Center for Social Studies on African, American and Asian Worlds

Drawing on long-term field engagement with microcredit programs in rural northern Tamil Nadu (South India), in this article I examine how this specific form of debt is used, experienced, signified, and interrelated to other forms of debt. I attempt to define debt from an economic and anthropological perspective and to highlight the diversity of values surrounding debt. Debt has a material value and actively contributes to producing social worth, setting debtors and creditors within local systems of social hierarchy, producing or eroding trust, and inserting people into local networks of wealth distribution, extending dependency and patronage ties. Far from being static, the social significance and regulation of debt are continually discussed and negotiated through practices of juggling sources of indebtedness. Yet owing to its multiple forms, debt is not only a powerful force for the reproduction of power relations but also a potential vehicle for the reconfiguration of forms of dependence. Analyzing practices and processes is essential for understanding the reasons for this ambivalence and how it plays out in specific historical contexts for situated subjects.

International audience

BACKGROUND: Global health conceives the notion of partnership between North and South as central to the foundations of this academic field. Indeed, global health aspires to an equal positioning of Northern and Southern actors. While the notion of partnership may be used to position the field of global health morally, this politicization may mask persisting inequalities in global health. In this paper, we reflect on global health partnerships by revisiting the origins of global health and deconstructing the notion of partnership. We also review promising initiatives that may help to rebalance the relationship. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION: Historical accounts are helpful in unpacking the genesis of collaborative research between Northerners and Southerners - particularly those coming from the African continent. In the 1980s, the creation of a scientific hub of working relationships based on material differences created a context that was bound to create tensions between the alleged "partners". Today, partnerships provide assistance to underfunded African research institutions, but this assistance is often tied with hypotheses about program priorities that Northern funders require from their Southern collaborators. African researchers are often unable to lead or contribute substantially to publications for lack of scientific writing skills, for instance. Conversely, academics from African countries report frustrations at not being consulted when the main conceptual issues of a research project are discussed. However, in the name of political correctness, these frustrations are not spoken aloud. Fortunately, initiatives that shift paternalistic programs to formally incorporate a mutually beneficial design at their inception with equal input from all stakeholders are becoming increasingly prominent, especially initiatives involving young researchers. CONCLUSION: Several concrete steps can be undertaken to rethink partnerships. This goes hand in hand with reconceptualizing global health as an academic discipline, mainly through being explicit about past and present inequalities between Northern and Southern universities that this discipline has thus far eluded. Authentic and transformative partnerships are vital to overcome the one-sided nature of many partnerships that can provide a breeding-ground for inequality.

BACKGROUND: The rise on the international scene of advocacy for universal health coverage (UHC) was accompanied by the promotion of a variety of health financing policies. Major donors presented health insurance, user fee exemption, and results-based financing policies as relevant instruments for achieving UHC in Sub-Saharan Africa. The "donor-driven" push for policies aiming at UHC raises concerns about governments' effective buy-in of such policies. Because the latter has implications on the success of such policies, we searched for evidence of government ownership of the policymaking process. METHODS: We conducted a scoping review of the English and French literature from January 2001 to December 2015 on government ownership of decision-making on policies aiming at UHC in Sub-Saharan Africa. Thirty-five (35) results were retrieved. We extracted, synthesized and analyzed data in order to provide insights on ownership at five stages of the policymaking process: emergence, formulation, funding, implementation, and evaluation. RESULTS: The majority of articles (24/35) showed mixed results (i.e. ownership was identified at one or more levels of policymaking process but not all) in terms of government ownership. Authors of only five papers provided evidence of ownership at all reviewed policymaking stages. When results demonstrated some lack of government ownership at any of the five stages, we noticed that donors did not necessarily play a role: other actors' involvement was contributing to undermining government-owned decision-making, such as the private sector. We also found evidence that both government ownership and donors' influence can successfully coexist. DISCUSSION: Future research should look beyond indicators of government ownership, by analyzing historical factors behind the imbalance of power between the different actors during policy negotiations. There is a need to investigate how some national actors become policy champions and thereby influence policy formulation. In order to effectively achieve government ownership of financing policies aiming at UHC, we recommend strengthening the State's coordination and domestic funding mobilization roles, together with securing a higher involvement of governmental (both political and technical) actors by donors.

This special collection examines the claim that microfinance promotes gender equality. The focus is on three areas of the debate: first, the question of how successful microfinance has been in empowering women; second, whether and how negative gender discrimination operates within the sector; third, how power relations within and beyond the household shape the context and outcomes of microfinance initiatives. The papers in this collection demonstrate the divergence of circumstances and emphasise the need to go beyond the past searches for a simple narrative regarding the impact of microfinance. Rather, as the sector evolves and is incorporated into the mainstream financial system, the challenge ahead for researchers is to marshal the evidence on gendered dynamics to ensure that the gains made are built on through deeper understanding of why impact outcomes and processes differ and use this to inform new initiatives to further gender equality.

As the financial crisis reached its climax in September 2008, the most important figure on the planet was Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke. The whole financial system was collapsing, with little to stop it. When a senator asked Bernanke what would happen if the central bank did not carry out its rescue package, he replied, "If we don't do this, we may not have an economy on Monday." What saved finance, and the Western economy, was fiscal and monetary stimulus – an influx of money, created ad hoc. It was a strategy that raised questions about the unexamined nature of money itself, an object suddenly revealed as something other than a neutral signifier of value. Through its grip on finance and the debt system, money confers sovereign power on the economy. If confidence in money is not maintained, crises follow. Looking over the last 5, 000 years, Michel Aglietta explores the development of money and its close connection to sovereign power. This book employs the tools of anthropology, history and political economy in order to analyse how political structures and monetary systems have transformed one another. We can thus grasp the different eras of monetary regulation and the crises capitalism has endured throughout its history.

International audience

Studies focusing on street trade in sub-Saharan Africa place great importance on the continuity with the colonial period and on the neocolonial characteristics of public action. This frame of reference, however pertinent it might be, does not account for all of the dynamics at work. I argue that it can benefit from an additional reading of what I characterise as the neoliberal dynamics also at work in these processes, drawing from governmentality studies and from the theories of ‘the urbanisation of neoliberalism’. The article discusses this hypothesis by examining the evolution of spatial politics on the streets of Nairobi's Central Business District (CBD) in the 2000s, focusing on a specific episode: the displacement of the street traders to an enclosed market located on the outskirts of the CBD. The first section considers the policies of street trade in Nairobi since the colonial period and the changes in their meaning under entrepreneurial rule, questioning the hypothesis of the colonial continuity. I then turn to an analysis of the neoliberal features of current street trade policies. I detail the emergence of the private sector as a major actor in the governance of street trade and its instrumental role in the crafting of a consultative procedure that has helped to reframe the traders' relationship to the state around the ideal of the responsible entrepreneurial citizen and contributed to enrolment as active participants in their own relocation.

BACKGROUND: Performance-based financing (PBF) in low- and middle-income settings has diffused at an unusually rapid pace. While many studies have looked at PBF implementation processes and effects, there is an empirical research gap investigating the ways PBF has diffused. Discursive processes are paramount elements of policy diffusion because they explain the origins of essential elements of the political debate on PBF. Using Bacchi's poststructural approach that emphasises problem representations embedded in the discourse, the present study analyses the construction of the global discourse on PBF. METHODS: A rich corpus of qualitative data (57 in-depth interviews and 10 observation notes) was collected. The transcribed material was coded using QDAMiner©. Codes were assembled to populate analytical categories informed by the framework on diffusion entrepeneurs and Bacchi's poststructural approach. RESULTS: Our results feature problem representations shaped and spread by PBF global diffusion entrepreneurs. We explain how these representations reflected diffusion entrepreneurs' own belief systems and interests, and conflicted with those of non-diffusion entrepreneurs. This research also reveals the specific strategies global diffusion entrepreneurs engaged in to effectively diffuse PBF, through reflecting problem representations based on the discourse on PBF, and inducing certain forms of policy experimentation, emulation, and learning. CONCLUSIONS: Bacchi's poststructural approach is useful to analyse the construction of global health problem representations and the strategies set by global diffusion entrepreneurs to spread these representations. Future research is needed to investigate the belief systems, motivations, resources, and strategies of actors that shape the construction of global health discourses.

This paper focuses on the consequences of the relocation processes of a group of street vendors evicted from downtown Accra in 2010. This eviction is seen as an emblematic operation of the decongestion and beautification of Accra’s city centre. Relocated in a public market, the street vendors set up new kinds of organizations, which were themselves characterised by division and competition for ruling the new allocated space. Based on empirical data collected between 2015 and 2016, this paper shows that vendors rebuilt a new order for themselves in the formal market. The paper stresses the daily control of the relocation space and raises the issue of the social and political transformation of the conditions of street vendors experiencing eviction and relocation. The development of the relocation space shows how power relationships between vendors, city dwellers and urban authorities are being reconfigured.

In the Himalayas, where the increase in temperatures is higher than the world average, climate change is expected to impact water resources in a particularly significant manner. Whereas climate specialists using measurements and simulations play down this statement by underlining uncertainties and differences between the west and east of the range, the media and development agencies tend to paint a uniform picture of a water shortage now and in the future. As part of an interdisciplinary programme (glaciology, hydrology, agronomy, geography) in the Koshi basin in Nepal, we discuss these remarks, while stressing the need to distinguish between situations according to the geographical units and to take into account the cultural, social and economic context when addressing this subject. The investigations that we carried out at four fieldwork sites, which are representative of Nepalese milieus, aimed to find out whether populations noticed any variations in water resources that affected their practices (farming, livestock breeding, tourism) and if they attributed them to climate change. Our results show contrasting situations and changes in practices with no obvious connection to the climate. Among other things, they provide information about snow, a parameter that has been measured incorrectly and underestimated in simulations, and they show that populations are more affected by fluctuations in rainfall patterns than by the melting of glaciers and the snow cover. Lastly, they highlight the geographical units and population groups most likely to be affected by climatic variations.

Abstract. In the Ganges–Brahmaputra–Meghna delta, covering most of Bangladesh, more than 165 million people live in low-lying coasts facing major extreme climatic events, such as cyclones. This article reviews the current scientific literature publications (2007–2020) in order to define vulnerability in the context of coastal Bangladesh facing cyclonic flooding. Based on this review, a new metric, called the socio-spatial vulnerability index (SSVI), is defined as function of both the probability of the cyclonic flood hazard and the sensitivity of delta inhabitants. The main result shows that the districts of Shariatpur, Chandpur and Barisal situated in the tidal floodplain of the Ganges–Brahmaputra–Meghna delta are in the fourth quartile, i.e., highest category, the most vulnerable areas. These districts are very densely populated (from 870 up to 1400 inhabitants per square kilometer) and exposed to inundation hazards with a large number of vulnerability factors. Finally, the delta's mouth was identified as a very vulnerable area to cyclonic flooding as well.

Abstract Combining multivariate and qualitative analyses, this micro‐level study suggests an explanation for the persistence of informal savings in rural south India despite publicly run large‐scale programmes to promote bank savings. Gold, in particular, but also Rotating Saving and Credit Associations (ROSCAs) and private lending, remain the dominant forms of savings. We argue that cultural norms and social institutions, such as social class and caste, shape the nature of savings, and also the propensity and opportunities to save. Gold serves multiple purposes, financial, economic, socio‐cultural and political. Furthermore, we find that the preference of Dalits (the lowest caste) for gold illustrates a relative emancipation, which contrasts with the persistence of caste‐related prohibitions preventing them investing in other assets, such as land.

Over the past 15 years, hundreds of millions of dollars have been invested in reforms founded on performance-based financing (PBF) in low- and middle-income countries. While evidence on its effectiveness and efficiency is still controversial, there appears to be an emerging consensus that equity has not been adequately considered. In this article, we show how PBF-type interventions in Africa have not sufficiently taken into account equity of access to care for the worst-off and their financial protection. In reviewing the history of health reforms in Africa, we show that this omission is nothing new. We suggest that strategic purchasing and PBF-type actions would benefit from being implemented in ways that promote equity and the financial protection of populations in Africa. Without such a reorientation of reforms, it will be impossible to achieve universal health coverage by 2030.

Abstract In October 2019, Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo, and Michael Kremer jointly won the 51st Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel "for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty." But what is the exact scope of their experimental method, known as randomized control trials (RCTs)? Which sorts of questions are RCTs able to address and which do they fail to answer? This book provides answers to these questions, explaining how RCTs work, what they can achieve, why they sometimes fail, how they can be improved and why other methods are both useful and necessary. Chapters contributed by leading specialists in the field present a full and coherent picture of the main strengths and weaknesses of RCTs in the field of development. Looking beyond the epistemological, political, and ethical differences underlying many of the disagreements surrounding RCTs, it explores the implementation of RCTs on the ground, outside of their ideal theoretical conditions and reveals some unsuspected uses and effects, their disruptive potential, but also their political uses. The contributions uncover the implicit worldview that many RCTs draw on and disseminate, and probe the gap between the method's narrow scope and its success, while also proposing improvements and alternatives. This book warns against the potential dangers of their excessive use, arguing that the best use for RCTs is not necessarily that which immediately springs to mind, and offering opportunity to come to an informed and reasoned judgement on RCTs and what they can bring to development.

BACKGROUND: Health in All Policies (HiAP) is an intersectoral approach that facilitates decision-making among policy-makers to maximise positive health impacts of other public policies. Kenya, as a member of WHO, has committed to adopting HiAP, which has been included in the Kenya Health Policy for the period 2014-2030. This study aims to assess the extent to which this commitment is being translated into the process of governmental policy-making and supported by international development partners as well as non-state actors. METHODS: To examine HiAP in Kenya, a qualitative case study was performed, including a review of relevant policy documents. Furthermore, 40 key informants with diverse backgrounds (government, UN agencies, development agencies, civil society) were interviewed. Analysis was carried out using the main dimensions of Kingdon's Multiple Streams Approach (problems, policy, politics). RESULTS: Kenya is facing major health challenges that are influenced by various social determinants, but the implementation of intersectoral action focusing on health promotion is still arbitrary. On the policy level, little is known about HiAP in other government ministries. Many health-related collaborations exist under the concept of intersectoral collaboration, which is prominent in the country's development framework - Vision 2030 - but with no specific reference to HiAP. Under the political stream, the study highlights that political commitment from the highest office would facilitate mainstreaming the HiAP strategy, e.g. by setting up a department under the President's Office. The budgeting process and planning for the Sustainable Development Goals were found to be potential windows of opportunity. CONCLUSION: While HiAP is being adopted as policy in Kenya, it is still perceived by many stakeholders as the business of the health sector, rather than a policy for the whole government and beyond. Kenya's Vision 2030 should use HiAP to foster progress in all sectors with health promotion as an explicit goal.

Altitude lakes are weakly impacted by human activities. This makes them choice ecosystems to understand how biological communities are impacted by natural factors. This question was addressed to littoral benthic diatoms, a largely used ecological indicator. We wanted to know if benthic diatoms in lakes are more impacted by local varying factors (altitude, lake depth...) or regional varying factors (geology). The study area takes place in the Northern French Alps. Littoral benthic diatoms of 63 natural lakes situated between 1350 and 2700 m · a.s.l. were sampled. Two categories of communities were observed: one of deep and lower altitude lakes and one of higher altitude and shallower lakes. In each category, communities were characterized and were corresponding to particular lake types: lakes dominated by a particular geology, lakes with a water level fluctuation, turbid lakes,... Communities did not show a spatial structure. We observed that local factors were more important than regional factors. Indeed, the study area displayed a mixed geology even at a local level. On another hand, altitude a local varying factor determines freezing period a determining item of high-altitude lake functioning.

Ce numéro de l’Espace politique s’intéresse aux déplacements forcés qui prennent place dans le cadre de transformations urbaines, dans un contexte « hors crise » au sens géopolitique. Cette approche met en lumière la généralisation actuelle de mobilités sous contrainte à l’échelle intra-urbaine, au cours de déguerpissements conduits au nom de la rénovation urbaine et dans le cadre de projets de villes compétitives et néolibérales. Malgré les alternatives proposées et les recommandations formulées par les instances internationales, les opérations de mobilités forcées intra-urbaines sont utilisées pour « nettoyer » les villes du Sud de citadins considérées « indésirables », en reléguant ces derniers aux marges de la cité. À ce titre, les déguerpissements révèlent des rapports de forces inégaux tout en participant à la coproduction de nouveaux référents constitutifs du droit à être en ville. Cet article introductif souhaite présenter les enjeux politiques et sociaux de la mobilité sous contrainte en ville en portant une attention particulière aux conflits et contestations qui entourent les opérations pour cerner les registres de justification qui émanent des acteurs en présence.

Poor women borrow from multiple sources. This study examines whether the source of debt matters for women’s role in household financial decisions. Drawing on a household survey from rural Tamil Nadu, we categorise women’s loans along the lines of accessibility and formality into ‘planned loans’ and ‘instant loans’. We find that ‘instant loans’ support women’s bargaining power in various types of household financial decisions, whereas ‘planned loans’ have no impact. This surprising result is better understood when the nature of ‘instant loans’ is examined – these are frequently usurious, involve coercive enforcement methods and are considered socially debasing. Hence women who use them perform a convenient role for their households and in return gain some negotiating power.

In recent years, a number of Islamic banks have been created to cater to the growing demand, driven by globalization and the vast wealth of some Muslim states in the Middle East and Southeast Asia, and Islamic finance has moved from a niche position to become a mainstream component of the global banking system. Islamic banking refers to a financial system which is consistent with principles of Islamic law (or sharia) and guided by Islamic ethics. A large amount of research has been undertaken into this subject. This paper presents islamic finances role in the new world order.