GEOG 102 Lecture Notes - Lecture 23: Dependency Theory, Why Nations Fail, Structural Adjustment
0 views5 pages
Geog 102
Cultural Geog
Spring 2017
Development Theories
Third World Perspectives on development
○ Dependency theory
■ Robbing third world countries of autonomy
■ Drain Theory: robbed of autonomy in a way which is not good for them,
negative consequences
■ Dependence is created
■ Disadvantage is development possibilities of these countries
■ From first world: development era was all about catching up, implicit idea is
that development is mutually beneficial
■ Third world perspective: linkages to these countries are a disadvantage,
undermining development possibilities
○ Global dependence (Amin)
■ Once you’re in the third world, you’re stuck because you’re systematically
disadvantaged
○ World system theory
■ There will always be some countries that will be disadvantaged but that
doesn’t mean some countries futures are fixed
■ example: china being more core, influential shaper
Race and Dependency
○ W.E.B. Dubois
○ Founders of NAACP
○ After second world war, moved from US to Ghana
○ See quote: boycott exports from exploiting world, live simply
○ Argument that race was an important part of this process
○ Many of third world countries occupied by white, racial inadequacy always piled on
top of political and economic forces at play
Women and Development
○ Chandra Mohanty
○ From prespective of those propagating development: emancipate women
○ If they make women full equal political and economic members then that ought to be
able to spread benefits of development more broadly in that society
○ Chandra Mohanty: when you listen to what women in the west had to say about what
women in the third world countries ought to be doing was what worked from them in
the United States; a sense of paternalism; geography matches= what works in north
America isn’t necessarily going to work; create space for women of third world to
articulate their own agendas
○ June Nash: anthropologist, studied women in assembly plants in Mexican border;
can’t just fix problem at home, part of disadvantage is global processes shaping by
the political and economic disadvantage of being working class and being located in
the geographic location
○ Maria Mies: not an issue of global capitalism, issue how women have been
disadvantaged across systems, gender marginalization that predates colonialism,
global capitalism
○ It’s not enough to provide opportunities in labor market because there are deeper
structural powers that simply cannot be addressed by local integration
○ Development Alternatives for Women in the New Era: DAWN
○ Association of African Women for Research and Development
Gender and Development
○ Naila Kabeer: women in third world have a better sense of what is good for them than
we do, has to be grassroots
○ Only by paying more attention to knowledge and experiences of people living at the
bottom of the development ladder
Globalization and Development
○ Globalization has taken on a particular meaning in the last 40 years, mid 1970s
○ Particular form that globalization has taken, recent manifestation of globalization
which has taken much longer forms
○ First World Perspectives
○ From “Development” to “Globalization”
○ 1944: Bretton Woods
■ meeting
■ made Truman’s speech possible
■ various countries on US/UK side on second world war
■ design how the world would look after the end of the second world war
■ US had opportunity to push European powers to give up colonies, colonies
would become independent colonies
■ These countries were deeply in debt to US (the ones that had colonies);
Europeans reluctant to do this
■ Did start to change discourse from world living in European clusters into a
world in which independence was going to come sooner or later
■ Wanted Americans to be able to sell commodities to all of these former
colonies
■ International monetary fund was agreed on here
■ World bank also agreed on: originally International Bank for Reconstruction
and Development
● Original role to lend money to Western European countries to help
rebuild after second world war
● Later took on global mandate for lending money for development
project
■ Various countries promised sums of money
■ Amount of money you gave to institutions related to your political power
■ Also an attempt to construct international trade organization
● To regulate free world trade
● Not created, refused by US senate
● 1996 world trade organization created