Ingrid's website
This new article in World Development interrogates how Eurocentrism is reflected in the Economics discipline’s approach to mining as well as in global mining policy. It then puts forward an alternative, South-centered understanding of mining, which is explored through a historical view of the Obuasi mine, which has been mined by AngloGold Ashanti in Ghana since 1897. The article is part of a special issue I’m co-editing on Decolonising Economic Development with Surbhi Kesar.
At a time when ‘decolonisation’ has become a buzzword in the international development industry and beyond, it is an opportune moment to assess what a decolonisation framework for the international non-governmental organisation (INGO) sector would entail. In this new report, Surbhi Kesar and I discuss what Eurocentrism is and how it can help us critically interrogate the role of INGOs in the development industry. You can read some reporting about our research here:
I wrote a new article with Florence Dafe, Annina Kaltenbrunner and Iván Weigandi in Development and Change‘s Forum issue on “Negotiating the Current Debt Crisis in Developing Countries”. Our article was on local currency bond markets in Africa and we drew on both quantitative data and interviews conducted. Here is the abstract:
This article examines the development and implications of local currency bond markets (LCBMs) in African countries in the context of international financial subordination (IFS). Despite the promotion of LCBMs as a solution to debt vulnerability, there is a dearth of research that offers a systematic empirical examination of their actual benefits along with conceptual explanations as to when and why such benefits may or may not materialize. This is especially true for countries at the bottom of the global economic hierarchy. To explore how the subordination in global production and financial systems shapes LCBM development, the article offers an empirical analysis of selected African countries that combines interviews with policy makers, officials and experts with statistical data. The findings suggest that while LCBMs offer some benefits, such as mitigating risks associated with foreign currency debt, their potential is limited by the structural processes created by IFS, such as their dependence on the global financial cycle, the relatively higher costs of this debt and the sustained constraint on macroeconomic policy making. However, there are also domestic factors which shape how these structural constraints are mediated in the context of LCBM development — in particular, historically developed financial structures of developing countries, the political economy of the state and the structure of production. This study thus contributes to the debate about the developmental benefits of domestic debt market development and the emerging research agenda on IFS.
Read the full article here.
I recently published a new open access article – The Hierarchies of Global Finance: An Anti-Disciplinary Research Agenda – with my friend and collaborator Maria Dyveke Styve, in Review of Political Economy.
Here is the abstract:
This article critically assesses the economics discipline’s capacity to capture the structural features and political economy implications of contemporary financial processes in the global South, with a particular focus on South Africa. Delving into the complexities of financial processes in South Africa, the article proposes an alternative, anti-disciplinary framework for understanding drivers and impacts of financial processes. We show how such an approach cannot simply be about adding social or political perspectives to mainstream economics, but rather about interrogating how we think about economic systems themselves, drawing on a variety of theoretical and disciplinary insights. This is about taking an open and holistic approach that centers history, power, structures, and social relations. With an issue such as finance, critical political economy approaches from a variety of disciplines allow us to see that finance cannot be separated from the wider economy or from the social relations it forms part of today and historically. This becomes particularly clear when considering how racial, gender and class relations both impact and are impacted by financial processes in South Africa. We conclude with recommendations for studies of changing financial processes globally and in the global South.
I recently contributed to a very interesting symposium curated by Stefan Ouma and Christine Vogt-William: Reconfiguring African Studies, reconfiguring economics: centring intersectionality and social stratification in the journal Critical African Studies. It centered on a discussion of Franklin Obeng-Odoom’s book Property, Institutions and Social Stratification in Africa and includes contributions by Obeng-Odoom himself, the curators, Abena D. Oduro, Tanita J. Lewis, Lebohang Liepollo Pheko, Sara Stevano, and myself.
I had the pleasure of contributing a chapter to this exciting book edited by Cristina Fróes de Borja Reis and Tatiana Berringer on South-North Dialogues on Democracy, Development and Sustainability. Each chapter consists of a dialogue between one scholar based in the global South and one in the global North. My conversation was with Cristina Reis on dependency, GVCs and TNCs.
Check out the book here.
I was recently on a plenary sponsored by the Development Studies Association (DSA) in Manchester with Kamna Patel, Sara Stevano and Indrajit Roy, where we were each asked to answer the above question. Along with the organizers, Pritish Behuria and Tom Goodfellow, we have now published the plenary discussion on the DSA blog:
I really enjoyed reading & reviewing Margarita Fajardo’s The world that Latin America created with Felipe Antunes de Oliveira. We argue the book makes a major contribution by taking Latin American development debates seriously, but leaves key political questions unresolved. Read the full review here.
Along with Erik Reinert, I’ve published A Modern Guide to Uneven Economic Development. In contrast to mainstream approaches to economics, this Guide addresses the complex reality of economic development as an inherently uneven process, exploring the ways of theorizing and empirically exploring the mechanisms with which the unevenness manifests itself. It covers a wide array of issues influencing wealth and poverty, technological innovation, ecology and sustainability, financialization, population, gender, and geography, considering the dynamics of cumulative causations created by the interplay between these factors.
I have a new article in the Review of International Political Economy with the fabulous co-author team of Ilias Alami, Carolina Alves, Bruno Bonizzi, Annina Kaltenbrunner, Kai Koddenbrock and Jeff Powell. The article (open access) outlines a research agenda for understanding international financial subordination by drawing on the heterodox traditions of dependency theory, Marxism, and Post-Keynesianism.
Ingrid's website 