Mining and Social Movements: Struggles Over Livelihood and Rural Territorial Development in the Andes

Social movements have been viewed as vehicles through which the concerns of poor and marginalized groups are given greater visibility within civil society, lauded for being the means to achieve local empowerment and citizen activism, and seen as essential in holding the state to account and constituting a grassroots mechanism for promoting democracy. However, within development studies little attention has been paid to understanding how social movements can affect trajectories of development and rural livelihood in given spaces, and how these effects are related to movements’ internal dynamics and their interaction with the broader environment within which they operate. This paper addresses this theme for the case of social movements protesting contemporary forms of mining investment in Latin America. On the basis of cases from Peru and Ecuador, the paper argues that the presence and nature of social movements has significant influences both on forms taken by extractive industries (in this case mining) and on the effects of this extraction on rural livelihoods. In this sense, one can usefully talk about rural development as being co-produced by movements, mining companies, and other actors, in particular the state. The terms of this co-production, however, vary greatly among different locations, reflecting the distinct geographies of social mobilization and of mineral investment, as well as the varying power relationships among the different actors involved.     

The Money Trail: Ranking Donor Transparency in Foreign Aid

Transparency of aid activity is being recognized to be one of the key areas whereby aid effectiveness can be improved. In this paper, we propose an index to measure and rank donors on the transparency of their aid activities. The Transparency Index rates 31 bilateral and multilateral donor agencies on six measures of transparency. We find that being a member of the IATI is a powerful signal of a donor being more transparent across most other dimensions as well. We find no relationship between transparency and donor aid volumes. Overall IDA and Australia are identified as the most transparent donors, while Korea and IDB Special Fund are the least transparent.     

On Taxation,Political Accountability and Foreign Aid: Empirics to a Celebrated Literature

The Eubank findings on taxation, political accountability and foreign aid have had an important influence on academic and policymaking debates. Eubank has warned that his findings should not be generalised across Africa until they are backed by robust empirical evidence. This paper puts some empirical structure to the celebrated literature. The empirical evidence which is based on data from 53 African countries for the period 1996‐2010 broadly confirms the Somaliland‐based Eubank hypothesis that in the absence of foreign aid, the dependence of government on local tax revenues provides the leverage for better political governance.     

25 Years of Aid Allocation Practice: Whither Selectivity?

The 4P framework (Poverty, Population, Policy, and Proximity) is introduced as a way of understanding a donor’s aid allocation. We use the two-part model and examine the period 1982–2006. The results indicate that recent conclusions of increasing selectivity are misplaced for the seven major donors analyzed, who together represent the majority of development aid. Indeed, the effect of each of the commonly mentioned time-trends (selectivity, the end of the Cold War, and the commencement of the Global War on Terror) is much smaller than the role of donor heterogeneity, which appears sizeable and entrenched.