SOCI 301 Final Flashcards
Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)
Dedicated to addressing challenges of the new century, including:
- Persistent poverty
- Pandemic disease
- Environmental damage
- Gender inequality
- Southern debt
Two organizations playing central role in global governance
The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF)
What are HIPCs?
Heavily Indebted Poor Countries, initiative created in 1996 to provide assistance to countries with unsustainable debt burdens
Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs)
Compiled as performances in order to meet the charge that imposing conditions is undemocratic, IFIs insist that other stakeholders vs. just the government are involved in writing the plans
**form of crisis management
TPNs
Transnational Policy Networks
What is the central impact of the neoliberal globalization project?
Poverty governance enhances institutional legitimacy at the same time as it subjects societies to market calculus and erodes social contract
Outsourcing
Relocates production of goods and services as a cost-reduction strategy and a means to increase operational flexibility of an organization
Why has outsourcing become significant?
- Hypermobility of capital in an era of deregulation and expanding access to cheap and flexible labour
- The privatization of states
Why do governments choose to outsource?
To decrease public expenditure and/or to privilege the private sector
3 characteristic effects brought about by neoliberal policies:
- Access to health care for the poor shrinks while investments grow
- Outsourcing and cutbacks in the public sector budgets decrease preventative programs – allow banished diseases to resurface
- After profiting through privatization of public health care systems, the managed care organizations and insurance companies move on when profit margins falls
Global division of labour
The subdivision of forms of labour in manufacturing perishable agricultural commodities, high and low-end services through the outsourcing of jobs
What is the “great-turnaround”?
The reversal of patterns of migration:
- Southern European states formerly supplied migrant labour to industrialized centres of northern Europe BUT now southern-Europe is the destination for inflows of North African migrant labour
Why is migrant labour precarious?
- Issues of documentation
- Exploitation
- Racism
- Sexism
- Employment uncertainty
- Separation from family and community
Peter Evans: “Reverse Whipsawing”
Solidarity networks allow stronger labour organizations to champion the rights of weaker ones as pushback against exploitative firms
Transnational Information Exchange (TIE)
Forged networks of labour organizations across the world based on the global commodity chain
Fair Trade
A method of transcending abuses in the free trade system and rendering more visible the conditions of production of globally traded commodities to establish just prices, environmentally-sound practices, healthy consumption and a direct understanding between producers and consumers of their respective needs
Producing fairtrade communities must:
- Undergo certification
- Require democratic representation of producers and/or workers
- Have labour conditions upholding basic ILO conventions regarding labour rights
Forms of displacement:
- SAP-mandated dismantling of ISI sectors and the privatization of public enterprise
- Forced resettlement by infrastructural projects
- Civil wars
- Destabilization of rural communities by market forces
Displacement of love
Feminization and export of care workers from the South to care for children of women in the North
Consequences of the displacement of love
Migrant women work as global nannies at a considerable emotional cost to their own children who are in turn cared for by relatives or teenage girls at home
Informalization
People working on the fringes of the market, performing casual and unregulated labour, working on cooperative arrangements, street vending, or pursuing what are deemed illegal economic activities
Formal vs. informal economy
Formal economy: legal/moral connotations
Informal economy: illegal/immoral connotations
2 related domains of the informal economy:
- Forms of social reproduction complementing production
2. Informal “productive” activity off the books
The Fast-World Elite
Professional and managerial classes who participate in global circuits that link enclaves of producers/consumers across state borders
2 related aspects of the process of informalization:
- The casualization of labour via corporate restructuring
2. New forms of individual and collective livelihood strategies
Recolonization
Restoring a colonial divison of labour at the expense of coherent national institutions and societies
Land-grabbing
Investors and companies and states acquire land for profit and/or access to food and fuel supplies
Countermovements
Social movements that challenge/resist the dominant paradigm
Swidden Agriculture
Land clearing for farming, followed by periods of fallow and renewal of grassland or forest land
Environmentalism
Challenges the artificial separation of the social from the natural world in the development enterprise
Ecological accounting
Approximate the real social and ecological costs of repairing/restoring a natural world subjected to industrial agriculture, mining, and the absorption of waste and greenhouse gases
2 forms of environmentalism:
- Active resistance seeking to curb the invasion of habitats by states and markets
- Adaptation – renewing habitats in the face of environmental deterioration
Challenges for environmental movements in the south:
- To create alternatives to the capital- and energy-intensive forms of specialized agriculture and agroforestry appropriate to the goal of restoring and sustaining local ecologies
- To build alternative models to the bureaucratic, topdown development plans that have typically subordinated natural resource use to commercial vs. sustainable social ends
3 feminist threads that weave an alternative development agenda:
- Assigning equal value to productive work
- Valuing the work of social reproduction
- Reorienting social values from economism to humanism
Women in Development (WID)
Focus on extending existing development programs to include women - especially regarding equality in employment and education, political participation, and health services
**Advocates what development needs from women
Gender and Development (GAD)
Goal includes involving women as decision-makers concerned with empowering all women in their various life-situations and championing opposition to all forms of gender discrimination, refocuses on the different development priorities and needs of women and men without segregating gender issues into different projects
Enabling equal education for women may:
- Reduce patriarchal practices of marrying daughters off once they reach puberty
- Associating status with large families
- Selling farm girls to contractors for factory work or the sex trade
Food sovereignty
Community self-determination in producing and consuming food equitably and sustainably
Precariat
The tenuous condition of a class of unemployed or casually employed workers, generated by rural dispossession, structural unemployment and outsourcing of jobs
3 tasks of microfinance:
- Providing credit to the poor as an entrepreneurial “leg up”
- Deepening market relations
- Enlarging financial opportunity in the form of legitimacy repair
