Peter Lawrence

Application of the water poverty index at different scales: a cautionary tale

Abstract The Water Poverty Index is an integrated tool developed on the basis of extensive consultation with a range of scientists, practitioners and policymakers. It is primarily designed for use at the community level to enable more holistic water-resource assessments on a site-specific basis. It can however be applied at different scales to suit different needs. One of the motivations to design such a tool was an attempt to move away from the conventional, purely deterministic, approaches to water assessment, relying primarily on models and large-scale data. In todays world such an approach is inappropriate, ill representing the complexities of modern water-allocation decisions where economic, political and social issues all have a powerful role to play. This paper highlights some applications of the Water Poverty Index at different spatial scales and discusses the implications of applying indicators at these different scales.

Agricultural Tradables and Economic Recovery in Uganda: The Limitations of Structural Adjustment in Practice

Abstract Ugandas economic reform program has been widely regarded as a success story for structural adjustment. Nevertheless, a large trade deficit persists, shored up by inflows of aid and private remittances. The poor performance of the agricultural tradables sector is presented as the key explanation for this trade imbalance. Two main reasons for this poor performance are found to be the failure to liberalize producer prices quickly and the failure to overcome early institutional resistance to reforms of marketing arrangements. Ugandas recovery is therefore much less impressive than it appears and the sustainability of the now heavily aid-dependent economy must remain in serious doubt.

The political economy of the ‘green revolution’ in Africa

This article sets out to survey the extent to which new agricultural technologies associated with ‘Green Revolution’ (the introduction of high yielding varieties of foodgrains and/or their associated biochemical and mechanical technologies) have been introduced in Africa and attempts a preliminary assessment of their economic and social effects. There is now significant evidence of the introduction and adoption of higher yielding varieties of maize, wheat and rice in Africa, as well as the adoption of other technological innovations in irrigation and mechanisation, albeit with widely varying degrees of success and with many instances of failure. It is noted that there are many standard technical explanations associated with the adoption of new technologies in agriculture, in particular, low levels of credit, poor supply of inputs, inadequate, faulty or no irrigation, poor extension advice, and low producer prices, as well as the poor state of the relationship between agronomic research and farm level inno...

Household Credit and Saving: Does Policy Matter?

This paper surveys the existing literature on the determinants of household savings and credit in developing countries and examines the ways in which macro-level policies might impact on household financial behaviour.

Employment experiences following the stoke‐on‐trent garden festival

During times of high and persistent unemployment within localities, arguments are often advanced in favour of locally based temporary employment schemes implicitly or explicitly attempting to rehabilitate, reintroduce or retrain the unemployed into the labour force. This article reports some results obtained from such a temporary employment scheme. As part of the National Garden Festival that took place at Stoke-on-Trent during the Spring and Summer of 1986, some 1,020 individuals were employed on a temporary employment Community Programme-funded scheme (possibly the largest such scheme to take place under the Community Programme). These temporary posts were offered to the contemporarily registered unemployed, and directed towards the long-term unemployed in the local area. A survey conducted by the authors during 1989 was able to check on the post-Garden Festival employment experiences, and on the effect of having been part of the programme, for 120 of those employed on the scheme. This short paper reports on some of the results of that survey. One of the objectives of the research undertaken is to test the hypothesis that the individuals taking up offers of places on the scheme improved their chances of gaining a permanent niche in an acceptable and productive employment career. If such could be found to be the case, then it would constitute an important justification for the establishment of projects such as the Garden Festival. Such findings would also support continued expenditure on other temporary local employment schemes and on training and placement schemes offering work experience.

Rural Cooperation & the Renewal of Rural Socialism in Africa

This article examines the debates over the role of co-operatives in the building of socialism and more generally their possible role as important organisations for boosting production and creating opportunities for collective decision making in capitalist and transition economies. It does so by putting centre stage the benefits of rural co-operation as well as the historical pitfalls. It stresses the opportunity for cooperatives to boost the democratic imperative for socialist development even at a time of neo-liberal ascendency

Radical political economy and industrialisation in Africa: ROAPE/Third World Network-Africa Connections workshop, held in Accra, Ghana, 13–14 November 2017

This introduction to the Accra workshop on ‘Radical political economy and industrialisation in Africa’, held on 13–14 November 2017, explains the rationale behind the initiative to have three Africa-based ROAPE meetings, why they are important and how they relate to historic socio-economic transformations, the most significant of which remains the great Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, whose centenary month coincided with the Accra workshop. Industrial transformation has been pivotal to such large-scale change. As Ghana’s experience underlines, when industrial change has failed or faltered, societies and polities have paid a steep price, certainly in terms of overall development that transforms the lives of all their peoples and, it seems, in terms of sovereign or autonomous economic development and freedom from foreign domination of their economies. That the workshop also coincided with Ghana’s 60th anniversary of independence made the reflections in Accra doubly important, focused as they were on strategies of industrialisation and Africa’s non-dependent development broadly defined. It was also the appropriate starting point for the trilogy of meetings: the upcoming meetings in Dar es Salaam in April and Johannesburg September 2018 will explore alternative development strategies and the politics and character of resistance and change respectively. ROAPE has historically convened large formal conferences. These included, to name a few, ‘The transition to socialism’, Leeds, 1982; ‘The world recession and food crisis’, Keele, 1984; ‘State, mining and development’, Leeds, 2007. In 2016, however, the journal’s Editorial Working Group (EWG) decided to adapt this approach and to help convene and establish a series of dialogues of enquiry and interrogation of issues over a longer time frame with activist and other non-academic actors in Africa. Our website initiative of www.roape.net has certainly increased accessibility and range of material from Africa with a modest view of trying to be more engaged in Africa. The series of three workshops is intended both to build on this initiative generated by the new website and to extend and deepen ROAPE’s grounding in Africa.

The state: the executive committee of global capitalism?

The articles in this issue are in one way or the other concerned with the state and its function within the economy. ROAPE has since its inception engaged with issues relating to the nature and role of the state in Africa. ROAPE no. 5, published in 1976, focused on the class character of the state, debating which factions of the petty bourgeoisie, or the ‘bureaucratic bourgeoisie’, or a ‘political class’ dominated it (Cliffe, Cohen, and Lawrence 1976). The state itself was variously labelled by the contributors to that issue as ‘relatively autonomous’, ‘overdeveloped’, ‘unsteady’ or in the case of Amin’s Uganda, ‘unhinged’. In the global North, the state was not regarded as Marx and Engels’s executive committee of the bourgeoisie, but rather as relatively independent of class forces, acting as a referee between capital and labour and ensuring some degree of fair distribution of income and effective provision of health, social welfare and education services. This view fitted well with the idea of a capitalism declining under the weight of its own contradictions and socialism being on the agenda for the near future. In Africa, as in most of the global South, the state, was seen as the necessary principal actor in mobilising resources for investment for development. However, over the period in which neoliberalism became the dominant ideology buttressing capital’s political fightback against labour’s increasing share of value and the ensuing falling rate of profit, especially from manufacturing, the order of the day has been to force the state to retreat. Financial liberalisation, the privatisation of state assets, the subcontracting of public functions to private enterprises, curbs on public expenditure, and laws curtailing the rights of trades unions were the building blocks of a process that saw capital recapture a greater share of value. These policies were not only pursued by governments but also became the key parts of the policy instructions to countries of the global South seeking help from the international financial institutions, along with other ‘liberalisation’ measures concerned with exchange rates, capital flows and trade. Yet these recommendations flew in the face of the history of the very successful East Asian economies, especially South Korea, examples of a ‘developmental state’ in which investment was directed by a technocratic elite to specific productive activities as part of a manufacturing industrial and rural development growth strategy involving parallel state investment in education, skills and social welfare. The state under neoliberal capitalism has been undergoing a process of what can best be called colonisation by capital such that the interests of the dominant global capital, both financial and industrial, were effectively aligned with those of the state. Now commonly known as ‘state capture’, this alignment has been enabled by the ‘revolving door’ through which political figures move into business and back into politics and vice versa, by business lobbying, by business funding of political parties at election time, and, as a consequence of privatisations and subcontracting of public services, by an increasingly systemic relationship between capital and the state. There have always been close relations between powerful business lobbies and governments, but nowhere near as blatant and corrupt as they have become. Today, the neoliberal project is under attack as never before, especially in the global South as its failure to achieve real structural change becomes increasingly evident. Even in the global

Remembering Lionel Cliffe

In 1972, Lionel Cliffe floated the idea of a radical Marxist journal on Africa, and in collaboration with other Marxist Africanists, produced the first issue in October 1974. Four decades later, the Review of African Political Economy (ROAPE) publishes this special issue in tribute to Lionel, following his death in October 2013. Most of the articles were first presented as papers at a Colloquium that took place in October 2014, organised by Lionel’s colleagues and friends at the Universities of the Western Cape and of Cape Town and supported by this journal, along with the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation and the University of Leeds. The Colloquium’s title of ‘Land, liberation and democracy in Africa’ reflected the three main areas of Lionel’s lifetime work. In making their presentations, many of the contributors reflected on their own collaborative relationships with Lionel, and on their debts to his encouragement and assistance in their own work. This issue is therefore a tribute both to Lionel’s life and work, which reflects the personal and political influences he had on the authors’ own approaches to analysing African realities and also the respect which the authors had for not only his work, but the man himself. Not all the papers presented could be included in this issue, but it is hoped that we can publish them, together with the papers that are included, in a Festschrift book in the near future. All the authors included in this issue have been associated with Lionel as colleagues and friends or students, or all three, and the geographic coverage of the contributions, as for the Colloquium, broadly matches that of Lionel’s own work. This issue begins with a revised version of my keynote address to the symposium. My own association with Lionel goes back to Tanzania in the late 1960s, as a research student and later as a colleague at the University of Dar es Salaam. Back in the UK we worked together as two of the founder editors of this journal, as collaborators in editing ROAPE issues, and in other work on land and rural development in which he involved me, usually when he had taken on more than he could cope with. Others of his collaborators and friends will recognise this story! The keynote tries to cover both Lionel’s life and his various contributions in the areas of land tenure and rural development, the politics of the liberation movements and the issues surrounding democratic political practice. It notes especially the formative effect on his thinking of his decade in Tanzania during the early, exciting years of independence and Julius Nyerere’s Ujamaa version of socialist development and rural cooperation. This thinking, and especially the importance of understanding rural class formation and its relationship to politics, carried through to work, especially on land, in Zambia, Zimbabwe, the Horn, and, in the later years, South Africa. The importance to Lionel of doing the fieldwork necessary to discover what was happening on the ground grew out of his experience in observing attempts at rural transformation and how Nyerere’s ideas of agricultural cooperation were more likely to be successful if built on existing practices at the grassroots rather than imposed by government and party edict from above. Following the keynote is a short and complementary tribute to Lionel by a former editor, Mike Powell. Powell sees Lionel as an exemplar of the ‘politically engaged intellectual worker’ whose participation in academic enquiry was concerned with how it would contribute to socio-economic progress, and thus determined his methodological approach to research. As he writes, his experience of seeing Lionel in action and interacting with him was not the same as mine, but his recollections of Lionel in meetings

Land, liberation and democracy: the life and work of Lionel Cliffe

ABSTRACT This paper is a revised version, for this issue, of the keynote address to the Colloquium in Cape Town in honour of Lionel Cliffe. It maps out the key features of Lionel’s life and his work starting in Tanzania in 1961, where through his long period of teaching, research and engagement, he formed much of what became his approach to the analysis of African social formations and appropriate policies for development and change. His founding role in this journal, his periods of further work in Zambia, the Horn, and then Southern Africa, are viewed through the three themes of the title. They add up to a major contribution to both theory and practice that has continuing relevance to answering the question he often put: what is to be done?