Give a Man a Fish: Reflections on the New Politics of Distribution
... Although this type of policy is often considered as a nontargeted, broad, universal social protection policy, it can represent more than that. As Ferguson (2015) argued, it can also present a political reorientation toward shared national resources and wealth. In addition, he argued, it provides a way to acknowledge and compensate for the shortcomings in the operation of labor markets that fail to accommodate qualified labor or that relegate most employed workers to precarious informal labor. ...
This document explores comprehensive policies to address inequality in Africa, drawing on the influential work of Anthony Atkinson and others. It underscores that inequality is a policy choice, necessitating interventions across multiple dimensions: material, experiential, cultural, and symbolic. The analysis emphasizes the urgency of tackling inequality due to demographic shifts, economic instability, climate change, and systemic shocks like the COVID-19 pandemic.
Utilizing Atkinson's "inside and outside the box" framework, the document reviews policies aimed at reducing income inequality. "Inside the box" policies include labor market interventions (minimum wages, collective bargaining, active labor market policies), social expenditure (cash transfers), and tax policies, while "outside the box" policies focus on altering social relations, technological change, guaranteed public employment, addressing power asymmetries, capital sharing funds, and a citizen's income. The challenges posed by Africa's large informal sector and limited fiscal space are highlighted.
The document discusses the role of technology in mitigating inequality, exemplified by mobile money platforms, and stresses the importance of addressing ownership and regulation issues. It also examines the need to rebalance power asymmetries between employers and employees, the role of trade unions, and the limitations of capital sharing funds and land redistribution policies. The feasibility of a citizen's income is analyzed, noting funding challenges through direct taxes.
Concluding, the document calls for an expanded policy toolkit tailored to African contexts, addressing the informal labor market, pre-market inequalities, and the legacy of colonialism. It highlights the necessity of coordinated global responses and policy innovation, as demonstrated by the COVID-19 pandemic, and advocates for a coherent policy agenda to reduce income inequality, broaden wealth and social capital ownership, and address fiscal constraints.
... This is despite the persistence of extreme, structural unemployment throughout the post-apartheid period. This lack of support for the working-aged unemployed is rooted in the assumption that, as in Latin America and elsewhere, only 'dependent' categories (such as the elderly, disabled, and children) are in need of social assistance support, while prime-aged, able-bodied individuals are presumed to be able to support themselves through the labour market (Ferguson, 2015). ...
This paper considers the labour market effects of an unconditional cash transfer targeted at the unemployed in a context of extreme unemployment. Using a staggered, heterogeneity-robust difference-in-differences design applied to panel labour force survey data, we estimate the contemporaneous and dynamic effects of a new transfer introduced in South Africa, the Social Relief of Distress grant, the first labour market-linked transfer in the country’s history. We find that, on average, receipt has positive effects on the probabilities of job search, trying to start a business, and employment. The latter effects are driven by effects on wage and informal sector employment. We show that employment effects are positive for the unemployed who are either actively searching for work or trying to start a business, as well as for those who are not, but they are substantially larger for the former. This indicates that the transfer both encourages and improves the efficiency of labour market activity by addressing labour market constraints, but highlights the importance of active labour market engagement for improving employment prospects through the transfer. However, these employment effects are non-linear, in that they are evident in the short-term but quickly become and remain null in the longer-term. These results suggest that cash transfers can help reduce labour market constraints but such gains need not translate into better longer-term employment prospects in high-unemployment contexts.
... In the Global North, neoliberal policies are usually associated with concern around dependency and a corresponding reduction of welfare. Ferguson (2015) highlights a more contradictory pattern, noting that across southern Africa, neoliberal governments have been associated with an increase in cash-based social assistance. Increased cash assistance may be reconciled with a neoliberal focus on individual responsibility where it is accompanied by a withdrawal of state or donor support in other areas of social protection, such as health or education. ...
Social protection is a well-accepted means to tackle poverty. This article focuses on social assistance, one aspect of social protection primarily involving non-contributory transfers, in cash or in-kind. Forcibly displaced people, particularly those displaced across international borders, have typically been excluded from state-provided social assistance. This has begun to change. In addition, informal sources of social assistance—community organizations, neighbours, faith groups, and family networks—are particularly significant for displaced people. A more transformative understanding of social protection should encompass this wider array of sources. Interpreted in this way, social assistance offers a new way of bridging humanitarian and development responses to displacement.
... Strategies for restoring personhood comprise remembering past injustices, working towards human dignity, fostering active senses of belonging (including citizenship and equality), and implementing projects to bring about material and psychological flourishing, including the ability to take advantage of opportunities for work and wealth creation or wealth redistribution. In fact, it has been shown that in societies where ideas of personhood are seen to be connected and collective, efforts at redistributing wealth is greater (Ferguson 2015;Merkel 2009). A key criterion for social restitution is therefore to ensure that contemplated actions address this collective understanding of what it means to be human, remembers how the past has impacted on the current state of our humanity, and contributes to rehumanising each other -through providing new opportunities for dignity, belonging and redistributing wealth. ...
Restitution has predominantly been described as a legal rather than a social action in international law, as well as in South Africa’s history of truth, reconciliation and redress policies after the end of apartheid. Introducing the concept of ‘social restitution’ this paper argues for a reimagined and wider understanding of restitution to address the need for social justice in the spaces between the law court and individual acts of charity, and between policies for redress and personal antipathy against these. Social restitution can be defined as intentional voluntary actions and attitudes developed through dialogue based on a sense of moral obligation aimed at addressing the damage done to individuals and communities by unjust actions and legacies of the past. Drawing on international debates about and understandings of the meaning of restitution, social restitution is shown to be both continuous with legal restitution and distinguished from it through its voluntary nature, its potential to be forward-looking rather than punitive, generative rather than accusatory, and offering everyday opportunities to bridge the gap between ‘knowing’ about injustice and ‘acting’ to repair it. Following this discussion, the latter part of the paper outlines the need for new categories of actors in contexts of injustice beyond those of victim, perpetrator and bystander (the Hilberg triangle of actors), introducing the ideas of beneficiaries and resisters; argues for the potential social restitution has as a mechanism for rehumanising all actors; and offers recommendations for how engaged action-oriented dialogues might contribute to achieving this aim, while noting the limits and dangers of dialogue. It draws on an empirical study on the meaning and actions of restitution conducted with black and white adult South Africans in making some of its arguments.
... Recent decades have witnessed a multitude of social crises and transformations, including pandemics and high unemployment rates alongside the rise of automation and digitalization, challenging social orders that link livelihoods predominantly to gainful employment (see, e.g., Weeks, 2011;Ferguson, 2015;Srnicek and Williams, 2016;Benanav, 2020). Despite these developments, debates about a decentralization of wage labor still tend to occur on the fringes of society while in most countries employment continues to be seen as the norm to secure one's own livelihood. ...
The norm of wage labor imposes itself on the unemployed as a material, legal and symbolic-discursive order. As ‘deviants’ from the norm, unemployed people are often confronted with pejorative judgments or social exclusion in everyday life. This paper asks how differently positioned unemployed people living in precarious circumstances position themselves in relation to the norm of employment and critique its accompanying social order. Based on the experiences with 25 interviewees, the paper argues that the social inequalities and power relations associated with the work-dogma permeate the research situation itself. This epistemic tension provides a methodological opportunity to place the interview situation and the mutual address between researcher and interviewee at the center of the analysis. Inspired by Situational Analysis (Clarke) and Interpretative Subjectivation Analysis (Bosančić), a heuristic is developed that focuses on inequalities and vulnerabilities in the research situation. The analysis of the interview dynamics reveals different modes of self-positioning with respect to the wage-labor norm, ranging from an embarrassed subordination under discursively transported subject positions to forms of critical appropriation and affective rejection. By identifying different self-positionings that challenge the norm of employment, the paper situates itself in ongoing debates within critical sociology, feminist epistemology and social philosophy about possibilities of criticism from the margins, arguing for a pluralistic and relational understanding of subversive practices and articulations of critique.
... Cubans raise credit by nurturing links to relatives in Cuba or in wealthier countries abroad or, more contentiously, by turning tourists into kin (Simoni, 2015;Stout, 2014). Whether the credit provider is foreign or national, based in Cuba or abroad, kin credit requires the tedious practice of what Ferguson (2015) calls "distributive labor." The case of Alejandro, a self-employed shoe seller in his mid-30s, illustrates the delicate nature of such labor. ...
In 2011, the Cuban government authorized banks to start offering loan credit to the country's growing number of small businesses for the first time since the beginning of the revolution. Yet in the following years, citizens have largely circumvented these services. This article draws on twenty months of fieldwork among market traders in Havana to examine why so few Cubans rely on the formal banking system to secure capital. It analyzes alternative methods people employ to organize their financial futures, by leveraging kinship ties, partnerships, friendships, property, and loan sharks, and by participating in rotating savings and credit associations. To understand the advantages these approaches offer to mobilize capital, it is crucial to grasp how people navigate their economic lives in ways that are influenced but not dictated by short‐term considerations of net profit. Nonmonetary concerns about access, time frame, and visibility lead people to raise and store wealth outside the formal banking system, constituting a domain I call infrabanking : banking practices that are too far removed from the established assumptions about banking to be perceived as part of the same phenomenon.
... What kinds of roles and responsibilities might come into being in a more democratic infrastructural citizenship (Lemanski, 2019(Lemanski, , 2020? The second is wider shifts in the meaning of labour and its relationship to fraught histories particularly in postcolonial contexts (Barchiesi, 2011(Barchiesi, , 2016Ferguson, 2015). Normative imaginations of work and labour tend to focus on -and valorize -wage labour within formal economies, which leads to diverse forms of work becoming ignored or viewed as deviations. ...
Studies of waste work have largely focused on labourers who collect and process materials in exchange for money, including informal waste reclaimers and those now working precariously due to neoliberalization. Researchers have also drawn attention to who sorts waste in and beyond the household. Here we examine voluntary clean-ups as well as waste education in South Africa. State discourse encourages people to engage with the wastescape without framing this participation as work. Yet such engagements require people to act, and changing existing practices and expectations of who does what (and who is paid what) to make waste flow. We argue that understanding such activities as infrastructural helps to explain how the state seeks to enrol citizens into waste configurations, and understanding them as labour enables more capacious politics and claims to waste’s value.
... It has thus been argued that state welfare can play a role in correcting such imbalances and 'insecurities'-if not replacing them altogether (e.g. Ferguson 2015). At the same time, aid-receiving countries grapple with important resource limitations and low levels of public funds through tax collection, resulting in a restrictive fiscal space for social policy delivery. ...
In July 2020, the United Republic of Tanzania gained the status of a lower-middle-income country. This came after two decades of significant social policy reforms and transformations in the country’s economic structures. This paper explores social policy trajectories in Mainland Tanzania with a gender lens, to better understand the contributions of these developments to inclusive development. More precisely, we examine past and current policy developments across the areas of health policy, social protection, and employment policy, and the level, reach, and quality of government social policy delivery to working-age women. The paper draws on a scoping review of diverse secondary materials, including academic publications, government policy documents, relevant statistics, and other types of literature. The findings indicate that despite significant advancements in the legal frameworks and increasingly gender-responsive government policy plans, Tanzanian social policy delivery remains two-tiered, with differences in provisions for women in the formal and informal sectors. Additionally, women continue to be largely overlooked in the broader industrialization and development strategy, which hinders the achievement of inclusive development in Tanzania.
This paper investigates a community work-sharing arrangement organized for and by precariously employed workers and jobseekers in South Africa’s construction and manufacturing industries. As work in the country’s secondary sector has become increasingly flexible, casualized, and mobile since the end of apartheid, tradespeople are compelled to seek work through a practice of what they call “chasing the shut.” These jobseekers will constantly travel (“chasing”) throughout southern Africa, from one short-term work contract (“the shut”) to another, seeking work through labor brokers (temporary recruitment agencies) that link this pool of migrant workers to employers. Unsatisfied with these working and jobseeking conditions, in 2018, a group of non-unionized labor activists self-organized in Durban (KwaZulu-Natal Province) to form a community work-sharing arrangement between their township and the employers in the nearby industrial park. This paper traces how these activists usurped the role of the labor brokerages to subordinate the labor market to what I argue was a directly democratic politics and organization: work-sharing organized by the community across multiple employing firms to guarantee long-term and communal income security. Here, I investigate how this new form of post-unionized labor activism might contribute to ongoing debates surrounding universal basic income (UBI) and public works programs as models for thinking through solutions to the problem of precarity and work in the twenty-first century.
This article challenges conventional critiques of institutions within disability studies and activism by drawing on fieldwork with a Catholic home and a Pentecostal school for people with intellectual disabilities in Uganda. Rather than stop at thinking about the institutional spaces of these Christian organizations as segregating exclusions from wider social life, this article approaches the work these institutions do in terms of inclusion – as constitutive inclusions, referring to the ways these organizations serve to underwrite not only the basic existence but also the personhood of their residents and students. In turn, such an analysis supports rethinking conventional Global North understandings of institutions as well as distinctions between total and social institutions.
En este artículo se analiza la experiencia de organización de trabajadores feriantes del Movimiento de Trabajadores Excluidos (MTE) en Olavarría, Provincia de Buenos Aires, Argentina, en el contexto del conflicto por el derecho al trabajo que involucra a este grupo y al Gobierno municipal. Se señala que dicha experiencia de la economía popular habilita un renovado proceso de repolitización popular del espacio que tensiona modos socialmente legítimos de apropiación espacial y vislumbra la incidencia del espacio público como recurso vinculado al sostenimiento de la vida, por el cual se convierte en espacio de lucha. El desarrollo del argumento se apoya, principalmente, en las contribuciones teóricas que conciben al espacio desde su carácter disputado y relacional, y en aportes recientes que han problematizado la relación entre las dinámicas de la economía popular y del espacio urbano. Desde un enfoque etnográfico, el artículo constituye un aporte a los debates sobre organizaciones sociales y la comprensión espacial de procesos sociales y políticos populares emergentes en los últimos años que han cobrado fuerza a escalas locales.
Background
Poor psychological well-being, including depression, anxiety, and low self-esteem, is both prevalent among young South Africans living with HIV and associated with poor HIV clinical outcomes. By impacting food insecurity and employment, the COVID-19 pandemic may have influenced psychological well-being in this population. This analysis sought to examine whether food insecurity and unemployment mediated the relationship between study cohort (pre- versus during-pandemic) and psychological well-being in our sample of young South Africans living with HIV.
Methods
This was a secondary analysis comparing baseline data from two cohorts of young South Africans ages 18–24 from the Cape Town and East London metro areas who tested positive for HIV at clinics (or mobile clinics) either before or during the COVID-19 pandemic. Baseline sociodemographic, economic, and psychological outcomes were analyzed through a series of bivariate logistic regression and mediation analyses. All data were analyzed in 2023 and 2024.
Results
Reported food anxiety, insufficient food quality, and insufficient food quantity were lower in the cohort recruited during the COVID-19 pandemic than those recruited before the pandemic (p < 0.001). Higher levels of food insecurity predicted higher depressive and anxiety symptoms and lower self-esteem. Food anxiety, insufficient food quality, and insufficient food quantity, but not unemployment, mediated the relationship between study cohort and depressive symptoms, anxiety symptoms, and self-esteem.
Conclusion
Food insecurity may have decreased amongst our sample of young people during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our findings build on our understanding of how the psychological well-being of young people living with HIV was affected by the COVID-19 pandemic and may lend support to interventions targeting food insecurity to improve psychological well-being in this population.
This article addresses the importance of understanding informal and customary arrangements to comprehend social security in the contemporary Indonesian context. Highlighting the work of K. von Benda-Beckmann, the focus is on how people foster circles of solidarity to deal with vulnerability, and needs for food, shelter and care, while creating their social security mixes, in which state provisions and community arrangements are combined. We argue that – since there is no welfare state capable of providing for all aspects of social security – people will depend on informal provisions that belong to the realm of moral economy. Based on both authors’ field research, the article explains how this social security mix functions in practice, with examples from the Indonesian islands of Bali and Sumba. We explore to what extent such a moral economy persists, and how moral economy arrangements for mutual support differ from state welfare, in particular from normative and relational perspectives, and how people shape articulations between the two support systems. We argue, in line with the von Benda-Beckmann approach, that it is crucial to understand social security practices as a mixture resulting from Indonesia’s economic and legal pluralism.
The main aim of this chapter is to assess the South African social policy and the role of Green Social Work during COVID-19 and beyond, considering social help programs and structural inequality. The Social policy of South Africa is governed by the Bill of Rights enshrined in the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa. The Constitution guaranteed the rights of human beings. However, COVID-19 has violated human rights considering the South African economic growth, which was sluggish with a high rate of unemployment even before the pandemic. It has aggravated the structural inequalities that characterize the country’s economy. However, South Africa’s ‘powerful social protection programs’ played a vital role to vulnerable people in meeting their basic needs, particularly during COVID-19, even though some communities experienced limited fiscal resources. The paper will use secondary sources to assess social policy adjustments and innovations that can be used for improvement.
Affordable and safe public transport underpins effective citizenship and freedom as well as work. Citizens expect the democratic state to be caring and reciprocal. Using in-depth interviews with residents and community leaders in Khayelitsha, we look at how worsening public and private transport – mainly mini-bus taxis – not only significantly extends the working day but also destroys political hopes – a process called de-citizenship. We show how mobilities are fundamentally rooted in radically bifurcated spaces of classed citizenship – a new class apartheid – in turn reflecting the structural contradictions of Cape Town and its class struggles.
This chapter describes the context, origin and development of the world’s first Basic Income pilot project: Otjivero, Namibia. We show that the Basic Income Grant immediately impacted poverty and, most importantly, reduced child malnutrition, as well as fostering small-scale local economic activity. Unfortunately, despite such promising evidence from the Pilot Study, no national Basic Income has been introduced in Namibia. We identify two reasons for this failure. First, critiques of the Basic Income tapped into stereotypes about poor people supposedly being incapable of using a cash grant developmentally. Such paternalistic thinking still dominates the Namibian policy debate, with policymakers seemingly reluctant to engage with the research findings and the experience of the people of Otjivero themselves. Second, the political elite was reluctant to adopt a social policy programme that constituted a right, preferring to implement a food bank without any evidence that it would work or be developmental. Political leaders appeared eager to retain power through social policy interventions that allowed for political patronage. We report on a follow-up study ten years after the pilot project and on renewed political engagement by young Namibians who have revived the Basic Income Grant Coalition and are becoming a political force to be reckoned with.
Literature on the impact of the digital ecosystem on youth is largely grounded on Western case studies and Eurocentric in its working assumptions; yet African children and teenagers—who account for most of the continent’s population—have been early adopters of social media’s possibilities and are exposed to distinctive risks. This article shows how, in the absence of viable institutional structures for self-actualization in post-liberalization Nigeria, digital platforms turn children into central actors of economic flexibility. With transitional pathways disappearing, formal employment and traditional markers of adulthood are no longer on the horizon of African youths. Uncertainty, hustling, and extraordinary aspirations are part and parcel of their socialization process, with “survival” and “success” increasingly perceived as intertwined, requiring everyone, from the youngest age, to “perform.” From rags-to-riches stories of viral children groups to racist images and videos of children feeding China’s livestreaming boom and the meme culture across the world, commodified African childhood is projected into the flows of digital popular culture, enabled by legal and socioeconomic vulnerability and the internalization of visibility as an avenue of opportunity. Nigeria in particular, with the world’s largest population of out-of-school children on the one hand, and an internationally booming entertainment industry on the other, delineates a palpable, yet unsustainable mode of aspiration and wealth acquisition through engagement with social media. This article draws on a year-long ethnographic investigation in Lagos among (a) groups of teenage aspiring dancers seeking to “blow” online and (b) marketing professionals who use children in their commercial strategies.
Le Programme national d’alimentation scolaire du Pérou, Qaliwarma, repose sur un principe de coresponsabilité et de cogestion, et prône une adaptation aux habitudes alimentaires locales. En pratique, en contexte autochtone amazonien, il distribue des aliments industriels issus des régions andines et côtières, produits par de grandes entreprises nationales et internationales qui monopolisent le marché alimentaire. Pourtant, les bénéficiaires de ces peuples sont des collecteurs et producteurs d’aliments. À partir d’une enquête ethnographique menée entre 2013 et 2017, cet article explore les limites du modèle péruvien de cogestion ainsi que les aménagements et les résistances locales qu’il suscite chez deux peuples autochtones amazoniens, maijuna et napuruna. Il montre que les choix politiques relatifs à la conception et aux modalités d’application du programme prolongent de manière singulière des mécanismes de domination et de résistance existants. Le programme s’avère très centralisé et, prenant appui sur des directives internationales, favorise l’agro-industrie au détriment des petits producteurs et des peuples autochtones. Bien que des comités « participatifs » aient été créés, la cogestion se résume à une délégation technique et est peu outillée pour aménager des espaces de dialogue et s’adapter aux préférences alimentaires locales. Toutefois, la « collaboration » informelle des parents, en particulier des mères qui préparent les repas, joue un rôle fondamental en ce sens. L’article met ainsi en évidence le paradoxe suivant : leur action politique ne se situe pas dans l’espace de cogestion mis en avant par le gouvernement mais plutôt dans leur participation directe à la préparation des repas.
Este trabajo analiza las condiciones sociales y políticas que hicieron de América Latina un epicentro global de la pandemia en 2020-2021. Aborda la cuestión de los impactos de los padrones de urbanismo sobre el desarrollo de la pandemia, considerando las jerarquías urbanas, las relaciones interurbanas, y las relaciones entre ciudades y interiores rurales, además de la estructuración de las desigualdades socioespaciales dentro de ciudades metropolitanas, las consecuencias de altos niveles de informalidad económica, y formas de gobernanza y coyunturas políticas. Adoptando la perspectiva de Boaventura Santos de que la pandemia es una crisis adicional sumada a más de cuatro décadas de crisis ligada al dominio del capitalismo financiarizado neoliberal, el artículo indaga sobre indicios de que la pandemia ha fortalecido movimientos en busca de alternativas, discutiendo las posibilidades y limitaciones de formas de resiliencia y resistencia populares a la luz de las estructuras de poder social y político vigentes. Concluye con algunas reflexiones sobre lo que la pandemia nos enseña sobre las transformaciones de la vida urbana que serían deseables en una época pospandémica.
The rapacious planetary extraction of energy and materials and associated socioecological violence have culminated in overlapping ecological, social, and political crises. With the advent of global initiatives that seek to address these crises and signs of post-pandemic recovery programmes deepening extraction, ‘extractivisms’ are at a critical juncture. Discussions over extractivisms, their relation to capitalism, and implications for creating alternative post-extractivist futures have proliferated in recent years. As a result, definitions have multiplied and expanded, which has led to ambiguity and prompted calls to better define and conceptualise extractivisms. This chapter contributes to this exercise in three ways: First, it details a genealogy of extractivisms that originates in Latin American scholarship, expands to ‘global extractivisms’, and culminates in conceptual expansions that progressively divorce the concept from the extraction of energy and materials. Second, it addresses how Marxian thought has theorised the relationship between capitalism and the biophysical world and analyses four recent interventions to clarify why extractivisms are pivotal to but cannot be equated with capitalism. Third, the chapter synthesises insights from these discussions to argue that extractivisms are best conceived of as particular ‘modes of extraction’ that provide the energetic and material basis for ‘imperial modes of living’. It concludes with reflections on how more sustainable and peaceful futures must be premised on transitions to ‘post-extractivisms’ and ‘post-imperial solidarity modes of living’.
Critical development and food studies scholars argue that the current food security paradigm is emblematic of a ‘New Green Revolution’, characterized by agricultural intensification, increasing reliance on biotechnology, deepening global markets, and depeasantization. High-profile examples of this model are not hard to find. Less examined, however, are food-security programs that appear to work at cross-purposes with this model. Drawing on the case of Feed the Future in Guatemala, I show how USAID engages in activities that valorize ancestral crops, subsistence production, and agroecological practices. Rather than the result of macro-level planning—of either the New Green Revolution or a greener reform regime—I argue that nonconforming food security projects can be traced to individual actors and their interactions on the ground. I draw on an ‘interface approach’ (Long 1990), focusing on the lifeworlds of development workers, their interfaces with each other, and with the to-be-developed. Doing so reveals how food security projects are significantly shaped by the relationships and interests of development actors enmeshed in particular organizational and national settings. This research contributes a fresh perspective on the food security paradigm and its role within the ‘corporate food regime’.
In a peculiar reversal of “history”, at the end of the twentieth century, we not only saw the collapse of “actually existing socialism” and its replacement by capitalism, we have also seen (and are continuing to see) the virtual decimation of the “working class” in the sense of a class tied to modern large-scale production. Alongside the political decimation of the working class, we also witness the peasantry and indigenous populations come center-stage in the new battles against capital that are being waged worldwide. This chapter, while exploring the decline of the modern working class and the rise of the peasantry in political terms, also argues that in the global South, the much expected process of “proletarianization” never really took place and what we had instead were “peasant workers” or what were often referred to in the literature as the “semi-proletariat”. Scholars, even those of Marxist persuasion, have acknowledged this and what is more, in recent times have also talked of “repeasantization”. Given this context, this chapter revisits the history of the peasant question in Marxism from the time of Engels and Kautsky to that of Lenin and Mao and argues that the peasantry constitutes what can be called the “Marxist unconscious”. This is largely because the historical materialist conception of time left no way of recognizing the peasantry as anything but doomed to extinction. It concludes with an attempt towards an alternative conception of time, drawing also on the Late Marx, aside from the experience of the global South.
This chapter examines the consequences of ART rollout in Africa. Ethiopia’s ART system emerged as one of the most coordinated in sub-Saharan Africa during the first decade of the twenty-first century, thus proving that fears of “antiretroviral anarchy” were exaggerated and the need for an adequate level of infrastructure had been overemphasized. Epidemiologists quickly interpreted the success of ART in Africa as evidence of the treatment-as-prevention (TasP) strategy, which continues to dominate HIV interventions worldwide. Drawing on abundant data on ART implementation in Africa, they constructed a mathematical model to demonstrate that universal treatment was virtually the only way to eliminate the pandemic cost-effectively. While the finely constructed model provided a rationale for further expansion of ART in Africa, it also paved the way for defunding of non-pharmaceutical HIV care, including home-based care activities. The focus on the economic value of intervention and the focus away from the individual state of life is a prominent characteristic of contemporary HIV intervention.KeywordsCost-effectivenessMathematical modelTreatment-as-prevention strategyUniversal treatment
A growing evidence base suggests that cash transfers can reduce poverty. African governments have adopted poverty alleviating social policies, particularly cash transfers, mainly motivated by external actors to address poverty. This chapter makes a case to centre consolidating agrarian welfare regimes in poverty alleviation. Using document analysis, the chapter argues that in light of semi-industrialisation and largely agro-based development in most of Africa, consolidating agrarian welfare regimes in countries such as Zimbabwe presents an enormous comparative strategic advantage as it provides an alternative path for poverty alleviation. The chapter concludes that the formulation of Africa sensitive social policies and technology is essential in agro-based economies like Zimbabwe to reduce poverty without conceding to international pressure.
This chapter examines the role of human agency in creating economic institutions based on certain interests and values. It views the pandemic as a historical opportunity to break out of “path dependence” and reclaim human agency in determining the kind of institutions and societies the masses would like to create. The centrality of choice and values is emphasised by contrasting an institution such as the joint stock limited liability company created during the Industrial Revolution to help the privileged amass greater wealth without accountability with commenda, a late medieval economic institution that pioneered the concept of profit sharing with labour. While the former perpetuated greed, the latter built trust and harmony. The paper concludes that people have to consciously choose the kind of society they would like to create and to commit to the action that would realise their vision.KeywordsPath dependenceHuman agencyGlobal institutions of governanceRural prosperityAlternative modernity
The US government response to the coronavirus pandemic has prompted renewed debate about the size and structure of the welfare state. Particular attention has been paid to prenatal and early childhood policy, domains in which the US safety net is less robust than those of its peer countries. Contra claims that the so-called care economy constitutes a sharp break with the neoliberal consensus, this article argues that the shift in social policy focus toward early life is consistent with changes in economic ideas about the best environment in which to grow “human capital”: the economization of early life. Building on insights about “critical periods” of development drawn from diverse fields including epigenetics and neurobiology, economists estimate that human capital gains are greatest when “investments in people” occur before the age of five. This article traces the history of how this research was brought to the attention of federal policy makers in the United States. While much human capital–focused social policy traditionally placed the burden of risk on the private family (e.g., with student loan debt or health insurance), in recent years, economists have instead argued that social programs dedicated to early childhood development are more “efficient” sources of public investment.
Riedke engages with the processes of digitization that accompany the selling of solar off-grid products to the so-called ‘unelectrified poor’. The chapter draws attention to how the selling of solar goes hand in hand with the establishment of people’s ‘credit worthiness’, aimed at advancing financial inclusion in markets beyond solar. From an ethnographic perspective, the chapter engages with a German-Kenyan solar start-up and a software it has designed to manage sales processes to keep track of current and future customers. Exploring the details of this software, the chapter contributes to our understanding of how solar power is provided to meet a basic need, a most basic level of human well-being, but simultaneously also to form new consumer subjects for new markets.
Envy and blame are two concepts that add social preferences to the economic behavior model of homo economicus. These have already been studied in general distributional issues as well as in the Edgeworth box. Building on this, these social preferences are examined specifically in the work-leisure model and applied to the example of a UBI. Here it is shown that envy is rather triggered by different endowments of individuals and blame only by different preferences. In the discussion about a UBI, this insight provides clarity about the normative basis of arguments against “free riders”. In terms of constitutional economics, envy can be combated through equality of opportunity, while blame can be contained through paternalism, at the expense of freedom of action.
Both in the past and at present, pro-capitalist, right-wing or even fascist movements and political parties have often found support from rural communities. Yet there is nothing inherently conservative in rural politics: history has also shown how working people in the countryside—peasants, landless labourers, and others—joined the proletariat and other social forces at the barricades and in the trenches during anti-feudal or socialist revolutions, and anti-colonial national liberation struggles. Key questions that scholars have grappled with during the past century include how and why such radical transformations happened from one society to another, and with what implications, and which strata of the working people in the countryside were the most open to such revolutionary projects.
This paper presents an ethnographic exploration of working-class commuter cyclists on Rudolf Greyling (RG) Street in Bloemfontein, Free State, South Africa. The historical significance of this street/road is that it traversed a ‘buffer zone’. In apartheid town planning, buffer zones were areas that, in the absence of physical or man-made boundaries, separated mono-racial areas designated as such under the Group Areas Act (Davies 1981). Today, these old buffer zones continue to map the distances that working people, living in low-income residential locations, cover to reach economic opportunities. For 3 weeks in the month of September 2018, we spent our mornings and evenings, walking, observing, and speaking, to the cyclists who rode along RG Street. Engaging with the stories cyclists of RG Street shared with us, we discuss how physical and metaphorical buffer zones of the past shape the experiences and concerns of working-class cyclists in the present. As much as the use of a bicycle to commute helped save money, riding along the roads decidedly not designed for cyclists exposed conditions of adversity.
Le gouvernement marocain a engagé depuis le milieu des années 2000 la mise en place de transferts sociaux ciblés destinés à des groupes identifiés comme 'pauvres' et 'vulnérables'. Ces transferts sont appelés à remplacer le régime de la 'compensation', qui a permis d'assurer à l'ensemble des marocains un accès à des produits de base à des prix bas depuis 1941. Le ciblage des transferts, dont l'emploi a été encouragé par la Banque Mondiale depuis le début des années 1980, repose à la fois sur la constitution de registres de population et l'emploi de données socioéconomiques issues d'enquêtes auprès des ménages et de recensements. Alors que le ciblage est appelé à prendre une importance croissante dans le Royaume, les expériences conduites dans ce cadre par le régime d'assistance médicale (RAMED) ont révélé une grande défiance des citoyens vis-à-vis de l'usage par les administrations des catégories statistiques de la pauvreté et des techniques d'identification des bénéficiaires. Cet article propose de montrer ce qu'une sociologie historique des enquêtes peut apporter à la compréhension des rapports État-citoyens, au Maroc et ailleurs en Afrique. Il revient pour cela sur les constats tirés d'une littérature éparse sur les enquêtes en Afrique depuis la période coloniale, argumentant de son apport pour l'étude des nouvelles politiques sociales qui emploient la constitution de registres biométriques, comme dans le cas du Maroc qu'illustre la seconde partie de l'article.
Targeting remains a highly contentious aspect of social protection design, despite the growing body of evidence on various targeting mechanisms. While targeting is often framed as identifying the poorest households within limited budgets, such decisions are inherently political and shaped by notions of social justice. This in-depth study of a contested cash transfer model in Zambia finds that local ideas of deservingness led to the rejection of eligible fit-for-work recipients, and changes to the targeting model to prioritise incapacitated households. The analysis draws on interviews with government and policy actors, as well as focus group discussions in communities receiving cash transfers. Applying van Oorschot’s deservingness heuristic to this data reveals that the criterion of control (of circumstance) was prioritised by local level respondents. The paper argues that popular perceptions of deservingness—and the broader social justice implications—need to be taken seriously in the design and analysis of targeting.
Childhood is considered to be the most vital period for mental, physical, and social development. Even short-term deprivation of nutrition, health care, education, and affection in childhood can have long-term and irreversible negative consequences. Various social assistance programs are being launched around the world to eliminate or alleviate social problems, including those experienced by children in their immediate environment. Different solutions have been proposed around the world, but welfare systems in all countries share the following common features: social assistance is necessary and underfinanced, and social workers struggle to cope with caseloads. As a result, welfare work is stressful and not highly effective. In this study, modern Geographic Information System (GIS) tools for supporting the employees of social assistance centers (SACs) have been proposed. The data relating to welfare beneficiaries were analyzed by nonparametric kernel density estimation and divided into five datasets. The kernel density tool in ArcGIS Pro software (Esri Polska sp. z o.o., Warsaw, Poland) was used to visualize areas with a relatively high prevalence of social problems, as well as areas where the neighborhood can deliver synergistic effects. A multicriteria analysis (MCA) procedure for mapping social problems was proposed, and an algorithm was developed in the GIS environment. The generated maps deliver helpful information for supporting SAC employees, as well as monitoring, planning, and initiating preventive measures. Above all, the presented method was designed to improve living conditions by facilitating the management of welfare workers’ duties. Therefore, the proposed approach had to be effective and easy to use without an advanced knowledge of GIS tools.
Many Indian textile and garment firms moved to Ethiopia, towing their machines through the new expressways and train lines constructed with Chinese financial and technical aid. These firms were lured by the laborers ready to work at wages that were five times cheaper than in China, and a duty-free export market supported by the African Growth and Opportunity Act signed with the USA. Deploying ethnographic methods, this chapter on Indian textile and garment making in Ethiopia seeks to identify the practices, developmental, or otherwise woven from the intersectional experiences of work, race, gender, and nationality. Although far from the old visions of postcolonial solidarity, Indian and Ethiopian interactions nonetheless generate new possibilities of humanist practices emerging from their shared subjecthood on the periphery of the Global North-determined world order.
How are travelling models adapted locally? What role does administrative intermediation play? How are these models perceived by their target audiences? The article offers answers to these questions through the study of a pension program for the elderly in Uganda, adopting a policy feedback perspective. Political and administrative district authorities occupy an important place in the implementation of the program, and maintain relationships based on paternalistic dominance with its beneficiaries. This paternalistic dominance influences the way in which the latter perceive their pension, as a favor and not a right. As the beneficiaries feel morally indebted, their use of the pension can be oriented by the authorities without resorting to constraints.
Pandemics occur in political spaces usually defined by contestations and conflicts. These conflicts influence governments’ responses to address pandemics. We argue that responses to curb COVID-19 are nested in politics best articulated through political economy theory as there are individuals who appear to advance their interests through decisions and strategies aimed at addressing the pandemic. Based on a desktop study grounded in a case study design, we explore the political economy of government strategies to combat the COVID-19 pandemic and its effects on socioeconomic development in sub-Saharan Africa, and particularly on local governments, drawing lessons from South Africa, Zimbabwe, Tanzania, and Lesotho. Emerging from the study are cases of corruption that involve state capture of donor funds characterized by national and local governments using the pandemic as a cash cow to attract funds from donors. Largely, the local governments have sanctioned the informal sector, which for long has been marginalized and criminalized; hence, the pandemic has been a good excuse to “eradicate” this sector. State violence towards certain groups of people has been noted under the guise of policing offenders contravening the imposed lockdown policies, while miscommunication and one-sided communication are also an inherent issue in managing the pandemic. Local governments have played a limited role in combating the pandemic as evident from their failure to address the socioeconomic needs of the poor, especially residents in informal settlements. We conclude that responses to pandemics should be informed by a human needs approach that recognizes human rights, especially for the marginal communities and individuals who tend to be side-lined despite their greater vulnerability.KeywordsPolitical economyCOVID-19Sub-Saharan AfricaLocal governmentLocal and urban governanceLesothoZimbabweSouth AfricaTanzania
Under the pressure of work's devaluation and the state's retrenchment, men and women in Spain manage their extended family resources in a struggle to provide for their dependents. These resources have become the main axis of inequality in Spain's financialized economy. Drawing on fieldwork in Madrid, I show that men and women understand themselves in terms of this responsibility, internalizing capitalist pressures on social reproduction as a family matter. This self‐identification cuts through the solidarities that exploited waged work and gendered domestic work might generate, and it makes family one's ultimate reference point. Instead of the refusal of a responsibility that used to be socialized being a principled and political stance, then, it is dismissed as selfish.
Drawing on interviews with welfare claimants living in Essex, UK, this article examines the material and symbolic effects of the UK government’s 2012 Welfare Reform Act, and it highlights the participants’ interpretations of and responses to that. In reaction to their sense of material and symbolic exclusion, participants made moral claims for their inclusion through a notion of social citizenship based on collective reciprocity and care. They claimed to have paid-in to the national purse in various material and moral ways until circumstances outside of their control meant they could no longer do so. They thus asserted a moral-economic right to social inclusion and an ensuing right to receive adequate, non-stigmatised, and non-punitive welfare. These moral-economic claims differ from other, more public, counter-narratives to welfare reform and government austerity, and they assert a clear but subtle opposition to the market-bound logic of the reform .
Contemporary scholars debate the factors driving despotic labour conditions across the world economy. Some emphasize the dominance of global market imperatives and others highlight the market's reliance upon extra-economic coercion and state violence. At the Margins of the Global Market engages in this debate through a comparative and world-historical analysis of the labour regimes of three global commodity-producing subregions of rural Colombia: the coffee region of Viejo Caldas, the banana region of Urabá, and the coca/cocaine region of the Caguán. By drawing upon insights from labour regimes, global commodity chains, and world historical sociology, this book offers a novel understanding of the broad range of factors - local, national, global, and interregional - that shape labour conditions on the ground in Colombia. In doing so, it offers a critical new framework for analysing labour and development dynamics that exist at the margins of the global market.
In the area surrounding the western Kenyan market town of Kaleko, almost half of the households targeted by the NGO GiveDirectly refused to participate in an unconditional cash transfer programme. Based on interviews and repeated visits to Kaleko over the last ten years, the article illuminates the reasons for the high refusal rate. Instead of understanding it as a technical problem to be fixed, the article situates it in local understandings of the economy as relational. Observing that different actors understood the transfer differently (e.g. as embedded in market exchanges with occult actors, asymmetrical gift relations, or political redistribution schemes), the article concludes that it was difficult for GiveDirectly to control how its cash transfer programme was interpreted locally because it did not accept the paradoxical nature of ‘the gift of free money’. If actors oppose money conceptually to the free gift, interpretations of unconditional cash are bound to be multiple and the transfer will remain indeterminable.
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