In Pursuit of Development

Do current “development” structures work? If not, why? And what solutions are out there that place greater agency in low-income countries to shape these development structures and results?Hannah Ryder is the CEO of Development Reimagined, an international development consultancy in China, which provides strategic advice and practical support to African, Chinese, and international stakeholders on issues ranging from the Belt and Road Initiative to Africa’s growth markets to green growth and China’s aid and investments. Hannah is an economist and former diplomat, and Senior Associate at the Center for Strategic International Studies in Washington DC. She is also a member of the UAE’s International Advisory Council on the New Economy and sits on the Executive Board of the British Chamber of Commerce in China.Development Reimagined’s Decolonising Global Health Report  What COVID19 informs us about on risk perceptions of Africa African Debt narratives and structures Blueprint for decolonising the development sectorChina-Africa in 2021 Twitter: Hannah RyderDevelopment Reimagined Dan BanikIn Pursuit of Development https://in-pursuit-of-development.simplecast.com/ Host:Dan Banik LinkedInX: @danbanik @GlobalDevPod Subscribe:Apple Spotify YouTubehttps://in-pursuit-of-development.simplecast.com

In an excellent book on how aid agencies manage foreign aid projects, Dan Honig argues that tight top-down controls and a focus on target-setting and metrics often lead aid projects astray. If one navigates from the top, one may achieve more management control, more oversight, and more standardized behavior. But this may be at the cost of flexibility and adaptability. By contrast, if one empowers those closest to the ground, and focuses on what field agents can see and learn, we may apply so-called “soft information” that will in turn allow for more flexibility. Managing large organizations is not easy. And most politicians and bureaucrats struggle to find the right balance between when to control and when to let go. In the book Navigation by Judgment: Why and When Top-Down Control of Foreign Aid Doesn't Work, Dan Honig argues that a misplaced sense of what it means to “succeed” encourages many aid agencies to get the balance wrong.Dan Honig is an assistant professor of international development at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). He is currently a visiting fellow at Leiden University’s Institute of Political Science, and a non-resident fellow at the Center for Global Development. He was previously special assistant, then advisor, to successive Ministers of Finance in Liberia and ran a local nonprofit in East Timor focused on helping post-conflict youth realize the power of their own ideas.Dan is busy completing his next book on “Mission-Driven Bureaucrats”, which explores the relationship between motivation, management practice, organizational mission, and performance in the public service.   Actually Navigating byJudgment: Towards aNew Paradigm of DonorAccountability Where theCurrent System Doesn’t Work (policy paper, Centre for Global Development)Managing Better: What All of Us Can Do to Encourage AidSuccess (CGD Brief, Center for Global Development)"Making Good On Donors' Desire to Do Development Differently", Third World Quarterly 39:1, 68-84 (Honig & Gulrajani, 2018)."Information, Power, & Location:  World Bank Staff Decentralization and Aid Project Success”, Governance 33:4, 749-769. (2020)The Limits of Accounting-Based Accountability in Education (and Far Beyond): Why More Accounting Will Rarely Solve Accountability Problems (Honig & Pritchett, working paper, Center for Global Development)Dan Honig on TwitterDan Banik and In Pursuit of Development on Twitterhttps://in-pursuit-of-development.simplecast.com/  Host:Dan Banik LinkedInX: @danbanik @GlobalDevPod Subscribe:Apple Spotify YouTubehttps://in-pursuit-of-development.simplecast.com

India is experiencing a devastating second wave of the pandemic. Indeed, the country appears to be going through one of the darkest moments in its post-independence history with new records broken every day for new cases of Covid-19. There are also growing concerns that even these staggering numbers that have been officially reported are in reality an undercount. And then there is the crippling shortage of life-saving supplies such as medical oxygen.Critics claim that the Indian government has ignored numerous red flags in recent months and disregarded scientific opinion. Thus, some have argued that Indians are now paying the price of government inaction while others have pointed to the historical neglect by successive ruling parties to invest more in health.The image of India as a country experiencing rapid economic growth and lifting millions of people out of poverty has of late been replaced by pictures of funeral pyres.How did it come to this? And how capable is the Indian state at responding to major crises?Patralekha Chatterjee is an award-winning journalist, columnist, and author, who has written extensively on the role of economic, political, social, cultural, and educational factors in public health in India.Patralekha Chatterjee's blog"Lessons not learnt after a year of battling Covid" (The Deccan Herald, 21 April 2021)"Why trust needs to be the key word in 2021" (The Asian Age, 06 January 2021)"Is India missing COVID-19 deaths?" (The Lancet, 05 September 2020)Patralekha Chatterjee on TwitterDan Banik and In Pursuit of Development on Twitter  Host:Dan Banik LinkedInX: @danbanik @GlobalDevPod Subscribe:Apple Spotify YouTubehttps://in-pursuit-of-development.simplecast.com

Why do aid agencies from wealthy donor countries with diverse domestic political and economic contexts arrive at very similar positions on certain foreign aid policies and priorities?In his book, The Globalization of Foreign Aid: Developing Consensus, Liam Swiss examines how certain ideas and practices influence the work of aid agencies in Canada, the United States and Sweden and how aid agencies end up adopting common policy priorities such as in the fields of gender and security. He argues that the so-called ‘emerging global consensus’ that constitutes the globalization of aid can be explained by both macro-level globalizing influences as well as micro-level social processes that take place within aid agencies.Liam Swiss is an associate professor at the Department of Sociology at Memorial University of Newfoundland in Canada. Liam Swiss on TwitterDan Banik and In Pursuit of Development on Twitter Host:Dan Banik LinkedInX: @danbanik @GlobalDevPod Subscribe:Apple Spotify YouTubehttps://in-pursuit-of-development.simplecast.com

There is considerable academic literature on the resource curse thesis which aims to explain why resource-rich countries have not benefited from their oil and mineral resources. And this resource curse thesis within economics, political science, and sociology has numerous economic, political, social, and environmental dimensions.But in her work, our guest has often highlighted the inadequacies of the “resource curse” thesis particularly in explaining dissatisfaction with the pace of economic development in her own country – Nigeria.Zainab Usman is a senior fellow and Director of the Africa Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She has previously worked as a Public Sector Specialist at the World Bank and is co-author of the book, The Future of Work in Africa: Harnessing the Potential of Digital Technologies for All. She also contributed to World Bank’s flagship report  –  Rethinking Power Sector Reforms in Developing Countries. Her forthcoming book, Economic Diversification in Nigeria: The Politics of Building a Post-Oil Economy, is set to be published later this year.Zainab Usman on TwitterDan Banik and In Pursuit of Development on Twitter Host:Dan Banik LinkedInX: @danbanik @GlobalDevPod Subscribe:Apple Spotify YouTubehttps://in-pursuit-of-development.simplecast.com

With many path-breaking books, James C. Scott has for long been a key figure in Southeast Asian Studies and in the comparative study of agrarian societies, peasant politics and resistance studies.  His hugely influential scholarship crosses disciplines, shaping political science, anthropology, and history.In this conversation, we focus on a selection of Prof. Scott's books, including Seeing Like a State, which is a magisterial critique of top-down social planning, The Art of Not Being Governed, which highlights the crucial functions of “places of refuge from the state”, and his latest, Against the Grain – which provides a deep history of the earliest states. He is currently writing a new book on the Irrawaddy River – in which he argues that engineering and damming show how humans work, violate Nature’s traffic and how humans shape land.James C. Scott is the Sterling Professor of Political Science and professor of anthropology at Yale University where he also co-directs the Agrarian Studies Program. His research concerns political economy, comparative agrarian societies, theories of resistance, peasant politics, revolution, Southeast Asia, theories of class relations, and anarchism. He is the recipient of the 2020 Albert O. Hirschman Prize, the Social Science Research Council’s highest honour, in recognition of his wide-ranging and influential scholarship.Jim encourages you to support the fight for democracy in Myanmar by donating to www.mutualaidmyanmar.org Host:Dan Banik LinkedInX: @danbanik @GlobalDevPod Subscribe:Apple Spotify YouTubehttps://in-pursuit-of-development.simplecast.com

An article in The Economist magazine in September 2018 argued that high birth rates is one of the main culprits for pervasive poverty on the African continent. The article, in particular, cited the example of Tanzania, where the then President John Magufuli did not apparently see the point with birth control, having announced in 2016 that women could throw away their contraceptives as state schools will be free. President Magufuli subsequently claimed that a major consequence of widespread contraception is a shrinking labour force, which in turn is bad for development. But others, including the Gates Foundation, have pointed to the Democratic Republic of Congo and Nigeria, which are projected to witness massive increases in their populations in the next few decades. And such rapid population growth can potentially pose major challenges for government policies aimed at promoting the well-being of citizens. So, what is the link between population and development and are there some lessons that the world can learn from China’s attempts at controlling population growth in recent decades?Lauren Johnston is a research associate at SOAS China Institute, and currently a World Bank consultant for a population ageing and China research project. She holds a PhD in Economics from Peking University and is widely published on topics relating to China’s economy with respect to demographics and economic ties with Africa. Lauren Johnston on TwitterDan Banik and In Pursuit of Development on Twitter Host:Dan Banik LinkedInX: @danbanik @GlobalDevPod Subscribe:Apple Spotify YouTubehttps://in-pursuit-of-development.simplecast.com

Western imperialism has fundamentally shaped the developing world. In particular, Great Britain and the United States – the dominant capitalist powers of the 19th and 20th centuries, respectively, have played a major role in this historical process. But why did they pursue imperialism? And what effects did such imperial practices have on the developing world? These are the key questions that Atul Kohli examines in his brilliant new book, Imperialism and the Developing World: How Britain and the U.S. Shaped the Global Periphery (Oxford University Press, 2020). Kohli meticulously examines both the causes and consequences of modern imperialism. He finds that the impact of imperialism on the developing world has been primarily negative. Indeed, the key argument in the book is that there is an inverse relationship between imperialism and development, i.e., the less control a state has over its own affairs, the less likely it is that the people of the state will experience steady and inclusive economic progress.Atul Kohli is the David K.E. Bruce Professor of International Affairs at Princeton University and one of the world’s leading experts in comparative political economy with a focus on developing countries.Dan Banik and In Pursuit of Development on Twitter Host:Dan Banik LinkedInX: @danbanik @GlobalDevPod Subscribe:Apple Spotify YouTubehttps://in-pursuit-of-development.simplecast.com

Several countries are vying for the African continent’s attention. While there has been considerable attention on China’s and India’s motives and interests, Russia, Germany, France, the UK, Turkey, Japan, South Korea and Middle Eastern countries are all trying to increase their footprint on the continent. An important first step for many of these countries is to organize a summit – a major gathering of leaders and other high-level officials to discuss how African countries can further strengthen trade and diplomatic relations with this one country hosting the summit. The goal of these events is basically to promote the idea of achieving win-win outcomes for all involved parties. This growth in so-called Africa plus 1 summit diplomacy has generated renewed interest in better understanding the growing competition among major world powers on the continent. But in trying to explain this growing interest in strengthening relations with African countries, there is often a tendency to downplay the role and influence of African countries in setting the agenda of these high-profile events, and how African leaders articulate their needs and interests. My guest this week argues that we really need to better understand the motives behind the increased engagement in ‘Africa + 1’ summitry by African politicians and bureaucrats.Indeed, rather than viewing these individuals as passive participants, we must recognize the numerous ways in which such summits and other high-level platforms that involve the continent, offer opportunities for African leaders to express and exert agency in both symbolic and substantial ways.Dr Folashadé Soulé is a Senior Research Associate at the Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford. She studies agency in Africa’s international relations and the politics of South-South cooperation. She is also the initiator of the Africa-China negotiation workshop series, which brings together African negotiators and senior policymakers to exchange and build better negotiation practices when dealing with China. '"Africa+1" summit diplomacy and the ‘new scramble’ narrative: Recentering African agency', African Affairs, volume 119, Issue 477, October 2020, pp. 633–646'How popular is China in Africa? New survey sheds light on what ordinary people think', The Conversation, November 2020'Tips for African Negotiators Doing Deals with China: Rebalancing Asymmetries', Natural Resource Governance Initiative (NRGI) blog post, February 2020Folashadé Soulé  on TwitterDan Banik and In Pursuit of Development on Twitter Host:Dan Banik LinkedInX: @danbanik @GlobalDevPod Subscribe:Apple Spotify YouTubehttps://in-pursuit-of-development.simplecast.com

While a considerable amount of world attention is focused on China’s commanding presence on the African continent and the impact of Beijing’s ambitious Belt and Road Initiative, India’s activities in Africa have received limited attention. This is indeed surprising because India has an over 2000-year presence on the continent and India-Africa relations have witnessed a major upsurge in recent years.In its relations with African countries, India frequently highlights the economic and philanthropic contributions of the Indian diaspora, Indo-African partnership in the post-colonial period, and solidarity with and support for the Non-Aligned Movement and the fight against racism. It also often highlights Mahatma Gandhi’s role in fighting oppression in South Africa and Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s active international lobbying efforts for African independence.Following Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit in 2018, New Delhi signed numerous bilateral agreements and outlined ten guiding principles for a renewed engagement with African countries. New Delhi has also, in recent years, stepped up its diplomatic presence and outreach in Africa by announcing new missions and is prioritizing the training of its foreign services personnel in French and Portuguese. India’s diverse and deep historical footprint in Africa has been somewhat different to that of other powers and only in recent decades has the country moved from idealism to pragmatism and the explicit pursuit of commercial interests.Renu Modi is a Professor at the University of Mumbai and Director of the University’s Centre for African Studies. Research project: India's Footprint in Africa: South-South Cooperation and the Politics of Gifts and Reciprocity (INDAF)COVID-19 Crisis in Africa: Impacts and Responses Interview: Professor Renu Modi on India-Africa partnerships | India UK Development Partnership Forum India-Africa: Mapping Trade and Bilateral Partnerships India-Senegal: People to People Connections through the AgesA look at how India's Africa strategy is workingSouth-South Cooperation between India and Africa: Advancing the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable DevelopmentPan African e-network: A Model of South-South CooperationTime to Overhaul African HealthcareAccessing Healthcare Beyond State BordersDan Banik and In Pursuit of Development on Twitter  Host:Dan Banik LinkedInX: @danbanik @GlobalDevPod Subscribe:Apple Spotify YouTubehttps://in-pursuit-of-development.simplecast.com