27 research outputs found
Nepad, land and resource rights
The New Partnership for Africa’s Development (Nepad) is an overarching programme for revitalising Africa’s fortunes. It has a
visionary tone, yet the way that it proposes to overcome Africa’s underdevelopment uncritically adopts neo-liberal policy prescriptions
that have repeatedly been shown not to work in Africa. Because it has been designed around promoting international foreign
investment and attracting Western donors, Nepad may not address the real needs of the African rural poor or deal with the core
problems hindering Africa’s development. By supporting the interests of multinational corporations, Nepad risks opening the
continent up to further exploitation and degradation. Other problems that have been identified include the lack of civil society
participation in its formulation. In spite of all of the problems associated with the programme, it is incumbent upon civil society to
engage with Nepad and influence its development and ensure that land and resource rights for the poor are enhanced
Securing land and resource rights in Africa: Pan-African perspectives
Across the African continent the land and resource rights
of the rural poor are threatened by inappropriate policies
and institutions (including global treaties); unequal social,
political and economic relations; the actions of powerful
vested interests (wealthy national or local elites, international
aid organisations, multinational corporations);
and the weakness of grassroots organisations. It is against
this background that the Pan-African Programme on
Land and Resource Rights (PAPLRR) Network’s initiative
to analyse, understand and engage with these
issues was conceptualised by four African centres of excellence
that subsequently developed the programme in
2001.
The unique contributions Africa can make are seldom
taken seriously in international natural resource policymaking
debates. One reason could be that the African
voice on land and resource rights is perhaps not as strong
in international forums as it should be. By coming
together in forums such as PAPLRR, Africans are able to
share their concerns and develop capacity to articulate
their opinions and influence outcomes in the international
arena.
Defining an agenda for advocacy and strategic
engagement with governments, and building links across
divides between scholars, practitioners and advocacy
groups, is an emphasis of PAPLRR into the future. A key
focus of the programme is the role of land and resource
rights in the struggle against poverty, exploitation and
oppression as well as their contribution in solving real
world problems of African people, not as academic
objects to be studied, but as key components of the
struggle
Constructing and deconstructing the democratic developmental State: the challenges of democratization in Nigeria and South Korea
In Nigeria, the state, which, ought to be central to the development and democratization project, remains as repressive, undemocratic and oriented to zero-sum politics as ever. The state does not really have development on its agenda. This is not to assume that the state has not formulated development plans, policies and projects; rather they only mimic the development models of the West, which cannot be replicated in Nigeria due to historical factors among others [Ake: 1985; Omoweh & Boom: 2005,
Omoweh: 2005, 2006, Kaiser and Okumu: 2004]. South Korea is far from being a liberal democracy not because of its relative economic growth, but due mainly to its model of post-colonial authoritarian and undemocratic state. The kind of development promoted by such state can hardly be sustained as evident in the economic crisis of 1997/8 from which it is yet to recover [Bang-Soon: 2003, Omoweh: 2005]. Adequate scholarly and policy attention has to be paid to so many false starts that have characterized the construction of the developmental state, especially as the debate now emphasizes its democratic component
The Paradox of Water Crisis and Rural Poverty in the Niger Delta of Nigeria
Introduction This paper is primarily concerned with water crisis as both a resource and an infrastructure, and its linkage with rural poverty in Bayelsa State within the larger context of the path the Nigerian state took to the governance of natural resources, particularly the production of petroleum and the consequences for water resources. Within this framework, it critically looks into how Bayelsa State, which is 90 percent water, 10 percent land, and located in the heart of the third larg..
Feasibility of the Democratic Developmental State in the South
This work is dedicated to all critical thinkers who contend that the prospect of
recovery from protracted and deepening social, political and economic crises of
the countries of the South and the ability of these countries to place themselves
on the path of sustainable development do not reside with the market.
Africa’s protracted failure to develop makes sharing of experiences with Asia
and Latin American countries a key issue in the discourses on the prospects of
the DDS in the South. It was, therefore, timely for APISA-CLACSO-CODESRIA
to launch the tri-continental collaborative joint research on the ‘Feasibility of the
Democratic Developmental State in the South’