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ABSTRACTThis Forum Debate explores the confluence of neoliberal, populist, conservative and reactionary influences on contemporary ideologies and practices of social policy, with a focus on the poorer peripheries of global capitalism. Several fundamental tensions are highlighted, which are largely overlooked by the social policy and development literatures. First, many recent social policy innovations have been discredited by their association with neoliberalism. The rising political Right has been much more successful than the Left at exploiting this discontent, despite simultaneously deepening many aspects of neoliberalism once in power. At the same time, right‐wing movements have proactively used social policy as a political tool to fashion the social order along lines deemed amenable for their interests and ideologies, expressed along nationalist, racialized, ethnicized, nativist, religious, patriarchal or other lines, and to innovate practices of segregation, exclusion and subordination. While these synergies of neoliberal and right‐wing populism are observed globally, they need to be carefully and differentially interpreted from the perspective of late industrializing (or late welfare state) peripheral countries. Nonetheless, common themes occurring across both centres and peripheries, as identified by the invited contributions to this Debate section, include exclusionary identity politics, hierarchical and subordinating inclusions, and patriarchal familialism. In this context, segregationism is an ominous possibility of post‐neoliberal social policy.

ABSTRACTThis article challenges Horner and Hulme's call to move from 'international development' to 'global development' with a reaffirmation of the classical traditions of development studies. With some adaptation to fit the changing contemporary context, these traditions not only remain relevant but also recover vital insights that have been obscured in the various fashionable re‐imaginings of development. In particular, development thinking and agendas in the past were much more radical and ambitious in addressing the imperatives of redistribution and progressive forms of transformation in the context of stark asymmetries of wealth and power. Such ambition is still needed to address the nature and scale of challenges that continue to face the bulk of countries in the world, particularly given the persistence if not deepening of asymmetries. This reaffirmation is elaborated by addressing three major weaknesses in Horner and Hulme's arguments. First, they do not actually define development, but instead treat it as simply poverty and inequality dynamics, which are better understood as outcomes rather than causes. Second, despite their assertion that the study of (international) development was primarily concerned with between‐country inequalities, this is not true. Domestic inequality was in fact central to both development theory and policy since the origins of the field. Third, the authors ignore the rise of neoliberalism from the late 1970s onwards and the profound crisis that this caused to development outside of East Asia and perhaps India, which the jargon of 'global' implicitly obfuscates and even condones. Rather, the experiences of East Asia and in particular China arguably vindicate classical approaches in development studies.

ABSTRACTDespite repeated chronicles of a death foretold, centre–periphery analysis remains very relevant for understanding the challenges of contemporary development. It reveals certain common asymmetries and constraints that structure the integration, lagging and subordination of the global South in the current world order through ongoing technological, industrial and financial dissemination. The precise forms of lagging and subordination have changed over time and context, in symbiosis with changes in the overall capitalist system, although the systemic principles remain pertinent. These can be evaluated according to three propositions: technological lagging; declining terms of trade; and pro‐cyclical macroeconomic adjustment in the peripheries. Accordingly, global imbalances are better understood as an evolution of US‐centred hegemony and the subordinated accommodation of 'rising powers' including China, rather than a weakening and rebalancing of US power vis‐à‐vis these 'rising powers', as per conventional interpretations. The possibility that we might be witnessing a reinvigoration of US hegemony — for a second time in the post‐war era — is one that needs to be taken seriously, particularly if this becomes associated with a deepening of imperialism rather than emancipation.

AbstractThis study estimates the extent of subsidization in the ten provinces of western China from 1990 to 2012 with the aim of highlighting the exceptionality of the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) leading up to and following the widespread Tibetan protests that swept through four Chinese provinces in 2008. Although the Tibet development model was criticized by many Chinese economists in the 1980s and 1990s for being highly subsidy-dependent and inefficient, these aspects of dependence and inefficiency were exacerbated even further under the Hu–Wen administration, particularly following the 2008 protests. While subsidies and investment also increased in other western provinces, the exceptionality of the TAR stands out in terms of the levels of subsidization attained, the sheer disassociation of these subsidies from changes in the local productive economy, and the degree to which ownership in the local economy has come to be dominated by external interests. The recent phase of intensive subsidization has thereby exacerbated the dependence of local Tibetan livelihoods on these state strategies, while at the same time intensified the state-led economic integration of the region into the rest of China through externalized patterns of ownership and consolidated state control. Arguments that the resultant inefficiencies and social tensions are owing to a marketization of social relations or to cultural insensitivity and lack of adaptation to local circumstances de-emphasize the central role of the state in shaping the deeply structural character of these transformations.

Despite the façade of precise estimates, we do not really know what has been happening to global poverty, all things considered. Despite the façade of moral consensus, we are not even certain whether the MDGs are leading us in the most appropriate policy directions to address poverty. Part of the problem lies in the fact that international and even national measurements of poverty are contentious, even in the best of cases such as China and India. The contentions relate not only to issues of methodology but also to the broader use of thresholds and the implicit agenda of targeting that their use encourages, which is the other part of the problem. Hence, the ethical focus on poverty within the MDGs has not transcended politics. To the contrary, the MDGs are problematic precisely because they depict policy choices that are actually very political as apolitical, thereby removing these choices from public deliberation in the name of moral urgency and expediency. Such predicaments are not necessarily resolved by multidimensional poverty measures for two reasons: they add even more opacity than money-metric measures, and the way they have been operationalised has tended to reinforce the use of thresholds and means-testing. Nor are these tensions necessarily resolved by human-rights–based approaches, which face similar ambiguities as the MDGs given that they can be construed in support of targeting agendas.

AbstractRecent debates on aid and development are waged on narrow terms in comparison to earlier debates in the 1950s and 1960s. The principal concern of the 'structuralist' pioneers of development economics, and the key absence in the current debates, was an understanding of the structural impediments faced by countries going through late industrialisation and rapid urban growth. These result in chronic trade deficits, shortages of foreign exchange and persistent balance of payments disequilibria. The positive potential of aid was understood to lie in its ability to mediate these imbalances in the context of national industrialisation strategies. By the same logic, this potential is lost if countries run trade surpluses. Current debates on aid mostly overlook this dual logic, despite the fact that both positive and negative experiences of post‐war development largely vindicate these structuralist insights, particularly in light of current global financial imbalances. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

ABSTRACTIn the aftermath of the COVID‐19 pandemic, much of the global South has been immersed in a debt crisis of a breadth and depth not seen since the early 1980s. The debt distress was apparent before the pandemic and the situation over the last decade is best described as a slow burn, which the pandemic and war in Ukraine ignited in often sudden and dramatic ways. However, what remains a surprising feature of the ongoing situation has been the avoidance so far of a generalized domino effect, unlike previous systemic Southern debt crises. This fact does not diminish the severity of the consequences given that the containment of crisis has been achieved by regular and persistent applications of austerity and adjustment programmes with deleterious impacts on development in poor countries. This article frames the Debate by exploring these aspects of the current Southern debt crisis, focusing on its deeper structural drivers versus the role of more proximate triggers of the crisis; the similarities or differences with past crises of recent decades; and the degree to which anything has in fact changed in orthodox responses to crisis management. A theme that emerges from the more heterodox scholarship profiled by this Debate is that the current crisis and its responses are maintaining the dominant development paradigm of the last 40 years, rather than eliciting a shift away from it. There is a continued adherence to neoliberal ideology in macroeconomic policy making and to the punitive subordination of developing countries in debt distress, through crisis responses, to the Northern and especially US‐centred international financial system. Ignoring the very strong similarities to the past, especially the 1982 debt crisis that ushered in this paradigm, risks repeating the lost decades to development that followed.

AbstractBased on an entirely unexplored source of data, this paper analyses the evolution of Tibetan representation and preferentiality within public employment recruitment across all Tibetan areas from 2007 to 2015. While recruitment collapsed after the end of the job placement system (fenpei) in the early to mid-2000s, there was a strong increase in public employment recruitment from 2011 onwards. Tibetans were underrepresented within this increase, although not severely, and various implicit practices of preferentiality bolstered such representation, with distinct variations across regions and time. The combination reasserted the predominant role of the state as employer of educated millennials in Tibetan areas to the extent of re-introducing employment guarantees. We refer to this as the innovation of a neo-fenpei system. This new system is most clearly observed in the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) from 2011 to 2016, although it appears to have been abandoned in 2017. One effect of neo-fenpei, in contrast to its predecessor, is that it accentuates university education as a driver of differentiation within emerging urban employment. The evolution of these recruitment practices reflects the complex tensions in Tibetan areas regarding the overarching goal of security and social stability (weiwen) emphasized by the Xi–Li administration, which has maintained systems of minority preferentiality but in a manner that enhances assimilationist trends rather than minority group empowerment.