Toby Carroll

Working On, Through and Around the State: The Deep Marketisation of Development in the Asia-Pacific

Abstract This article describes an important new push by international financial institutions towards broadening and deepening capitalist social relations in the underdeveloped world in ways well beyond Washington Consensus structural adjustment or even post-Washington Consensus forms of institutionally-oriented “participatory neo-liberalism.” Described here as the “deep marketisation of development” (or simply “deep marketisation”), this process is attracting increasing resources that are formally allocated directly to private actors around states, while also demanding and promoting shifts in state form and function that relate to cultivating “enabling environments” for capital and facilitating “access to finance.” The article begins by conceptualising deep marketisation and placing it in historical and political context. The second section presents examples of deep marketisation in action in the work of the World Banks private sector arm, the International Finance Corporation, in the Asia-Pacific. The article concludes by highlighting some serious concerns with the deep marketisation agenda.

Introduction: Neo-liberal Development Policy in Asia beyond the Post-Washington Consensus

Abstract This paper introduces a special issue on contemporary neo-liberal development policy in Asia. The paper contextualises the current state of neo-liberal development policy as having moved beyond two earlier phases: one that intended to limit the state and unleash market forces and, subsequently, one that was oriented towards remaking the state in an idealised liberal market image. While building off its forebears, contemporary neo-liberal development policy – what we describe as “market building” – displays a new array of foci and modalities that not only continue to target the state as a site of reform (though often in novel ways) but which also regularly work around the state to directly cultivate private sector activity. Moreover, a product of its times, market building incorporates an increased emphasis upon risk and risk management, with risk to programme implementation and capital now central concerns within the neo-liberal agenda. However, just as with earlier phases of neo-liberalism, the market-building agenda is both subjected to and produces particular patterns of politics. As the papers in this special issue show, perhaps nowhere is this reality more interesting than in Asia, where new and emboldened patterns of accumulation are evident and, where too, nation-states are no longer as materially dependent on organisations such as the World Bank as before.

Good governance and security: The limits of Australia's new aid programme

Abstract This article analyses the Australian Agency for International Developments (AusAID) approach to overseas development assistance (ODA) through an examination of AusAIDs recent White Paper. The White Paper focuses on the nexus between poverty reduction and security in the Asia-Pacific region. We argue that the Papers emphasis upon good governance as the key to poverty reduction and security is fundamentally flawed. This stems from the particular ideological and political conditions in which the Paper materialised. In focusing on good governance and security the Paper neglects more fundamental poverty reduction issues, while promoting policies that are difficult to implement and, when implemented, have highly problematic outcomes. This article examines the Australian-led intervention in Solomon Islands and the Australian aid programme in Indonesia as examples for the shortcomings of the approach articulated in the White Paper. We conclude by examining alternative development policies that move beyond the neo-liberal orthodoxy endorsed by AusAID.

The New Politics of Development: Citizens, Civil Society, and the Evolution of Neoliberal Development Policy

Abstract In this article, we explore the evolution of neoliberal development theory and practice, its manifestations and impact on the political economy of the state, domestic classes, and the material conditions of populations in emerging economies. Specifically, the article focuses on the modes of resistance to the rollout of neoliberal development practice by citizens, civil society, and NGOs, and, in turn, the responses of international financial institutions such as the World Bank—a process that we argue has forced the reinvention and transformation of neoliberal development policy. Furthermore, we attempt to situate the evolution of neoliberal development policy and the changing modes of resistance to it within a theoretical framework that explains emergent class and material interests in the context of the increasing functionality of pro-market agendas to modes of accumulation that benefit discrete elite and class interests but which also generate substantial and ongoing contradictions.

Pipelines, crisis and capital: understanding the contested regionalism of Southeast Asia

Abstract Via an analysis of the trans-ASEAN gas pipeline project (TAGP), in this article we argue for a reconceptualising of the regional dynamics of Southeast Asia and the forces shaping them. For this task, we propose an analytical framework based upon social conflict theory that delves within and beyond the state, and which places emphasis upon the roles of both material and ideological factors operating across time in the reordering of particular geographical spaces. The framework reveals that the tensions acting within and upon ASEAN and the TAGP influence regionalism in such a way that the gas pipeline project – much like other ‘regional’ projects – is unlikely to ever come close to fulfilling its brief of enhancing regional security and cohesion. What is more probable is that the projects form will continue to be conditioned by entrenched politico-economic realities and the influence of dominant ideologies – factors which have the capacity to exacerbate existing regional animosities and disparities.

“Access to Finance” and the Death of Development in the Asia-Pacific

Abstract This article details and dissects the promotion by the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation of financial intermediaries – entities such as wholesale and retail micro-finance organisations and deposit-taking banks – as a key component within the push to establish and extend capitalist social relations in the underdeveloped world. It argues that the approach must be seen as emanating not out of some (re)discovery of key methods that foster the substantive and sustainable improvement of material conditions but rather the material and ideological interests attending late capitalism. Focusing on financial intermediary support in the Asia-Pacific, this article begins by outlining the new politics of development driving financial intermediary support and the broader agenda to which it belongs. The second section of the article details some “working examples” of the International Finance Corporation’s support of financial intermediaries in the Asia-Pacific, fleshing out the precise form that financial intermediary support takes. The article concludes by highlighting how the approach is further consolidating the death of development as a modern nationalist/internationalist project and deepening the distribution of late capitalism’s contradictions.

Market building in Asia: standards setting, policy diffusion, and the globalization of market norms

This special issue of the Journal of Asian Public Policy brings together five contributions that arose from a series of workshops held at the National University of Singapore in 2012. The workshops were part of a larger project titled ‘New Approaches to Building Markets in Asia.’ The project brought together a series of scholars to examine the ongoing efforts by states, private and non-governmental entities engaged in development work but focused on and mediated increasingly through market-building activities – that is activities related to establishing liberal market norms. For participants in the project, the starting point for engagement with the topic emerged from a collective recognition that development in Asia is no longer a state-directed effort; that the contours of Asia’s development are increasingly driven by market rationality, and that the historical images of East Asia’s ‘developmental state’ were no longer sufficient to capture the contemporary socio-political and economic landscape of Asia’s most recent wave of developmentalism (Cammack 2012). Indeed, for most participants in the project there was a collective recognition that the ‘developmental state’ was all but dead and increasingly replaced by a reliance on markets as a manifest form of development in and of itself – the development of market societies (see Stubbs 2009, Hayashi 2010, Carroll 2012). These observations are in stark contrast with most literatures and ideational images of the state in Asia; literatures that place the state front and centre as the major explanatory factor responsible for the region’s miracle economies. Indeed, they conflict with the historical role of authoritarianism in Asia where states were politically bound by ‘command and control’ governance modalities dominated by coalitions of powerful political elites, large-scale domestic capital (Chaebol capital networks in South Korea, for example, or networks of elite family capital in countries such as Indonesia, Singapore, and Thailand), and in some instances the military. For much of their recent history, Taiwan, South Korea, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand have been characterized by these institutional contexts, where political dissent was quashed, civil society demobilized, organized labour disciplined, and the state all powerful in the management of economic activity. While, of course, Japan has been an exception in terms of democratic governance, equally

Contested Regionalism in Southeast Asia: The Politics of the Trans-Asean Gas Pipeline Project

This article analyses the trans-ASEAN gas pipeline project (TAGP) as a way to reconceptualise regional dynamics in Southeast Asia and the forces shaping them – what we call ‘contested regionalism’. For this task, we propose an analytical framework that delves within and beyond the state, and which places emphasis upon the role of material and ideological factors operating at particular moments in time. The framework reveals that the tensions acting within and upon ASEAN and the TAGP shape the regional approach to energy governance in such a way that the gas pipeline project – much like other ‘regional’ projects – is unlikely to ever come close to fulfilling its brief or that of its masters. What is more probable is that the project’s form will continue to be conditioned by entrenched politico-economic realities and the influence of dominant ideologies – especially during times of crisis – that have the capacity to exacerbate existing regional animosities and disparities.

The politics of marketising Asia

1. Theorising Asias Marketisation under Late Capitalism: Risk, Capital and the New Politics of Development Toby Carroll and Darryl S.L. Jarvis 2. Risk, Social Protection and the World Market Paul Cammack 3. The International Finance Corporations Transformation of Development in the Asia Pacific: Working on, Through and Around the State Toby Carroll 4. Regulatory States in the South: Can they Exist and do we want them? The case of the Indonesian Power Sector Darryl S.L. Jarvis 5. State-Building and Primitive Accumulation in the Solomon Islands: The Unintended Consequences of Risk Mitigation at the Frontiers of Global Capitalist Expansion Shahar Hameiri 6. Into the Deep: The World Bank Group and Mining Regimes in Laos, The Philippines and Papua New Guinea Pascale Hatcher 7. Building Neoliberal Markets and other Agendas: The Politics of Risk Management at AusAID Thomas Wanner and Andrew Rosser 8. Market building and risk under a Regime in Transition: The Asian Development Bank in Myanmar (Burma) Adam Simpson 9. Reforming the Chinese Railway Sector: The Role and Limits of International Governmental Organisations in Building Markets Marc Laperrouza 10. Institutional Design and Quality as Determinants of Market Building: The Markets for Corporate Control in Asia Alberto Asquer 11. The Market Turn in Jakartas Water Supply: Vested Interests and Challenges of Realising the Regulatory State Leong Ching 12. Problems and Obstacles to Market Building in the Indian Energy Sector Pramod Kumar Yadav

Introduction: Financialisation and Development in Asia under Late Capitalism

Abstract Multilateral development agencies have increasingly focused attention on underdeveloped countries in Asia as potential new sites for financial capital. Often referred to as “emerging markets”, these economies are seen as ripe for private sector investment and, at the same time, in need of foreign capital to support rapid industrialisation, modernisation and poverty reduction. For development agencies, this confluence of interests suggests a means for quickly closing the “development gap”, primarily through mobilising techno-managerial modalities designed to reduce barriers to capital entry and other institutional inefficiencies seen as inimical to investment. Thus development agencies now encourage the construction of “enabling environments” to support “market driven development” through processes of “financialisation”. Development, in this sense, is no longer state-led or state-centred, but rather financially driven and privately procured. As we highlight in this special issue, however, financialised modes of development are highly contested and problematic. Indeed, the diffusion into the underdeveloped world of essentially developed world financialisation agendas that seek to instil a broad-based market rationalism that downloads new costs and risks to populations is of significant concern. This Introduction sets in context and introduces a much needed set of articles that bring clarity to financialisation in developing Asia and its implications for development as a process of substantively improving material conditions.