Passageways of cooperation: mutual help in post-socialist Tanzania

African Studies Center Working Paper No. 267This paper will examine the patterns and discourses of sharing and cooperation as well as broader moralities and freedoms that are reproduced in Kuria mutual help groups. It is based on 32 months of ethnographic field research in Tarime and Serengeti districts of Mara region that investigated local patterns of cooperation and the emerging modes of personhood within the novel associational environments.2 The study argues that the systemic dynamic of Kuria cooperative groups should not be sought in the additive accumulation of material wealth or undisputed reproduction of social solidarity, but rather in historically defined processes of extending one’s self through social ties of interdependence. Such relational dynamics of informality also illuminate the emerging public spaces and socialities in globalizing Tanzanian communities. The paper is structured to provide an overview of different forms of Kuria cooperation in historical as well as contemporary perspectives, and situate these in a broader framework of culturally relevant exchanges and moralities. The first part of the study discusses the social organization of Kuria mutual help, analyzing its connections with descent and age organization and other variables relevant for its mobilization. It explores transformations in local mutual help forms and discusses the dynamics of contemporary Kuria work and savings groups that proliferate in commercializing local communities. Tendencies toward greater formalization of work reciprocities and the emergence of new categories of peers are explored. The evolution of Kuria mutual help is placed in the context of comparative ethnographic evidence of recent transformations of collective work in Africa. The second part of the study examines the construction of Kuria persons through public collective activities, situating these within the transformed materiality of socially significant exchanges and transfers. Socially relevant forms of savings and accumulation that affect mutuality and their historical transformations are explored. Changes in gendered savings and work profiles are also discussed. The study also examines novel forms of cooperation in community peacekeeping, revealing Kuria vigilantism as another important associational area of the local informality

Land mortgage: a device for rural restructuring in transitional settings?

Daivi Rodima-Taylor explores the evolution of land mortgage in African countries

Introduction: mutual help in an era of uncertainty

Global Challenges (FSW

Introduction: ʿAjamī literacies of Africa: the Hausa, Fula, Mandinka, and Wolof traditions

First author draf

The veil of transparency : blockchain and sustainability governance in global supply chains

This article interrogates the turn towards digital technologies for addressing sustainability challenges in global supply chains. Focusing on the case of blockchains, we assess industry claims that this set of distributed ledger technologies for undertaking, verifying, and publishing digital transactions provides the greater transparency necessary to resolve sustainability challenges. Our central contention is that blockchain-based initiatives to promote sustainability in global supply chains double-down on modes of third-party audit and disclosure governance that have thus far failed to address labour and environmental abuses. The turn towards these digital technologies, we show, extends interlinked processes of managerialization and the spread of ‘audit culture’ in the governance of global supply chains. These tendencies heighten obstacles to enhancing sustainability across global supply chains, exacerbating the very challenges blockchain initiatives are ostensibly meant to address. Worse than not fundamentally addressing sustainability problems, applications of this set of ‘sustech’ render failures to address sustainability abuses more opaque. The technological novelty of blockchain helps to construct what we call a ‘veil of transparency’ over sustainability abuses and marginalities in and across global supply chains

Remittance flows to post-conflict states: perspectives on human security and development

This repository item contains a single issue of the Pardee Center Task Force Reports, a publication series that began publishing in 2009 by the Boston University Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future.Migrant remittances – that is, money or other goods sent to relatives in the country of origin– play an increasingly central role in post-conflict reconstruction and national development of conflict-affected states. Private remittances are of central importance for restoring stability and enhancing human security in post-conflict countries. Yet the dynamics of conflict-induced remittance flows and the possibilities of leveraging remittances for post-conflict development have been sparsely researched to date. This Pardee Center Task Force Report is the outcome of an interdisciplinary research project organized by the Boston University Center for Finance, Law & Policy, in collaboration with The Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future. The Task Force was convened by Boston University development economist John R. Harris and international banking expert Donald F. Terry, and social anthropologist Daivi Rodima-Taylor, Visiting Researcher at the Boston University African Studies Center, served as lead researcher and editor for the report. The Task Force was asked to research, analyze, and propose policy recommendations regarding the role of remittances in post-conflict environments and their potential to serve as a major source of development funds. The report’s authors collectively suggest a broader approach to remittance institutions that provides flexibility to adapt to specific local practices and to make broader institutional connections in an era of growing population displacement and expanding human and capital flows. Conditions for more productive use of migrants’ remittances are analyzed while drawing upon case studies from post-conflict countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America. The papers in this Task Force Report establish the importance of remittances for sustaining local livelihoods as well as rehabilitating institutional infrastructures and improving financial inclusion in post-conflict environments. Highlighting the increasing complexity of global remittance systems, the report examines the growing informality of conflict-induced remittance flows and explores solutions for more efficient linkages between financial institutions of different scales and degrees of formality. It discusses challenges to regulating international remittance transfers in the context of growing concerns about transparency, and documents the increasing role of diaspora networks and migrant associations in post-conflict co-development initiatives. The Task Force Report authors outline the main challenges to leveraging remittances for post-conflict development and make recommendations for further research and policy applications

Interrogating technology-led experiments in sustainability governance

Solutions to global sustainability challenges are increasingly technology‐intensive. Yet, technologies are neither developed nor applied to governance problems in a socio‐political vacuum. Despite aspirations to provide novel solutions to current sustainability governance challenges, many technology‐centred projects, pilots and plans remain implicated in longer‐standing global governance trends shaping the possibilities for success in often under‐recognized ways. This article identifies three overlapping contexts within which technology‐led efforts to address sustainability challenges are evolving, highlighting the growing roles of: (1) private actors; (2) experimentalism; and (3) informality. The confluence of these interconnected trends illuminates an important yet often under‐recognized paradox: that the use of technology in multi‐stakeholder initiatives tends to reduce rather than expand the set of actors, enhancing instead of reducing challenges to participation and transparency, and reinforcing rather than transforming existing forms of power relations. Without recognizing and attempting to address these limits, technology‐led multi‐stakeholder initiatives will remain less effective in addressing the complexity and uncertainty surrounding global sustainability governance. We provide pathways for interrogating the ways that novel technologies are being harnessed to address long‐standing global sustainability issues in manners that foreground key ethical, social and political considerations and the contexts in which they are evolving

Reconceptualising adaptation to climate change as part of pathways of change and response

The need to adapt to climate change is now widely recognised as evidence of its impacts on social and natural systems grows and greenhouse gas emissions continue unabated. Yet efforts to adapt to climate change, as reported in the literature over the last decade and in selected case studies, have not led to substantial rates of implementation of adaptation actions despite substantial investments in adaptation science. Moreover, implemented actions have been mostly incremental and focused on proximate causes; there are far fewer reports of more systemic or transformative actions. We found that the nature and effectiveness of responses was strongly influenced by framing. Recent decision-oriented approaches that aim to overcome this situation are framed within a "pathways" metaphor to emphasise the need for robust decision making within adaptive processes in the face of uncertainty and inter-temporal complexity. However, to date, such "adaptation pathways" approaches have mostly focused on contexts with clearly identified decision-makers and unambiguous goals; as a result, they generally assume prevailing governance regimes are conducive for adaptation and hence constrain responses to proximate causes of vulnerability. In this paper, we explore a broader conceptualisation of "adaptation pathways" that draws on 'pathways thinking' in the sustainable development domain to consider the implications of path dependency, interactions between adaptation plans, vested interests and global change, and situations where values, interests, or institutions constrain societal responses to change. This re-conceptualisation of adaptation pathways aims to inform decision makers about integrating incremental actions on proximate causes with the transformative aspects of societal change. Case studies illustrate what this might entail. The paper ends with a call for further exploration of theory, methods and procedures to operationalise this broader conceptualisation of adaptation

Scenario planning to leap-frog the Sustainable Development Goals: An adaptation pathways approach

Few studies have examined how to mainstream future climate change uncertainty into decision-making for poverty alleviation in developing countries. With potentially drastic climate change emerging later this century, there is an imperative to develop planning tools which can enable vulnerable rural communities to proactively build adaptive capacity and 'leap-frog' the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Using an example from Indonesia, we present a novel participatory approach to achieve this. We applied scenario planning to operationalise four adaptation pathways principles: (1) consideration of climate change as a component of multi-scale social-ecological systems; (2) recognition of stakeholders' competing values, goals and knowledge through co-learning; (3) coordination of responses across multiple decision-making levels; and (4) identification of strategies which are 'no regrets', incremental (tackling proximate drivers of community vulnerability) and transformative (tackling systemic drivers). Workshops with stakeholders from different administrative levels identified drivers of change, an aspirational vision and explorative scenarios for livelihoods in 2090, and utilised normative back-casting to design no regrets adaptation strategies needed to achieve the vision. The resulting 'tapestry' of strategies were predominantly incremental, and targeted conventional development needs. Few directly addressed current or possible future climate change impacts. A minority was transformative, and higher level stakeholders identified proportionately more transformative strategies than local level stakeholders. Whilst the vast majority of strategies were no regrets, some were potentially mal-adaptive, particularly for coastal areas and infrastructure. There were few examples of transformative innovations that could generate a step-change in linked human and environmental outcomes, hence leap-frogging the SDGs. We conclude that whilst effective at integrating future uncertainties into community development planning, our approach should place greater emphasis on analysing and addressing systemic drivers through extended learning cycles

COVID-19 pandemic in Africa: Is it time for water, sanitation and hygiene to climb up the ladder of global priorities?

The authors would like to thank the authors of the freely-usable images from Unsplash and Pixnio included in the Graphical Abstract: photos by Janice-Haney Carr and Dr. Ray Butler (USCDCP), USCDCP and Crystal Thompsom (USAID) on Pixnio; photos by CDC, UN COVID- 19 response and Raymond Hui on Unsplash.Wewould also like to thank the reviewers for their comments and keen interest in this article.In the current pandemic context, it is necessary to remember the lessons learned from previous outbreaks in Africa, where the incidence of other diseases could rise if most resources are directed to tackle the emergency. Improving the access to water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) could be a win-win strategy, because the lack of these services not only hampers the implementation of preventive measures against SARS-CoV-2 (e.g. proper handwashing), but it is also connected to high mortality diseases (for example, diarrhoea and lower respiratory infections (LRI)). This study aims to build on the evidence-based link between other LRI andWASH as a proxy for exploring the potential vulnerability of African countries to COVID-19, as well as the role of other socioeconomic variables such as financial sources or demographic factors. The selected methodology combines several machine learning techniques to single out the most representative variables for the analysis, classify the countries according to their capacity to tackle public health emergencies and identify behavioural patterns for each group. Besides, conditional dependences between variables are inferred through a Bayesian network. Results show a strong relationship between low access toWASH services and high LRI mortality rates, and that migrant remittances could significantly improve the access to healthcare and WASH services. However, the role of Official Development Assistance (ODA) in enhancing WASH facilities in the most vulnerable countries cannot be disregarded, but it is unevenly distributed: for each 50–100 US$of ODA per capita, the probability of directing more than 3 US$ toWASH ranges between 48% (Western Africa) and 8% (Central Africa)