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Development and Change
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Wiley Online Library : Development and Change
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Labour Productivity and Energy Use in a Three-Sector Model: An Application to Egypt
This article presents a model of a developing economy with three sectors ? industry, agriculture and energy. Industry and energy are assumed to be demand-constrained, but agriculture supply-constrained. The model highlights: (a) structural transformation, through labour transfer from agriculture to industry; (b) inflation, driven by the interaction of demand and the supply constraint in agriculture; and (c) the link between energy use and labour productivity. Employing a Kaldor-Verdoorn productivity rule in industry augmented with energy intensity ? energy per unit of labour ? as an argument, we emphasize that labour productivity growth is driven by energy intensity rather than energy productivity growth. As a consequence, emissions reduction without North?South technology transfer and financial assistance costs growth.
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Grassroots Development and Upwards Accountabilities: Tensions in the Reconstruction of Aceh's Fishing Industry
This article explores the tensions between aid funding and grassroots development goals in the context of post-disaster fisheries reconstruction in Aceh, Indonesia. We argue that both short- and long-term grassroots goals are distorted by upward accountability requirements which lead to unsatisfactory aid outcomes. Our analysis employs the concept of aid webs and draws on fifty-one formal interviews with stakeholders in Aceh in 2007/2008. The findings initially concentrate on the impacts of upward accountability on project cycles, with a particular focus on the problematic incorporation of private boat-building contractors and commercial values during the implementation phase. We then discuss the more subtle, long-term impacts of upward accountability on the professionalization of community institutions ? in this case, the Panglima Laot Lhok. We conclude with a few observations about the hybrid institutions ? combining elements of local and development cultures ? that are produced within the current political economy of aid.
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Interpreting Industry's Impacts: Micropolitical Ecologies of Divergent Community Responses
Where governments have failed to protect their citizens from the environmental and social impacts of industrial development, social movements have often arisen in response. However, other community members may defend ? sometimes violently ? the same corporations that are targeted by their peers. The contributions to this cluster explore some of the ways in which communities disagree about how to respond to the ecological impacts of industry, their reactions inflected by differential concerns about economics, landscapes, indigenous rights and human health. The three studies illustrate the heterogeneity that communities display in their interpretations of, and responses to, industrial development, and demonstrate how this diversity informs, in crucial ways, grassroots activism against the development, or acceptance of it. In particular, this cluster examines how community-scale actions, and the interpretations of industry's impacts upon which these actions are based, are contested through multiple discourses centred around community identities and boundaries.
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Mining (Dis)amenity: The Political Ecology of Mining Opposition in the Kaz (Ida) Mountain Region of Western Turkey
Opposition to mining activities is an increasingly global phenomenon. A key feature of political ecology literature examining this opposition is its focus on the power of multinational corporations to gain access to resources on lands principally claimed by indigenous peoples and peasants in ?Third World? countries. These struggles often play out within the context of tensions between neoliberal natural resource policies and interventions by non-governmental and civil society actors. Meanwhile, political ecology scholars of natural resource conflicts in ?First World? countries are documenting conflicts over environmental management that emerge from complex commodification processes and competing forms of capital investment, such as those associated with amenity migration, that privilege different characteristics of landscapes. These perspectives are rarely combined into a single framework, despite the recognition that common dimensions may intermingle in regional contexts around the world. Using the case of conflict over gold mining in the Kaz (Ida) Mountains of western Turkey, this article explores the intersection of state neoliberalism with competing forms of rural capital, which produce a regional mining conflict. Our case highlights the value of ?locating the First and Third Worlds within? when it comes to studies of social processes that shape environmental conflicts.
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The Micropolitics of Indigenous Environmental Movements in the Philippines
Indigenous movements face what Stuart Kirsch has called the ?risks of counterglobalization?, which can distort their objectives into an all-or-nothing position with respect to development. In this contribution, I explore a case from the Philippines, where a movement originally conceived in terms of indigenous rights grew to include a more diverse mix of constituents and claims. This trajectory has made the movement vulnerable to charges of inauthenticity, particularly since the corporation it opposes has sponsored a parallel indigenous group and fashioned itself as the noble custodian of a threatened marine ecosystem. Nevertheless, the movement's constituents do not evaluate their activities exclusively in terms of its formal objectives or identity politics. For them, organized protest is entangled with the ?serious games? of everyday life, including, for example, local elections, struggles to achieve upward social mobility and efforts to redefine ethnic identity. As a result, some constituents see their involvement primarily as a claim to socioeconomic parity and others as a pursuit of the exceptional rights that indigeneity confers. Without attention to such local-level variation, we risk obscuring some of the most important motives and outcomes of indigenous movements ? and, as a result, we may overlook the alternative visions of socio-environmental justice that emerge from their day-to-day struggles for livelihood, dignity and empowerment.
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