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This chapter takes a detailed look at the developmental state model and its manifestations in regional development policies. Developmentalist ideas have been waxing and waning across periods of economic boom and bust. Recent years, however, have seen a renaissance of East Asian developmentalism – reminiscent of its heyday in the 1980s and 1990s and most notably driven by the region’s continued economic strength.
The endorsement of state-led modernization, preferential policies, and close state-business relations – which underpinned Japan/Korea/China’s transformations – has also left its mark on current ODA practices in the region and beyond. East Asia’s state agencies are pushing ahead with colossal infrastructure programs – in close cooperation with commercial actors – that advance broad development goals and, at the same time, promotes national interests. Compared to Western OECD peers, Asian development cooperation tends to focus less on neoliberal and democratic principles and, instead, places greater emphasis on state-corporatist and meritocratic ideas.
To what extent East Asia’s infrastructural megaprojects and connectivity corridors across Eurasia and Africa (BRI, EAI, and Partnership for Quality Infrastructure) will generate political momentum for an emergent developmental consensus remains uncertain. The jury is still out when it comes to whether and how Asian developmentalism will take center stage in global development debates. What is clear, however, is that the changing zeitgeist of a less Anglo/Euro-centric world bodes well for more heterodox and diverse ideas on development cooperation.
Bittamo
(2021)
The Ethiopian state increasingly seeks to enlist putative ‘traditional authorities’ to lend legitimacy to policies and interventions in the southwestern peripheries of the country. The underlying assumptions do not accord with the perceptions of the local populations: among the Kara in the South Omo region, legitimacy is predicated upon duty and accountability, and higher degrees of public legitimacy are disconnected from authority and direct command over other people’s conduct. The office of the Kara bitti, the highest spiritual leader, thus proves intractable to such attempts at enlistment and has been little affected by the radical transformation of the Kara’s lives through increasing integration into the Ethiopian state over recent decades. But even as the office has changed little, the lives of those expected to assume the role of bitti has, and the duties of a bitti strongly constrain the office holder and limit their personal ambitions and participation in politics at the local, regional and national level.
Shared Field, Divided Field
(2020)