armies from the South, this arrangement didn't disappear. It just changed form. Today, the artificial scarcity is maintained by enforcing structural dependence on international capital, and enforcing fiscal and monetary discipline. All of this ensures that capital has access to cheap labour and resources, and maintains a steady flow of tribute from South to North.

Breaking free

Fortunately, there is a way to end this reliance on foreign finance and investment. There is nothing to stop a Southern government from using its full monetary powers, within the limits of the economy's productive capacity. But to do so, they have to break free from the power of international creditors. That means defaulting on external debt obligations (or at least defaulting on any creditors that prevent them from deficit spending). This might sound radical, but it's really not. Unilateral default has been used successfully by governments many times in the past, and with positive outcomes; it's just that in today's neoliberal era it seems so heretical as to be unthinkable.

Of course, there would be consequences. Default might make it more difficult to borrow on international markets, at least in the short term (probably around a year). And angering international creditors is likely to cause currency depreciation, which in turn makes imports more expensive - specifically energy and food, which comprise the majority of Southern imports.

Angering international creditors is likely to cause currency depreciation, which makes imports more expensive − specifically energy and food, which comprise the majority of Southern imports

Some of these negative ramifications can be mitigated. If, for example, multiple Southern countries co-ordinate default together (the 'united debt resistance' that the revolutionary Burkinabe president Thomas Sankara famously called for in the 1980s) this would reduce creditors' leverage and force them to swallow the losses.

But preparations would still have to be made for the fallout. The good news is that these would take the form of the four key measures I outlined above. Relying on national currency instantly eases the need for foreign credit. And working toward self-sufficiency in energy and food goes a long way to reducing the need for imports. Tariffs and subsidies can be used to develop national industries, substituting imports and further reducing reliance on foreign currency and creditors. Northern trading partners will be upset, but since the aim is to be less reliant on them this shouldn't matter as much as it does now.

Taking this approach would bring an added benefit: reducing inflation pressures. As Fadhel Kaboub from Denison University has explained, when inflation happens in the Global South it's quite often 'imported' from currency exchange rates and trade imbalances. The MMT approach to development therefore offers a solution to inflation (rather than creating a risk of inflation, as people often assume) by reducing dependency on foreign currency and imports. As for cases where imported goods cannot be substituted, we can minimize trade with Northern countries and opt instead to trade with Southern partners, where the terms of trade are fairer ('de-linking', as Egyptian economist Samir Amin put it, from unequal exchange with the North).

We can also impose capital controls to prevent finance from fleeing the country: rules that require investors, companies and rich people to get approval, and pay fees, before moving their profits or holdings abroad. This way money - and foreign currency - stays in the country and can be used for domestic investment and trade, which further reduces reliance on foreign credit. There's nothing actually radical about this policy; it was used widely in the pre-neoliberal era. Foreign investors don't like it, but again, reliance on them should be reducing, so this doesn't matter as much as it otherwise might. They've lost their power to punish.

All of this would release Southern governments from the grip of neo-colonial power. The steps I've suggested here amount to a kind of unilateral decolonization; in other words, a throwing off of colonial power. They would expand economic sovereignty and enable us to build societies around human wellbeing and ecological regeneration, rather than around the interests of international capital. These ideas are not new. They were promoted by Gandhi, Sankara, Franz Fanon, Julius Nyerere and other leading figures of the anti-colonial struggle, who understood that economic sovereignty and self-reliance were essential to real decolonization.

This approach helps us solve the dilemma of development. But it also helps address the other central crisis of our time: ecological breakdown. Research in industrial ecology makes it clear that global ecological breakdown is being driven overwhelmingly by rich nations. The Global North is responsible for 92 per cent of all emissions in excess of the planetary boundary. (I have calculated this using an ' equality-attribution ' method that takes into account historical carbon emissions, and ties emissions to where they are consumed). They have colonized the atmosphere for their own enrichment.

High-income countries are also responsible for the vast majority of excess resource use, with per-capita consumption at more than four times the sustainable level - much of which is plundered from the Global South.

Research in the field of ecological economics has made it clear that if we are to have any chance of keeping global warming under 1.5 or 2°C and reversing ecological breakdown, rich countries will have to scale down their energy and material throughput - in other words, degrowth.

Enforced degrowth

As a number of scholars have pointed out, degrowth in the North entails a reduction in extractivism and liberates Southern labour and resources for other ends. But scholarship in degrowth faces a conundrum. We know that it's possible for rich nations to scale down resource and energy use while improving social outcomes; but why would they voluntarily make such a transition, when they benefit so prodigiously from the status quo? Of course, we might hope that enlightened leaders will take steps to bring their economies into line with ecological objectives, or that social movements will eventually force them to do so. But why should we wait around for this to happen?

The approach I've called for here - unilateral decolonization - helps solve this problem. The South has the power to enforce degrowth in the North, by refusing to be used as a supplier of cheap labour and raw materials for Northern consumption. Ending this exploitative relationship would require Northern countries to either pay more for resource and labour imports from the South, or otherwise to rely on their own resources and labour. Both options would be more expensive, so Northern countries would have to consume less (ie find ways to meet human needs with more modest amounts of throughput), and the rate of capital accumulation would decline.

As the 21st century unfolds, we must strive for a world where everyone can live healthy, dignified lives in balance with the planet's ecosystems. This requires a radical convergence in the global economy: resource use in the North needs to decline dramatically to get back to sustainable levels, while resources in the South must be reclaimed for meeting human needs, converging at a level that is consistent with universal human welfare and ecological stability. By leveraging insights from MMT to enable economic sovereignty in the South, we can take real steps toward realizing such a world. Full decolonization remains to be achieved - but it is not out of reach.

This article is part of the Food Justice files, which is funded by the European Journalism Centre through the European Development Journalism Grants programme, a fund supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

This article is from the September-October 2021 issue of New Internationalist.
You can access the entire archive of over 500 issues with a digital subscription. Subscribe today "

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Conventional development is not delivering for people or planet. If countries in the Global South are to nourish and provide for their populations within ecological limits they will first need to break their financial dependence on international capital. Modern monetary theory offers a way to go about it.

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Rich countries drained $152tn from the global South since 1960 | Opinions | Al Jazeera

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We have long known that the industrial rise of rich countries depended on extraction from the global South during the colonial era. Europe's industrial revolution relied in large part on cotton and sugar, which were grown on land stolen from Indigenous Americans, with forced labour from enslaved Africans. Extraction from Asia and Africa was used to pay for infrastructure, public buildings, and welfare states in Europe - all the markers of modern development. The costs to the South, meanwhile, were catastrophic: genocide, dispossession, famine and mass impoverishment.

Imperial powers finally withdrew most of their flags and armies from the South in the mid-20th century. But over the following decades, economists and historians associated with "dependency theory" argued that the underlying patterns of colonial appropriation remained in place and continued to define the global economy. Imperialism never ended, they argued - it just changed form.

They were right. Recent research demonstrates that rich countries continue to rely on a large net appropriation from the global South, including tens of billions of tonnes of raw materials and hundreds of billions of hours of human labour per year - embodied not only in primary commodities, but also in high-tech industrial goods like smartphones, laptops, computer chips and cars, which over the past few decades have come to be overwhelmingly manufactured in the South.

This flow of net appropriation occurs because prices are systematically lower in the South than in the North. For instance, wages paid to Southern workers are on average one-fifth the level of Northern wages. This means that for every unit of embodied labour and resources that the South imports from the North, they have to export many more units to pay for it.

Economists Samir Amin and Arghiri Emmanuel described this as a "hidden transfer of value" from the South, which sustains high levels of income and consumption in the North. The drain takes place subtly and almost invisibly, without the overt violence of colonial occupation and therefore without provoking protest and moral outrage.

In a recent paper published in the journal New Political Economy, we built on the work of Amin and others to quantify the scale of drain through unequal exchange in the post-colonial era. We found that the drain increased dramatically during the 1980s and 1990s, as neoliberal structural adjustment programmes were imposed across the global South. Today, the global North drains from the South commodities worth $2.2 trillion per year, in Northern prices. For perspective, that amount of money would be enough to end extreme poverty, globally, fifteen times over.

Over the whole period from 1960 to today, the drain totalled $62 trillion in real terms. If this value had been retained by the South and contributed to Southern growth, tracking with the South's growth rates over this period, it would be worth $152 trillion today.

These are extraordinary sums. For the global North (and here we mean the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Israel, Japan, Korea, and the rich economies of Europe), the gains are so large that, for the past couple of decades, they have outstripped the rate of economic growth. In other words, net growth in the North relies on appropriation from the rest of the world.

For the South, the losses outstrip foreign aid transfers by a wide margin. For every dollar of aid the South receives, they lose $14 in drain through unequal exchange alone, not counting other kinds of losses like illicit financial outflows and profit repatriation. Of course, the ratio varies by country - higher for some than others - but in all cases, the discourse of aid obscures a darker reality of plunder. Poor countries are developing rich countries, not the other way around.

Neoclassical economists tend to see low wages in the South as "natural" - a kind of neutral market outcome. But Amin and other economists from the global South argued that wage inequalities are artefacts of political power.

Rich countries have a monopoly on decision-making in the World Bank and IMF, they hold most of the bargaining power in the World Trade Organization, they use their power as creditors to dictate economic policy in debtor nations, and they control 97 percent of the world's patents. Northern states and corporations leverage this power to cheapen the prices of labour and resources in the global South, which allows them to achieve a net appropriation through trade.

During the 1980s and 1990s, IMF structural adjustment programmes cut public sector wages and employment, while rolling back labour rights and other protective regulations, all of which cheapened labour and resources. Today, poor countries are structurally dependent on foreign investment and have no choice but to compete with one another to offer cheap labour and resources in order to please the barons of international finance. This ensures a steady flow of disposable gadgets and fast fashion to affluent Northern consumers, but at extraordinary cost to human lives and ecosystems in the South.

There are several ways to fix this problem. One would be to democratise the institutions of global economic governance, so that poor countries have a fairer say in setting the terms of trade and finance. Another step would be to ensure that poor countries have the right to use tariffs, subsidies and other industrial policies to build sovereign economic capacity. We could also take steps toward a global living wage system and an international framework for environmental regulations, which would put a floor on labour and resource prices.

All of this would enable the South to capture a fairer share of income from international trade and free its countries to mobilise their resources around ending poverty and meeting human needs. But achieving these goals will not be easy; it will require an organised front among social movements toward a fairer world, against those who profit so prodigiously from the status quo.
The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial stance.

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Rich countries drained $152tn from the global South since 1960

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Imperialism never ended, it just changed form.

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Podcasts — Jason Hickel

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The Divide - Renegade Inc

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When we see images of poverty in countries that are rich in resources, there's confusion. When we hear of the massive disparity between the world's rich and poor, many people wonder why. Our understandable reaction is that the system has failed. But that is not the case. Actually the system is working perfectly. Inequality and poverty rage on because the economic rules have been rigged in favour of the people, organisations and countries who wrote them.

It is now time for a truly democratic rewrite. If so, what's standing in the way? And how do we rethink the constraints of an outdated economic order that has caused so much pain?

Writer and anthropologist, Jason Hickel, whose book The Divide, debunks the myths that have been peddled around global inequality and poverty joined co-founder and presenter, Ross Ashcroft on this week's episode of Renegade Inc. to discuss how we got here and how we begin to redress the balance.

Hickel was born and raised in Swaziland, in the middle of the AIDS crisis, in the country hit hardest by the virus than any other in the world. His parents were medics, Hickel saw up close and personal devastating poverty. He moved to the US in the late '90s where he completed his degree and PhD and was confronted with the complete opposite of the poverty he grew up around.

In a world of real access and very high incomes in aggregate, he said he scrambled for explanations of how this massively divided world came to be.

"At the time I was really persuaded initially by the story we were told by the development industry, which is that our poor countries need a little bit of aid to help them develop and climb the ladder, poor countries are poorer because of their own internal policy problems; they need advice from the West," said Hickel. "That persuaded me. I worked in India and Swaziland again after I graduated but I was never really satisfied with with the answers the development industry was giving."

He recognised that despite decades of interventions and trillions of dollars of aid disbursements, nothing was really getting any better. The Global Poverty headcount today is 4.3 billion people. More than four billion people - 60% of the world's population - do not have enough money to make basic ends meet.

"There's something really fundamentally wrong with the way the global economy works," Hickel said. "I wanted to be able understand what that was."

" The dominant understanding is that poor countries are poor because of their own internal policy failures, but that's a very narrow and a historically biased view."

By broadening our view a little bit, and taking history into account, what we see is that poor countries are poor and remain poor because of a global economic system that has been designed over about 500 years, since the onset of colonialism, to the trade policies of today.

"They are intentionally designed to serve the interests of a handful of rich countries, at the expense of the vast majority of the rest of the world," Hickel said.

"It really does all have to do with rules. If we start to examine that, then we see that the system is working perfectly, in fact, it is serving those who it was designed to serve.

"The only problem is that we are left with a global economy that simply doesn't serve the vast majority of humanity. To me that's a real crisis. It is the 21st century. We shouldn't have 60% of the world's population in grinding poverty."

The income gap between rich countries and poor countries is not diminishing. It has been increasing dramatically, and not only during colonialism. Since the 1960s, the income gap between north and south has tripled.

"There's something fundamentally wrong and it won't be changed with a bit of aid here and there," Hickel says. "We need to fundamentally restructure the global economy and make it fair."

Hickel's central thesis is that there is nothing natural about poverty. His book examines structurally determined behaviour, designed in-fact, to deliver the poverty outcomes we witness around the world.

" One of the dominant understandings out there I seek to question in the book is the idea that rich countries are giving aid to poor countries in any meaningful quantity," he says. "In fact there is a lot of aid given - about $130 billion per year transferred from rich countries to poor countries. That's an enormous amount of money."

Some of the money comes in the form of charity. A lot of it in the form of loans, with debt strings - and conditions - attached.

"A lot of the aid that's given comes with conditions attached that the recipients of the aid have to implement certain economic policies, or have to vote with the donor country in UN agreements and so on," says Hickel. "There's no free lunch."

" But even if we assume that there was a free lunch, that $130 billion dollars are really being transferred for free from rich countries to poor countries, even that is misleading because, in-fact, vastly more than that amount flows in the opposite direction - from poor countries to rich countries - for all sorts of reasons.

"The biggest one is probably illicit financial flows, most of which are in the form of tax evasion by major multinational companies operating in the global south, headquartered often in rich countries that are effectively stealing wealth, their profits from global south countries and stashing them away in tax havens because of rules written by the World Trade Organisation that make this practice possible."

The World Trade Organisation basically governs the rules of global trade, for the most part, centrally. It is a very anti-democratic institution, where the vast majority of bargaining power has long been in the hands of a handful of countries which get to determine rules that end up serving their interests.

"That's one of the reasons that we see these financial flows in such magnitude," says Hickel.

"These financial flows outstrip the aid budget by a factor of 10. So for every dollar of aid that poor countries receive, they lose 10 dollars to multinational tax havens. Another one is debt service. Poor countries pay $200 billion per year in debt service to banks in rich countries.

"That's just the interest payments on debts, many of which have been paid-off already, many times over, some of which are accumulated by legitimate dictators. That's a direct cash transfusion from from poor to rich. That outstrips the aid budget by a factor of two."

The anthropologist says aid has become a very powerful narrative that has convinced us all that rich countries have nothing to do with the impoverishment of poor countries, that we're basically in a position of benevolence, reaching out generously across a divide to give our surplus, when in fact the opposite is true.

"This is not an ideological perspective," says Hickel. "This is rooted in data that is very clear. I trace this data up until even the most recent figures from last year showing this reverse flow of wealth around the world.

"That's a really important antidote to the dominant narrative of charity, aid and development that we're served in the media."

Hickel says there has been a shift in consciousness since the Global Financial Crisis of 2008. People are beginning to realise that poverty and inequality in their own countries are not a natural phenomenon. They're being generated by policies introduced by bankers and politicians.

"People are looking for the political determinants of their suffering," he says. "When people hear that the same thing applies to the global stage, that global poverty and poor countries are a direct consequence of intentional policies, then that's not surprising to them anymore. There really has been a kind of awakening to the fact that this is the case.

"There is a lot of passion in our communities, in our country, for trying to make the world a better place. That passion right now - and the money behind it - is misguided. It has been demoted and channelled into charity, which is not solving problems. That is patently true. It's time for us to start addressing the deeper, structural causes of the problems that we care so much about. Once we do that, then it's going to change the game."
Watch the full interview above to find out how to restructure the economy and aid programs to benefit the vast majority.

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When we see images of poverty in countries that are rich in resources, there's confusion. When we hear of the massive disparity between the world's rich and poor, many people wonder why. Our understandable reaction is that the system has failed. But that is not the case. Actually the system is working perfectly.

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https://youtu.be/HoSUuxbD9k8

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Videos - Tax Justice Network

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Jason Hickel

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Centre for Global Education |

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About The Centre for Global Education

The Centre is a non-governmental development organisation based in Belfast which aims to raise awareness of global issues and encourage action toward social change. We organise events, deliver training, produce publications and provide a wide range of resources to target groups in the formal and non-formal education sectors. You can download many of our publications from this site and find out about the range of resources available from our library located on our premises at 9 University Street, Belfast. Please navigate around the site and send us your feedback and suggestions.

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On 6 November 2021, a climate protest was organised in Belfast city centre to coincide with the COP-26 conference in Glasgow. The protest attracted a large turnout from across civil society including young climate activists, trade unions, non-governmental organisations, political parties and concerned members of the public. The Centre for Global Education carried out some filming on the day and interviewed some of the speakers and protesters to get their views on the climate emergency and how we should respond. Many of those we spoke to commented on the lack of climate change legislation in Northern Ireland when the climate crisis appears to be accelerating toward a tipping point. Speakers also commented on the importance of public activism to make this legislation a reality and to ensure that political leaders take action to mitigate the causes and effects of climate change. Please share the film on social media to encourage continued public activism on this crucial issue.

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About The Centre for Global Education The Centre is a non-governmental development organisation based in Belfast which aims to raise awareness of global issues and encourage action toward social change. We organise events, deliver training, produce publications and provide a wide range of resources to target groups in the formal and non-formal education sectors.

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About | Centre for Global Education

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Policy and Practice: A Development Education Review is the flagship publication of the Centre for Global Education and the only journal on global education published in the island of Ireland. It features contributions from practitioners in a range of education settings based in Ireland, Britain, across Europe, North America and thedeveloping world. It is in its seventh year of operation, and is available as an open-access online publication to increase accessibility and global reach. It aims to widen the global education sector's understanding of the delivery and effectiveness of development education at local and international levels.

Policy and Practice is published bi-annually, and aims to provide a space for practitioners to critically reflect on their practice and discuss the main challenges faced by practitioners such as funding, evaluation and monitoring practice. The journal features in-depth contributions on aspects of global education practice such as research, methodologies, monitoring and evaluation, the production of resources, enhancing organisational capacity, strategic interventions in education, and sectoral practice. The journal aims to share research findings, update academics and practitioners on policy developments, celebrate and promote existing good practice in global education, inform the work of practitioners in development education and related adjectival education organisations, and to promote global education within the statutory education sector in Ireland.

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The journal's designated web site is developmenteducationreview.com. The site has an archive of previous articles and profiles the current issue. It is an excellent resource for educators interested in, or researching, global education and its related areas of activity.

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Policy and Practice: A Development Education Review is the flagship publication of the Centre for Global Education and the only journal on global education published in the island of Ireland. It features contributions from practitioners in a range of education settings based in Ireland, Britain, across Europe, North America and thedeveloping world.

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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: The Danger of a Single Story | TED

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https://youtu.be/xbqA6o8_WC0

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Radi-Aid (radiaid.com)

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What responsibility does corporations have in terms of telling nuanced stories about the world and their work with social responsibilities?

Through the media and the aid sector, audiences are often presented with a one sided and oversimplified depiction of countries and people in the global South. The narrative is often centered around unfortunate individuals in need of monetary assistance. This perpetuates the Western stereotypical perception of developing countries and reinforces the so called "white savior" mind set. Our wish is for stories to be shared through the voices of those who are being portrayed, that stories focus more on how individuals are working to better their own situation, and for a more nuanced portrayal of local contexts. The Radi-Aid project has sparked debate about this through the years and, in some cases, we notice that practices are changing.

It is becoming frequently more common that corporations are also taking on social responsibilities in different areas. This year's Radi-Aid campaign "Africa Corp." is therefore targeted towards the business world. There are many good initiatives for corporate social responsibility both in Norway and internationally, but the way they operate and communicate varies greatly. Oftentimes we see that companies in rich nations give aid to poorer nations through products and service delivery, rather than via sustainable and locally anchored alternatives. We encourage corporations working with social responsibility to seize the opportunity to show that business and innovation can contribute positively to development, by communicating and sharing examples of creativity, invention and sustainable progress in the contexts and projects they work with in the global South.

Another important element is for corporations to consider how their social responsibility initiatives can best align with their existing work. If a company is making efforts to influence positive change through their social responsibility work - for example around environmental protection, other operations of that company should follow the same principles. This point is often made by John Ruggie, a pioneer researcher of human rights-based approaches to corporate social responsibility. A rule of thumb for corporations engaging with social projects is to focus on rights of societies and citizens, rather than emphasizing their needs and challenges.

In light of the above, we have made a checklist that companies can use to ensure that their corporate social responsibility projects are based on sound principles and values and are communicated in a good manner.

Radi-Aid's checklist for communicating corporate social responsibility initiatives:

Don't cast yourself in the leading role! You might be tempted to focus on your company's own engagement in the social responsibility projects. However, this way you could easily fall into the trap of taking on the "white savior" role - coming to save Africans who can't help themselves.

Give local voices and communities ownership in the communication of your projects. Portraying recipients of corporate aid as passive people in need of saving is problematic and reinforces the perception that only countries in the West have the solutions.

Be creative! The world has seen a lot of fundraising videos for poor and sick children, so how about changing it up by profiling good local projects, using humor, or focusing on solutions rather than problems?

Ask yourself control questions! This can be useful to avoid stereotyping. What if this was me or my children? How would I be comfortable being portrayed? Are people depicted in a dignified way, or are we magnifying some elements based on our own desire to show ourselves as compassionate?

Think about why you want to work with social responsibility initiatives and which partnerships and project you engage with. Is there a clear connection to the existing work of your company? Do the projects spring from a genuine desire to engage with development and influencing change? Or is the motivation about attracting customers? The main thing is that there is an expressed need and interest from citizens on the ground and that local voices are heard and active in the partnership.

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Through the media and the aid sector, audiences are often presented with a one sided and oversimplified depiction of countries and people in the global South. The narrative is often centered around unfortunate individuals in need of monetary assistance. This perpetuates the Western stereotypical perception of developing countries and reinforces the so called "white savior" mind set.

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Aid on the Edge of Chaos - Hardback - Ben Ramalingam - Oxford University Press (oup.com)

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It is widely recognised that the foreign aid system - of which every country in the world is a part - is in need of drastic overhaul. There are conflicting opinions as to what should be done. Some call for dramatic increases to achieve longstanding promises.

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NGOs and States in Global Politics: A Brief Review (e-ir.info)

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Over the past three decades, the study of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in international relations (IR) has moved from a peripheral concern to the center of the field. NGOs have long been active in global politics (Davies 2014, Charnovitz 1997), but IR scholars began to take NGOs seriously in the 1990s. Today, there are many signs of the prominence of NGO scholarship. The study of NGOs has been taken up across theoretical approaches, from constructivism to realism and from institutionalism to feminism. IR scholars study NGOs' work in the issue areas of terrorism, civil war, religion, migration, finance, human rights, and environmental protection.

A persistent theme in NGO research has been the relationship between NGOs and the state. Early research on NGOs largely focused on demonstrating that they had the ability to influence state policies (Keck and Sikkink 1998, Princen and Finger 1994) and shape state interests (Finnemore 1996, Boli and Thomas 1999). While these early studies are impressively rich and complex, the IR establishment tended to collapse discussions of NGOs into debates about state power and sovereignty (Mathews 1997, Krasner 2009, though see Raustiala 1997). Thankfully, that simplified approach to NGOs is disappearing. NGO scholarship demonstrates the diverse sources of NGO power and authority that shape the many ways that NGOs and states interact. This work has been enhanced by the laudable dismantling of the IR-comparative divide, easing comparison among NGOs operating in local, national, and transnational settings.

This short review highlights two themes in recent research on NGO-state relations (for longer treatments, see here and here). I first offer a snapshot comparison of the power and authority of NGOs and states, then explore four types of relations among the two actors.
NGOs and States: Understanding Actors on the Stage of Global Politics
The early IR field privileged attention to coercive and material power and largely focused on states (Baldwin 2012). In the 1980s and 1990s, international organizations and multinational corporations (wielders of material and coercive power) did receive serious attention as actors beyond the state. Still, over the past two decades, the big policy questions - terrorism, refugee crises, civil conflict, global corporate regulation - are ones in which many non-state actors play outsized roles. New, multifaceted examinations of power and authority in global governance (Barnett and Duvall 2005, Avant et al. 2010) have thus enabled a rich comparison between states and NGOs.

Material power does matter for NGOs, as resources provide capacity and offer leverage over other actors. Compared to states, NGOs are still relatively small. World Vision is the world's largest INGO, but its annual budget of around $2 billion only outpaces the GNI of a handful of (mostly island) states. Additionally, states are important sources of income for many INGOs (Mitchell and Schmitz 2014). The preferences of states' aid agencies can shape NGO programs and strategies (Cooley and Ron 2002, Bush 2015). Importantly, however, in many national and local contexts, NGOs are wealthy and independent from their host states. In Kenya, for example, NGOs receive almost none of their funding from the state, but sizeable international funding allows them to play a major role in service provision and governance (Brass 2016).

Beyond this coercive capacity, many other types of authority empower NGOs as they engage with states. Rarely, NGOs are delegated authority over particular policy areas or regulatory issues (Green 2013). More often, NGOs claim authority based on their principled commitments (Hopgood 2006) or expertise (Gourevitch, Lake, and Stein 2012; Wong 2012). Of course, states enjoy these same forms of authority too, which can create interesting contests of morals and knowledge. Some critics of NGOs celebrate the principle of broad representation advanced by democratic governments in the face of seemingly narrowly self-interested NGOs (Anderson 2009). Elsewhere, the expertise of NGOs on corporate financial reporting and taxation is contested by state regulators working with corporate allies (Seabrooke and Wigan 2015).

Authority exists in specific social relations, and thus must be cultivated with different audiences. At the global level, as few leading INGOs are authoritative in the eyes of multiple audiences, while most others are ignored (Stroup and Wong 2017). Yet these leading INGOs can struggle to achieve their goals in specific local or national contexts where states or beneficiaries do not trust them (Balboa 2018, McMahon 2017).
Relational Dynamics in NGO-State Interactions
The popular conception of the NGO-state relationship is a confrontation between David and Goliath, where small, powerless activists take on bullying states. Yet scholars have documented many dynamics - cooperation, conflict, competition, and cooptation - in NGOs' relations with states (Najam 2000).

NGO-state cooperation emerges when both are committed to the same goals, as in election monitoring (Hyde 2011) and the advancement of new treaty law (Rutherford et al. 2003). Cooperation appears particularly frequent in sectors where service delivery is the primary focus. In global development, NGOs have been supported by donor governments as efficient and effective ways to advance grassroots poverty alleviation (Edwards and Hulme 1996). In DR Congo, INGOs promote attention to gender violence and prop up local legal institutions, making this site a leader in international criminal law despite broader state weaknesses (Lake 2018). When goals differ, conflict emerges. In human rights and environmental protection, NGOs select recalcitrant states and then target them with shaming strategies (Ron et al. 2005, Murdie and Urpelainen 2014). In illiberal states, NGOs with foreign funding or a focus on political advocacy face an increasing wave of restrictions (Dupuy et al. 2013, Christensen and Weinstein 2013).

While conflict and cooperation have received the most attention in studies of NGO-state relations, competition and cooptation are equally interesting. NGOs and states compete in various ways. As regulators, NGO-led private standards can displace efforts at state regulation (Auld 2014, Vogel 2008). Rarely but visibly, NGOs claim to enforce laws when states fail, as in the fascinating case of Sea Shepherd and anti-whaling laws (Eilstrup-Sangiovanni and Bondaroff 2014). Cooptation of NGOs by states is little discussed in IR. Many argue NGOs are instruments of general principles of Western culture (Boli and Thomas 1999) or liberal logics of governmentality (Sending and Neumann 2010), but this isn't the clear take-over of NGOs by states for an entirely different purpose. In the comparative politics literature, cooptation has received much attention in states like China and Georgia (Heurlin 2010, Grodsky 2012).

This typology is a rather static simplification, of course, but hopefully demonstrates that there is no modal NGO-state relationship. States and NGOs learn from one another and adapt their strategies (Brass 2016, Noakes and Teets 2018). In some cases, NGOs can shape the regulatory environments of their host states to become more favorable (Heiss 2019). Dynamics that may appear cooperative in the short term may not yield long term success. INGOs and states cooperate in responding to gender violence in DR Congo, but may contribute to the continuing fragility of the state (Lake 2018).
Future Research Paths
To keep the discussion of NGO-state relations lively, researchers can push on a few new questions. First, it is essential to look within states and NGOs to explain cooperation and conflict, as Rich (2018) does to explain NGO-state cooperation in Brazil on HIV/AIDs. For NGO scholars, this requires close observation of or collaboration with practitioners (Mitchell et al. 2020). Second, researchers should focus on the other actors present in NGO-state interactions, particularly the business groups that are often pushing back on NGOs' call for greater regulation (Hanegraaff 2019). Finally, there is growing evidence that the golden era of NGO expansion may be over, as population growth rates slow (Bush and Hadden 2019) and states adopt more restrictive laws (Chaudhry 2016). Greater competition and external challenges to legitimacy might encourage NGOs to become more accountable and representative, but it is also possible that NGO influence will decline.

The IR scholarship on NGOs has unearthed new insights on NGO-state relations but avoided a myopic focus on the state. NGOs work with the full array of global actors - international organizations, global corporations, labor groups, religious institutions, peacekeepers - to affect global policy, deliver important services, and advance social change. Wonderfully interdisciplinary and tackling all levels of analysis, the NGO research community should resist attempts by the still-state-centric IR subfield to caricature the complex dynamics of NGO-state relations.
References
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Auld, G., 2014. Constructing private governance: The rise and evolution of forest, coffee, and fisheries certification. Yale University Press.

Avant, D.D., Finnemore, M. and Sell, S.K. eds., 2010. Who governs the globe? Cambridge University Press.

Balboa, C.M., 2018. The Paradox of scale: How NGOs build, maintain, and lose authority in environmental governance. MIT Press.

Baldwin, D.A., 2012. Power and International Relations. Handbook of International Relations. Sage Publications.

Barnett, M. and Duvall, R., 2005. Power in international politics. International Organization, 59 (1), 39-75.

Boli, J. and Thomas, G.M., 1999. Constructing World Culture: International nongovernmental organizations since 1875. Stanford University Press.

Brass, J.N., 2016. Allies or Adversaries: NGOs and the state in Africa. Cambridge University Press.

Bush, S.S., 2015. The Taming of Democracy Assistance. Cambridge University Press.

Bush, S.S. and Hadden, J., 2019. Density and Decline in the Founding of International NGOs in the United States. International Studies Quarterly, 63(4), 1133-1146.

Charnovitz, S., 1997. Two centuries of participation: NGOs and international governance. Michigan Journal of International Law, 18(2).

Chaudhry, S., 2016. The Assault on Democracy Assistance: Explaining state repression of NGOs (Doctoral dissertation, Yale University).

Christensen, D. and Weinstein, J.M., 2013. Defunding dissent: Restrictions on aid to NGOs. Journal of Democracy, 24(2), 77-91.

Cooley, A. and Ron, J., 2002. The NGO scramble: Organizational insecurity and the political economy of transnational action. International Security, 27(1), 5-39.

Davies, T., 2014. NGOs: A new history of transnational civil society. Oxford University Press.

Dupuy, K., Ron, J. and Prakash, A., 2016. Hands off my regime! Governments' restrictions on foreign aid to non-governmental organizations in poor and middle-income countries. World Development, 84, 299-311.

Edwards, M. and Hulme, D., 1996. Too close for comfort? The impact of official aid on nongovernmental organizations. World Development, 24(6), 961-973.

Eilstrup-Sangiovanni, M. and Bondaroff, T.N.P., 2014. From advocacy to confrontation: Direct enforcement by environmental NGOs. International Studies Quarterly, 58(2), 348-61.

Finger, M. and Princen, T., 1994. Environmental NGOs in World Politics: linking the local and the global. Routledge.

Finnemore, M. 1996. National Interests in International Society. Cornell University Press.

Gourevitch, P.A., Lake, D.A. and Stein, J.G. eds., 2012. The Credibility of Transnational NGOs: When virtue is not enough. Cambridge University Press.

Green, J.F., 2013. Rethinking private authority: Agents and entrepreneurs in global environmental governance. Princeton University Press.

Grodsky, B., 2012. Co-optation or empowerment? The fate of pro-democracy NGOs after the Rose Revolution. Europe-Asia Studies, 64(9), 1684-1708.

Hanegraaff, M., 2019. Whose side are you on? Explaining the extent to which national interest groups support states in global politics. JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies, 57(3), 563-579.

Heiss, A., 2019. Taking control of regulations: how international advocacy NGOs shape the regulatory environments of their target countries. Interest Groups & Advocacy, 8(3), 356-375.

Heurlin, C., 2010. Governing civil society: The political logic of NGO-state relations under dictatorship. VOLUNTAS, 21(2), 220-239.

Hopgood, S., 2006. Keepers of the Flame: Understanding Amnesty International. Cornell University Press.

Hyde, S.D., 2011. The Pseudo-Democrat's Dilemma: Why Election Observation Became an International Norm. Cornell University Press.

Keck, M.E. and Sikkink, K., 1998. Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy networks in international politics. Cornell University Press.

Krasner, S.D., 2001. Abiding sovereignty. International political science review, 22(3), 229-251.

Lake, M.M., 2018. Strong NGOs and weak states: pursuing gender justice in the Democratic Republic of Congo and South Africa. Cambridge University Press.

Mathews, J.T., 1997. Power shift. Foreign Affairs, 76(1), 50-66.

McMahon, P.C., 2017. The NGO game: Post-conflict peacebuilding in the Balkans and beyond. Cornell University Press.

Mitchell, G.E. and Schmitz, H.P., 2014. Principled instrumentalism: a theory of transnational NGO behaviour. Review of International Studies, 40(3), 487-504.

Mitchell, G.E., Schmitz, H.P. and Bruno-van Vijfeijken, T., 2020. Between Power and Irrelevance: The Future of Transnational NGOs. Oxford University Press, USA.

Murdie, A. and Urpelainen, J., 2015. Why pick on us? Environmental INGOs and state shaming as a strategic substitute. Political Studies, 63(2), 353-372.

Najam, A., 2000. The four C's of government third Sector‐Government relations. Nonprofit management and leadership, 10(4), 375-396.

Noakes, S. and Teets, J.C., 2018. Learning under authoritarianism: Strategic adaptations within international foundations and NGOs in China. VOLUNTAS, 1-21.

Neumann, I.B. and Sending, O.J., 2010. Governing the global polity: Practice, mentality, rationality. University of Michigan Press.

Raustiala, K., 1997. States, NGOs, and international environmental institutions. International Studies Quarterly, 41(4), 719-740.

Rich, J., 2019. State-Sponsored Activism: Bureaucrats and social movements in democratic Brazil. Cambridge University Press.

Ron, J., Ramos, H. and Rodgers, K., 2005. Transnational information politics: NGO human rights reporting, 1986-2000. International Studies Quarterly, 49(3), 557-587.

Rutherford, K., Brem, S., Matthew, R.A. and Matthew, R. eds., 2003. Reframing the agenda: the impact of NGO and middle power cooperation in international security policy. Praeger.

Seabrooke, L. and Wigan, D., 2016. Powering ideas through expertise: professionals in global tax battles. Journal of European Public Policy, 23(3), 357-374.

Stroup, S.S. and Wong, W.H., 2017. The Authority Trap: Strategic choices of international NGOs. Cornell University Press.

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Wong, W.H., 2012. Internal Affairs: How the structure of NGOs transforms human rights. Cornell University Press.

Further Reading on E-International Relations

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NGOs and States in Global Politics: A Brief Review

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Over the past three decades, the study of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in international relations (IR) has moved from a peripheral concern to the center of the field. NGOs have long been active in global politics (Davies 2014, Charnovitz 1997), but IR scholars began to take NGOs seriously in the 1990s.

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NGOs, Social Movements and the Neoliberal State: Incorporation, Reinvention, Critique (sagepub.com)

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Can NGOs Make a Difference?: The Challenge of Development Alternatives: Anthony J. Bebbington: Zed Books (bloomsbury.com)

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Can non-governmental organisations contribute to more socially just, alternative forms of development? Or are they destined to work at the margins of dominant d…

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Neoliberalism, INGO practices and sustainable disaster recovery: a post-Katrina case study | Community Development Journal | Oxford Academic (oup.com)

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Neoliberalism, INGO practices and sustainable disaster recovery: a post-Katrina case study

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Abstract. This case study of a post-Katrina community-based action research project conducted in partnership with an international non-governmental organization

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NGOs under Neoliberal Governance | SpringerLink

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This chapter will explore the role of NGOs under neoliberal governance. It will start by reflecting on the mutable character of neoliberalism, the different ways of comprehending it and its...

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‘Missionaries of the new era’: neoliberalism and NGOs in Palestine - Sibille Merz, 2012 (sagepub.com)

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Governance to Governmentality: Analyzing NGOs, States, and Power | International Studies Quarterly | Oxford Academic (oup.com)

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Abstract

Studies of global governance typically claim that the state has lost power to nonstate actors and that political authority is increasingly institutionalized in spheres not controlled by states. In this article, we challenge the core claims in the literature on global governance. Rather than focusing on the relative power of states and nonstate actors, we focus on the sociopolitical functions and processes of governance in their own right and seek to identify their rationality as practices of political rule. For this task, we use elements of the conception of power developed by Michel Foucault in his studies of "governmentality." In this perspective, the role of nonstate actors in shaping and carrying out global governance-functions is not an instance of transfer of power from the state to nonstate actors but rather an expression of a changing logic or rationality of government (defined as a type of power) by which civil society is redefined from a passive object of government to be acted upon into an entity that is both an object and a subject of government. The argument is illustrated by two case studies: the international campaign to ban landmines, and international population policy. The cases show that the self-association and political will-formation characteristic of civil society and nonstate actors do not stand in opposition to the political power of the state, but is a most central feature of how power, understood as government, operates in late modern society.

During the course of the 1990s, global governance emerged as a new and powerful research agenda. This literature has produced a wealth of insights about the changing roles and significance of sovereign states in the governing of global or transnational affairs. There are at least three key interrelated claims within this literature. The first is that government must be studied as a process, not as an institution. This analytical move is said to make it possible to analyze changes from hierarchical and sovereignty-based modes of governing to more horizontal, network-based modes of governing (e.g., Rosenau and Czempiel 1992; Rosenau 1999; Held and McGrew 2002). The second is that various nonstate actors have become much more powerful in global politics, and that the state hence is less powerful than before ( Keck and Sikkink 1998; Rosenau 2002). The third is that political authority is increasingly dislodged from the sovereign state and in the direction of transnational policy-networks and functionally specific "spheres of authority" (SOAs), where the state plays a strategic but not necessarily dominant role ( Rosenau 1999, 2002). The analytical power of studies of global governance is thus said to lie in its ability to move beyond state-centric analyses to include a focus on the processes of governance, to highlight the power of nonstate actors, and to identify and theorize about the changing forms and institutionalization of political authority ( Held and McGrew 2002).

In this article, we critically review these three claims. We argue, first, that while the literature on global governance highlights governance as a set of interrelated processes, it does not provide the analytical tools to study these processes. Second, studies of global governance have a zero-sum conception of power where an increase in the power and influence of nonstate actors is ipso facto defined as a simultaneous reduction in state power and authority. Third, studies of global governance perpetuate the very same analytical framework that they purport to transcend as their key findings-about the power of nonstate actors and the diffusion of political authority from the state to other actors-is parasitic upon an analytical framework tied to the triad between sovereignty, authority and legitimacy.

These three limitations invite the formulation of a different theoretical approach. An attempt to grasp the role of nonstate actors, and civil society organizations in particular, requires an approach that can theorize about the specific relations between state and nonstate actors and about the logic of the processes of governance. For example, different types of nonstate actors are often funded, actively encouraged and supported by states both to mobilize political constituencies, to confer legitimacy to policy-processes, to implement policies, and to monitor and evaluate them. While these dimensions of global governance are mentioned in the literature on global governance, they are not theorized with a view to understanding the mechanisms of power implied in them. To grasp the thinking and practice associated with these relations, and the power implied in them, we draw upon the concept of "governmentality" originally developed by Michel Foucault ( Foucault [1976] 2003; cf. Burchell, Gordon and Miller 1991).

In the governmentality perspective, the role of nonstate actors in shaping and carrying out global governance-functions is not an instance of transfer of power from the state to nonstate actors ( Foucault [1982] 2000:341). Rather, it is an expression of a changing logic or rationality of government (defined as a type of power) by which civil society is redefined from a passive object of government to be acted upon and into an entity that is both an object and a subject of government. We argue that the self-association and political will-formation characteristic of civil society and nonstate actors do not stand in opposition to the political power of the state, but is a most central feature of how power operates in late modern society. In short, we argue that new insights can be generated if we study the sociopolitical functions of governance in their own right and seek to identify their rationality as governmental practices. This perspective on power enables us to identify dimensions of global governance that are largely omitted in the extant literature, and makes it possible to challenge some of the core claims in this literature about the autonomy and power of civil society actors.

Having critically reviewed key propositions within the literature on global governance in section one, and spelled out a set of alternative analytical tools derived from the literature on governmentality in section two, we apply these in two case studies in section three. The international campaign to ban land-mines and the transnational advocacy for "reproductive health and rights"-both of which occurred in the 1990s-are frequently cited as cases in point of how nonstate actors have assumed a more powerful role in global governance ( Higher 1996; Hodgson and Watkins 1997; Cameron, Lawson and Tomlin 1998; Price 1998; Singh 1998; Thakur and Maley 1999; Cooper, English and Takur 2002). Hence, they are good cases for our attempt to establish a different theoretical interpretation. Both cases suggest that a governmental rationality is at work whereby the political agency and self-association of civil society emerges as a key asset for the formulation of new policies and for the practice of governing societies.

Process, Dualism and Sovereignty in the Literature on Global Governance

Studies of global governance were very much triggered by a related debate on the sources and effects of processes of globalization ( Hirst and Thompson 1996; Keohane and Milner 1996; Held and McGrew 2000). Proto-formulations about global governance-type networks and processes are found in regime theory ( Krasner 1983; Holsti 1992). For Oran Young (1994), for example, the vast number of international environmental regimes amount to an issue-specific "system of international governance." Moreover, studies of how transnational social movements and advocacy groups have been able to advance human rights norms and shape state policy have contributed to the view that world politics is increasingly shaped by processes and networks of governance where nonstate actors play an increasingly powerful role ( Keck and Sikkink 1998; Boli and Thomas 1999; Risse, Ropp and Sikkink 1999; Khagram, Rider and Sikkink 2002; Price 2003). Global governance thus forms a comprehensive yet heterogeneous research agenda that has at its core at least three central claims about (i) governance as a process; (ii) the increased role and power of nonstate actors; and (iii) the resulting diffusion or de-centralization of political authority. We critically review each of the below, and find that beneath each of the claims there is a particular view of power wedded to the concept of sovereignty that makes authority the analytical core of the concept of global governance.

Governance as a Process

Although the term "global governance" is in fact not used in Rosenau and Czempiel's (1992)"Governing with Government" this work is widely seen as a seminal contribution to the study of global governance as it distinguished government as an institution from government as a task or process. In keeping with this distinction, global governance is commonly defined as a process that involves both public and private actors, the activities of which are coordinated through both formal and informal rules and guidelines in such a way that a common or public goal is advanced ( Sandholtz 1999; Pierre and Peters 2000; Held and McGrew 2002). However, while studies of global governance define their object of inquiry as a set of processes, their ontology and concomitant analytical tools are not equipped to grasp the content of the processes of governance itself. Rather, studies of global governance typically focus on the changing roles and power of state and nonstate actors, and on resulting changes in the institutionalization of political authority.

It is instructive in this regard to look at the most prolific and arguably most influential writer about global governance, James Rosenau. Rosenau asserts that global governance amounts to "social functions or processes that can be performed or implemented in a variety of ways at different times and places ..." ( Rosenau 2002:72). He formulates a typology of governance that emerges from two dimensions; "the degree to which authority is formally established," and "the degree to which authority flows in vertical or horizontal directions" (2002:8). In this typology, the processes of governance are transformed into a focus on the "types of collectivities involved" (i.e., governments, Nongovernmental Organizations (NGOs), Transnational Corporations (TNCs), Intergovernmental Organizations (IGOs)). It is thus the type of actors involved, rather than the processes and practices of governance, that is of interest. Similarly, Koenig-Archibugi (2002:50-52) focuses exclusively on the institutional dimensions of global governance as he identifies the degrees of publicness, delegation and inclusiveness as the central dimensions through which to categorize and understand global governance. This conception of governance effectively limits the analysis of governance conceived as a process to an exploration of the types of actors involved and the authority they are able to bring to bear, as opposed to the substance of the processes of governance that flows from such authority.

Dualism: The Power of Nonstate Actors

The central empirical claim in studies of global governance is that nonstate actors have emerged as powerful actors in world politics, thus challenging the power and authority of sovereign states. The increased influence and power of actors representing "civil society" and its implications for the power and authority of the state are at the core of what global governance is all about ( Weiss and Gordenker 1996; Florini 2000; Anheier, Glasius and Kaldor 2002; Woods 2002; Scholte 2002; Higgot, Underhill and Bieler 2000; Held and Koenig-Archibugi 2004). Underlying the claim about the increased power of nonstate actors in shaping and carrying out governance function is a conception of the relation between state and nonstate actors as a zero-sum game: as nonstate actors have become more powerful, states have by definition become less so. Some authors note, for example, that states can no longer "bypass the concerns of transnational actors" as these have "strengthened their bargaining position with significant moral, financial and knowledge resources" ( Benner, Reinicke and Witte 2004: 195).

It is typically argued that there is a "relocation of authority from public to quasi-public, and to private, agencies" ( Held and McGrew 2002:10. Emphasis added). According to Rosenau (1999:294) for example, "The weakening of states has not been followed by authority vacuums (...) so much as it has resulted in a vast growth in the number of spheres in which authority has moved." Against this background, he suggests that an "appropriate ontology will highlight the extent to which the erosion of state authority and the proliferation of NGOs has resulted in a disaggregation of the loci of governance" (1999:293). While studies of global governance excel in charting the diffusion and disaggregation of authority from the state to nonstate actors, they fail in exploring both the power at work in the actual practices through which governance takes place, as well as the more specific content or logic of the relations between state and nonstate actors. The extent to which nonstate actors are directly funded by and actively encouraged by states to be engaged in processes of global governance is thus inadequately addressed. For example, Woods (2002:31-34) provides an instructive overview of examples of how states fund, encourage, outsource or leave space open for nonstate actors. Risse (2002:260) asserts that "it would be preposterous to claim that the INGO [international nongovernmental organizations] world simply represents global civil society against the inter-state system," and lists different ways in which states actively support, fund and encourage nonstate actors. However, both of them stop short of using these observations as a springboard for theorizing about the relations of power at work in processes of governance, including those that have bearing on the relations between state and nonstate actors.

Sovereignty and Authority

A pervasive feature of studies of global governance is the extent to which there is, contrary to programmatic statements, a commitment to the triangle between sovereignty, authority, and legitimacy. Rosenau's (2000:188) formulation of "SOAs" (SOAs) as the unit of analysis for studies of global governance is intended to "trace and assess the processes of governance wherever they may occur. That is, through focusing on rule systems we will not be confined to the world of states" (Emphasis added). However, these processes of governance are to be analyzed "in terms of the way in which authority is created, dispersed, consolidated or otherwise employed to exercise control." In focusing on authority defined in terms of the "capacity to generate compliance" Rosenau decidedly operates within the triad of power, authority and legitimacy. Hall and Biersteker (2002:5) similarly conclude that "The state is no longer the sole, or in some instances even the principal, source of authority in either the domestic arena or in the international system."

By tying the analysis of the processes of governance to a concern with authority, studies of global governance inadvertently perpetuate the very state-centric framework that they seek to transcend: the focus is negatively defined in relation to sovereignty, aimed at analyzing to which actors power and authority have flowed from the state. The more recent interest in how to render global governance more legitimate and accountable is a testament to this feature of studies of global governance. Here, the focus is on the effects of the fact (established by studies of global governance) that the practices and processes of governance do not correspond to the site of the institutionalization of political authority in the sovereign state. Addressing the "democratic deficit" and lack of accountability and legitimacy of global governance, these studies typically note that global civil society emerges as a substitute for a national "demos" to which global governance is or can be made accountable ( Risse 2002; Scholte 2002; Held and Koenig-Archibugi 2004; Nanz and Steffek 2004).

The literature on global governance does provide important insights. There are, however, clear limits to the central concepts that guide studies of global governance. Because of its commitment to power as sovereignty and the associated concern with the institutionalization of political authority, studies of global governance misread central aspects of the relations between state and nonstate actors when it asserts that nonstate actors' power and authority has increased while that of states have decreased. Studies of global governance are thus also unable to deliver on its claim that global governance should be studied as a process, inasmuch as its analytical tools favor theorizing about what actors "are" in terms of which actors have power and authority rather than about what these actors "do" as they engage in the processes of governing. Below, we offer an analytical framework that makes the study of power integral to the analysis of the substantive content of the practices and processes of governing. In this perspective, the role of nonstate actors and the relation between state and nonstate actors emerge in a very different light.

Governmentality: A Different Take on Global Governance and Nonstate Actors

In a recent volume entitled Power in Global Governance, Barnett and Duvall (2005) argue that studies of global governance have been inattentive to power. We concur with this interpretation, and advance an argument to the effect that the research-agenda on global governance can be enriched not only by analyzing power in more detail, but by considering a particular conception of power associated with the concept of "governmentality" ( Foucault [1978] 1991; Foucault [1982] 2000; Foucault [1976] 2003).

Government and Sovereignty

To grasp the meaning and import of "government" as a form of power it is useful to contrast it with that of sovereignty. Foucault identifies a historically significant transformation occurring from the sixteenth century onwards in which what he terms the "art of government" emerged to form a practice that was separate and partly autonomous from the principle and practice of sovereignty ( Foucault [1978]1991). "In contrast to sovereignty," Foucault ([1978] 1991:100) notes, "government has as its purpose not the act of government itself, but the welfare of the population, the improvement of its conditions, the increase of its wealth, longevity, health etc." Government is for Foucault thus defined in terms of the "conduct of conducts," involving a range of techniques and practices, performed by different actors, aimed to shape, guide, and direct individuals' and groups' behavior and actions in particular directions ( Foucault [1982] 2000:341; Foucault [1978] 1991:102-103). The central elements of government as a form of power are captured in the following distinction made between the workings of sovereignty and the workings of government:

with sovereignty the instrument that allowed it to achieve its aims-that is to say, obedience to the laws-was the law itself: law and sovereignty were absolutely inseparable. ... [W]ith government it is a question not of imposing law on men, but of disposing things; that is to say, of employing tactics rather than laws, and even of using laws themselves as tactics-to arrange things in such a way that, through a certain number of means, such and such ends may be achieved ( Foucault, [1978]1991:95).

The concepts of "disposing things" and "employing tactics" are an essential feature of government as a form of power. In contrast to both sovereignty and discipline, which are the two other key modes of power theorized by Foucault, government takes the freedom and agency of those that are governed as both an end and a means for governing (see Dean 1999).

Governmentality

Governmentality is an analytical concept aimed at grasping government as a form of power. Foucault's formulation of the concept of governmentality was aimed specifically at analyzing changes in the early modern state as a function of changes in the practices of government ( Gordon 1991:4). For our purposes here, this is particularly apposite as it enables us to say something about the changes in sovereignty and the relation between state and nonstate actors through a focus on processes of global governance. Indeed, both Raeff (1983), Oestreich (1982), and Foucault ([1979] 2000) show how the emergence of the early modern state in the sixteenth century hinged crucially on its ability to harness "society" to further its strength. As there is no reason to doubt that this phenomenon has a continuous historical existence, we should expect it to be present also as the state faces new challenges of globalization. We would, therefore, expect that new practices of government emerge whereby civil society organizations on the global level are harnessed to the tasks of governing.

A focus on governmentality implies at least three things. First, it is aimed at investigating the specific practices and techniques of governing as an empirical phenomenon, thus seeking to replace a focus on institutions (characteristic of studies focused on sovereignty) with a focus on practices. Second, it is aimed at identifying the "mentality" or rationality that characterizes the systematic thinking and knowledge that is integral to and renders possible different modes of governing. Third, it does not replace sovereignty or discipline-each of which represents distinct forms of power ( Gordon 1991:7; Dean 1999). As Mitchell Dean (1999:20) argues, "rather than displacing discipline or sovereignty, the modern art of government recasts them within this concern for the population and its optimization (in terms of wealth, health, happiness, prosperity, efficiency), and the forms of knowledge and technical means appropriate to it." Sovereignty and discipline, then, are reconfigured in that, as Foucault ([1978]1991:92) puts it, the essential aspect of government is the "introduction of economy into political practice."

With respect to global governance, the perspective of governmentality offers a good optic for analyses. First, it explicitly builds on, and was originally developed as a tool for, studying the processes of governing. The concept of governmentality is aimed at investigating the practices of governing as an empirical phenomenon but also to identify the "mentality"-the rationality characteristic of the systematic thinking, reflection, and knowledge that is integral to different modes of governing. Second, it delivers a conception of the relation between the state and nonstate actors that places the focus of sovereignty within a more general concern for changes in the practices and rationality of governing.

The key point to recognize is that this analytical perspective focuses on how certain identities and action-orientations are defined as appropriate and normal and how relations of power are implicated in these processes. A focus on governmentality, therefore, seeks to analyze the "relation between individuals and the political order from the perspective of the different processes whereby the former are objectified as certain kinds of subject through the ways they are targeted by political power" ( Burchell 1991:119. Emphasis added).

Mitchell Dean's concept of "technologies of agency" adds specificity to Foucault's general perspective in terms of analyzing nonstate actors in global governance. For Dean (1999:167-168), technologies of agency "seek to deploy our possibilities of agency" as a tactic or mode of governing. These technologies "engage us as active and free citizens, as informed and responsible consumers, as members of self-managing communities and organizations, as actors in democratizing social movements, and as agents capable of taking control of our own risk." Another case in point is Graham Burchell's (1996) interpretation of how civil society is defined as a sphere that is brought into the task of governing by virtue of a "contractual implication." This observation is particularly interesting for the analysis of global governance, and it is thus worthwhile to quote him at some length. This contractual implication involves

"offering" individuals and collectivities active involvement in action to resolve the kind of issues hitherto held to be the responsibility of authorized governmental agencies. However, the price of this involvement is that they must assume active responsibility for these activities, both for carrying them out and, of course, for their outcomes, and in so doing they are required to conduct themselves in accordance with the appropriate (or approved) model of action. This might be described as a new form of "responsibilization" corresponding to the new forms in which the governed are encouraged, freely and rationally, to conduct themselves ( Burchell 1996:29).

In this view, the ascendance of nonstate actors in shaping and carrying out global governance-functions is not an instance of transfer of power from the state to nonstate actors, or a matter of the changing sources of, or institutional locus for, authority. Rather, it is an expression of a change in governmentality by which civil society is redefined from a passive object of government to be acted upon and into an entity that is both an object and a subject of government. Two crucial points thus emerge. First: "civil society" or individuals or groups claiming to represent it does not constitute a realm devoid of relations of power. These organizations' goals and modes of operations are here seen as an effect of relations of power that are integral to the practices of governing and the thinking that underwrites it in late modern society. Second: the self-association and political will-formation characteristic of civil society organizations do not stand in opposition to the political power of the state but is a most central feature of its exercise: Civil society organizations are constituted as self-associating units-through "technologies of agency"-whose political significance resides both in their capacity to convey and mobilize the preferences and concerns of individuals' and communities, and in their capacity to carry out regulatory functions.

In reviewing the genesis of international population policy below, we show not only that nonstate actors have always been central, but also, and more importantly, that the type of nonstate actors, and the roles that these have assumed, are integral to and products of different governmental rationalities that change over time. In the second case, we focus on the more micro-level relations and inter-actions between the Norwegian government and some NGOs in the context of processes of advocating a ban on land mines. This case thus substantiates how a focus on governmentality produces new insights about how the roles and action-orientations of nonstate actors are shaped by a governmental rationality that governs "through" civil society by harnessing their expertise and ability to responsibly channel political will-formation.

From Objects of Regulation to Subjects with Rights-the Case of International Population Policy

It is implicit in studies of global governance that nonstate actors are more powerful today than they were before. Studied through the lenses of governmentality, the genesis of international population policy suggests otherwise. Nonstate actors have always been central in international population policy, but there has been a marked shift in the rationality of government over time, rendering different types of nonstate actors central in different historical periods. The case of international population policy, then, shows the limitations of the literature on global governance in terms of grasping the changes in the modes of governing that take place over time, how these changes are integral to shifting governmental rationalities, and how these changes give a prominent role to different types of nonstate actors.

The history of international population policy can be read as a case which shows that the power of nonstate actors in shaping global governance is not new, that nonstate actors are as powerful vis-à-vis state actors as they ever were: A small network of philanthropic institutions such as the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations invested heavily in research and education about population dynamics and reproductive control in the 1950s and 1960s ( Harkavy 1995; Hodgson 1988, 1991). By the mid 1960s, they had created an international network of research institutions, and helped establish graduate training programs in demography and public health that were singularly addressed to the task of reducing global population growth through family planning programs. This laid the groundwork for international population policy that emerged in the late 1960s ( Critchlow 1999; Sending 2003).

Yet, there is much more to the genesis of this policy-field. The formative phase of population policy was characterized by a particular governmental rationality, which gave to research institutions and expert groups a particular role in shaping governmental efforts. The first three decades after World War II (WWII) were characterized by what we can call a "hierarchical" conception of civil society and of its constituting individuals. This hierarchical conception implied that whereas individuals were generally seen as endowed with reason and autonomy, consistent with a more general liberal political rationality, a great number of individuals, particularly in the developing world, were specifically not seen as having fully developed the capacity to act freely and autonomously. Consequently, these individuals were defined as objects of government whose behavioral patterns had to be adjusted by identifying and acting upon causal relations. Nonstate actors that could lay claim to authoritative knowledge here assumed a particularly significant role as they rendered this type of governing possible by way of formulating theories about the functioning of "traditional" societies and by identifying how to intervene to act on, shape and speed up the transition to modernity.

Consistent with this governmental rationality, then, the relation between state and nonstate actors was one in which some types of nonstate actors were identified as central. These types of nonstate actors were those that were identified as having, and who saw themselves as having, a privileged and knowledge-based access to the workings of society. The framework of modernization theory and the credo of social engineering formed an integral part of this governmental rationality. As Michael Latham (2000:33) observes, the framework of modernization theory enabled would-be social engineers to state that

[...] complex social relationships could be placed along a progressive index. Culture, society and personality could be evaluated on the basis of whether they emphasized universalism or particularism, achievement or ascription, oriented toward self or the collective, role specificity or diffuseness, and affective and non-affective relationships.

With the "traditional" and the "modern" being placed on an evolutionary, progressive scale, modernization theory identified the genesis of western society as the model upon which traditional societies could and would develop, assisted by western expertise and know how. This formed the governmental context within which a host of nonstate actors who were engaged in knowledge-production, were central in establishing international population policy. In an important report from a survey trip to the "Far-East" organized by the Rockefeller Foundation in 1948 to assess what could be done in the field of population, it was emphasized that "careful observation and testing of a wide variety of ameliorative efforts" should form the basis for the Foundation's efforts to invest in the field of population ( Balfour et al. 1950:112). The authors of the report emphasized that because of the magnitude and sensitivity of the population problem, "The role of the private agencies lies in encouraging teaching, research and experiment and demonstration to increase knowledge and ultimately to foster its wide dissemination. Study should be emphasized as opposed to direct ameliorative action" (1950:112). It was, for example, with these considerations in mind that the singly most important institution in shaping international population policy-the Population Council-was set up by John D. Rockefeller III in 1952.

The Population Council was to invest heavily in the production and dissemination of knowledge. The Population Council sought, through funding from the Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation, as well as private donations from John D. Rockefeller III and the Scaife Foundation, to establish a resource-base of "trained personnel" that could "rationally" approach and seek out solutions to what was believed to be a fact beyond dispute: high population growth rates in the developing world slow down economic growth and undermine other development efforts thus threatening to undercut the United States-led projection of liberal values to the developing world.

The Population Council was involved in establishing or funding specialized research programs in family planning and related fields at the University of Chicago, Columbia University, University of Michigan, University of Pennsylvania, Boston University, Princeton University, Cornell University, the University of Minnesota, and Dartmouth College ( Critchlow 1999:240). This was in keeping with what had been the rationale for the very establishment of the Population Council. As formulated in the first 5-year program of its Demographic Division, the Population Council's identity was intimately linked to a conception of knowledge and expertise as a prerequisite for governing, where those to be governed were conceptualized as objects in need for guidance from those with access to the workings of society:

[the] intelligent resolution of the world's population problems requires the interests and initiative of trained people in the countries concerned, especially in underdeveloped areas. The Council has therefore worked to develop a small body of persons in important countries who can provide authoritative guidance on population problems to both the governments and the public, in their own language and in terms of their own values ( Population Council 1958:1).

Starting in 1953, the Population Council established a fellowship program for the study of demography or a related topic at U.S. universities. By 1958, 69 fellowships had been awarded to individuals from 21 countries. During the 1950s, nearly half of these fellows attended Frank Notestein's course on the demographic transition, which he gave at the Office of Population Research at Princeton University ( Caldwell and Caldwell 1986:12). By 1961, 140 fellowships had been granted, ( Notestein 1961) and, by 1968, the Population Council had awarded no less than 529 fellowships, 404 of which had gone to individuals from the developing world ( Notestein 1968).

Both the research centers established at different universities and the Population Council and the Ford Foundation in fact provided direct technical assistance to developing countries, thus assuming direct policy (and political) roles. The population research centers at the universities of Michigan, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, North Carolina, Chicago, and Pittsburgh were all involved directly in providing technical assistance, in giving courses and seconding personnel to help establish population programs in the developing world. The involvement of U.S. universities in the formulation and execution of population policies was also transmitted to Asia. For example, in 1972, 20 universities from Asia met in Jogjakarta, Indonesia, "to discuss the role that universities should play in formulating and carrying out national population policies" ( Demeny 1972:249. Emphasis added). The role of knowledge-producing actors was thus central to this governmental rationality: They made it possible to identify groups whose behavioral patterns could be altered by acting upon causal relations.

During the three decades stretching from World War II (WWII) and to the early 1970s, the individuals that were targeted for intervention to reduce population growth were defined as objects whose behavioral characteristics could be changed by delivering modern contraceptive technology through family planning programs. The types of actors rendered central for such a rationality of political rule were those that could lay claim to authoritative interpretations and explanations of societal structures and the behavioral patterns of individuals, as well as those that could produce contraceptive technology ( Sending 2003). These experts were not only central in shaping the rationale and thinking for these governmental efforts, but were also heavily involved in carrying them out by establishing and running family planning programs in the developing world. These types of actors were, finally, politically well-connected, elitist in orientation and saw themselves as an integral element of the United States foreign policy of combating Communism ( Critchlow 1999).

The last two decades of the twentieth century, on the other hand, saw the emergence of a new governmental rationality. Here, civil society became conceptualized in "horizontal" terms, and individuals were simultaneously defined as objects of government and subjects with rights and autonomy. Accordingly, other types of nonstate actors emerged as central in shaping and performing governance-functions: actors claiming to represent affected individuals and constituencies of "civil society" emerged to assume key governing roles, both in terms of service delivery, advocacy, and expertise. Here, governing increasingly operated through affected individuals rather than on them as they were increasingly conceptualized as key actors to ensure both effectiveness in program-delivery and to confer legitimacy on governmental practices.

In contrast to the formative phase of population policy, the formulation and advancement of the so-called "reproductive health and rights approach" in the 1990s was performed by a transnational women's health movement, loosely organized and coordinated through some key NGOs in the United States. In 1980, Judith Bruce published an article with a title that signaled the emergence of the individual subject in family planning research and population studies. Bruce initiates her discussion in "Implementing the User's Perspective" with an instructive critique of established policy:

The individual's perspective and experience have often been viewed as discretionary and dispensable items, rather than as determining factors in the effectiveness of birth planning programs ( Bruce 1980:29).

Bruce's call for establishing "the individual as the analytical focal point" was aimed at establishing a different conceptualization of the individual women in which she would emerge as a subject endowed with rights and autonomy rather than as an object of regulation based on social scientific knowledge. This type of research expanded considerably during the 1980s, and it signaled the emergence of individuals as subjects, the preferences, rights and action-orientation of which must be made an essential feature of governmental efforts. A decade later, this research had coalesced with other strands of research and with rights-based women's health advocacy to form an integrated epistemic-political platform aimed at advancing "reproductive health and rights."

More generally, from the 1980s onwards, modernization theory lost its sway over development-policy. Rational, knowledge-based planning and social engineering had been replaced by a conceptualization of development as best promoted by establishing an institutional framework within which the self-regulating mechanisms of the market and of civil society could be realized. Moreover, human rights norms had emerged, especially with the end of the Cold War, as something of a normative master-discourse (see Risse, Ropp and Sikkink 1999).

It was on this basis that a women's health movement emerged to advocate for a "reproductive health and rights" approach in the context of the UN-organized International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) in 1994. This new conceptualization of individuals as subjects whose preferences and rights were central to governmental efficacy is integral to a new governmental rationality, which gave a new type of nonstate actor a central place in shaping and carrying out international population policy.

Organizations representing the subjects of population policy were given the opportunity to assert their views and goals directly through the ICPD-process. As Donald Critchlow observes, "the mobilization of grassroots groups meant that power shifted from elite interests, which had played a critical role in the shaping of family planning programs policy in the first three decades following the Second World War, to social movements organized at the community level" ( Critchlow 1999:185). In our view, the emergence of this new type of actor is better understood as a change in governmental rationality. The new conceptualization of the task of government and the concomitant relations between governmental practices and the objects of government privileged a new and different set of nonstate actors.

The reproductive health and rights approach was formulated and advanced by a set of actors that assumed roles qualitatively different from those research-institutions that had established the policy-field of population. The very names of the key women's organizations involved in the ICPD process suggest that their self-understanding derived from a political project of advancing and expressing the preferences, rights and concerns of women. Examples include: the Women's Environmental and Development Organization (WEDO), the International Reproductive Rights Research and Action Group (IRRRAG), Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era (DAWN), Women's Global Network for Reproductive Rights (WGNRR), National Feminist Health and Reproductive Rights Network, Women Living Under Muslim Laws, Medical Women's International Association, Women and Development Unit, and Catholics for Free Choice (see Singh 1998).

In preparing for the ICPD, organizations such as the International Womens' Health Coalition (IWHC), WEDO, DAWN, and others entered into relations with governmental agencies in the United States that involved what Burchell calls a "contractual implication." Claiming to represent and safeguard the rights and autonomy of individual subjects in the developing world, these actors assumed identities and action-orientations in keeping with the faith that governing is most effectively pursued by enrolling actors that can ground governmental efforts in such a way as to render their content consistent with these individuals' self-identity as autonomous actors.

In keeping with such a governmental rationality, the women's health movement organized themselves to perform a series of activities integral to the task of governing in late modern societies. These efforts were encouraged and welcomed by the United States State Department. Timothy Wirth, Under-Secretary for Global Affairs, actively encouraged the involvement of these nonstate actors as the United States set out to formulate a new policy on population. For example, in 1993 the IWHC served as secretariat for a meeting in New York that produced a declaration "Women's Voices '94-A Declaration on Population Policies." It was signed by individuals from all continents and published in the Population and Development Review ( IWHC 1994a).

In January 1994, 215 women's health advocates from 79 countries met to formulate a common position in Rio de Janeiro. Referred to as the "feminist prepcom," the meeting represented a central arena for the formulation of a common position. "The Rio Statement" that resulted from the conference asserts that

The participants strongly voiced their opposition to population policies intended to control the fertility of women and that do not address their basic right to secure livelihood, freedom from poverty and oppression; or do not respect their rights to free, informed choice or to adequate health care; that whether such policies are pro- or anti-natalist, they are often coercive, treat women as objects, not subjects, and that in the context of such policies, low fertility does not result in alleviating poverty ( International Women's Health Coalition 1994b:4).

Through such and other networking activities in advance of and during the ICPD-process, the women's health movement was able to influence the views and positions advanced by the official delegations, not least because these delegations often included representatives from NGOs that formed part of this effort to establish a reproductive health and rights approach.

While the formative phase of the policy-field of population was marked by investment in social scientific knowledge as a tool to conceal or present as "rational" a set of intrusive governmental practices, the formulation and advancement of the reproductive health and rights approach were marked by a rationality that gave to the self-associating political subjects in civil society-in the north and the south-a clear role in identifying and justifying a new policy approach.

When viewed from within the problematics of sovereignty and the triad between power, legitimacy and authority, these developments can be read as a case of how nonstate actors representing civil society are able to exercise power at a global level. It can be interpreted as a changing institutionalization of political authority: A new set of actors, women's health organizations, were able to define a sphere of political authority by reference to the legitimacy of human and women's rights. To our minds, this is a somewhat shallow interpretation. Not only did these women's groups establish close ties with the old breed of nonstate actors that had established this policy-field, such as the Population Council, and also with key states, such as the United States. They also, and much more importantly, were allowed to perform these central functions by virtue of a new conceptualization of individuals and of society as objects of government.

We have here, more generally, a case of how a new governmental rationality defines the autonomy of individual subjects as a prerequisite for legitimate and effective government. The political will-formation found in civil society represents a central locus of government to the extent that it renders these forces responsible by implicating them in formulating and carrying out these governmental functions. In the words of the Commission on Global Governance, "in their wide variety, they (NGOs) bring expertise, commitment and grassroots perceptions that should be mobilized in the interests of better governance" ( Commission on Global Governance 1995:254). In this sense, the literature on global governance itself forms part of the governmental rationality that characterizes contemporary world politics: in identifying nonstate actors as crucial actors in global governance, and particularly in identifying new sources and modes of conferring legitimacy to governmental practices that involves nonstate actors, the extant literature on global governance forms part of and underwrites the govern mentality in terms of the thinking and knowledge that underwrites this form of governing.

Hand-Maidens of State Do-Gooders-The Case of "Contractual Implication"?

The literature on global governance and on "global civil society" frequently highlights the case of the ban on antipersonnel landmines as a key example of successful transnational network advocacy ( Cameron, Lawson and Tomlin 1998; Price 1998; Thakur and Maley 1999). A global governance-style interpretation of the case of Norway in the global advocacy against antipersonnel landmines may have immediate appeal. Certain Norwegian NGOs allied with other NGOs and over time persuaded, or "shamed," or otherwise made the Norwegian government support politically and financially the NGO-initiated advocacy for banning landmines ( Neumann 2002). It would be a standard case of the power of NGOs vis-à-vis states, and a testament to a transformation of the dynamics of global politics.

We demonstrate how, in the Norwegian case, such an interpretation is misleading. It is not a case of a transfer of power from the state to nonstate actors. Our analytical perspective enables us to focus on the micro-level relations and inter-actions between the state and nonstate actors, which makes clear how a governmental rationality was at work that defined the will-formation, the expertise and advocacy residing in "civil society" as key to effective governing.

The Norwegian government invested heavily in the land-mine process, both financially and politically. Indeed, the government's funding of NGOs in the field of development more generally has increased dramatically during the last two decades. Between 1981 and 2002, official funding of Norwegian development-NGOs increased from NOK 204 million to NOK 2.374 billion (approximately USD 390 million). Although NGOs are very much dependent on the state for funding and operate within a broad sociopolitical consensus, this should not lead to the conclusion that the increased reliance upon NGOs for policy-advocacy and policy-execution merely represents an "extension" of the state into civil society-as if the state in some way "controls" civil society. By probing deeper into the mechanisms by which the Norwegian state and Norwegian NGOs acted and related to each other in the process of advocating for a ban on land-mines we will see that their relationship is characteristic of a form of government involving a "technology of agency" by which nonstate actors are enrolled to perform governance functions by virtue of their technical expertise, advocacy and capacity for political will-formation.

Together with Norwegian People's Aid (NPA), the Norwegian Afghanistan Committee (NAC) was to be a central player in the process that resulted in a full-scale official activism at the international stage against antipersonnel land-mines. The official funding of Norwegian NPA increased by more than NOK 255 million (approximately USD 41 million) between 1991 and 1996, largely because of the fact that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) encouraged them to take up mine-clearance in certain countries. Jan Egeland had served at the Geneva headquarters of the Red Cross. Before he became its media face in Norway, and in Geneva, he had been involved in landmines issues. Having been appointed State Secretary in the Norwegian MFA, he was heavily involved in the issue of landmines. Egeland, who served in a social democratic government, turned to the Norwegian NPA with the knowledge that they had the backing and the financial resources to follow through on the initiative.

The NPA was enrolled not only as an object, but also as a subject of government, with all the pros and cons involved: "The NPA was keen, I was actually a bit worried about how keen they were, they are willing to do everything for everybody. [...] Our civil servants had to make sure that the NGOs recruited professionals, but we also wanted the enthusiasm that the NGOs could provide. They also had the major comparative advantage of knowing what the mine situation was out there in the field."

The NAC had started already in 1989 to work on mine clearance after two of the organization's people and nine others were killed in a car explosion in Peshawar in 1988. When the UN started to work on mine clearing in Afghanistan in 1989, they approached the Norwegian MFA, which decided to finance this work. In this context, the NAC was to be a central actor in shaping official Norwegian policy. As a representative of the NAC put it in an interview,

... the NAC was an important decision shaper where Norwegian Afghan policy was concerned. We were always asked when new initiatives were afoot. We had regular meetings, for example the annual meetings on disaster aid allocation as well as informal ones, and quite often they took place when our local representative in Peshawar was in Oslo. Actually, the MFA people around Peshawar also discussed with them on location, and we had good contacts with the Norwegian military personnel-you know how ex-pat circles work, you talk to compatriots you would never have approached at home even if you had been neighbours. They [the MFA] would show us stuff they had received from the UN with a view to hearing how this looked from out in the field. Actually, a meeting never went by without them putting out at least one of these feelers. The MFA rarely asked us just like that, however, they were a bit invisible in the way they asked their questions.

In a word, the Norwegian state drew on the practical knowledge of the NGOs, the lion's share of whose work they had financed in the first place. In the late 1980s, however, the NAC also partook in parallel activities centred on Peshawar, namely the setting up of a Mines Advisory Group that was eventually to transmute into the International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL).

The question to be asked here is what kind of governmental rationality characterizes the intimate relations between NGOs and the state. Egeland's reading of this relationship is instructive:

This circle [around the NPA], which also consisted of the Norwegian Red Cross, their Geneva office, Norwegian Church Aid and their international branches-the Lutheran World Federation and the World Council of Churces-began to argue in favor of a total ban. Suddenly, I was on the defensive. I had seen the need for this, I had put the NPA on the case, I had even provided the money, and then there they were! I remember sitting down to a TV program on mines, you know, rest a little on my laurels, and there was this person from the NPA being interviewed out in the field in Cambodia saying now the Norwegian state must wake up and see the enormous need etc. etc. [...] I was called names, you know reactionary, all that, by the people who thought of themselves as progressive activists.

This statement seems to indicate that the relation between state and nonstate actors is one of criticism from the outside, where nonstate actors represent the liberal-progressive forces of a "global civil society" against the traditionalism of states. Interestingly, however, Egeland goes on to tell how he approached this criticism:

So I thought it was time to follow up on my previous good experiences and simply talk to them. This was when I initiated a series of meetings, but there I had to argue the case for why a total ban was unrealistic. This I had not done before. I had been neither in favour, nor against, because the idea of a total ban had not existed as such. [...] So why, they said, why cannot we be the first ones to be in favour of a total ban? Well, I said, because Canada and Belgium are bordering other NATO allies only [and not Russia, as does Norway]. In Norway, the MoD and the department for security affairs were in the driver's seat, and to put it mildly, I had no power of instruction over them.

The critical role played by nonstate actors in this case is directed at a different part of the state apparatus, the Ministry of Defense (MoD). As representative of the Norwegian state, Egeland is at pains to mediate between the humanitarian goals that he supports, and the "high politics" of disarmament represented by the MoD. This opposition is refound in the framing of the international process as one where a global movement (representing "global civil society") to ban landmines involving a plethora of actors are working under a humanitarian banner, in opposition to a UN-based disarmament process where states, and particularly the great powers, are in charge.

In fact, the genesis of the Norwegian involvement in the work to ban landmines shows how nonstate actors are used to create space for political agency by different parts of the state. Officers in the Norwegian Army had been involved in training mine-clearance for some time, and they were the ones that had the technical expertise to do this. However, the MoD was not the place to start advocating for a ban on landmines. When these officers started to get involved in the work of the NGOs against land-mines, Egeland and the MFA could use both the local knowledge and technical expertise of these ex-military officers and the critical and progressive advocacy of the NPA and NCA to advance the "humanitarian" cause against the more traditional military views found in other parts of the state apparatus.

The following description by two diplomats of the relation between state officials and NGO-representatives provides an intake to understanding how the relative autonomy and opposition of NGOs were central to their standing as politically significant subjects through which to govern: "We were opponents and collaborators at the same time. We needed their expertise, which was of a kind that we ourselves did not possess, and so it was nice to be able to draw on theirs." This suggests that while nonstate actors have increasingly been enrolled to assume active, responsible roles in performing governance-functions, their critical attitude and more idealistic goals do generate some friction.

The ways in which the MFA and the NGOs interacted and related to each other during the land-mine process is indicative of a more general development. The relations between the state and nonstate actors have been redefined as an integral part of a shift whereby nonstate actors are defined as both objects of government by the state, and subjects whose self-associating features, criticism and mobilizing capacity are to be put to use in processes of governing. For example: Already in 1975 the MFA established a "Humanitarian Emergency Committee" to advise the government on how to respond to humanitarian emergencies. It included all the large NGOs working on humanitarian and development assistance. Starting in the early 1990s, the State Secretary in the MFA started to chair the Committee's meetings. Crucially, this meant that the function of the Committee changed from having an advisory function to having a coordinating and mobilizing function. It signaled, more than anything else, that the participating NGOs came to be seen, both by themselves and by representatives of the state, as actors that operated in tandem with the state and as responsible and mobilizing actors within civil society.

In the early 1990s, the Norwegian Government issued a report, which outlined a qualitatively new relation between the government apparatus and NGOs. It stated that NGOs filled an important, yet "supplementary" role in relation to official development institutions, especially in geographical areas and issue-areas where the government could not or would not get directly involved. The report emphasized, however, that NGOs would in the future be included as "active partners" in the formulation and planning of Norwegian development policy ( Uteniksdepartementet 1991-1992). This identification of NGOs as "active partners" in the governments' official policy is reflected in the increased funding for NGOs in this period.

There can be no doubt that the transnational movement to ban antipersonnel mines was instrumental in swaying the Norwegian state's policy on landmines. Neither can there be any doubt that Norwegian NGOs played a central role both where agenda-setting and decision shaping is concerned. The NGOs played to their different strengths: the NAC using its early contacts with the rest of what we may call the epistemic community of mine specialists to sensitize the rest of the NGOs and also the state to the issue, and the NPA using its intimate links with the rest of the Labor movement and also a whole swathe of politicians and NGOs with an interest in humanitarian work to launch an effective lobbying campaign.

Our analytical perspective both challenges and provides an "added value" to the literature on global governance. It challenges the view that nonstate actors have become more powerful at the expense of the state. But it also provides an analytical framework that explicitly aims to theorize the ways in which states relate to nonstate actors. A governance-focus that only considers how the knowledge and expertise produced and brought to bear by NGOs as a case of how nonstate actors challenge state supremacy and control misses a fundamental point. The expertise and knowledge embedded in NGOs must be analyzed in terms that also consider how different types of actors and organizations fit into and correspond to a more general rationality of government. Consider, for example, the following description by two diplomats of the genesis of NGOs' activities during the last decade:

The NGOs were learning on the job. Since protocol 2 they had been adjusting their language and their behavior. In the early days, they were slogging around, but now they had shaped up, started to look out for what was effective, they appeared streamlined and diplomatic in their approach.

This description of how NGOs have been "adjusting their language and their behavior," of how they in previous periods had a tendency of simply "slogging around" but had now "shaped up" and had become "effective" and "streamlined and diplomatic in their approach" points to two important theoretical points. First, it suggests what we also discussed in the case of population policy, namely, that different governmental rationalities generate different action-orientations of non-state actors: The transformation in governmental rationality implied in the increased emphasis on governing through free and autonomous subjects generates new types of NGOs and new action-orientations of existing ones. As brought out in the quote above, these actors have assumed responsible, effective and diplomatic attitudes. Second, it suggests that NGOs are defined as responsible and "streamlined" actors that perform crucially important governmental tasks in international settings by virtue of being defined as subjects of government. It is precisely their ability to act as responsible vehicles for political will-formation and as sources of expertise that render them central actors in such processes. As they are brought into the task of governing, the state simultaneously emphasizes their autonomous capacities. For example, a centrally placed state secretary emphasized that it was vital for the MFA to "professionalize" the NGOs in the land-mine case, yet retain their "enthusiasm" and draw on their expertise on the ground.

This case is specifically not one that conforms to the notion of cooptation: these actors are not brought into the fold and as such deprived of their autonomy and as recognized representatives of "civil society." Rather, it is precisely their status as actors that possess expertise central to the task of governing and, much more importantly, the fact that they appear to be autonomous political subjects with a capacity for political will-formation that make them key subjects of, and allies in, governmental tasks. It is thus not the functional role of the state which has changed as such, but the intermeshing of the networks which has become so much denser that it qualitatively changes how the state goes about minding that function-how it recruits its personnel, organizes its work and shapes in different ways the plethora of actors central to governmental functions.

Looking specifically at the case of the landmine campaign, Richard Price (1998) maintains that the success of the NGOs challenges the central role of states. As this case study demonstrates, however, these generalizations are in need of specification. The change in operating mode of states surely does suggest that new actors emerge to play important roles. When subsumed within an analytical framework focused on governmental rationalities, however, the changing institutional forms of the state are considered as being internal to and derived from a much more general political rationality of rule.

Conclusion

Studies of global governance have certainly produced a range of new insights about how political institutions, such as the sovereign state, have been affected by the forces of globalization. These studies have shown how multilayered and polyarchic networks that comprise states, NGOs, IGOs and transnational corporations have become central sites for the formulation and implementation of governance. Crucially, the literature on global governance concludes that nonstate actors have become more powerful and that states have become less so, with resulting changes in the institutionalization of political authority.

We have argued here that the literature on global governance fails to deliver on its claim to focus on the processes of governance, that it conceptualizes the relation between the state and nonstate actors as a zero-sum game, and that, contrary to programmatic statements, it perpetuates a concern with the triad between sovereignty, authority, and legitimacy. We have offered a different perspective that partly challenges and partly supplements this literature. Studying global governance through the lens of "governmentality" enables us to study how different governmental rationalities are defined by certain rules, practices and techniques, and how such rationalities of rule generate specific action-orientations and types of actors. Our two case-studies have shown how, in late modernity, the changing institutional forms of the state that readily identifiable are perhaps better understood within a more general framework of a change in governmental rationality. Both the types of actors involved-state and nonstate-in shaping and performing governmental tasks and the various institutional forms of the state and of political authority, should be analyzed within a focus on governmental rationalities.

We have applied this theoretical perspective to two critical cases: on international population policy and on landmines. This has made it possible to criticize the literature on global governance on key accounts. We have found that civil society is increasingly defined as a field populated by political subjects whose autonomy, expertise and ability to responsibly channel political will-formation has become crucial to the tasks of governing. We have identified a governmental rationality where political power operates through rather than on civil society. Governing is performed through autonomous subjects, not on passive objects.

References

Interviews

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Governance to Governmentality: Analyzing NGOs, States, and Power

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Studies of global governance typically claim that the state has lost power to nonstate actors and that political authority is increasingly institutionalized in spheres not controlled by states. In this article, we challenge the core claims in the literature on global governance.

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Liberalism, Governmentality and Counter-Conduct; An Introduction to Foucauldian Analytics of Liberal Civil Society Notions | Foucault Studies (cbs.dk)

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Keywords: civil society, counter-conduct, government(ality), liberalism, neoliberalism, subject

Abstract

This article gives an analysis of Foucault's studies of civil society and the various liberalist critiques of government. It follows from Foucault's genealogical approach that "civil society" does not in itself possess any form of transcendental existence; its historical reality must be seen as the result of the productive nature of the power-knowledge-matrices. Foucault emphasizes that modern governmentality-and more specifically the procedures he names "the conduct of conduct"-is not exercised through coercive power and domination, but is dependent on the freedom and activeness of individuals and groups of society. Civil society is thus analyzed as fundamentally ambivalent: on the one hand civil society is a field where different kinds of technologies of governance meet the lives and wills of groups and individuals, but on the other hand it is a potential field of what Foucault called 'counter-conduct' - for both collective action and individual political action.

Special Issue on Civil Society

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Liberalism, Governmentality and Counter-Conduct; An Introduction to Foucauldian Analytics of Liberal Civil Society Notions

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Keywords: civil society, counter-conduct, government(ality), liberalism, neoliberalism, subject This article gives an analysis of Foucault's studies of civil society and the various liberalist critiques of government. It follows from Foucault's genealogical approach that "civil society" does not in itself possess any form of transcendental existence; its historical reality must be seen as the result of the productive nature of the power-knowledge-matrices.

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The privatization of public interest: theorizing NGO discourse in a neoliberal era: Review of International Political Economy: Vol 11, No 1 (tandfonline.com)

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This paper examines recent policy discussions on non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and their central role in the democratization of civil society. The author argues that the policy debate on NGOs exemplifies the conflict between liberalism and socialism, or more specifically between private interest and public good. The contemporary context of neoliberal economic policies and structural adjustment represents a vindication of liberal norms, and the ascendancy of NGOs is theorized in this context. An analysis of recent policy positions on NGOs and their role in promoting governance and development is illustrative of the complex ways in which NGOs, at local and international levels, are being incorporated into the neoliberal model of civil society.

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The privatization of public interest: theorizing NGO discourse in a neoliberal era

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This paper examines recent policy discussions on non-governmental organiz­ations (NGOs) and their central role in the democratization of civil society. The author argues that the policy debate on NGOs exemplifies the conflict between liberalism and socialism, or more specifically between private interest and public good.

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Finding Irish Frames: Exploring how Irish NGOs communicate with the public - DevelopmentEducation.ie

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Resource Title

Summary

The aim of this project was to explore how Ireland's NGOs inform the public about development and the subsequent actions these NGOs assert. The research was built upon the premise that NGOs are contributing to low levels of public knowledge about development progress and the causes of poverty, through limited information provided in communications and campaign materials.

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Finding Irish Frames: Exploring how Irish NGOs communicate with the public - DevelopmentEducation.ie

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Resource Title Summary The aim of this project was to explore how Ireland's NGOs inform the public about development and the subsequent actions these NGOs assert. The research was built upon the premise that NGOs are contributing to low levels of public knowledge about development progress and the causes of poverty, through limited information provided in communications and campaign materials.

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People around the world demand IMF to cancel Ukraine's unjust debt (cadtm.org)

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People around the world demand IMF to cancel Ukraine’s unjust debt – CADTM

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The CADTM publishes this petition which emanates from citizens of Ukraine and which rightly asks for the cancellation of the Ukrainian debt. Correctly the initiators of this petition state that…

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Secrets and Fries: McDonald’s £295 million tax dodge | War on Want

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Selling 'ideas' rather than burgers

McDonald's operates a franchise business model, which enables it to minimise its tax bills. That's because profits get taxed where they're made. So rather than selling burgers, McDonald's sells the ideas behind the burgers (branding and intellectual property rights). Ideas are much easier to move than a burger restaurant - they can be moved to wherever they'll get taxed the least, such as a tax haven. This process is called 'profit-shifting'.

McDonald's then sets up subsidiary companies - legally separate entities that it owns - that charge franchises for using McDonald's packaging, trademarks, and other 'intangible assets. The royalty payments that McDonald's can then collect on selling its branding and intellectual property rights are enormous - and all count as 'expenses' for the franchisee and national McDonald's subsidiaries, meaning there's less tax to pay in the country where the burgers are sold.

London tax haven

McDonald's used the tax haven of Luxembourg to avoid paying €1 billion on its income from across Europe. After its Luxembourg tax arrangements were exposed by War on Want and others in our 2015 UnHappy Meal report, McDonald's moved its tax base to the City of London.

The European Commission's subsequent investigation found that McDonald's tax arrangements were unfair, but not illegal, according to the narrow state aid rules that the European Commission uses to tackle tax dodging. However, after the European Commission started asking questions about these arrangements, McDonald's decided it was time for a move - to the City of London, UK.

With Brexit on the horizon, placing its international tax base in the UK would move McDonald's outside of the EU's jurisdiction, and give it access to the UK's favourable corporate tax regime. The UK government has been keen to attract multinationals' intellectual property to London by offering tax breaks. UK parliamentarians must address the City of London's role as a tax haven for global corporations.

McDonald's billion dollar IOU to itself

In 2016, McDonald's newly established UK-based subsidiary, McD Global Franchising Ltd, bought a franchise rights business from another McDonald's subsidiary, McD APMEA Franchising Pte Ltd in Singapore - for $3.55 billion.

Instead of using cash for this transaction, UK-based McD Global Franchising Ltd paid for the franchise rights business using three loan notes - financial debt instruments similar to an 'I owe you' (IOU), a written agreement acknowledging debt. This note was then passed around the world via different McDonald's subsidiaries, until eventually it came back to McD Global Franchising Ltd in London. Unable to owe itself money, McDonald's cancelled the IOU.

However, the rights that UK subsidiary McD Global Franchising Ltd had acquired stayed on the books. By using an accounting process called amortisation (similar to depreciation, whereby a business asset loses value over time) - it can claim an expense for at least ten years, for the value of the rights dropping as they age, meaning less profits for it to pay tax on.

In total, this amounts to a potential tax saving of at least $40 million per year or £295 million ($400 million) over a decade. These figures are calculated at the UK corporate tax rate of 19%, and based on the amortisation McDonald's claimed as a tax expense in 2018.

McDonald's circular paper transaction enables royalties that McD Global Franchising Ltd receives from McDonald's entities around the world, including from Europe, the Middle East and Africa, to be shielded from taxation in the UK. This will deprive UK public funds of at least £295 million in tax revenue over ten years.

End the McTax Dodge!

When multinational corporations such as McDonald's dodge paying taxes, it creates unfair competition for small businesses. McDonald's growth and increasing market dominance fuels the normalisation of poverty wages and poor working conditions. McDonald's business model fuels growing inequality.

That's why we can't let McDonald's get away with it. We can't let McDonald's get away with granting its shareholders huge payouts off the back of public subsidies and tax breaks, whilst its workers were paid poverty wages to put their health at risk by working during Covid-19 lockdowns, furloughed workers suffered, and thousands of local businesses were going under.

We must not let politicians force ordinary working people to fund the bailouts big business received, instead of cracking down on corporate tax dodgers. We must demand politicians rebalance our rigged economy in favour of workers and the communities where multinationals operate.

HMRC must investigate McDonald's.

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Secrets and Fries: McDonald's £295 million tax dodge

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
McDonald's operates a franchise business model, which enables it to minimise its tax bills. That's because profits get taxed where they're made. So rather than selling burgers, McDonald's sells the ideas behind the burgers (branding and intellectual property rights).