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Third World Quarterly
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New actors and alliances in
development
Lisa Ann Richeya & Stefano Ponteb
a Department of Society and Globalisation, Roskilde University,
Denmark
b Department of Business and Politics, Copenhagen Business
School, Denmark
Published online: 13 Feb 2014.
To cite this article: Lisa Ann Richey & Stefano Ponte (2014) New actors and alliances in
development, Third World Quarterly, 35:1, 1-21, DOI: 10.1080/01436597.2014.868979
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2014.868979
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New actors and alliances in
development
Lisa Ann Richey
a
*and Stefano Ponte
b
a
Department of Society and Globalisation, Roskilde University, Denmark;
b
Department of Business and
Politics, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark
‘New actors and alliances in development’brings together an interdis-
ciplinary group of scholars exploring how development financing and
interventions are being shaped by a wider and more complex
platform of actors than usually considered in the existing literature.
The contributors also trace a changing set of key relations and
alliances in development –those between business and consumers;
NGOs and celebrities; philanthropic organisations and the state;
diaspora groups and transnational advocacy networks; ruling elites
and productive capitalists; and ‘new donors’and developing country
governments. Despite the diversity of these actors and alliances,
several commonalities arise: they are often based on hybrid transna-
tionalism and diffuse notions of development responsibility; rather
than being new per se, they are newly being studied as practices that
are now coming to be understood as ‘development’; and they are
limited in their ability to act as agents of development by their lack
of accountability or pro-poor commitment. The articles in this collec-
tion point to images and representations as increasingly important in
development ‘branding’and suggest fruitful new ground for critical
development studies.
Keywords: actors; alliances; relations; critical development studies
Introduction
This special issue examines the rise of new actors and the configuration of new
alliances in development financing and intervention. The nexus of international
development has seen a marked shift from public aid to private flows, from
primarily North–South relations to multiple polarities of emerging economies
and non-Development Assistance Committee (DAC) donors to the ubiquitous
debate on China in Africa. The contributions in this collection move beyond the
analysis of ‘traditional’actors –such as governments, international organisations
and NGOs–to highlight how business, consumers, celebrities, philanthropic
organisations, diaspora groups, elites and ‘non-traditional’state actors work as
‘legitimate’development actors to configure the ideas and financing for
*Corresponding author. Email: richey@ruc.dk
© 2014 Southseries Inc., www.thirdworldquarterly.com
Third World Quarterly, 2014
Vol. 35, No. 1, 1–21, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2014.868979
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international development. In the process new spaces are shaped, both opened
and constricted, by a changing set of relations and alliances –those between
business and consumers; NGOs and celebrities; philanthropic organisations and
the state; diaspora groups and transnational advocacy networks; ruling elites and
productive capitalists; and ‘new donors’and developing country governments.
Not all the actors and alliances examined in this special issue are strictly
‘new’, as they may have taken new configurations or be operating in new ways,
but many have only recently been considered as the targets of study by interna-
tional development scholars. As concluded by Corbridge in his seminal piece on
the field: ‘Development studies…cannot escape the dirty worlds of practical
policy-making which lend it a reason for being, and which render it impotent,
apolitical or supportive of a series of interventions that disempower and even
infantilize “the poor”’.
1
Central concerns of the authors in this collection involve
the agency of actors whose practices are constituting new forms of engagement
in development processes, as well as the structures of constraint and opportunity
that shape their engagement. Reflecting on the importance of history for
contemporary development policy,
2
the articles included here strive to
understand difference historically and to highlight critical changes, but also
continuities. They document how these actors and alliances are arising, their
potential and limitations, the subjectivities they (re)create and the reconfiguration
of worthy recipients of ‘help’they stimulate. In doing so, they stake a claim for
understandings of development that are critically engaged, while remaining
informed by theoretical, historical and empirical research.
Development scholars wedding critical theory insights with international
development practices have argued that the perpetuation of universal notions of
development are misguided, as these concepts are inextricably linked to the
logics of global capitalism.
3
This ‘development’apparatus was described in
Ferguson’s classic book as ‘an anti-politics machine, depoliticizing everything it
touches, everywhere whisking political realities out of sight, all the while
performing, almost unnoticed, its own pre-eminently, political operation of
expanding bureaucratic state power’.
4
At its most poignant critical development
studies was able to meticulously document how development worked in specific
instances to expand the tentacles of the great liberal villain: the state. Then, as
neoliberalism and its accompanying structural adjustments emasculated state
after state in both North and South, and replaced them with markets,
development’s critical impulse subsided. Since its peak in the 1990s critical
development studies has become increasingly sidelined on ideological grounds,
under what Schuurman terms ‘neoliberal triumphalism’,
5
and on practical
grounds of policy irrelevance when critics began to conflate the cultural turn in
development studies as constituting the entire scope of ‘critical development’.
In its place little has emerged in the way of novel critical scholarship from
within international development studies to move us beyond what Ferguson
terms ‘the politics of the “anti”’.
6
As Ferguson suggests, these politics of
denunciation contribute little to understanding the contemporary practices of
new actors and alliances involved in the geographical and technical areas that
were once the purvey of states, NGOs and consultants acting on their behalf.
International development is goal- and target-oriented; it tends to be preoccupied
with the future and is thus largely unreflexive,
7
but critical development studies
2L.A. Richey and S. Ponte
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need not suffer the same weaknesses. Meanwhile, most understanding of
contemporary development practices remains dominated by economists, who
study the policies of states and international organisations with the aim of
promoting economic growth, occasionally featuring poverty reduction in
post-Millennium Development Goal (MDG) times.
We recognise that considerable knowledge can be gained from parsimonious
explanations of when development happens through aid, by whom, and how,
8
yet there is a need to further expand the scope of aid actors to be studied and
the disciplinary methods used to understand them. This, we argue, can
contribute to critical development studies. This special issue responds to a call
for scholarship that engages global issues comparatively but with a proper
respect for the differences that place makes (for the legacies of geography and
history).
9
Using qualitative methodologies, typically based on fieldwork
and empirical data collection, the contributions provide cross-disciplinary and
nuanced analyses of the practices of development relations in particular contexts.
While this issue focuses on documenting ‘new’contemporary actors, the
inclusion of grounded historical work is essential in order to ‘provide critical
responses to the historical effects of colonialism and the persistence of colonial
forms of power and knowledge into the present’.
10
The contributors were
deliberately chosen for their potential contributions to development studies that
are based on empirical, not ontological, critique. Critical development studies
cannot decouple theory from policy-oriented development practice –to do so
would be to neglect the moral responsibilities held by scholars from various
geographical and disciplinary places, who document and argue for changes
in policies and politics elsewhere.
11
Important questions for critical development scholarship and engaged policy
are raised by these grounded studies:
(1) Are there important common traits in these new actors and alliances?
(2) To what extent are they ‘new’and what are the historical trajectories of
current trends?
(3) How do these actors and alliances act as agents of development?
(4) How are new actors and alliances shaping images, communication and
representations of development?
(5) What are the implications of these new actors and alliances for critical
development studies?
The rest of this introduction will examine a set of key debates addressed by the
contributions, as well as indicating some of the answers to the questions posed
above. An epilogue to the issue by Banks and Hulme provides a complementary
perspective on the articles through the lenses of poverty alleviation and
inequality.
12
Through an analysis of the relative roles of state, market and civil
society in ‘new’development alliances, Banks and Hulme conclude that their
transformative potential is limited by their disregard of civil society.
The development aid debate
In the contemporary context in which ‘economic scarcity’refers not only to the
‘lacking’economies in the developing world, but also to their ‘donors’, the
Third World Quarterly 3
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place of new actors and alliances in development is becoming increasingly
relevant. Even development issues of unprecedented popularity for international
donor funding have been hit by the global economic crisis. For example,
funding for HIV/AIDS fell by 10% in 2010 from the previous year, which is the
first time that such funding has dropped in more than a decade (between
2002–08 spending on HIV/AIDS rose more than six fold).
13
Private funding is
becoming more important in development as traditional sources are under stress
from the effect of a shrinking tax base as a result of the contemporary economic
crisis. This is reflected by a historical trend of shifting patterns of resource
transfers from North to South. Sources of development financing that are outside
official development assistance are growing and diversifying, and this is shaping
the funding and agenda of development.
Official development assistance (ODA)isdefined by the OECD and the IMF as:
flows of official financing administered with the promotion of the economic
development and welfare of developing countries as the main objective, and
which are concessional in character with a grant element of at least 25 percent
(using a fixed 10 percent rate of discount). By convention, ODA flows comprise
contributions of donor government agencies, at all levels, to developing countries
(bilateral ODA) and to multilateral institutions.
14
ODA is becoming less important in relative terms for both the material and the
symbolic meaning of development assistance. Between the 1960s and the late
2000s the public/private patterns of transferring resources from donor countries
to development recipients reversed to the point that, in 2007, philanthropy from
all OECD donor countries amounted to $49.1 billion, remittances to $14.6 billion
and private investment to $325.4 billion: in sum, private flows represented 83%
of all flows, while public ODA was only 17%.
15
This reversal in the ways of
engaging between North and South, from public aid to private flows, has been
acclaimed for providing better ‘development’.
16
Yet we know very little about
the actual development impact of private flows, even less than we know about
the impact of ODA, which remains inadequate.
17
We do know that this material
shift in how resources flow has been accompanied by a symbolic shift in the
meaning of development, who should be involved and how.
The fundamental debates in development –whether they are conducted by
scholars, practitioners, politicians, donor or recipient constituencies –have
formed around one main question: ‘does development assistance work?’Does a
transfer of funding, material resources or services from donor to recipient bring
about economic growth and employment, improved governing institutions, better
health, education or political participation? Tierney and colleagues review the
academic debates since 1990 over aid effectiveness, and summarise them into
three schools of thought: ‘more aid’,‘problem aid’and ‘conditional aid’.
18
Given the comprehensiveness of the recent review, we will not repeat the
academic grounding for these positions here.
19
However, it is important to keep
in mind that academically significant empirical evidence has been published to
support contradictory positions. And, as summarised by Tierney et al, ‘the
roughly one million official development projects and activities over 66 years
have brought little certainty about the scope, purposes or effects of development
finance. Not for the public whose tax dollars fund aid; not for the foreign aid
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scholars; not for development practitioners; and certainly not for the recipients
of foreign aid.’
20
The polarisation in the more ‘popular’debate on international aid has played
along two main parallel axes:
21
(1) aid is bad because there is not enough of it –
from this perspective, proposing more aid, a grand plan, or a big push, is needed
to get the poorest countries out of their predicament (especially in Africa); and
(2) aid is bad because there is too much of it going to the wrong places –this
perspective argues that aid is wasted because of bad governance in recipient
countries (especially in Africa) and proposes solutions ranging from less or even
no aid to promoting more targeted and efficient aid. In practice, supporters of the
big push theory (notably, Jeffrey Sachs) tend to underestimate the effect of
corruption on aid delivery and growth. Conversely, supporters of smaller, more
targeted aid (notably, William Easterly, Robert Calderisi and Dambisa Moyo),
tend to place more importance on corruption and argue that less aid, not more, is
needed, because more money will inevitably lead to more corruption.
While from a scholarly perspective these debates appear fatally simplistic,
engaging in a ‘chicken and egg’-type debate over whether increasing aid, or
decreasing corruption in fact comes first, they are important for understanding
the power of engaging new actors in development. The form of these debates,
in which famous authors target audiences of ‘non-experts’, is significant, but
perhaps more significant is the skilful management of affect, of individual desire
to ‘do good’, in these texts. Thus, statements that are both simplified and
generalised to the point of being indisputable (one cannot dispute arguments that
are not based on evidential claims) form the engagement between a caring
public and their international development possibilities. Yet what really counts
in these debates in relation to the focus of this special issue is that both camps
generate ideological support for the engagement of business as development
agent (in ways that go beyond the generation of economic growth and
employment), of consumers as donors, of celebrities as key communicators and
mediators, and of private philanthropic foundations as rising agenda setters in
sectors like health and agriculture in developing countries. The Director of the
Hudson Institute argues that there is a dialectical relationship between new
actors and alliances and traditional aid: ‘Official aid is a minority shareholder in
the growth and development of poor countries. As a result, government aid
agencies are beginning to change their business models to leverage official aid
with activities launched and run by businesses, foundations, charities, religious
groups, universities, and even remittances being sent back to hometowns for
community projects.’
22
A new role for business in development
Both the ‘aid is bad because it is too little’and the ‘aid is bad because it is too
much’camps seem to agree that government interventions and ‘traditional’aid
are not likely to hold the solution to either problem. However, business is held
in favourable view by all sides in this debate. We briefly examine three linkages
between business and development in this section: (1) development-oriented
activities that fall under the broad agenda of Corporate Social Responsibility
(CSR); (2) Cause-Related Marketing (CRM); and (3) Bottom of the Pyramid (BOP)
business approaches to development.
Third World Quarterly 5
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Corporate Social Responsibility has operated under a number of names and
definitions through its rapid practical proliferation and conceptual develop-
ment.
23
Although the issue of the social responsibility of business can be found
in writings that go back centuries, examination of business as a social actor has
expanded considerably in the past half century or so.
24
The European
Commission defines CSR as ‘a concept whereby companies integrate social and
environmental concerns in their business operations and in their interaction
with their stakeholders on a voluntary basis’.
25
But other definitions of CSR
expand responsibility to cover society as a whole, not just the company’s imme-
diate stakeholders. Alongside a large literature in business studies, a thriving
reflective literature on the role of CSR in international development has also
emerged. Much of it concurs that not enough is known on the actual impact of
CSR activities in developing countries,
26
or about the complicated relationships
linking CSR and desirable developmental outcomes, particularly in Africa.
27
It
also argues that CSR often actually distracts attention from the root causes of
poverty and environmental destruction.
28
Related to CSR, an equally large litera-
ture has examined whether sustainability certifications promote positive out-
comes for beneficiaries in developing countries, finding mixed results.
29
But, for
all their limitations, at least CSR and sustainability certifications seek –to differ-
ent degrees –to improve production and trade conditions for Southern producers
and other actors who bring a product to the (Northern) market.
In contrast, the link between the social and environmental conditions of
production and beneficiaries is dissolved in Cause-Related Marketing initiatives.
In CRM the marketing of a brand, company, product or service is tied directly to
a cause (including international development causes), with a proportion of the
sales going to support the cause. These ‘transactional programmes’are classic
exchange-based donations, where a corporation agrees to give a specified share
of the proceeds for every unit sold.
30
CRM can be used for meeting overarching
business goals (including the drive for profits), and strengthening brand
reputation and employee loyalty, aiding recruitment and retention.
31
CRM also
shifts consumer attitudes, as companies become represented as ‘yearning to
connect to people and things that will give meaning to their lives’.
32
In the
process, business improves brand reputation and sales, without needing to
reconsider any of its actual operations and practices.
33
The most orthodox interpretation of the ‘business can solve development
problems’argument comes from Bottom of the Pyramid approaches, articulated
by Prahalad.
34
In these approaches the key to helping the poor to help
themselves is to convince business that BOP markets are important. Business is
seen as the key solution in addressing poverty because it can ‘create opportuni-
ties for the poor by offering them choices and encouraging self-esteem’.
35
Prahalad criticises the traditional approach used to create the capacity for poor
people to become consumers –providing products or services for free. He seeks
to encourage consumption in BOP markets by making unit packages small and
more affordable (because of poor people’s unpredictable income flows), and by
using new purchase schemes –such as providing credit to consumers in new
ways. Not only is there money at the BOP, and profit-making potential, but these
markets are also brand conscious. Similarly to CRM,BOP approaches do not
address the conditions of inequality and/or poverty that are responsible for their
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inability to consume in the first place. The difference is that in BOP approaches
the focus is on consumers in the South; in CRM approaches the focus is on
consumers in the North. In both, the production and trade relations embedded in
consumer products disappear.
Contribution to this theme of the articles in this issue
Two articles in this collection specifically focus on the changing role of business
in development. Blowfield and Dolan’s article provides a comprehensive
discussion of how the conceptualisation of business in development has changed
over time and where it stands now that poverty has been redefined as a condi-
tion amenable to market intervention. They show that business has long been
recognised as a key actor in economic development through its traditional roles
in investment, production, trade and retail. These activities contribute to job
creation, the supply of goods and services, and the funding of social services
though taxation. In this classic role as ‘development tool’, business is active but
not responsible for development outcomes. Blowfield and Dolan argue, however,
that business is increasingly showing interest not only in developing countries
as sites of investment, production, trade or distribution, but in the development
of these countries as well. This is often the result of self-interest, but one that
can involve ‘mutual interest between companies and the poor or otherwise
marginalized’.
36
They examine these processes by drawing from a number of
studies of what they call ‘bottom billion capitalism’initiatives, including that of
Fairtrade in tea and flowers in Kenya, and of BOP initiatives such as the CARE
Bangladesh Rural Sales Programme (RSP) and Avon South Africa.
‘Bottom billion capitalism’according to Blowfield and Dolan is a ‘model of
inclusive business that recasts poverty as a site of opportunity for both business
and the poor’, underpinned by the principle that markets can work for the poor.
The term is the merging of two other terms coined by Collier
37
–focusing on
the population of poor ‘bottom billion’countries stuck in poverty traps –and by
Prahalad
38
–denoting the aforementioned BOP four billion people earning less
than two dollars a day. Blowfield and Dolan highlight that business is involved
in a wide range of ‘bottom billion capitalism’initiatives not only in terms of
engaging with the bottom billions but also in casting them as ‘clients’,‘partners’
and ‘entrepreneurs’, shifting the discourse of the poor from beneficiaries of
aid to active market actors.
39
They conclude critically that, to be a true
‘development agent’, rather than simply a development actor or tool, business
also needs to give primacy to the benefits for the poor and marginalised and to
strive to address poverty and marginalisation. Thus, business would be required
to become accountable to developing country citizens in ways it currently is
not.
McGoey’s article shows that business is affecting development-related
processes and institutions not only directly, but also by exporting its manage-
ment models to the non-profit and philanthropic sectors. She draws parallels
between the contemporary philanthrocapitalists such as Bill Gates and early
20th-century philanthropists such as Rockefeller and Ford to suggest that the
contemporary phase ‘is simultaneously far less novel and more novel than
proponents suggest’. She points out that shaping philanthropic organisations to
Third World Quarterly 7
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operate like business was actually John D. Rockefeller’s original idea –what is
new about it is ‘the unprecedented scale of philanthropic spending’.
McGoey’s analysis draws on three case studies based on a wealth of primary
interview material on: (1) governmental grants to profitable companies such as
Vodafone (for the establishment of M-Pesa, a system first developed in Kenya
to allow people to pay bills through text messaging); (2) increased governmental
support for ‘impact investing’(investment in projects providing environmental
and social benefits with the expectation of ‘market-rate’financial returns); and
(3) the relative roles of the Gates Foundation and of governments in promoting
and financing the first Advanced-Market Commitment (AMC) to encourage the
development of drugs and vaccines for underfunded diseases.
Using theory from the economists Lazonick and Mazzucato on the
‘risk–reward nexus’, McGoey shows that, just as government interventions were
key to the development of global markets in the 19th and 20th centuries, state
support remains essential to the rise of contemporary philanthrocapitalists.
‘Governments are, somewhat ironically, instrumental to the success of philan-
thropic movements strengthened by proclaiming the ineptitude and waning influ-
ence of government policies…[they] are extending themselves in new directions
in a semblance of surrendering control to private entities that are, in many ways,
less entrepreneurial than governments themselves’. She concludes that
philanthrocapitalists have helped to perpetuate the belief that the private sector
is filling public sector gaps in development financing, while in reality it is often
governments that subsidise the philanthrocapitalists.
Consumers and celebrities as development actors
Recasting the role of business in development is accompanied by the increasing
engagement of consumers and celebrities as development actors. ‘Ethical
consumers are those whose decisions about what to consume (the “consump-
tion”part) are shaped by their assessment of the moral nature of that context
(the “ethical”part)’.
40
There has been increasing interest in, and debate on,
various forms of ethical and political consumption over the past two decades. A
rich literature has fine-tuned the links between the ethics and the politics of
consumption,
41
examined the ethics of ‘everyday consumption’,
42
or argued that
ethical consumption is a dangerous myth.
43
One of the important aspects emerg-
ing from this literature is the fact that the possibility of ‘consuming ethically’is
often based on the consumption of branded products, despite the ‘No Logo’
battle cry of the anti-globalisation movement. In other words, it is brands’
vulnerability to ethical concerns that opens up space for consumer action. But
because branded companies seek to minimise such vulnerability, they are also
developing initiatives (such as CRM) that detach ethical concerns from the
products themselves, and relocate them instead to the ethics of supporting a
development cause.
A culture of consumption promotes freedom of choice and consumer
sovereignty, and strives to meet needs that are in principle unlimited and insatia-
ble.
44
The consumption of signs and experiences can be the vehicle for the
mobilisation of ‘meaning’, belonging to a ‘community’, political action and
development intervention. Citizen-consumers are increasingly seen as exercising
their rights to demand developmental outcomes via individual acts of
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‘consumption for a cause’. But while consumer agency may take the form of
collective action through campaigns and consumer organisations’pressure, the
focus of these campaigns is often on the individual act of consumption of
branded products. As the value of goods depends increasingly on their ‘sign’
rather than on their functional or economic value, advertising, marketing and
branding become central functions on their own, not subordinate to produc-
tion.
45
In many cases this kind of consumption is mobilised by celebrities
through the management of affect. Consumption can then delineate values and
form a partial basis for creating a community that ‘cares’for development.
The state-of-the-art understanding of ethical and political consumption rests
on the core belief that reconnecting the sites of consumption with those of
production will enable a fairer distribution of value along the chains, potentially
driven by ‘fair trade’and ‘ethical consumption’purchases. But while this focus
on products must not be neglected, it should be accompanied by an understand-
ing of the causes (including development) that are increasingly ‘sold’together
with the products, and of the celebrities who translate and embody an ethical
leadership role in the management of consumers’desire to do good while
shopping well.
From the ‘movie star on the famine stage’
46
to the ‘AIDS heroes’of China,
47
the past decade has seen a proliferation of celebrities appearing in productions
of transnational caring.
48
As celebrities become more relevant, other forms of
expertise have followed the celebrity modality, and public figures, academics
and business leaders have become ‘celebritised’as well. Celebrities have
become the faces of doing good, of credibility and of believability. For example,
Bono is popular as a rock star and his commitment to development advocacy
over time has earned him legitimacy as an expert.
49
This distinguishes some
celebrities as particularly effective in cause work from other stars who simply
engage in ‘do gooding’.
50
Aid celebrities have thus become trusted advisors on
issues of health, poverty, the environment or climate change in ways that extend
beyond the actual scope of their research or practitioner experience, and their
presence is invoked to stand in for important beliefs and social values.
51
In
other words, celebrities have become a way of mediating between proximity
and distance in the global as well as the specific context.
Contribution to this theme of the articles in this issue
Three articles examine the role of consumers and/or of celebrities in develop-
ment. Kothari’s article shows that linking Third World producers and Western
consumers through public campaigns, charity advertising and media promotion
is deeply rooted in the history of Empire. Through her analysis of the (British)
Empire Marketing Board poster campaign of 1926–33 she argues that popular
representations of the ‘exotic other’sought to reorder relations between produc-
ers and consumers in ways that are not too dissimilar from contemporary
campaigns.
52
Kothari shows that it is important to reflect on the historical legacy
of the current wave of ‘ethical consumption’but without falling into a
historically deterministic trap. What is more important is that we should pay
specific attention to how the instrumental use of images and representations in
these campaigns actually influences development policies, discourses and prac-
tices. Kothari shows, literally, through the images of the Empire Marketing
Third World Quarterly 9
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Board, how caring was never considered a relation between equals.
Development is sold as yet another product quality trait and contemporary
initiatives that use products to link domestic and overseas histories draw on
deep imperial roots.
Ponte and Richey’s article covers the role of both consumers and celebrities
in development, and their new alliance. They formalise a conceptual model for
what they have termed ‘Brand Aid’, the intersection of international
development causes, branded products and celebrities –placing it in the context
of an institutional framework. Ponte and Richey use this model as a guide to
conduct a systematic empirical analysis of contemporary Brand Aid initiatives,
including three in-depth case studies of General Mills’‘Win One Give One’
campaign, TOMS shoes and Product (RED). They highlight how, in Brand Aid
initiatives, celebritised multi-media imaginaries of development are used to sell
products to Northern consumers. Development outcomes themselves become so
imbued with symbolic and ‘ethical’value that they now are used to market
consumer goods to Northern buyers, often with celebrities being part of creating
‘caring brands’that sell development. Commodities are then sold as the means
to achieving development for recipients and good feelings for consumers
simultaneously. In the process ‘development’becomes ontologically ingrained as
‘having the right things’. In Brand Aid initiatives consumers can save distant
others who have no connection with the product on sale. Instead of striving to
improve production and trade conditions (as in fair trade or other sustainability
initiatives), Brand Aid engages the work of a ‘story factory’, often generated
with or through celebrities, producing emotional ‘truths’about development and
consumer engagement that make development appear simplified and
manageable.
Brockington’s article argues that our understanding of celebrity and develop-
ment still lacks an account of how the celebrity industry and the development
sector have become intertwined, and a better understanding of the political
economy of these relationships. Brockington argues that celebrity in develop-
ment is important not only because it mediates between Northern consumers
and the receivers of ‘help’, but also because it facilitates access to elites. On the
basis of material drawn from over 100 interviews with employees of different
NGOs, journalists and agents, managers and public relations staff (mostly in the
USA and UK), and from an analysis of articles in the major UK newspapers,
Brockington chronicles in detail the emergence of a celebrity–charity–corporate
complex as a site of negotiation, clash and overlap of interests, and the
emergence of new professional figures managing the celebrity–charity interface.
He shows that relations between the development sector and celebrity industries
have become more organised and systematic in the past decade, and that, as a
consequence, some development NGOs now have dedicated staff who are deeply
engaged with agents, publicists, managers and celebrities to build effective
relationships. Finally, he shows that the celebrity–charity–corporate complex is
also attractive to corporate sponsors because of the valuable publicity it can
facilitate, and because of ‘the personal pleasure the company of the famous
affords’. Brockington concludes that celebrities have become an important set of
development actors, and that their presence and influence needs to be better
understood by development studies scholars in future work.
10 L.A. Richey and S. Ponte
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State actors, elites and transnational networks
The role of the state, while pushed out of fashion in development theory by
‘neoliberal triumphalism’,
53
is never absent from understandings of what
development might mean in practice and what actors and alliances are necessary
to drive it. Thus, development does not emerge spontaneously from the interplay
of market forces, but rather requires concerted state interventions. Even in
contexts of increasing transnationalism, states are necessary to ensure macroeco-
nomic stability and provide infrastructure, utilities and selective industrial
policies. In this collection Whitfield and Buur argue that ‘few non-traditional
export success stories from anywhere around the world occurred without the
help of industrial policies of some sort, such as assisting the absorption and
learning of new technologies, export subsidies, and preferential tariff
arrangements’.
54
There is increasing agreement on the necessity of industrial
policy and the importance of the state, although the details of how this should
take place in varying contexts continue to be debated.
55
At the centre of many
debates on state actors and elites in development we find the resurgence of
African ‘exceptionalism’. There is a highly sceptical literature on the capacity of
African states to effectively engage as development actors.
56
Specifically it is
argued that African states lack capacity because of the prevalence of neo-patri-
monial politics and bad political leadership. Within African states ruling elites
have often been seen as sources of underdevelopment because they exploit
public resources for personal gain and narrow elite or ethnic interests.
57
Structural adjustment programmes sought to undo these alliances, by taking
away many of the tools of the state in order to support the emergence,
consolidation or expansion of a group of domestic capitalists. Yet, in the era of
privatised international development efforts, these very elites, and their relations
to industry and the state, are being reconsidered.
The power politics that play into elite alliances and state capacity for
development are not limited to those which are geographically bound within
developing countries. Transnational networks are increasingly studied for the
ways in which they operate a ‘boomerang’set of linkages initiated by domestic
organisations that ‘bypass their state and directly search out international allies
to try to bring pressure on their states from outside’.
58
Keck and Sikkink argue
that the linkages between international allies and the victim or target group are
mutually beneficial, providing access, leverage and money in exchange
for credibility for the benefactors as struggling with, not only for, their Southern
partners.
59
However, such ‘boomerang politics’for development involve
extensive complications around resource control and the management of the
representation of the development ‘problem’, termed ‘information politics’.As
these transnational actors gain in legitimacy on the basis of their perceived
access to accurate but often-overlooked information, they enjoy more public
trust than states, businesses and the media.
60
Contribution to this theme of the articles in this issue
In addition to McGoey’s intervention already summarised above, three articles
in this collection examine state actors, elites and transnational networks and
their new, returning and/or reconfigured role in development. Whitfield and
Buur’s article examines the resurgence of an alliance that has always been
Third World Quarterly 11
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central to the process of economic development –that between ruling elites and
domestic productive capitalists. These alliances are now experiencing heightened
attention from scholars and policy makers with the current revival of debates
around industrial policy in developing countries. Whitfield and Buur draw from
in-depth and fieldwork-based case studies of the evolution of two successful
productive sectors in Africa (sugar in Mozambique and cocoa in Ghana), carried
out by the authors as part of the larger research programme ‘Elites, Production
and Poverty’. They highlight the conditions under which alliances between
ruling elites and domestic productive capitalists occur, their specific characteris-
tics and their outcomes. With careful attention to historical and contextual
specificity, Whitfield and Buur show that close relations between ruling elites
and capitalists are not necessarily ‘crony’or unproductive. Under certain condi-
tions, they can lead to positive development outcomes. This happens when the
following conditions are met: there are mutual interests between ruling elites
and productive capitalists; factional demands within the ruling coalition can be
managed in order to create ‘pockets of efficiency’in the bureaucracy; and state
bureaucrats engage in institutionalised relations with industry actors under a
framework providing clear incentives for increasing productivity or expanding
an industry. However, Whitfield and Buur also provide a cautionary note –alli-
ances can change with transformations in the configuration of political power or
the power of capitalists, and thus their developmental outcomes are far from
assured in the long term.
Kragelund’s article highlights how non-traditional state actors (emerging
donor countries such as China, India and Brazil) contribute to creating ‘develop-
mental space’in policy making in Africa. He points out that, while some of
these actors have been active in Africa for decades (China in particular), their
renewed involvement and the specific modality of this involvement signals the
weakening of an old alliance (between African states and DAC donors) and the
strengthening of a new one. Kragelund applies Harrison’s concept of the ‘sover-
eign frontier’
61
to move us ‘beyond the traditional discussion of whether or not
African states are indeed sovereign…to a discussion of how a variety of domes-
tic and international actors interact to shape the (changing) development space’.
Using his fieldwork-based case study in Zambia, Kragelund examines the role
of China, India and Brazil in financing development activities and in promoting
alternative development models. He argues that it is not the size of financial
flows from these emerging donors that counts –these are still small compared
to those from DAC countries. What is most important is that new donors are
providing alternative models of development that combine purposive state
intervention with market-based economic growth and integration into world mar-
kets, while maintaining a high degree of national control. He shows that the
Zambian state is taking its first steps in strengthening its ‘sovereign frontier’of
development, but also that the extent of this movement is still small and devel-
opment outcomes remain far from assured.
Budabin’s article examines the alliance between diaspora groups and transna-
tional advocacy networks. Through her analysis of primary data documenting
the relations between the Darfuri diaspora in the USA and the Save Darfur
Coalition (an advocacy NGO embedded in a transnational network), Budabin
shows that the uneven constitution of alliances between unequally resourced
12 L.A. Richey and S. Ponte
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actors limits the abilities of groups like the Darfuri diaspora to act as
development agents. The article emphasises that looking simultaneously at the
home and host country contexts is key in understanding the strength and viabil-
ity of transnational alliances. While diaspora groups can provide the emotional
‘pull’in the host country for improved visibility, lack of strong ties in the home
country, political cleavages and the short-termism of advocacy networks can
limit the longer-term development potential of these alliances and lead to an
exclusive focus on humanitarian aid. Nevertheless, transnational linkages remain
important for diasporas because of their need to align with better-resourced
groups that provide necessary financing, communications skills and political
access in the host country. For the NGOs engaging in transnational advocacy
networks with diaspora groups provides them with an advantage in the ‘informa-
tion politics’of negotiating between legitimate representation of ‘others’and
policy ‘asks’on their behalf.
Conclusion
The contributions to this special issue analyse the rise of new actors, the
transformation of old actors and the configuration of new alliances in develop-
ment. In previous sections we have highlighted the contribution these articles
offer in relation to understanding: the new role of business in development; the
involvement of consumers and celebrities as development actors; and the
complex interactions between state actors, elites and transnational networks. In
this last section we provide some answers to the questions raised in the
introductory section and suggest future directions for critical development
studies.
Are there important common traits in these new actors and alliances?
The articles in this collection demonstrate two main commonalities: hybrid
transnationalism and diffuse notions of development responsibility. First, hybrid
transnationalism is seen across the studies as resulting from the geopolitical
situatedness of the resources generated to support the new actors and alliances
in development: funds from global philanthropists, advocacy networks, and
development-minded consumers are raised to support causes that are sold as
being ‘above politics’. This hybrid transnationalism means that development has
not become firmly cosmopolitan in ways that would oblige equivalences
between distant strangers and close kin and would thus also necessitate struggles
against global inequality, in the midst of all the ‘helping’. Neither is
development geopolitically configured along the traditional lines of DAC donors,
bilaterals and multilaterals, or NGOs and states. Many of the new actors and
alliances here fall clearly in between; they are neither local nor global –but
instead hybrid transnationals.
Second, the new actors and alliances explored in these contributions suggest
that most are active as development tools –active, but not responsible for
development –and that a diffuse notion of responsibility characterises the rela-
tionships between them. As illustrated by Blowfield and Dolan in this issue,
62
the new actors and alliances are ‘no more responsible for development outcomes
than a hammer is responsible for the carpenter’s thumb’. Yet the articles here
Third World Quarterly 13
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suggest that a clearer understanding of development responsibility could be
better achieved through an empirical analysis of the mechanisms that are
producing these new alliances between actors and between processes of develop-
ment and their supposed beneficiaries.
To what extent are these actors and alliances ‘new’and what are the
historical trajectories of current trends?
As might be anticipated, nothing we see in contemporary development practices
is without specific or combined historical precedent. Most explicitly Kothari
shows how the visualisations of self and state created possibilities of empire in
ways analogous to how development relations are depicted as a shared struggle
for good commodity provision and consumption.
63
Whitfield and Buur demon-
strate how ruling elites and domestic productive capitalist relations seen in
Mozambique and Ghana have historical precedents in the sugar plantations and
smallholder cocoa farms, and that these continue to present challenges for con-
temporary development.
64
Alliances between new aid actors (China, India and
Brazil) and the Zambian state are formed upon the fraught history of that coun-
try’s domination by its traditional donors and lenders, as shown by Kragelund.
65
And while the scale of contemporary philanthrocapitalism may appear extreme,
McGoey traces this to the 19th century development of international markets,
with the state remaining central, even though concealed by the relations of
‘new’philanthropy.
66
In sum, these actors and alliances are not new per se, but
they are newly being studied by development studies scholars as practices that
are now coming to be understood as an important part of the rubric of what
constitutes ‘development.’
How do these actors and alliances act as agents of development?
In the positioning of agency in development, we see a new twist in which inten-
tionality or motivation is less important than engagement of one’s own (individ-
ual or corporate) resources in the risky activity of development. For example, in
Blowfield and Dolan’sdefinition of what makes a development agent –willing-
ness to deploy one’s assets for development activity, not whether or not there is
a profit motive –should be central. In Ponte and Richey’s examination of Brand
Aid, development’s value as a product feature is not lessened by consumer com-
mitment to conspicuous consumption or by businesses capitalisation on the
affective need to ‘help’. In Brockington’s analysis the investment of celebrities’
time and publicity capital suggests that they too may be legitimate development
agents, and that development causes are also risky endeavours for the profile of
an A-list celebrity. Bill Gates (in McGoey’s contribution), ‘non-traditional state
actors’(in Kragelund’s), and the Darfuri Diaspora (in Budabin’s) are all invest-
ing their own assets for developmental activity, and thus meet one of the criteria
for constituting them as development agents. However, Blowfield and Dolan’s
other criteria for defining agency in development –pro-poor primacy and
accountability –are much more difficult to meet for many of the development
actors examined here.
14 L.A. Richey and S. Ponte
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How are new actors and alliances shaping images, communications and
representations of development?
The power of storytelling, including visual representation, has been largely
neglected by development scholars.
67
Yet the power of international development
representations is not simply a material power that stems from the way that alli-
ances engage business, consumers and other development actors. The impact is
also based in images –pictures of the world. Northern shoppers are animated by
a confident aid celebrity Bono, who speaks from American television screens
claiming: ‘We can be the generation that ends extreme poverty. This is our
moment to show what we’re about.’International development’s expansion to
include new actors among the so-called ‘generation-net’calls for critical consider-
ation of communication, including from the perspective of those affected by it.
68
Drawing on the emotional in political life and on the affective politics of develop-
ment, some new actors, like celebrities, shape the form of representation of inter-
national development and constructions of identity that are always co-constituted
through imaginaries of ‘us’and ‘them’
69
–often with imperial, racist and reli-
gious legacies.
70
Several contributions in this collection speak to these issues. Budabin lends
weight to the argument that transnational networks, with their presumptions of
legitimacy,
71
rely to a large extent on their ability to furnish compelling
stories.
72
As also argued by Keck and Sikkink, the information flows from and
around these alliances ‘provide not only facts, but testimony –stories told by
people whose lives have been affected’.
73
Brockington, however, suggests that
celebrity testimonies may be even more important than those of the affected:
‘When public figures handle interviews they can speak with more conviction
and ease, they are able to tell stories of people they have met, adding
much more colour’.
74
Kothari’s and Ponte and Richey’s contributions support the argument that
‘suffering strangers’and ‘“iconic figures”of misfortune’are produced,
reproduced, formed and transformed according to the stories that need to be told
to garner public support.
75
Thus, controversially, it appears that, as international
development has become more democratic, including more non-expert voices, it
is also becoming increasingly reliant on the silencing of complexity, conflict and
on-the-ground realities of development interventions. Through the creation of
representational consensus, with the same stories and pictures circulated in
various forms of expert and popular media, notions of under-development
become popularised via ‘reductive repetition’,
76
and diverse subjectivities are
placed together into the ‘suffering slot’that has replaced the ‘savage’as the
privileged object of cross-cultural attention.
77
Ponte and Richey push this
argument even further, arguing that Brand Aid initiatives not only use imaginar-
ies of development to sell products to Northern consumers, but also engage in
the work of a ‘story factory’–producing truths about international development
and consumer engagement that make development appear simplified, manage-
able and marketable.
78
As Budabin (this issue) explains, in the policy space
possible for some diaspora groups and not others, ‘not everyone is a good
speaker’, and as Ponte and Richey illustrate, those whose stories do not compel,
do not sell. This has relevant implications for both the performances and the
politics of development.
Third World Quarterly 15
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What are the implications of these new actors and alliances for critical
development studies?
The articles in this special issue indicate important directions for research in
critical development studies by staking a middle ground between post-develop-
ment/anti-development culturalism and materialist political economy critiques of
development as exploitation. First, they suggest that critical research does not
have to remain disengaged from development practices –as much of the earlier
post-development or anti-development theory had suggested. Critiquing practices
and their justificatory premises through Corbridge’s provision of Weber’s
‘inconvenient facts’can provide a better understanding of the implications of
the mechanisms through which development works.
79
These practices may well
oppress people, but they may also provide the master’s tools necessary for
taking down his house (to reverse paraphrase Audre Lorde).
80
Second, these
contributions point to fruitful new areas for studying international development
in its hybrid transnational nature –in addition to the ongoing relationships
between international organisations, states and NGOs. Research should look
outside the usual scope of development confined by ODA to find out what
practices are taking place, what they might mean, and how they might intersect
with the practices we conventionally study as international development.
Third, the articles here suggest that development studies could be better under-
stood as part of the intellectual scope of global studies: because the geographical
scope of development actors and its recipients is increasingly less confined to
‘developing countries’; and because hybrid transnational actors and alliances
cross boundaries between state, international organisations and NGOs.
81
This is
not a call for less attention to empirical data collection, including fieldwork in
developing country sites, but instead a reading of these new actors and alliances
through the lens of the global. Fourth, critical development studies must be will-
ing to engage both the material and the representational sides of development
interventions. Questions raised around representations of development relate quite
directly to the political economy of the ‘asks’that form policy and practices in
these new alliances and roles of new actors. Who can legitimately ask for what,
for whom and from whom? Critical development scholars should bring empirical
evidence to bear on political, not merely technical, debates around development,
new actors and alliances and changing configurations of North–South relations. A
political economy of interests, not an ideological blindness built on the assump-
tions of altruism, would better guide understandings of development actors and
alliances. At the same time the symbolic value of the performance of altruism
must be taken into the development calculus.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank the participants in the EADI/DSA conference panel on ‘New actors and alli-
ances in development’, University of York, 20 September 2011 and Jan Nederveen Pieterse for feedback on
this introduction.
Notes on Contributors
Lisa Ann Richey is Professor of International Development Studies in the
Department of Society and Globalisation, Roskilde University. She is the author
16 L.A. Richey and S. Ponte
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of Brand Aid: Shopping Well to Save the World with Stefano Ponte (2011) and
Population Politics and Development: From the Policies to the Clinics (2008),
and the co-editor of “Women and Development: Rethinking Policy and Recon-
ceptualizing Practice”with Frances Vavrus (special issue of Women’s Studies
Quarterly, 2003). She works on new actors in international aid, citizenship and
body politics, and gender and the global South.
Stefano Ponte is Professor of International Political Economy at Copenhagen
Business School. He is interested in how the global economy is governed and
in how developing countries and emerging economies fare in it. In recent
research, he has been examining the increasing importance of celebrities and
branding in mobilising ‘compassionate consumption’and new forms of corpo-
rate social responsibility that are ‘distant and disengaged’. His most recent
books are Brand Aid: Shopping Well to Save the World (with Lisa Ann Richey,
2011) and Governing through Standards: Origins, Drivers and Limitations (with
Peter Gibbon and Jakob Vestergaard, 2011).
Notes
1. Corbridge, “The (Im)possibility of Development Studies,”202.
2. Woolcock et al., “How and Why does History Matter?”
3. See Crush, Power of Development; Escobar, Encountering Development; Nederveen Pieterse,
Development Theory; Sachs, The Development Dictionary; and Sylvester, “Development and Postcolonial
Studies”.
4. Ferguson, The Anti-Politics Machine,xv.
5. Schuurman, “Critical Development Theory.”
6. Ferguson, The Uses of Neoliberalism.
7. Kothari, “Critiquing ‘Race’and Racism,”67.
8. See, inter alia, Tierney et al., “More Dollars than Sense.”
9. See Corbridge, “The (Im)possibility of Development Studies.”
10. Kothari, “Commentary”, 69.
11. See Corbridge, “The (Im)possibility of Development Studies.”
12. Banks and Hulme “New Development Alternatives.”
13. “Investing Wisely in HIV/AIDS.”Lancet Infectious Diseases 12, no. 1 (2012): 1. http://www.thelan-
cet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3099(11)70357-7/fulltext?rss=yes.
14. http://stats.oecd.org/glossary/detail.asp?ID=6043; and IMF,External Debt Statistics.
15. Adelman, “Global Philanthropy and Remittances,”27.
16. Ibid.
17. Tierney et al., “More Dollars than Sense.”
18. Ibid., 1893–1894.
19. For detailed literature reviews, see also Hansen and Tarp, “Aid Effectiveness Disputed”; and Tarp,
Foreign Aid and Development; Riddell, Does Foreign Aid Really Work?
20. Tierney et al., “More Dollars than Sense,”1891.
21. See, inter alia, Sachs, The End of Poverty; Calderisi, The Trouble with Africa; Easterly, The White Man’s
Burden; and Moyo, Dead Aid.
22. Adelman, “Global Philanthropy and Remittances,”24.
23. Wartick and Cochran, “The Evolution of the Corporate Social Performance Model.”
24. Carroll, “Corporate Social Responsibility.”
25. See http://ec.europa.eu/.
26. Blowfield, “Reasons to be Cheerful?”Newell and Frynas, “Beyond CSR?”
27. Idemudia, “Corporate Social Responsibility and Developing Countries.”
28. Newell, “CSR and the Limits of Capital.”
29. Among many others, see Gibbon et al., Global Agro-food Trade and Standards.
30. Berglind and Nakata, “Cause-related Marketing.”
31. King, Pink Ribbons, Inc.,9.
32. Ibid., 11.
33. Richey and Ponte, Brand Aid.
34. Prahalad, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid.
Third World Quarterly 17
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35. Ibid., 5.
36. Ibid.
37. Collier, The Bottom Billion.
38. Prahalad, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid.
39. Ponte and Richey, “Buying into Development,”show that, while in BOP initiatives the poor are being
cast as active market actors, in Brand Aid ‘deserving others’are used as marketing tools to sell products
to Western consumers. The ‘poor’,‘African’‘women and children’in these initiatives are passive receiv-
ers, who have no agency.
40. Carrier, “Introduction,”1.
41. Clarke et al., “Globalising the Consumer”; Clarke, “From Ethical Consumerism to Political Consump-
tion”; Barnett et al., Globalizing Responsibility; and Carrier and Luetchford, Ethical Consumption.
42. Miller, The Dialectics of Shopping; Barnett et al., “Consuming Ethics.”
43. Devinney et al., The Myth of the Ethical Consumer.
44. Slater, Consumer Culture and Modernity.
45. Bandelj and Wherry, The Cultural Wealth of Nations.
46. de Waal, “The Humanitarian Carnival.”
47. Hood, “Celebrity Philanthropy.”
48. See also Brockington, Celebrity and the Environment.
49. Cooper, “Beyond One Image Fits All.”
50. See Boykoff and Goodman, “Conspicuous Redemption”; Goodman and Barnes, “Star/Poverty Space”;
and Littler, “‘I Feel Your Pain’”.
51. See Richey and Ponte, Brand Aid.
52. See also Trentmann, “An Introduction.”
53. Schuurman, “Critical Development Theory.”
54. See also Rodrik, One Economics, Many Recipes.
55. See Cimoli et al., Industrial Policy and Development; and Lin, New Structural Economics.
56. Noman and Stiglitz, Good Growth and Governance in Africa.
57. See, for example, Mills, Why Africa is Poor; Sandbrook and Barker, The Politics of Africa’s Economic
Stagnation; and van de Walle, African Economies and the Politics of Permanent Crisis.
58. Keck and Sikkink, Activists beyond Borders, 12.
59. Ibid.
60. Wade, “Accountability Gone Wrong”, 26.
61. Harrison, “Debt, Development and Intervention in Africa.”
62. Blowfield and Dolan, “Business as a Development Agent.”
63. Khotari, “Trade, Consumption and Development Alliances.”
64. Whitfield and Buur, “The Politics of Industrial Policy.”
65. Kragelund, “‘Donors Go Back Home’.”
66. McGoey, “The Philanthropic State.”
67. For notable exceptions, see Smith and Yanacopulos, “Special Issue: The Public Faces of Development”;
and Nair, “Governance, Representation and International Aid.”
68. See Alhassan and Chakravartty, “Postcolonial Media Policy”, for a critical review.
69. See Hall, “The West and the Rest”; and Crush, Power of Development.
70. See Kapoor, Celebrity Humanitarianism; Harrison, “Campaign Africa”; Nederveen Pieterse, White on
Black; Kothari, “Commentary”; and Richey and Ponte, Brand Aid.
71. Wade, “Accountability Gone Wrong”.
72. Budabin, “Diasporas”.
73. Keck and Sikkink, Activists beyond Borders, 19.
74. Brockington, “The Production and Construction of Celebrity Advocacy.”
75. Butt, “The Suffering Stranger”; and Fassin, When Bodies Remember, 22.
76. Andreasson, “Orientalism and African Development Studies.”
77. Robbins, “Beyond the Suffering Subject.”
78. Ponte and Richey, “Buying into Development?”
79. Corbridge, “The (Im)possibility of Development Studies,”201.
80. Lorde’s famous essay, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House”, 10, actually
suggests that fundamental critique cannot be based upon existing categories, such as ‘woman’; however,
our argument is based on the conduct of a practice-based critique. See, for example, Adler and Pouliot,
International Practices.
81. This collection offers a more practice-based interrogation of development than Nederveen Pieterse’s
notions of hybridisation as the ‘rhizome of culture’, drawing a middle ground in descriptions of the
effects of cultural globalisation on developing countries. Nederveen Pieterse, Globalization and Culture.
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