Development Education in the Age of COVID-19 and Climate Change

2022 ◽  
pp. 472-492
Author(s):  
Stephen McCloskey

Development education (DE) is a radical learning pedagogy that combines analysis, discussion, and action to engage the learner in active citizenship toward positive social change. This chapter discusses the contribution that DE and other related ‘educations' can make to mitigating the climate crisis and addressing the growing levels of poverty and inequality in the global North and South. Central to this discussion is the neoliberal economic model that has driven ‘development' since the 1970s and placed the needs of the market above the social needs of citizens. This has become particularly apparent during the coronavirus pandemic which has overwhelmed the health services of countries across the world. The chapter argues for a more sustainable form of development based on de-growth and a Green New Deal.

Author(s):  
Stephen McCloskey

Development education (DE) is a radical learning pedagogy that combines analysis, discussion, and action to engage the learner in active citizenship toward positive social change. This chapter discusses the contribution that DE and other related ‘educations' can make to mitigating the climate crisis and addressing the growing levels of poverty and inequality in the global North and South. Central to this discussion is the neoliberal economic model that has driven ‘development' since the 1970s and placed the needs of the market above the social needs of citizens. This has become particularly apparent during the coronavirus pandemic which has overwhelmed the health services of countries across the world. The chapter argues for a more sustainable form of development based on de-growth and a Green New Deal.


While debt has the capacity to sustain social relations by joining together the two parties of a debt relation, it also contains the risk of deteriorating into domination and bargaining. Throughout history, different understandings of debt have therefore gravitated between reciprocity and domination, making it a key concept for understanding the dynamics of both social cohesion and fragmentation. The book considers the social, spatial and temporal meanings of this ambiguity and relates them to contemporary debates over debts between North and South in Europe, which in turn are embedded in a longer global history of North-South relations. The individual chapters discuss how debts incurred in the past are mobilised in political debates in the present. This dynamic is highlighted with regard to regional and global North-South relations. An essential feature in debates on this topic is the difficult question of retribution and possible ways of “paying” – a term that is etymologically connected to “pacification” – for past injustice. Against this backdrop, the book combines a discussion of the multi-layered European and global North-South divide with an effort to retrieve alternatives to the dominant and divisive uses of debt for staking out claims against someone or something. Discovering new and forgotten ways of thinking about debt and North-South relations, the chapters are divided into four sections that focus on 1) debt and social theory, 2) Greece and Germany as Europe’s South and North, 3) the ‘South’ between the local, the regional and the global, and 4) debt and the politics of history.


Author(s):  
Sue Brownill ◽  
Oscar Natividad Puig

This chapter draws on debates about the need for theory to ‘see from the South’ (Watson, 2009) to critically reflect on the increasingly global nature of co-creation both as a focus for research and for initiatives from governments around the world. It explores whether current understandings of co-creation narratives, which have tended to come from the Global North, can adequately characterise and understand the experience from the South, and the resulting need to decolonise knowledge and conduct research into the diverse ways in which co-creation can be constituted. It goes on to illustrate these debates by exploring the differing contexts for co-creation created by state-civil society relations in the project’s participating countries. These show that, while distinct contrasts emerge, it is important to move beyond dichotomies of north and south to explore the spaces of participation and resistance that are created within different contexts and how these are navigated by projects and communities engaged in co-creation. The chapter draws on material from interviews with local stakeholders and academics involved in the Co-Creation project and project conferences in Rio, Mexico City and Berlin.


2016 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ben Scully

<p>Guy Standing is among the most provocative and influential analysts of the rise of precarious work around the world. His writing is part of a wave of global labour studies that has documented the spread of precarious work throughout the Global North and South. However, this article argues that by treating precarity around the world as a single phenomenon, produced by globalisation, the work of Standing and others obscures the different and much longer history of precarious work in the Global South. This article shows how many of the features that Standing associates with the contemporary “precariat” have long been widespread among Southern workers. This longer history of precarity has important implications for contemporary debates about a new politics of labour, which is a central focus of Standing’s recent work.</p>


2021 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Malin Tillmar ◽  
Helene Ahl ◽  
Karin Berglund ◽  
Katarina Pettersson

Purpose Contrasting Sweden and Tanzania, this paper aims to explore the experiences of women entrepreneurs affected by entrepreneurialism. This study discusses the impact on their position in society and on their ability to take feminist action. Design/methodology/approach This paper analysed interviews conducted in the two countries over 15 years, using a holistic perspective on context, including its gendered dimensions. Findings The results amount to a critique of entrepreneurialism. Women in Sweden did not experience much gain from entrepreneurship, while in Tanzania results were mixed. Entrepreneurialism seems unable to improve the situation for women in the relatively well-functioning economies in the global north, where it was designed. Research limitations/implications In mainstream entrepreneurship studies, there is a focus on the institutional context. From the analysis, it is apparent that equal attention must be given to the social and spatial contexts, as they may have severe material and economic consequences for entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship. The paper raises questions for further studies on the gendering of markets in different contexts, as well as questions on the urban-rural dimension. Practical implications In Sweden, marketisation of welfare services led to more women-owned businesses, but the position of women did not improve. The results strongly convey the need for a careful analysis of the pre-existing context, before initiating reforms. Originality/value The paper adds to the understanding of context in entrepreneurship studies: Africa is largely an underexplored continent and contrasting North and South is an underexplored methodological approach. This paper further extends and develops the model of gendered contexts developed by Welter et al. (2014).


Author(s):  
Martin Müller

Carving up the world into Global North and Global South has become an established way of thinking about global difference since the end of the Cold War. This binary, however, erases what this paper calls the Global East — those countries and societies that occupy an interstitial position between North and South. This paper problematizes the geopolitics of knowledge that has resulted in the exclusion of the Global East, not just from the Global North and South, but from notions of globality in general. It argues that we need to adopt a strategic essentialism to recover the Global East for scholarship. To that end, it traces the global relations of IKEA’s bevelled drinking glass to demonstrate the urgency of rethinking the Global East at the heart of global connections, rather than separate from them. Thinking of such a Global East as a liminal space complicates the notions of North and South towards more inclusive but also more uncertain theorizing.


Author(s):  
Stefanie Sievers-Glotzbach ◽  
Anja Christinck

Abstract This Symposium explores how the theory of commons can be used to study, conceptualize and transform governance models for seed and plant varieties to counter ongoing trends towards agrobiodiversity loss and concentration of economic and political power in farming and food systems. Contributions to the Symposium present case studies from a range of geographical and socio-cultural contexts from the Global North and South. They show how seed and varieties relate to various known commons categories, including natural resource commons, knowledge and cultural commons, and global commons. Elements of these categories need to be integrated to gain a deeper understanding of Seed Commons, including the specific challenges that arise from the fact that seed, although a biological asset, is at least partly shaped by human selection driven by values, knowledge and needs of users. Collective responsibility, sharing of knowledge and seed, protection from private enclosure, and distributed, polycentric governance are key features of Seed Commons. The notion of ‘commoning’ focuses on the social practices and processes that create and sustain commons. Conceptualizing Seed Commons in their complexity offers initial starting points for policies and legal frameworks conducive to releasing the transformative power of Seed Commons for advancing sustainable farming and food systems.


Author(s):  
Hanna Alasuutari

This paper analyses policies that seem to promote mutuality and reciprocity in development education partnerships and pedagogy. It explores challenges to mutuality and reciprocity in global and development education pedagogy in countries in the Global North and proposes that critical literacy and ethical intercultural learning can be a way forward to a renegotiation of ideas of self and other and of power relations between the North and South.


2010 ◽  
pp. 6-28 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter J. Smith ◽  
Elizabeth Smythe

Since its inception in 2001 World Social Forum (WSF) has grown in numbers and drawn activists from all areas of the globe. It has also spawned a myriad of social forums around the world. But the pattern of participation within the WSF global event or within other forums has not been evenly spread in geographic or spatial terms. This chapter examines how and why social forum activism emerged in some places and not others. We map the social forum from the first WSF in 2001 through its proliferation and fragmentation over time as it has taken root at various levels—continental, national, regional and local. Then we provide comparative case studies of sub-global forums drawn from North and South America, Europe and Africa. We also compare different manifestations of social “forumism” along a number of dimensions. Drawing on comparative politics and its emphasis on the specifics of place and the role of context we discuss these patterns and the factors that might account for why these forms of resistance find barren or fertile ground around the world.


2021 ◽  
pp. 102452942110443
Author(s):  
Alexis Moraitis

The post-2008 era saw a return of the manufacturing fetish, the idea that manufacturing constitutes the flywheel of growth without which no nation can thrive. Across the Global North and South, voices are calling to reverse deindustrialization and revive manufacturing. While today deindustrialization is met with anxiety, in the 1930s economists predicted deindustrialization but interpreted it as a liberating process leading to a post-industrial age based on material abundance and widespread economic security. Far from delivering this vision, deindustrialization actually produces a precarious economic order driven by labour precarity, economic stagnation and lost development opportunities for the Global South. What can be termed the Baumolian and Kaldorian frameworks, attribute this precarious reality to services’ inability to replace manufacturing as a growth engine given their technologically stagnant nature. However, this article argues that, by focusing on the technical aspects of service economies, such views overlook the social limits of the capitalist economy and its historically specific conception of wealth, value. As capitalism matures, productivity becomes an increasingly inadequate form of augmenting social wealth as it results in great increases in physical output but counterintuitively undermines the expansion of value. Capitalism is underpinned by a secular movement towards declining dynamism, as it increasingly struggles to maintain its former economic vigour. Stagnation and heightened labour precarity are not merely the product of tertiarization but symptoms of capitalism’s declining trajectory.


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