COVID-19 and the case for global development.

COVID-19 accentuates the case for a global, rather than an international, development paradigm. The novel disease is a prime example of a development challenge for all countries, through the failure of public health as a global public good. The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the falsity of any assumption that the global North has all the expertise and solutions to tackle global challenges, and has further highlighted the need for multi-directional learning and transformation in all countries towards a more sustainable and equitable world. We illustrate our argument for a global development paradigm by examining the implications of the COVID-19 pandemic across four themes or 'vignettes': global value chains, digitalisation, debt, and climate change. We conclude that development studies must adapt to a very different context from when the field emerged in the mid-20th century.

The government of chronic poverty: from exclusion to citizenship?

Development trustees have increasingly sought to challenge chronic poverty by promoting citizenship amongst poor people, a move that frames citizenship formation as central to overcoming the exclusions and inequalities associated with uneven development. For sceptics, this move within inclusive neoliberalism is inevitably depoliticising and disempowering, and our cases do suggest that citizenship-based strategies rarely alter the underlying basis of poverty. However, our evidence also offers some support to those optimists who suggest that progressive moves towards poverty reduction and citizenship formation have become more rather than less likely at the current juncture. The promotion of citizenship emerges here as a significant but incomplete effort to challenge poverty that persists over time.

Governing chronic poverty under inclusive liberalism: the case of the Northern Uganda Social Action Fund.

The paradigm of 'inclusive neoliberalism' that currently characterises international development places a particular emphasis on community-based responses to the often structural problems of poverty and exclusion. Such approaches have become increasingly controversial: celebrated by optimists as the most empowering way forward for marginal citizens on the one hand, and derided as an abrogation of responsibility by development trustees by sceptics on the other. Uganda provides a particularly interesting context to explore these debates, not least because it has become a standard bearer for inclusive neoliberalism at the same time that regional inequalities within it have become increasingly apparent. Our investigation of the flagship response to deep impoverishment in its northern region, the World Bank-funded Northern Uganda Social Action Fund, offers greater support to the sceptics, not least because of the ways in which the more pernicious tendencies within inclusive neoliberalism have converged with the contemporary politics of development in Uganda.