Anita Lacey

Governing through empowerment: Oxfam's global reform and trade campaigns

Abstract Within the context of globalization and governmentality studies, this essay analyses Oxfams global reform and trade campaigns as a form of governance. These campaigns are based on advanced liberal programmes of empowerment which aim to shape poverty relations and the conduct of the poor in the ‘developing’ world. Oxfams campaign to ‘Make Trade Fair’ and its influential report on ‘Rigged rules and double standards’ serve as a basis from which to understand the organizations governing practices, and how these are embedded in the NGOs programme statements and policy documents. Following Barbara Cruikshanks insights on the will to empower, we argue that self-management and self-empowerment have been tirelessly put forward by Oxfam as solutions to poverty which have in turn obscured this organizations means of government.

Enacting the Millennium Development Goals: Political Technologies of Calculation and the Counter-calculation of Poverty in Namibia

Abstract This paper advances that the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) act as a governmentality that brings with them assemblages of international and national policies and practices of poverty reduction. These assemblages are characterized by neoliberal rationalities that shape relationships and practices with and of the poor themselves by repositioning and deploying the values and norms of the market as the principal means for the establishment of development aid partnerships. Such rationalities, we argue, are exercised through political technologies that make visible and operable certain governing schemes such as calculative practices. Drawing on extensive interview, policy, programme, and archival documents, the paper advances the argument that the MDGs and the national development plan for Namibia, Vision 2030, shape ideas of poverty reduction through political technologies of calculation and via multi-scale partnership arrangements. These technologies emerge from diverse elements, subsume the shaping of social and political spaces, and have diverse effects on the lives of the poor. Our analysis also highlights an approach to poverty reduction in Namibia, that of BIG, a Basic Income Grant scheme. We view BIG as a potential counter-calculation of poverty, and counter-partnership to poverty reduction efforts, which can develop into a more socially just and sustainable means to reduce poverty and lead to an overturn of contemporary neoliberal assemblages of poverty reduction.

Tourism for development and the new global aid regime

This article analyses the new global aid regime’s championing of tourism as a solution to poverty as a continuum of colonial governmentalities. A key focus is an examination of tourism for development in Namibia, particularly the role of conservancies and the Community-Based Natural Resource Management (CBNRM) programme in this promotion. We argue that this tourism promotion in Namibia is a vital example of tourism for development and part of an increasingly widespread promotion of tourism as a means of achieving broad advanced liberal development goals. We examine the growth of conservancies and suggest that they are a technology of colonial governmentality in Namibia’s tourism for development. They act to shape the physical environment, wildlife and livelihoods for the communities engaged in the conservancies in the name of tourism and advance liberal ideas of poverty reduction. The article concludes with consideration of the manner in which these conservancy programmes can be considered as extensions of colonial rule in the name of tourism for development.

Twenty-five years of Bananas, Beaches and Bases: A conversation with Cynthia Enloe

Cynthia Enloe’s book Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics brought a new approach to the study of war, conflict and political economy, an approach informed by and starting from a feminist curiosity. Such a starting point allows for recognition of the diverse, often disregarded gendered dynamics of militarization. A feminist curiosity facilitates making visible the politicization of everyday life via what Enloe calls a bottom-up approach to research and investigation. This account of a conversation between feminist scholars draws attention to the means by which researchers exercise the sociological imagination in their work on labour, militarism and war; the theorizing of gendered militarization; the role for feminist activism around conflict and sexual violence as well as solidarity politics; and the life cycle of Bananas, Beaches and Bases.

Urban Labour and Livelihoods: Women, Postcolonial Developmental Governance and Rapid Employment Programmes in Honiara and Port Moresby

The World Bank’s Rapid Employment Programmes (REPs) in Honiara and Port Moresby govern urban and peri-urban women as productive /unproductive, at risk and vulnerable, and call them to participate in the formal employment sector in the name of development. Women’s labour, livelihoods and responsibilities are imagined to be practiced in narrowly productive and transformative ways by the proponents of these work schemes. The urban site of the programmes and urbanization itself and the challenges and opportunities afforded by urbanization patterns in these two locations are central too to the REPs as development solutions. Vitally, they are urban programmes in their imagining and deployment and are premised on the dangers of rapid urbanization and the potential of the market to mitigate against these dangers, to shape the informal towards the formal. I argue that the development programmes and their actors, importantly including the women themselves, are engaged in a myriad of interwoven advanced liberal and postcolonial biopolitical governance practices. The recognition by leading development agencies in urban settings like Port Moresby and Honiara of the complexity of development recipients’ lives could act as a vital first step towards gender justice-based development solutions. Recognition would then need to be matched with a desire to engage with this complexity in project design and deployment. Certainly, the World Bank’s REPs in Honiara and Port Moresby are informed by research at the community level, but an assumption of the transformative nature of formal cash-based labour perhaps precludes other possibilities and the recognition of centrality of informal and formal labour to participants’ lives.

Universal basic income as development solution

The world is currently abuzz with the possibilities offered by a Universal Basic Income (UBI) grant (see, for example, Klein, 2016; Koistinen and Perkiö, 2014; Panda, 2016; Rankin, 2016). The concept has been touted as a just solution to wealth distribution and anecdote to poverty over the course of five centuries, from the writings of Thomas More and Johannes Ludovicus Vives to the present. A UBI is currently proposed as a means to resolve the impact of neoliberal reform at the macroeconomic level and at the more specific level of welfare reform. While arguably much of the current fervour around UBI initiatives comes from the global north, UBI is being advanced as a solution to poverty and a wide range of developmental challenges in the global south linked to the deployment of neoliberalism. The diverse and far-ranging deployment of what I term neoliberal postcolonial developmentalities (Lacey, 2016) has involved increased reliance on the market rather than the state or organisations for wealth regulation, making the poor and disenfranchised responsible for their own circumstances and, vitally, their own routes out of poverty, and a problematically uniform approach to development solutions (Ilcan and Lacey, 2011). A question this piece considers is whether UBI can successfully counter these characteristics and their effects. Can UBI offer an effective means for radical poverty reduction in the global south? I first consider the ways a UBI could counter neoliberal postcolonial developmentalities and their effects before moving to more specifically consider its potential in addressing women’s poverty. I conclude with a discussion of a lived example of UBI as a development solution. A stark difference between neoliberal approaches to poverty and UBI becomes apparent when we consider a working definition of a UBI. Philippe Van Parijs (1992) describes it as ‘an income unconditionally paid to all on an individual basis, without means test or work requirement’ (p. 3). This lack of conditionality, the absence of both means testing and the requirement to demonstrate willingness to work are in glaring contrast with neoliberal poverty tools. States and para-state organisations have increased the degree of conditionality of welfare transfers in the name of efficiency. Welfare recipients are tested