The Environmentalist and Development Value Paradox in Bangladesh: Case of Rampal Power Plant and the ‘Save Sundarbans’ Movement

From the past decade, Bangladesh has shown a strong drive toward economic growth and in the process of achieving the related goal of becoming a middle-income country, it has adopted a power system plan that is heavily dependent on fossil fuels. As a result, there was a certain plan to build several coal powered plants, among which the most debated remains the plant initiated near the largest mangrove forest in the country, the Sundarbans. This power plant, called the Rampal power plant, has seen the emergence of a strong urban environmental movement resisting it. The anti-Rampal or ‘Save Sundarbans’ movement showcases the environment versus development discourses elaborately, with each side- the government and the environmental activists advancing their respective arguments supporting or opposing the plant under construction. This paper attempts to view these arguments through the lens of value theories, i.e. what are the values of either parties regarding the power plant and how they uphold these values. In a related vain, the environmentalist approach(s) of the movement are analyzed, as well as the development centered values of the state are analyzed within the energy/power sector context. Methods of critical discourse analysis were applied to analyze the public debate that ensued regarding the power plant.

The Pacific Reset: A Retroliberal Analysis

<p>The interaction and relationships between stakeholders, international trends, history and politics, inform the shape and sequencing of development policy. The Pacific Reset policy initiative of the Sixth Labour Government is an example of how such interactions not only impact, but contribute to understandings on development policy. Despite being a recent policy announcement, the Pacific Reset was understood as being informed by the factors listed above and is a geopolitically motivated statement of capability in the region. The last decade of development thinking has shifted towards a model of economic growth, defined by ‘shared prosperity’ and development tied to national interest. Marking a distinct aid regime, retroliberalism offers the theoretical rigour to this research. In analysing the understandings of the Pacific Reset through such a lens, the Pacific Reset loosely aligns with the tenets of retroliberalism. Although it was found that rhetoric surrounding the Pacific Reset marks New Zealand’s divergence from typical retroliberal, and current global development discourses. Using critical discourse analysis of rhetoric surrounding the announcement, and early stages of the Pacific Reset, together with a thematic analysis of eight interviews, this thesis examines the understandings of the Pacific Reset as communicated by members of the New Zealand development community. It assesses the factors involved in the policy’s formation, and its impact on Pacific-focused development activities, before discussing the extent retroliberalism can interpret the Pacific Reset. This research found the Pacific Reset to be an amalgam of policies, modalities, and structures of earlier New Zealand development policy. Historical patterns of development assistance, personalities and style of engagement, and path dependence in policy were found to impact the Pacific Reset. Participants understood the policy as merely a shift in rhetoric and a geopolitical statement of renewed engagement in the Pacific. This thesis collates these responses to analyse the understandings on, and the impact of the Pacific Reset on New Zealand development activities, and to offer an empirical base for further research on the policy.</p>

The Pacific Reset: A Retroliberal Analysis

<p>The interaction and relationships between stakeholders, international trends, history and politics, inform the shape and sequencing of development policy. The Pacific Reset policy initiative of the Sixth Labour Government is an example of how such interactions not only impact, but contribute to understandings on development policy. Despite being a recent policy announcement, the Pacific Reset was understood as being informed by the factors listed above and is a geopolitically motivated statement of capability in the region. The last decade of development thinking has shifted towards a model of economic growth, defined by ‘shared prosperity’ and development tied to national interest. Marking a distinct aid regime, retroliberalism offers the theoretical rigour to this research. In analysing the understandings of the Pacific Reset through such a lens, the Pacific Reset loosely aligns with the tenets of retroliberalism. Although it was found that rhetoric surrounding the Pacific Reset marks New Zealand’s divergence from typical retroliberal, and current global development discourses. Using critical discourse analysis of rhetoric surrounding the announcement, and early stages of the Pacific Reset, together with a thematic analysis of eight interviews, this thesis examines the understandings of the Pacific Reset as communicated by members of the New Zealand development community. It assesses the factors involved in the policy’s formation, and its impact on Pacific-focused development activities, before discussing the extent retroliberalism can interpret the Pacific Reset. This research found the Pacific Reset to be an amalgam of policies, modalities, and structures of earlier New Zealand development policy. Historical patterns of development assistance, personalities and style of engagement, and path dependence in policy were found to impact the Pacific Reset. Participants understood the policy as merely a shift in rhetoric and a geopolitical statement of renewed engagement in the Pacific. This thesis collates these responses to analyse the understandings on, and the impact of the Pacific Reset on New Zealand development activities, and to offer an empirical base for further research on the policy.</p>

Exploring the Mission-Development Nexus Through Stories from Christian ‘Missionaries’ in Bangladesh

<p>Over the past decade, development research and policy has increasingly paid attention to religion and belief. Donors and researchers have progressively engaged with faith-based organisations and recipients. However, Christian mission and ‗missionaries‘ remain underexplored aspects within religion and development discourses. In response, this research explores stories from eleven Christian ‗missionaries‘ in Bangladesh. Firstly, I assess how the changing non-governmental sector in Bangladesh influenced participants‘ activities. Secondly, I contextualise their stories within religion and development discourses with reference to analyses of development workers. Finally, I reflect on the significance of spirituality in participants‘ lives. I also describe how spirituality played a role in my research. I frame this research within feminist and poststructuralist ways of knowing. Methodologically, I conducted semi-structured interviews and ‗hung out‘ with participants. I ‗wrote myself-in‘ to this research to highlight how the process intersected with my own subject positions. I found that participants‘ engaged with development in similar ways to development workers as analysed by others. They reproduced discourses of modernisation, expertise, altruism, and the ‗third world‘. They additionally responded to Christian discourses, such as ‗calling‘. Participants‘ activities and subjectivities were shaped by these intersecting discourses, and were also shaped by the historic and current setting of Bangladesh. Missionaries‘ stories revealed some aspects of the ‗mission-development nexus‘ in Bangladesh (Fountain, 2012). Participants‘ stories and my own research experience, also demonstrated that engagement with belief in God can be difficult within development and within ‗the academy‘ (Shahjahan, 2005).</p>

Exploring the Mission-Development Nexus Through Stories from Christian ‘Missionaries’ in Bangladesh

<p>Over the past decade, development research and policy has increasingly paid attention to religion and belief. Donors and researchers have progressively engaged with faith-based organisations and recipients. However, Christian mission and ‗missionaries‘ remain underexplored aspects within religion and development discourses. In response, this research explores stories from eleven Christian ‗missionaries‘ in Bangladesh. Firstly, I assess how the changing non-governmental sector in Bangladesh influenced participants‘ activities. Secondly, I contextualise their stories within religion and development discourses with reference to analyses of development workers. Finally, I reflect on the significance of spirituality in participants‘ lives. I also describe how spirituality played a role in my research. I frame this research within feminist and poststructuralist ways of knowing. Methodologically, I conducted semi-structured interviews and ‗hung out‘ with participants. I ‗wrote myself-in‘ to this research to highlight how the process intersected with my own subject positions. I found that participants‘ engaged with development in similar ways to development workers as analysed by others. They reproduced discourses of modernisation, expertise, altruism, and the ‗third world‘. They additionally responded to Christian discourses, such as ‗calling‘. Participants‘ activities and subjectivities were shaped by these intersecting discourses, and were also shaped by the historic and current setting of Bangladesh. Missionaries‘ stories revealed some aspects of the ‗mission-development nexus‘ in Bangladesh (Fountain, 2012). Participants‘ stories and my own research experience, also demonstrated that engagement with belief in God can be difficult within development and within ‗the academy‘ (Shahjahan, 2005).</p>

Life before Vegetables: Nutrition, Cash, and Subjunctive Health in Samoa

Since the 1950s, Samoa has faced rapid changes in food systems and labor practices, creating an environment in which health conditions such as diabetes touch every individual. Through an ethnographic analysis of Samoan people’s attitudes toward the novel food category of vegetables, this article explores how intersecting health promotion and development discourses instrumentalize vegetables as a source of both health and sickness, and as signs of poverty or wealth. This dual instrumentalization simultaneously positions vegetables as objects of trade that may generate wealth for farmers and as objects of health that may accrue nutrition to combat chronic sickness. I introduce the notion of subjunctive health to analyze people’s preoccupation with vegetables, even when these are rarely eaten. In Samoa, subjunctive health frames the consumption of vegetables in several ways: as if vegetables were both plentiful and essential to a proper meal, as if people were not healthy before imported vegetables were introduced, as if it were possible to sustain one’s family through gardening alone. The subjunctive highlights how health is constructed as aspirational, relying on an as if logic that entangles economic and nutritional conditions. It operates through the daily acts of nourishing one’s family to erase from view those biocolonial processes that generated an environment in which chronic diseases flourish.

Exploring the Origins of Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness

Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness (GNH) is often dismissed by its critics as being an instrument for policy elites to address ‘national security concerns’ that started to threaten their grasp on the state around the turn of the millennium. This study problematizes this line of criticism that relegates GNH to an ‘invented tradition’ of recent origin. For this purpose, this study draws on Roy Wagner’s notion of ‘invention’ that draws attention to how various sets of meanings are brought together. A historical analysis of the country’s development plans points to several origins of GNH, including ‘Buddhism and Bhutan’s traditional socio-economic system’ and ‘outside concepts’ holding sway in international debates on development. GNH has undergone a long and gradual process of elaboration in view of Buddhist mores and development discourses, while also taking into account national security concerns. This study concludes by warning against the reductionistic stance of GNH critics, in favour of a more balanced perspective that captures the multiplicity of the origins of GNH.

From Commodity to Capability Fetishism: Human Development as a Harmonisation of Social and Territorial Cartographies

The development discourse has been thrown into a disarray and paradigmatic quagmire by the impasse of neo-liberal transnational social cartographies. There are calls within the development discourse fraternity to deterritorise the concept of development so as to grapple with it sufficiently and effectively. Failure to adhere to this call, various development discourses have been accused of methodological territorialism. This paper uses critical hermeneutics to argue that the trajectory from Trickle Down and Basic Needs Theory to Human Rights, Capability and Functionings approaches to development is fundamentally a paradigm shift from territorial to social cartographies. This paper further argues that despite the significance of social cartographies occasioned by neo-liberal globalisation, territorial cartographies as envisaged by structuralists, post-structuralists, post-developmentalists, post-colonialists and global ethnographers are still vital because of their thorough critique of the power discourse behind structures that disadvantage individuals. The paper contends that in order to realise engendered development, it is pertinent to ultimately look at the individual who is the basic ingredient of a moral society (ethical individualism) as well as the structures and strictures that disempower and vulnerablelise individual moral agents.

Amazon Development

While historically “Amazon” could refer to a river, a basin, and later a forest, it has been shaped into a coherent regional space by the development politics of governments, companies, and nongovernmental organizations throughout the 20th century, concealing a more complex cultural and ecological reality. Development discourses ignored the human technologies existing prior to the 16th century and drew on the imaginary of a “pristine” jungle, which actually resulted from the human depopulation that occurred in the Amazon during colonization. Colonialism (17th–19th centuries), nonetheless, connected the region to the global economy, indirectly leading to the “rubber boom” (1880–1920), when the Amazon became indispensable to the second industrial revolution. After state and business actors led different operations meant to “modernize” the region in the first half of the 20th century, “developing” the Amazon became a major target of the Brazilian government in the decades following World War II. The politics of the military regime that ruled from 1964 to 1984 in particular drove the expansion of roadways, cattle-ranching, mining, and dams. While statistically creating economic growth, this trend had disastrous consequences for nature, Indigenous livelihoods, and labor relations, which mobilized scientists, activists, and local communities against it. Yet, although by the 1990s the developmentalist model was highly contested, social and environmental movements did not manage to gather society behind a new consensus for the Amazon. Attempts to put development at the service of reducing inequalities and to reinforce environmental legislation achieved certain (mitigated) success in the early 21st century, but they did not prevent deforestation and land conflicts from trending upwards after 2015, threatening the Amazon’s very existence.