SOAS University of London

Journal Article Rural development: putting the last first Get access Rural development: putting the last first. By Robert Chambers. London, New York: Longman. 1983. 246pp. Index. Pb.: £2.00. Terence J. Byres Terence J. Byres 1School of Oriental and African Studies, London Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar International Affairs, Volume 60, Issue 3, Summer 1984, Pages 477–478, https://doi.org/10.2307/2617619 Published: 01 July 1984

Abstract Global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions can be traced to five economic sectors: energy, industry, buildings, transport and AFOLU (agriculture, forestry and other land uses). In this topical review, we synthesise the literature to explain recent trends in global and regional emissions in each of these sectors. To contextualise our review, we present estimates of GHG emissions trends by sector from 1990 to 2018, describing the major sources of emissions growth, stability and decline across ten global regions. Overall, the literature and data emphasise that progress towards reducing GHG emissions has been limited. The prominent global pattern is a continuation of underlying drivers with few signs of emerging limits to demand, nor of a deep shift towards the delivery of low and zero carbon services across sectors. We observe a moderate decarbonisation of energy systems in Europe and North America, driven by fuel switching and the increasing penetration of renewables. By contrast, in rapidly industrialising regions, fossil-based energy systems have continuously expanded, only very recently slowing down in their growth. Strong demand for materials, floor area, energy services and travel have driven emissions growth in the industry, buildings and transport sectors, particularly in Eastern Asia, Southern Asia and South-East Asia. An expansion of agriculture into carbon-dense tropical forest areas has driven recent increases in AFOLU emissions in Latin America, South-East Asia and Africa. Identifying, understanding, and tackling the most persistent and climate-damaging trends across sectors is a fundamental concern for research and policy as humanity treads deeper into the Anthropocene.

Abstract Despite the enormous energy devoted to generating the right policy models in development, strangely little attention is given to the relationship between these models and the practices and events that they are expected to generate or legitimize. Focusing on the unfolding activities of a development project over more than ten years as it falls under different policy regimes, this article challenges the assumption that development practice is driven by policy, suggesting that the things that make for ‘good policy’— policy which legitimizes and mobilizes political support — in reality make it rather unimplementable within its chosen institutions and regions. But although development practice is driven by a multi‐layered complex of relationships and the culture of organizations rather than policy, development actors work hardest of all to maintain coherent representations of their actions as instances of authorized policy, because it is always in their interest to do so. The article places these observations within the wider context of the anthropology of development and reflects on the place, method and contribution of development ethnography.

This paper presents an algorithm for identifying the noun phrase antecedents of third person pronouns and lexical anaphors (reflexives and reciprocals). The algorithm applies to the syntactic representations generated by McCord's Slot Grammar parser and relies on salience measures derived from syntactic structure and a simple dynamic model of attentional state. Like the parser, the algorithm is implemented in Prolog. The authors have tested it extensively on computer manual texts and conducted a blind test on manual text containing 360 pronoun occurrences. The algorithm successfully identifies the antecedent of the pronoun for 86% of these pronoun occurrences. The relative contributions of the algorithm's components to its overall success rate in this blind test are examined. Experiments were conducted with an enhancement of the algorithm that contributes statistically modelled information concerning semantic and real-world relations to the algorithm's decision procedure. Interestingly, this enhancement only marginally improves the algorithm's performance (by 2 %). The algorithm is compared with other approaches to anaphora resolution that have been proposed in the literature. In particular, the search procedure of Hobbs'algorithm was implemented in the Slot Grammar framework and applied to the sentences in the blind test set. The authors' algorithm achieves a higher rate of success (4%) than Hobbs' algorithm. The relation of the algorithm to the centering approach is discussed, as well as to models of anaphora resolution that invoke a variety of informational factors in ranking antecedent candidates

Our aim in this paper is to address certain empirical and conceptual issues in the theory of Universal Phonology. Specifically, we will formulate a number of proposals aimed at characterising the notion ‘possible syllable' and ‘possible word'. The principles we will lay out follow from what we see as a unified theory of phonological government. The introduction of the notion of multi-levelled representations, as well as the recognition of constituent structure organisation in phonology, has allowed for a shift from mainly segment-internal, paradigmatic considerations to the study of syntagmatic relations holding between phonological units. What is now required is nothing less than a syntax of phonological expressions.

Although theory suggests that financial market imperfections–mainly information asymmetries, market segmentation and transaction costs–prevent poor people from escaping poverty by limiting their access to formal financial services, new financial technologies (FinTech) are seen as key enablers of financial inclusion. Indeed, the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (UN-2030-ASD) and the G20 High-Level Principles for Digital Financial Inclusion (G20-HLP-DFI) highlight the importance of harnessing the potential of FinTech to reduce financial exclusion and income inequality. This paper investigates the interrelationship between FinTech, financial inclusion and income inequality for a panel of 140 countries using the Global Findex waves of survey data for 2011, 2014 and 2017. We posit that FinTech affects inequality directly and indirectly through financial inclusion. We invoke quantile regression analysis to investigate whether such effects differ across countries with different levels of income inequality. We uncover new evidence that financial inclusion is a key channel through which FinTech reduces income inequality. We also find that while financial inclusion significantly reduces inequality at all quantiles of the inequality distribution, these effects are primarily associated with higher-income countries. Overall, our results support the aspirations of the UN-2030-ASD and G20-HLP-DFI. Highlights Harnessing the potential of FinTech to reduce financial exclusion and income inequality has been proposed by the UN and G20. We posit that FinTech affects income inequality directly and indirectly through financial inclusion. We invoke quantile regression analysis to investigate whether the effects of FinTech differ across countries with different levels of income inequality. We find that financial inclusion is a key channel through which FinTech reduces income inequality, at all quantile levels, primarily among higher-income countries.

Asheim B. T., Lawton Smith H. and Oughton C. Regional innovation systems: theory, empirics and policy, Regional Studies. Interest in regional innovation systems has grown significantly over the past three decades driven partly by advances in theoretical analysis, partly by the growing interest in innovation as a source of competitive advantage, and partly by the need for new policies to address regional inequalities and divergence. This article explores the elements and characteristics that exemplify the regional innovation systems approach. It provides an appraisal and synthesis of the regional innovation systems paradigm and aims to shed light on a number of areas where theoretical, empirical and policy-based questions remain unanswered. It outlines and assesses the major strands in recent theoretical and empirical debates and discusses how they might be developed to contribute to the further advancement of the regional innovation systems literature. Three interrelated questions form the key themes around which the article is structured. The first concerns the very nature of the system itself. The second concerns the boundaries of industrial districts, clusters and regional innovation systems, and the role of cognitive frontiers, knowledge transfer and learning. The third relates to the central role of knowledge and learning in clusters and regional innovation systems and in particular to the role and functioning of the labour market. These three cross-cutting themes separately and collectively provide new theoretical, empirical and policy insights; they also raise other questions which are intended to stimulate much future research.

What is new about neoliberalism? Such a question immediately implies that certain objects and processes can be defined as ‘neoliberal’ and, importantly, that the contents of the ‘neo’ can be explained by reference to a larger phenomenon called liberalism. A veritable galaxy of things are now attached to the term ‘neoliberalism’, if not as some primary identifying marker then at least as one descriptive property among others. This chapter seeks to offer a window through which to problematize and analyse this core, if recalcitrant, question. In keeping with other debates in the social sciences, it proposes that the frame of neoliberalism tries to capture something about developments in capitalism since the 1970s, with commodification, financialization, and general moves towards ‘market-based’ modes of regulation or governmentality being major debates in the literature (Harvey 2005; Brenner et al. 2010; Peck et al. 2012; Springer 2010, 2012). While accepting this temporal frame as a starting point, the chapter seeks to contextualize the history of neoliberalism in two ways. First, the chapter sheds a sharper light on the relationship between capitalism and its mechanisms of legitimation, particularly at the level of everyday experience. Second, within the inevitable space constraints, the argument traces certain threads of meaning that connect the history of the liberal tradition to the present, specifically the themes of individualism, universalism, and meliorism. Thus, the chapter aims to reveal how justifications for neoliberal capitalist practices are the product of a long history of social struggles that are, moreover, often confusing, multifarious, and even contradictory. Ironically, once this perspective is recognized, the task of deciphering contemporary neoliberalism arguably becomes harder, particularly concerning efforts to understand where certain ideas and values tied to neoliberalism acquire their commonsensical power. If neoliberalism is a moving concept then scholarship needs to be equally adept at moving with it.

Successful financing of innovation in renewable energy (RE) requires a better understanding of the relationship between different types of finance and their willingness to invest in RE. We study the 'direction' of innovation that financial actors create. Focusing on the deployment phase of innovation, we use Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF) data to construct a global dataset of RE asset finance flows from 2004 to 2014. We analyze the asset portfolios of different RE technologies financed by different financial actors according to their size, skew and level of risk. We use entropy-based indices to measure skew, and construct a heuristic index of risk that varies with the technology, time, and country of investment to measure risk. We start by comparing the behavior of private and public types of finance and then disaggregate further along 11 different financial actors (e.g. private banks, public banks, and utilities) and 11 types of RE technologies that are invested in (e.g. different kinds of power generation from solar radiation, wind or biomass). Financial actors vary considerably in the composition of their investment portfolio, creating directions towards particular technologies. Public financial actors invest in portfolios with higher risk technologies, also creating a direction; they also increased their share in total investment dramatically over time. We use these preliminary results to formulate new research questions about how finance affects the directionality of innovation, and the implications for RE policies.

The financial technologies (FinTech) revolution is in full swing globally. In this paper, we review the burgeoning literature on FinTech and FinTech-enabled services, focusing on the opportunities and risks for banks. Using high quality bank level data from 115 countries around the world for the past 16 years, we compute statistical moments of some key indicators of the changing banking landscape in the FinTech era. Our preliminary findings suggest that it is unlikely that FinTech lenders will replace banks, perhaps because banks are developing their own FinTech platforms or working with FinTech start-ups. We also showcase how regulation, global infrastructures and geopolitical frictions will shape the future of banking. We identify some promising research ideas; we also summarize some key implications, from existing research, for policy makers and practitioners.

Recent studies have shown that the high standard of living enjoyed by people in the richest countries often comes at the expense of CO2 emissions produced with technologies of low efficiency in less affluent, developing countries. Less apparent is that this relationship between developed and developing can exist within a single country's borders, with rich regions consuming and exporting high-value goods and services that depend upon production of low-cost and emission-intensive goods and services from poorer regions in the same country. As the world's largest emitter of CO2, China is a prominent and important example, struggling to balance rapid economic growth and environmental sustainability across provinces that are in very different stages of development. In this study, we track CO2 emissions embodied in products traded among Chinese provinces and internationally. We find that 57% of China's emissions are related to goods that are consumed outside of the province where they are produced. For instance, up to 80% of the emissions related to goods consumed in the highly developed coastal provinces are imported from less developed provinces in central and western China where many low-value-added but high-carbon-intensive goods are produced. Without policy attention to this sort of interprovincial carbon leakage, the less developed provinces will struggle to meet their emissions intensity targets, whereas the more developed provinces might achieve their own targets by further outsourcing. Consumption-based accounting of emissions can thus inform effective and equitable climate policy within China.

Much has been written about the measurement of socio-economic position (SEP) in high-income countries (HIC). Less has been written for an epidemiology, health systems and public health audience about the measurement of SEP in low- and middle-income countries (LMIC). The social stratification processes in many LMIC-and therefore the appropriate measurement tools-differ considerably from those in HIC. Many measures of SEP have been utilized in epidemiological studies; the aspects of SEP captured by these measures and the pathways through which they may affect health are likely to be slightly different but overlapping. No single measure of SEP will be ideal for all studies and contexts; the strengths and limitations of a given indicator are likely to vary according to the specific research question. Understanding the general properties of different indicators, however, is essential for all those involved in the design or interpretation of epidemiological studies. In this article, we describe the measures of SEP used in LMIC. We concentrate on measures of individual or household-level SEP rather than area-based or ecological measures such as gross domestic product. We describe each indicator in terms of its theoretical basis, interpretation, measurement, strengths and limitations. We also provide brief comparisons between LMIC and HIC for each measure.

Climate change research is at an impasse. The transformation of economies and everyday practices is more urgent, and yet appears ever more daunting as attempts at behaviour change, regulations, and global agreements confront material and social-political infrastructures that support the status quo. Effective action requires new ways of conceptualizing society, climate and environment and yet current research struggles to break free of established categories. In response, this contribution revisits important insights from the social sciences and humanities on the co-production of political economies, cultures, societies and biophysical relations and shows the possibilities for ontological pluralism to open up for new imaginations. Its intention is to help generate a different framing of socionatural change that goes beyond the current science-policy-behavioural change pathway. It puts forward several moments of inadvertent concealment in contemporary debates that stem directly from the way issues are framed and imagined in contemporary discourses. By placing values, normative commitments, and experiential and plural ways of knowing from around the world at the centre of climate knowledge, we confront climate change with contested politics and the everyday foundations of action rather than just data.

Abstract The current crisis is one outcome of the financialisation of contemporary capitalism. It arose in the USA because of the enormous expansion of mortgage-lending, including to the poorest layers of the working class. It became general because of the trading of debt by financial institutions. These phenomena are integral to financialisation. During the last three decades, large enterprises have turned to open markets to obtain finance, forcing banks to seek alternative sources of profit. One avenue has been provision of financial services to individual workers. This trend has been facilitated by the retreat of public provision from housing, pensions, education, and so on. A further avenue has been to adopt investment-banking practices in open financial markets. The extraction of financial profits directly out of personal income constitutes financial expropriation. Combined with investment-banking, it has catalysed the current gigantic crisis. More broadly, financialisation has sustained the emergence of new layers of rentiers, defined primarily through their relation to the financial system rather than ownership of loanable capital. Finally, financialisation has posed important questions regarding finance-capital and imperialism.

Absent vaccines and pharmaceutical interventions, the only tool available to mitigate its demographic effects is some measure of physical distancing, to reduce contagion by breaking social and economic contacts. Policy makers must balance the positive health effects of strong distancing measures, such as lockdowns, against their economic costs, especially the burdens imposed on low income and food insecure households. The distancing measures deployed by South Africa impose large economic costs and have negative implications for the factor distribution of income. Labor with low education levels are much more strongly affected than labor with secondary or tertiary education. As a result, households with low levels of educational attainment and high dependence on labor income would experience an enormous real income shock that would clearly jeopardize the food security of these households. However, in South Africa, total incomes for low income households are significantly insulated by government transfer payments. From public health, income distribution and food security perspectives, the remarkably rapid and severe shocks imposed because of Covid-19 illustrate the value of having in place transfer policies that support vulnerable households in the event of 'black swan' type shocks.

(2nd ed.) Arturo Escobar 2012. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 344 páginas

Inherited caste identity is an important determinant of life opportunity for a fifth of the world’s population, but is not given the same significance in global development policy debates as gender, race, age, religion or other identity characteristics. This review asks why addressing caste-based inequality and discrimination does not feature in intergovernmental commitments such as the Sustainable Development Goals, and whether it should. Taking India as its focus, it finds that caste has been treated as an archaic system and source of historical disadvantage due compensation through affirmative action in ways that overlook its continuing importance as a structure of advantage and of discrimination in the modern economy, especially post-liberalization from the 1990s. A body of recent literature from anthropology, economics, history and political science is used to explore the modern life of caste in society, economy and development. Questions are asked about caste as social hierarchy, the role of caste in post-liberalization rural inequality, in urban labor markets and in the business economy, and the effect of policies of affirmative action in public-sector education and employment. Caste is found to be a complex institution, simultaneously weakened and revived by current economic and political forces; it is a contributor to persisting national socioeconomic and human capital disparities, and has major impacts on subjective wellbeing. Caste effects are not locational; they travel from the village to the city and into virtually all markets. Caste persists in the age of the market because of its advantages – its discriminations allow opportunity hoarding for others; and the threat of the advancement of subordinated groups provokes humiliating violence against them. The evidence points to the need for policy innovation to address market and non-market discrimination and to remove barriers, especially in the informal and private sector; and to ensure caste has its proper place in the global development policy debate.

At the same time that the World Bank appears to be going through a process of replacing the Washington consensus with the Post‐Washington consensus, the notion of social capital is coming to the fore both in development studies and social science more generally. These developments are closely connected to one another analytically: they are liable to stake out a new development agenda based on new Keynesianism and social capital in place of state versus the market; and they reflect more generally the growing influence of mainstream economics over other social sciences.

The tragic conflict in Rwanda and the Great Lakes in 1994–1996 attracted the horrified attention of the world's media. Journalists, diplomats and aid workers struggled to find a way to make sense of the bloodshed. Johan Pottier's troubling study shows that the post-genocide regime in Rwanda was able to impose a simple yet persuasive account of Central Africa's crises upon international commentators new to the region, and he explains the ideological underpinnings of this official narrative. He also provides a sobering analysis of the way in which this simple, persuasive, but fatally misleading analysis of the situation on the ground led to policy errors that exacerbated the original crisis. Professor Pottier has extensive field experience in the region, from before and after the genocide, and he has also worked among refugees in eastern Zaire.

Abstract The transition to a low‐carbon economy will entail a large‐scale structural change. Some industries will have to expand their relative economic weight, while other industries, especially those directly linked to fossil fuel production and consumption, will have to decline. Such a systemic shift may have major repercussions on the stability of financial systems, via abrupt asset revaluations, defaults on debt, and the creation of bubbles in rising industries. Studies on previous industrial transitions have shed light on the financial transition risks originating from rapidly rising “sunrise” industries. In contrast, a similar conceptual understanding of risks from declining “sunset” industries is currently lacking. We substantiate this claim with a critical review of the conceptual and historical literature, which also shows that most literature either examines structural change in the real economy, or risks to financial stability, but rarely both together. We contribute to filling this research gap by developing a consistent theoretical framework of the drivers, transmission channels, and impacts of the phase‐out of carbon‐intensive industries on the financial system and on the feedback from the financial system into the rest of the economy. We also review the state of play of policy aiming to protect the financial system from transition risks and spell out research implications. This article is categorized under: Climate Economics > Economics and Climate Change