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Research Articles (Development Studies)

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/10413/6665

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Browsing Research Articles (Development Studies) by Author "Ballard, Richard James."

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    Cookie cutter cooperatives in the KwaZulu-Natal school nutrition programme.
    (Taylor and Francis., 2013-06-04) Beesley, Alan.; Ballard, Richard James.
    This article examines an initiative by the KwaZulu-Natal provincial government to increase the income opportunities emerging from the school feeding programme. Since the inception of the programme, small medium and micro enterprises (SMMEs) had been enlisted to provide schools with ingredients. However in 2006, the KwaZulu-Natal provincial government replaced some SMMEs with women’s cooperatives. By 2009, 12 of the original 42 cooperatives had collapsed, and some schools being serviced by these cooperatives complained of unreliable delivery of ingredients. This article examines the interface between policy and implementation through a case study of four cooperatives in one district. Our data suggests that some cooperatives struggled to take root as a result of a variety of factors which we discuss under the themes of viability, membership and skills. The top down creation of these cooperatives according to inflexible guidelines also resulted in significant problems.
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    Geographies of development II: cash transfers and the reinvention of development for the poor.
    (Sage., 2013) Ballard, Richard James.
    Since the mid-1990s, a number of governments in the global South have instituted programmes which provide regular cash grants to poor people. The results of cash transfer programmes have been impressed those searching for ways to improve welfare: the depth of poverty has been reduced, more children are being educated and vaccinated, and the poor are more likely to get jobs and start enterprises. Advocates of social democracy are hopeful that this heralds the possibility of comprehensive social protection. Experiments in welfare in the global South do not, however, inevitably signal an epochal shift to a postneoliberal era. They form part of an increasingly heterodox approach which combines an enduring emphasis on liberalised economic growth with bolder biopolitical interventions for the poor.
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    Geographies of development: without the poor.
    (Sage., 2012) Ballard, Richard James.
    Some contemporary narratives of development give privileged status to middle classes in the global South. In the face of intractable poverty, policy makers take heart from the success stories of ordinary people who have, over generations, realised and consolidated the gains of development and who embody society at its most functional. Their presumed virtues are their self‐sufficiency, their ability to articulate with the global economy, their buying power, and their good sense as responsible citizens. This, the first of three reports on geographies of development, reflects on recent research that interrogates the privileged status of middle classes in some narratives of development. As this burgeoning literature suggests, celebratory narratives elide the complex circumstances that make and unmake middle classes. Furthermore, middle class gains do not automatically translate into development for others. Indeed, efforts to centre the middle class threaten to displace, and justify the displacement of, economically marginalised groups seen as surplus to development.