{"title":"Greening the Gulf? Renewables, Fossil Capitalism and the ‘East–East’ Axis of World Energy","authors":"Adam Hanieh","doi":"10.1111/dech.70006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/dech.70006","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article examines the place of the Gulf Cooperation Council states in the global energy transition, with a focus on the recent and rapid expansion of renewable energy in the region. It argues that much like at the global scale, the energy transition in the Gulf is an additive process, one that superimposes renewable energy on growing fossil fuel production. Far from being in tension with hydrocarbons, renewables in the Gulf are explicitly conceived as part of a strategy to sustain and enhance the production (and export) of oil and gas. The article situates these dynamics within broader shifts currently underway in the world system, notably the rise of major centres of capital accumulation in China and East Asia alongside a relative decline of American global power. A key feature of this transformation is the emergence of an ‘East–East’ energy circuit linking the Middle East and China/East Asia, which now encompasses fossil fuels, petrochemicals and (increasingly) renewables. This axis is forging new interdependencies between Middle East and East Asian capitalisms, reflected not only in trade and investment flows but also in ownership patterns across the energy sector. This analysis offers a critical lens on the political economy of the so-called ‘green transition’, highlighting the strategic centrality of the Gulf in determining future pathways for global energy and climate policy.</p>","PeriodicalId":48194,"journal":{"name":"Development and Change","volume":"56 4-5","pages":"957-981"},"PeriodicalIF":3.2,"publicationDate":"2025-08-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/dech.70006","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145730478","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Amiya Kumar Bagchi and the Political Economy of Underdevelopment","authors":"Prabhat Patnaik","doi":"10.1111/dech.70009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/dech.70009","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":48194,"journal":{"name":"Development and Change","volume":"56 4-5","pages":"1048-1060"},"PeriodicalIF":3.2,"publicationDate":"2025-07-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/dech.70009","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145719809","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"When Governments Deliver: Migrant Remittances and the Willingness to Pay Higher Local Taxes","authors":"Ana Isabel López García","doi":"10.1111/dech.70002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/dech.70002","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article deviates from prior research which considers only national-level and formal taxes when examining tax attitudes and behaviours in migrant-sending countries. It investigates the relationship between the receipt of remittances and ‘conditional tax compliance’, and how it varies between the local and the national levels. The article posits that remittance recipients are willing to pay higher taxes at the local level in exchange for better services, but this willingness does not extend to higher levels of government. Data from the AmericasBarometer support this hypothesis: those receiving remittances show greater readiness to pay higher taxes for better municipal services. Statistical findings also reveal that recipients’ greater conditional tax compliance at the local level correlates with higher trust in municipal authorities, increased demand making on them, greater attendance of town hall meetings and closer engagement in community affairs, including making tax-like payments towards community-improvement activities. Contrariwise, at the national level, recipients of remittances display no greater willingness to pay higher taxes for welfare, no greater trust in state authorities, and lower participation in presidential elections. These findings suggest that a local perspective can provide deeper insights into the tax attitudes and behaviours of migrants and their families and the nature of state–society relations in migrant-sending countries.</p>","PeriodicalId":48194,"journal":{"name":"Development and Change","volume":"56 3","pages":"393-425"},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2025-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/dech.70002","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144688087","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"‘I Love Being My Own Boss (But the Work is Killing Me)’: Ride-hail Drivers’ Contradictory Ideas about Work in African Cities","authors":"Matteo Rizzo","doi":"10.1111/dech.70003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/dech.70003","url":null,"abstract":"<p>As digital employment becomes increasingly significant, a number of legal cases have emerged centred on whether digital workers should be classified as independent partners or employees. Workers’ freedom in choosing whether and how long to work for an app is central to the argument by platform firms that they are mere technology providers to independent partners. Conversely, the tight control exercised by apps is emphasized by those who see ride-hail work as unprotected wage work. Drawing on mixed-methods research in Dar es Salaam, Johannesburg and Nairobi, this article contributes to the literature by analysing the paradoxical perceptions about work by ride-hail drivers who operate under tight control from apps and yet often think of themselves as their own boss. The manuscript reviews the literature which explains this paradox as the result of the apps’ successful ideological control over work, which is hegemonic and is internalized by drivers, inducing them to consent. The article then discusses the value and limitations of this explanation. It argues that a stronger focus on drivers’ employment histories, and on the often-unexplored dynamics of drivers’ internal class stratification, are essential to understanding why some drivers consider themselves to be their own boss, whilst others do not.</p>","PeriodicalId":48194,"journal":{"name":"Development and Change","volume":"56 3","pages":"484-509"},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2025-07-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/dech.70003","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144687942","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Rereading Ujamaa, Rethinking Freedom","authors":"Stephanie Wanga","doi":"10.1111/dech.70005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/dech.70005","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article examines the compatibility of Ujamaa's conceptualization of freedom with the limits of the sovereign state. This is done by examining popular enactments of Ujamaa in Tanzania in the 1960s, which resulted in what, for a moment, was a quasi-utopian realization of post-colonial freedom. It analyses the ways in which Julius Nyerere, in turn, was inspired by these popular practices and attempted to codify and advance their spread. Viewing this back-and-forth communication as a multidirectional means of theorizing the ideals of Ujamaa, including its radical conceptions of freedom, the article examines how such imaginations were eventually interfered with and restricted by the state, and how they might be revisited today.</p>","PeriodicalId":48194,"journal":{"name":"Development and Change","volume":"56 3","pages":"572-594"},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2025-06-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/dech.70005","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144688269","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"How the Institutional Context Creates a Neoliberal Politics of Aid: An Italian Case Study","authors":"Lisa Ann Richey","doi":"10.1111/dech.70004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/dech.70004","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Transnational ‘helping’ today relies upon partnerships with private companies as enshrined in the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, creating Faustian bargains of neoliberalism. However, a knowledge gap remains over how state institutional structures produce these neoliberal solutions. This article explores the case of Italy, an under-researched development actor, to analyse the interactions between its development institutions and their politics to better understand the role of for-profit actors in transnational helping. As in other donor countries, there has been a weakening of public trust in the traditional aid sector of Italian non-profits, combined with recent decreases in national funding for assistance abroad. The article is based on review of state, NGO and private sector documents, including laws and policies, as well as participant observation and review of academic literature in Italian and English. Using an historical institutional approach, the author demonstrates how Italian helping has been characterized by a strategic co-mingling of public and private aid, development and humanitarian aid, and of helping abroad and within Italy. In a changing institutional context for Italian NGOs characterized by reduced public solidarity, negative discursive framing and the need to diversify fund-raising channels, Italian businesses are being sought out for partnerships between for-profit and non-profit actors.</p>","PeriodicalId":48194,"journal":{"name":"Development and Change","volume":"56 3","pages":"539-571"},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2025-06-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/dech.70004","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144688270","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A Postcolonial Card Cartel: How European Companies Sold Biometric Voting in Africa","authors":"Marielle Debos","doi":"10.1111/dech.70000","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/dech.70000","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p>Biometrics companies see Africa as the ‘ultimate frontier’ — a relatively untapped market, yet to be fully captured. Although there is now a substantial critical literature on identification technologies in Africa and the Global South, little attention has been paid to one set of key actors, namely, the companies that sell the technologies. To explore this issue, the author uses a case study involving the biometric identification of voters. Building on the work of David Lyon, the article introduces the notion of the postcolonial card cartel and analyses how this cartel came to be. First, the analytical framework brings vendors, who are central but often neglected actors, back into the study of identification technologies. Second, it reflects on the postcolonial dimension of the market. It explains the dominance of European companies, with a particular focus on French companies in the former French Empire, and analyses how African actors navigate these unequal global power structures. The article concludes that while anti-imperialist mobilizations have recently politicized the role of foreign companies, African states have become increasingly dependent on corporate actors for both election management and citizen identification.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":48194,"journal":{"name":"Development and Change","volume":"56 3","pages":"457-483"},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2025-06-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144688011","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Care Agenda in Latin America: Towards a New Understanding of Well-being?","authors":"Belén Villegas Plá","doi":"10.1111/dech.70001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/dech.70001","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p>Since the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020–22, care policies have gained increasing relevance worldwide, particularly in Latin America. Currently, several countries in this region are developing care policies based on feminist principles that position care as a central component in the reproduction of societies. This perspective recognizes care as a social need that must be addressed and as a crucial tool for promoting fairer and more equitable gender relations. Through an extensive documentary analysis that includes government documents, reports from international organizations, laws, decrees and regulations related to care in eight Latin American countries, this article outlines the care agenda in the region from 2020 to 2024. The article examines how this agenda challenges the notion of well-being in Latin American societies and the traditional social protection frameworks that characterize this region.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":48194,"journal":{"name":"Development and Change","volume":"56 3","pages":"426-456"},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2025-06-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144687884","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Green Energy and State Power: The Case of Zhanatas Wind Power Project in Kazakhstan","authors":"Weishen Zeng","doi":"10.1111/dech.12880","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/dech.12880","url":null,"abstract":"<p>In current debates, green energy is often presented as an opportunity for peripheral states and regions to take a lead in energy production and challenge their peripheral status. This article offers a counterview. It builds on qualitative fieldwork at the Zhanatas 100 MW Wind Power Plant in southern Kazakhstan — Central Asia's largest wind farm at the time of construction. On terrain considered by some to be ‘wasteland’, wind is captured, extracted and centralized as an emerging energy resource. At the same time, the nomadic population remain politically marginalized and the land and its many non-human inhabitants continue to be ecologically vulnerable. This article argues that the long-term effect can be described as changing state power within unchanging and unequal centre–periphery power relations. The article provides a theoretical contribution to the understanding of how green energy and state power can substantially reconstruct each other on the ground; it furthers our knowledge of the relationship between space and state under the conditions of energy transition, and advocates for a focus on spatial and historical inequalities in the context of changing energy production.</p>","PeriodicalId":48194,"journal":{"name":"Development and Change","volume":"56 3","pages":"510-538"},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2025-06-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/dech.12880","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144688088","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The ‘Ethnic Fractionalization’ Variable in Development Economics — A Systematic Review","authors":"Irene van Staveren","doi":"10.1111/dech.12879","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/dech.12879","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article consists of a systematic review of 73 empirical articles in economics journals using the ‘ethnic fractionalization’ variable in cross-country analyses with developing countries. This variable was introduced in development economics in 1997 by two World Bank economists, Easterly and Levine. Their publication was followed by many others using the same variable. What is striking is that the variable does not measure fractionalization of ethnic groups but simply ethnic diversity. The negative connotation of such groups falling apart resulted in many hypotheses about a negative relationship of ‘ethnic divisions’ with a variety of economic development outcomes, including economic growth, investment and innovation. This systematic review reveals that less than half of the 73 publications confirm hypotheses about negative effects of ‘ethnic fractionalization’. Most of the selected studies do not discuss relevant theory and they do not include confounding variables about how ethnic groups relate to each other. Although more research is needed regarding Scholars' motivations for the use of the variable, the way in which researchers have used the variable points to normative choices made in terms of hypotheses, data, variable label and models. This calls for more reflection about research ethics in applied economics.</p>","PeriodicalId":48194,"journal":{"name":"Development and Change","volume":"56 2","pages":"306-334"},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2025-05-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/dech.12879","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144300059","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}