1
Migration in a
Globalizing World
Also in this issue:
Environment and
Development: The
Contributions of Hans
Opschoor
Roundtable with Human
Rights Defender Tulip
Award Winner Justine
Bihamba
DevISSues
DevelopmentISSues
Volume11/Number2/November 2009
2
From the Guest Editor
Migration: is the 21st century different?
In recent years migration, again, has become one of the most controversial and emotive social and economic issues. This despite
its being as old as human beings who moved around to improve their living conditions, for safety and even adventure! In previous
phases of globalization and since the eighteenth century, the development of the rich ‘North’ depended on the movement of
millions of people through slavery, indenture and wage labour.
The current phase of globalization is little changed; modern migratory movement can best be understood in the context of a
globalized market economy that directs the flows of goods, money and labour within and beyond nations. People, however, have
much less freedom to move than the goods that they produce and the profit and financial wealth that they create, and the rich who
accumulate the wealth. Labour is not like other goods, it is embodied in human beings with all its physical, gendered and cultural
characteristics that are shaped by history, giving labour migration its political and cultural dimensions. It is people who move in
search of work or safety and offer their labour in different locations and contribute to a globalized labour market. Yet this simple fact
is often ignored in the debate on migration and reveals itself in: ‘we asked for labour but then people came.’
This special issue is devoted to the contribution of migrants and considers forces that shape their lives, policies needed to protect
them and how migratory flows are to be understood. Historical evidence and current practices point to states’ ambivalent attitude
towards migration (see the opening article by Harris and that by Davin on Chinese migration). Migrants are essential for national
and international economic development, yet their lives are governed by xenophobic, racist and fear mongering policies and
culture.
Most migration takes place at national or regional levels within the ‘South’. Awumbila and Kujima cover migration in West Africa
and Asia respectively and show how a gender pattern of migration is governed by labour market demands. Awumbila and
Opschoor (interview with Pellegrini) also draw our attention to the long-term impacts of environmental degradation on rural
livelihoods and migration.
Much of migration is voluntary and as part of the household strategy to improve living standards, but not all voluntary migration is
legal, nor do all migrants have legal protection, even at a national level (see Davin on migrants in Chinese cities). People smuggling
and trafficking further complicates the matter. Kujima shows how female migration in Asia is driven by a labour demand for private
care and commercial sex services, with the latter being closely linked to trafficking. Yet both services share a precarious and
unregulated employment pattern, in which migrants live a marginal life that is shaped by their gender, class, ethnicity, race and
occupation, without many labour or civil rights. Kujima argues that migration policy reforms should aim to protect all migrants,
rather than being preoccupied with irregular migration and trafficking. The universal protection of human and worker rights remains
the best strategy to prevent abuses of one section of the population that happen to be migrants.
Migrants have their own strategies to deal with vulnerability that include temporary tolerance of and bargaining for improved
conditions (Kujima) or organizing urban associations based on ethnicity and regional ties (Davin) or formation of transnational
community organizations (Smith and van Naerssen). Maintaining family links through remittances is also important (Grabel), as is
‘escaping’ home when conditions at destination deteriorate. It is generally agreed that remittances and migrants are important and
valuable sources of capital, knowledge and information to the areas of
origin and should be an integral component of national and international
development policies.
The hope is that, given the importance of migrants to both the ‘North’
and ‘South’, migration policies should focus more on the regulation of
migration and management of its benefits rather than on control which
presently seems neither practical nor to the benefit of destination and
sending regions.
About the cover
The cover photograph is a section of a painting entitled ‘Mothers
who go abroad to work’ by school children whose mothers have
left the country as migrant workers. It was created as part of an
art competition held in celebration of the 2002 International
Migrant Day on 18 December 2002. The photograph was kindly
Mahmood Messkoub
provided to us by Yu Kojima, one of the contributors to this
DevISSues. She was sent it by the Sri Lankan NGO Woman and
Mahmood Messkoub is Senior Lecturer in Development Studies at ISS and guest editor for
Media Collective (www.womenandmedia.net) which aims to bring
this issue. He has worked and published on migration issues in Middle East, Europe and
about change based on feminist principles for a society free from
China. He is currently the ISS coordinator of a cooperative project with colleagues from
violence and militarization. Our thanks go to the Women and
the University of Ghana, the Radboud University (NL) and MDF consulting (NL) to support
Media Collective for permission to use the photograph. Thanks
the work of the Centre for Migration Sudies at the University of Ghana (Legon). He can be
also to Action Network of Migrant Workers (ACTFORM), Sri
contacted at [email protected].
Lanka and Migrant Services Centre (MSC), Sri Lanka.
DevISSues is also available on the ISS website at www.iss.nl
The views expressed in DevISSues are those of the original
authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the Institute.
Contents
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Page 4/ Immigration and State Power
Nigel Harris
Page 8/ Intra-Regional Migration In West Africa: Changing
Patterns And Dynamics
Mariama Awumbila
Page 11/ International Female Migration and Trafficking Continuum in Asia
Yu Kojima
Page 13/ Internal Migration in China
Delia Davin
Page 16/ Remittances, Political Economy, and Economic Development
Ilene Grabel
Page 19/ Migrants: Suitable brokers of development?
Lothar Smith and Ton van Naerssen
Page 22/ Environment and Development: the contributions of Hans Opschoor
Lorenzo Pellegrini
Page 24/ A roundtable with Human Rights Defender Tulip Award winner Justine Masika Bihamba
The views expressed in DevISSues are those of the original authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the Institute.
The online versions of all articles with full bibliography can be found at www.iss.nl/devissues
4
Immigration and
State Power
Nigel Harris
For the past thirty years, the study of economic migration has been almost
exclusively preoccupied with the social and economic impact of immigration on
labour-receiving countries (as opposed to, for example, the impact of emigration on
labour-sending countries). But now, in the new century, it seems that the key issues
are not economic but rather concern the political implications of immigration for
State sovereignty, for the viability of nation-States. The processes associated with
economic globalization make the questions at stake much more urgent than before,
progressively raising immigration as an issue in the policy agenda of almost all
developed countries.
Globalization, as understood here,
is the beginning of a process that
creates a single global economy, by
implication superseding the old world
of separate and politically defined
national economies. Such an economic
order implies the increasing mobility of
capital, goods and labour, just as the
earlier creation of national economies
required the increasing mobility
of the factors of production within
national borders. However, whereas
the creation of national economies
usually enjoyed the supervision of one
governing authority, the political State,
economic globalization has no such
single supervisor. On the contrary, the
world remains politically governed
almost exclusively by a mass of separate
States, each in principle limited to a
geographically defined fragment of the
whole, and each therefore immobile in
a world of growing mobility. To put it
in a simplistic form, the economics of
the new system collide directly with the
politics of the old.
This question is briefly explored here
in three parts: internal migration;
international migration; and the
‘integration’ of immigrants.
Internal Migration
A central concern of the State, one of
the underpinnings of its capacity to rule,
is control of the country’s population.
One component of this historically has
entailed attempts to regulate or prevent
movement, at an extreme, to enforce on
the inhabitants, a measure of immobility.
Efforts vary over time and in impact,
limited always by the administrative
capacity of the State relative to its many
other objectives.
Some of the more extreme historical
cases occur in authoritarian regimes,
requiring the inhabitants to carry
internal passports (the identity card
is perhaps the relic of this order),
permits or visas to move, domestic
and inter-provincial check points, and
in some cases direct prohibition on
movement between provinces, districts,
parishes, villages and cities. There are
many examples here but some of the
best known might include medieval
France, Tsarist Russia, seventeenth
and eighteenth century Prussia, and,
outside Europe, Tokugawa Japan.
More generally, serfdom in European
feudalism – tying the worker to the soil
- illustrates an extreme form of legal
immobilization, the subordination of the
labour force to the will of the lord.
In the twentieth century, comparable
regulatory regimes existed in, for
example, the former Soviet Union and
its allies. Tying the population to its
place of registration or birth survives
in the identity card or propiska. Such
an immobilization of the workforce
is economically tolerable only when
married to forced labour or worker
conscription, directing workers to move
to places where they are required (to,
for example, the large construction
projects, dams, power stations etc
undertaken in the 1930s in the Soviet
Union). In essence, the difference
between the soldier and the civilian is
eliminated; the workforce is reduced to
being an army, subject to State orders,
with severe penalties for those who
move without permission.
In a number of newly independent
developing countries, governments
assumed they knew where the
population should be best located,
and proceeded to try to employ
police power to enforce this – as
with transmigrasi policy in Indonesia,
Malaysia’s FELDA programme to
populate the western provinces;
policies to prevent urbanization in
many countries for example the ujaama
villagistion campaign in Tanzania.
More brutally, the apartheid regime in
South Africa endeavoured to control the
black population by classifying them as
foreigners (citizens of the bantustans),
and enforcing exclusion from white
areas through the notorious pass system
and extensive internal police checks. A
comparable system is enforced in the
occupied Palestinian territories (the
West Bank and Gaza), again through
identity cards, numerous check points,
controlled routes and other obstructions
to movement.
While there may be different local
justifications for internal migration
control, in all cases the mobility required
for rapid economic development – the
creation of a national labour force with
the ability to move to wherever work is
created - is sacrificed to the need for
political control.
One of the more interesting cases in this
connection is the evolution of migration
5
policy in China. After the success of the
1948 revolution in China, it was made
clear there that the new Republic took
for granted that tens of thousands
of rural dwellers would move to
the cities in the normal process
accompanying industrialization; by
implication, freedom of movement was
assumed. A decade later, following
the extraordinary growth of the first
Five Year Plan period (and the major
effort required by the Korean war), the
government’s nerve seems to have
failed in the face of a major surge of
urbanization (a panic replicated in
many other developing countries at
that time). Freedom of movement
was ended. The Chinese government
adapted the pre-revolution household
registration system – hukou – to
register the urban population entitling
the legal urban-dweller to social
security, pensions on retirement,
housing, education and medical care,
rights denied to those registered as
rural inhabitants. Elaborate controls
were introduced to prevent transfer
from rural to urban residence – non
transferable food ration cards;
requirements for permission to leave
the rural commune, to travel, to
enter urban areas, to reside and work
there. Police raids at railway and bus
terminals and in poor city areas were
designed to enforce this regime and
expel the illegal migrants to their place
of origin or registration.
Such an order could work only with
forced labour to direct workers to the
places where the State required them
(for example, for oil or other resource
exploitation in under-populated areas,
to settle areas with low population
density – for example, Inner Mongolia,
Tibet etc). During the Cultural
revolution, there were also, for political
reasons, mass expulsions of the urban
population to temporary exile in rural
areas. However, accelerated economic
growth also raised the demand for
unskilled work in existing cities in jobs
the urban dwellers refused. The regime
allowed cities to import rural labour
on temporary contract (and without
a hukou), what the regime called a
‘worker-peasant system’, supposedly a
revolutionary attempt to overcome the
ancient contradiction between town
and country. The scale of resentment
among the rural migrants concerned
exploded in the Shanghai general
strike of 1966 during the early phases
of the Cultural Revolution.
The controls on mobility were
completely incompatible with
accelerated and sustained economic
growth, and while, following the Deng
reforms of the late 1970s, they were
not formally removed (and hukou
was not ended), they were allowed
to lapse, or applied only selectively.
The sheer pace of economic growth
washed away the politics of mobility
control.
The cumulative costs of immobilization
must have been considerable, not just
in terms of foregone economic growth,
but in losses to the rural population in
earnings from migration. According to
a Chinese survey in 2003 remittances of
inter-provincial migrants accounted for
about 60 per cent of rural household
income. The costs of State policies
to restrict or prevent migration were
borne by the poorest segment of
the Chinese population, the rural
inhabitants.
In sum, the State’s efforts to control,
curb or prevent internal migration
provide policy lessons on the issues
at stake in international migration
– and the sacrifice of the immense
potential to reduce world poverty to
the maintenance of the world political
order. It is thus not entirely fanciful to
identify rising immigration and free
world mobility as an existential threat
to the inherited forms of the State.
International Migration
The creation of national economies
since the 18th century forced radical
changes to an inherited hitherto
borderless economic geography.
It forced also an increase in the
mobility of the factors of production,
capital and labour, within national
boundaries, severing linkage that
had hitherto extended beyond the
borders. It also created new patterns
of domestic interdependent economic
specialization at the expense of what
had now become external transactions.
This experience provides us with
some suggestions as to the results of
globalization, the creation of a single
global economy.
However, some aspects of economic
globalization featured even as national
economies were being created,
particularly when much of the world
was dominated by European empires.
Thus, large scale movements of forced
and free labour took place in the
modern period – of slave labour from
Africa to the Americas, and following
the end of slavery, of indentured
labour. Furthermore, in the first great
surge of economic globalization in
the second half of the nineteenth
century, there were unprecedented
flows of migrant workers from Europe,
to the Americas, the Antipodes, and
to Africa. The second surge, in the
second half of the twentieth century,
led to some 150 million living outside
their country of birth (the UN figure
is an underestimate since it excludes
returnees, whereas gross figures must
be very much larger). Again, these
are figures that cover only countries,
excluding the very much larger
numbers who migrate within.
The present phase of steady growth
in global migration is, so far as the
developed countries are concerned,
much exaggerated by two special
features:
1. The demography of the
developed countries (and
China), leading to a decline in
the active population, as a result
of a declining birth rate. This
is threatening the end of selfsufficiency in the national labour
forces of the developed countries
and, other things being equal,
a growing incapacity to sustain
6
current output with existing levels
of technology and capital-output
ratios. Indeed, to sustain current
output requires the developed
countries either to locate activity
to areas where workers are
available (‘out-sourcing’) or create
mechanisms for the recruitment of
additional workers from abroad,
whether as permanent or temporary
residents.
2. The long-term emphasis in the
developed countries on raising the
skill-intensity of their respective
national outputs, is producing
almost perpetual scarcities of
workers with a range of appropriate
skills. This has produced a growing
dependence by developed
countries on foreign-born skilled
workers, a growing competition
for the world’s stock of skilled (to
the relative impoverishment of
many developing countries), and
the establishment of mechanisms
for permanent recruitment (now
affecting the recruitment of foreign
students to higher education
in developed countries). The
dependence is most pronounced
for the most highly skilled, as
US figures suggest –in the year
2,000 nearly 47 per cent of the US
stock of scientists and engineers
with doctoral qualifications were
foreign-born (as were two thirds of
the net addition of such workers to
the labour force in the last half of
the decade of the 1990s). It seems
that the foreign-born contribute
disproportionately, and increasingly
so, to innovation in the United
States (where in 2006, the foreignborn were included on 25 per cent
of applications for patents, up from
7.6 per cent in1998). Furthermore,
the continual enhancement of the
skills of the native-born workforce is
exaggerating the scarcity of workers
willing to undertake unskilled or low
skilled work, or at least undertake it
at the wages on offer.
Within a global economy, one
would expect patterns of territorial
specialization to emerge to
contribute to a global output. The
same phenomenon might emerge in
relation to skilled labour, whether as
the result of deliberate government
policy or a global market organizing
the distribution of training facilities.
A striking, if limited, example of
government initiative here is the Filipino
supply of two categories of workers nurses and merchant mariners, both
produced by Filipino training institutions
in numbers far in excess of the domestic
requirements. In the future, given
current investment in higher education,
possibly China and India will come
to provide the world’s main supply of
engineers and medical doctors.
However, we should note in passing
that we are still employing the
‘archaic’ concept of countries,
politically-defined units, to identify
what are often borderless economic
transactions. Outsourcing now covers
global networks of interdependent
collaborative activities in many countries
where the States concerned may be
entirely unaware of the economic
logic involved. What has happened in
advanced manufacturing and services,
may now be affecting what were
formerly identified as ‘non-tradeables’
- for example, medical services (where
patients are treated in different locations
internationally, according to local
specializations) or higher education
(where students travel between different
campuses for different special fields of
a global university). Such developments
might well reduce the need for workers
to travel to different countries.
Will the present economic conjuncture
affect these trends, restoring the old
national economies? There is certainly
evidence that governments have
reached for economic nationalism
to offset the slump – from trade
protection measures to national
financing of banking. However, I believe,
governments have left it far too late to
restore the old order. The attempt itself
would be economically – and therefore,
politically – devastating. Whenever the
world resumes growth, as it certainly
will, it will start from where it left off
which suggests that while economic
globalization (and its relationship to
national States) may be changed in
important ways, it will be a process in
substance resumed.
In sum, whatever the current position,
the developed countries will be obliged
to establish mechanisms for the
permanent recruitment of workers (if not
settlers) if governments are going to be
able to meet the welfare expectations
of their inhabitants and thus secure
political survival.
The integration of immigrants
If mobility of the factors of production
remains a fundamental feature of the
new global economy, States remain
preoccupied with their own immobility
– not with facilitating circulation in the
interests of the welfare of the world and
their own populations, but with migrants
as settlers, new members of the national
political club. The economic question of
facilitating mobility is subordinate to the
political issue – migrants as new citizens
or as invaders. Such an approach almost
completely dismisses the economic
benefits of migration for the native-born
to concentrate on the fears of losing
political power. It is this context which
in the developed countries leads to a
preoccupation with the ‘integration’ of
immigrants, turning them, whether they
wish it or not, into citizens.
However, as many people have
discovered it is almost impossible to
say what constitutes a native, a rightful
member of the national club. Most of
us have no choice – we are born into
the club and spend our lives within
it whether we approve of it or not. It
is an existential condition, not a free
choice. Some of us, in random swings
of the political pendulum are violently
excluded – as were the German
Jews under the Nazis, and with a
terrible shock bludgeoned into being
foreigners. Fortunately most of us never
have to face this crisis (unless you live
in the Balkans or Rwanda etc). But the
occasional violence of exclusion justifies
the earlier point that immigration
constitutes an existential threat to the
nation-State.
There are various approaches to trying
to define what constitutes a true
member of the club and a loyal citizen
(even though the majority of the nativeborn are not required to adhere to the
club or declare their loyalty). Let us
restrict ourselves to two extremes:
1. The nation is defined by a common
culture, adherence to a common
set of values. However, in practice
it is impossible to make explicit
this common culture, or to specify
what values all or a majority of
the inhabitants share. Either the
7
specification is impossibly vague
(and does not exclude things
shared by many non-natives), or it
is subject to the prejudice or vanity
of the person concerned – we are
all kindly and truthful. More to
the point, the native-born are not
obliged to accept either the culture
or the principles. Governments
retreat to the archaic – all
newcomers to Britain are expected
to swear loyalty to the monarch
although there are no explanations
to why republicans are excluded
from British nationality (and natives
are not).
2. The second approach lays down no
such conditions for acceptance; the
newcomer has to do no more than
accept the rules until changed.
The first approach illustrates, in my
view, a dangerous authoritarianism, an
illiberalism, implicit in the procedure,
and its dependence on hypocrisy about
the status quo. By contrast, liberal
principles might suggest as long-terms
objectives:
1. In general, people should be free
to travel, to work and settle where
they choose, and to be able to do
so with their rights protected by
the State in whatever country they
reside. In essence, the conditions
of international migration should
be the same as those for domestic
migration.
2. People should have freedom of
thought, and not be obliged to
abandon their existing beliefs or
adopt other beliefs because these
are locally fashionable;
3. All residents should be treated
equally – nothing should be
required of the foreign-born which
is not required of the native-born.
Implicitly, joining the national club
means accepting the club rules, paying
club dues etc, without necessarily
sharing the same opinions or customs as
existing members. These were broadly
the conditions that pertained in parts of
Europe in the past.
In current conditions, such principles
are completely utopian. In Europe, the
legacy of xenophobia and hundreds
of years of internecine war makes
foreigners potential or actual enemies.
Furthermore, human rights are currently
secured only by States, and those
without citizenship may be severely
disprivileged.
onerous and expensive is liable to
considerably increase the disincentives
to try. Even now passports are no longer
sacred badges of identity so much as
simple conveniences for travel.
Given what has been said before
about increasing mobility in the world,
the disincentives to seek citizenship
might suggest increasing numbers of
inhabitants will choose not to naturalize
where they live and work. In addition,
the growing bureaucracy seeking in vain
to match labour demand and supply will
give great incentives to move illegally
or move legally and work illegally. Such
workers will accordingly slip out of
whatever control the State retains until
such time as governments recognize
reality and assume responsibility for all
who live within their domains, regardless
of origins. But there may be many who
are severely damaged before such a
state of affairs comes to prevail.
Professor Emeritus of the economics of the city,
University College London; former director of the
Development Planning Unit (UCL); Senior policy
adviser, European Policy Centre (Brussels); and
consultant to the World Bank etc.. He is author of
the book ‘The New Untouchables’ published by
Penguin. His article is based on his lecture entitled
‘Population, Migration, Urbanization’ given at
However, the attempt by many
governments now to make the
conditions of entry to citizenship both
ISS in May 2009 as part of the SID lecture series
‘Population Question and Development: The need
for a debate in the Netherlands’.
ISS News
The next issue of DevISSues will be a special alumni issue.
We are inviting alumni to tell us their ideas on development,
from their own work and life perspective. How, if at all, was
this influenced by their studies at ISS? How are they using
the knowledge and insights you gained at ISS? If you are
interested in writing then please first visit the ISS website
for more details at http://www.iss.nl/Alumni/Alumni-news/
DevISSues-call-for-papers
ISS Honorary Fellow Elinor Ostrom has won the Nobel
economics prize. Ostrom won the prize with Oliver Williamson
for their analyses of economic governance — the way
authority is exercised in companies and
economic systems. Dr Ostrom is the
first woman to win the prize since it was
founded in 1968, and the fifth woman to
win a Nobel award this year — a record.
Dr Ostrom devoted her career to
studying the interaction of people and
natural resources. She was awarded an
Honorary Doctorate at ISS in 2002, the
year in which ISS celebrated
its 50th anniversary.
The ISS research project
‘Unlocking Potential: Tackling
Economic, Institutional and
Social Constraints of Informal
Entrepreneurship in SubSaharan Africa’, submitted by Michael Grimm and research
cluster Macro-Micro Dynamics of Poverty, has been selected
for funding by the World Bank Multi-Donor Trust Fund (MDTF)
in the area Labor Markets, Job Creation and Economic
Growth: Scaling up Research, Capacity Building and Action on
the Ground. Read more about this important research on the
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8
Intra-Regional Migration In West
Africa: Changing Patterns And
Dynamics
Mariama Awumbila
Introduction
Migration has gained significance on
the global agenda with the increasing
interdependence of the world economy.
Popular views of an ’invasion’ of African
migrants into the European Union
and other parts of the developed
world permeate policy discourses
and the media landscape. However,
contemporary mobility patterns in West
Africa indicate that only a small share of
migrants actually moves to Europe and
the USA and that intra and inter-country
movements within the region are and
continue to be a central feature of
people’s life. Thus in reality, south-south
migration involving different categories
of migrants such as temporary crossborder workers, especially female
traders, seasonal migrants, clandestine
workers, professionals, refugees,
farm labourers, unskilled workers and
nomads remains the bulk of migration
streams. Much of the movement takes
place in diverse political, economic
and ecological settings but remains
essentially intra-regional. These
movements play fundamental roles
in the livelihood strategies of many
families and communities in West
Africa. Yet neither much research
nor media focus is given to these
migration streams. I will focus on these
intra-regional migration dynamics in
West Africa and argue that a focus on
intra-African mobility is necessary for
designing holistic migration policies for
Africa’s development. Evolution of West
African Migration Patterns
Africa’s migration history is complex,
and present-day migration trends
are deeply rooted in historical
antecedents. In West Africa, migration
has long since been a way of life,
and has always played a central role
in livelihood strategies of both rural
and urban populations. Pre-colonial
migrations in West Africa took various
forms and were initially dominated
by traders, fisherman, and nomadic
farmers. The introduction of economic
development policies of both colonial
and post colonial governments however
changed the dynamics of migration
(Adepoju, 2005). During the colonial
era the development and expansion
of cash crop production (cocoa in
Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire, coffee in
Côte d’Ivoire) attracted a workforce
from various parts of the region. Ghana
for example became a net receiver of
people as the opening up of cocoa
and oil palm plantations, mines and
infrastructure development drew large
scale immigration from other West
African countries. Migrants came in from
neighbouring countries: Togo, Nigeria,
Burkina Faso, Mali and francophone
Africa. Following independence,
the consolidation of boundaries by
national governments began to hinder
cross-border migration. By the early
1960’s, both South-South and SouthNorth migrations had developed
simultaneously. By the 1980s a ‘culture
of migration’ had emerged where
migration especially to Europe and
North America, had become not only a
coping strategy and a form of economic
mobility for individuals and families in
West Africa, but also a form of transition
into adulthood in some West African
countries.
Dimensions of Contemporary
West African Migration
Patterns
Contemporary migration patterns
indicate the overwhelmingly regional
nature of West African international
migration. In Benin, Burkina Faso,
Ghana, Guinea, Mali, Mauritania, Niger
and Togo, over two-thirds of emigrants
are living within West and Central
Africa. For the region as a whole,
over the last decade, 61.7 per cent of
emigrants have moved to another part
of the region, 8.2 per cent to Central
Africa, 0.3 per cent to the Gulf, 14.8
per cent to various parts of Europe
and 6.0 per cent to North America (de
Haas, 2008). Thus, despite the recent
diversification of West African migration,
it is important to highlight that intraregional migration remains far more
important than migration from West
Africa to the rest of the world. Table 1,
showing the destinations of Ghanaian
emigrants in 2005, similarly indicates
the overwhelmingly regional nature of
Ghanaian emigration.
Table 1: Destination of Ghanaian
Emigrants
Countries
Percentage
Côte d’Ivoire
32.0
Nigeria
13.0
Burkina Faso
10.0
Guinea
9.0
USA
7.0
UK
6.0
Togo
4.0
Germany
2.0
Liberia
2.0
Canada
2.0
Others
13.0
Total
100.0
Source: Sussex Global Migrant Origin Database,
2005.
9
Another important dimension of
contemporary West African migration is
that many West Africa countries are now
simultaneously immigration, emigration
and transit countries. The main countries
of immigration in the sub-region are
Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Senegal and
Nigeria The major labour exporting
countries include Burkina Faso, Guinea,
Mali and Togo, involving a lot of cross
border movements, female traders,
farm labourers and unskilled workers
who pay little attention to the arbitrary
borders. Rural to urban migration has
also intensified as farm labourers have
moved in search of waged labour in
the cities. Conflicts and environmental
degradation further aggravate the
pressure for migration from poorer to
relatively prosperous regions, within and
outside the sub-region.
Since the late 1980s, traditional labourimporting countries (Côte d’Ivoire,
Ghana) and attractive destinations for
migrants (Ghana, Nigeria, Senegal) have
experienced political and economic
crises, which have resulted in the outmigration of their nationals. In recent
years, Ghana has, however, experienced
a flow of return migrants facilitated by
improved economic conditions and
political stability. There is also some
evidence of a pattern of replacement
migration, in which migrants of rural
origin move to towns to occupy
positions vacated by nationals who
emigrate abroad as appears to be
occurring in Mali, Burkina Faso, Côte
d’Ivoire and Senegal (Adepoju, 2005).
Since the 1970s, there have been
movements of highly skilled migrants
first to more prosperous parts of the
region (e.g. Ghana to Nigeria) and later
to other African countries, Europe and
North America, attracted by relatively
higher salaries and better prospects for
improved living conditions. Senegal has
become a transit country for migrants
seeking to enter Europe via the Canary
Islands. Thus countries that were once
immigrant-receiving have become
migrant-sending and transit countries.
Another significant development
particularly since the 1980s has been
a clear diversification of migration
patterns within and from the continent
away from migration patterns
determined by colonial and linguistic
divisions. For instance, Ghanaians,
Nigerians, Moroccans and Senegalese
emigration has increasingly focused on
countries outside their main language
community. Intercontinental migrants
have begun to go to countries other
than the respective former colonizers.
Examples include Senegalese and
Malian migrants to Zambia and more
recently to South Africa and the USA.
OECD (2005) data shows that Ghanaians
for example are increasingly moving
to non English-speaking European
and African countries, indicating
the dynamic nature of West African
migration and the ability to adapt to
new constraints.
Despite the dominance of migration
within the continent, however, since
the 1980s there has been growing
regular and irregular migration from
Africa to Europe, the Middle East, Asia,
North America. There has also been
growing migration towards some West
African countries, such as the increasing
numbers of Chinese, South Africans and
other West African nationals into Ghana.
An increasing number of West Africans
have migrated to Southern Africa,
such as Ghanaian and Nigerian health
workers now found in South Africa and
Botswana. Likewise, more West Africans
have migrated to Libya and Maghreb
countries, creating a vital link between
sub-Saharan, North African and transMediterranean migration systems.
Women are playing important and
presumably increasing roles in
international migration. The traditional
pattern of migration within and from
Africa which has been male-dominated
is increasingly becoming feminized.
A significant share of migrants is
now made up of women who move
independently to fulfill their own
economic needs. Women dominate
short distance emigration to nearby
countries, accounting for 64, 57 and
56 per cent respectively of Ghanaian
emigrants in Côte d’Ivoire, Burkina
Faso and Togo in the mid 1990s
(Twum-Baah et al, 1995). The extent to
which the mobility of women may be
providing opportunities for changing
gender roles in Africa requires further
focus, as in many cases women’s
mobility is still largely determined by
unequal gender relations that either
inhibit their movement or force them
to leave their homes. Despite this the
gendered nature of migration drivers
and processes in West Africa needs to
be recognized.
Trafficking in persons is also a
characteristic of West African migration.
Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Nigeria, Senegal,
Mali, among others, are all involved in
human trafficking in a complex web of
being origin, transit and destination
of trafficked women and children.
Côte d’Ivoire for example, is a major
destination for trafficked children from
Mali and Burkina Faso as forced labour
to work in plantations and as domestic
servants.
Cross Border Migration: Fulani Migrant Women from Burkina Faso / Awumbila, M. and Tsikata, D.
10
Drivers of Contemporary
Migration Patterns
Studies indicate that most West African
migration is driven by essentially the
same social, economic and political
forces (such as poverty, conflicts,
environmental factors and other crises)
as in other world regions. Despite this
similarity, studies also indicate that in
reality a much more complex mix of
factors have helped to shape people’s
movements across and beyond West
Africa. The assumption that every
migrant is escaping from poverty,
squalor, deprivation and want, and
that the focus of such migrations is
Europe and the western world does
not necessarily hold, as it neglects the
social factors that influence emigration
from the sub-region. The conventional
causes of migration in Africa are often
reinforced by processes of globalization.
In particular, diminishing environmental
resources as a result of sustained
exploitation have led to violent conflicts
among resource users which have in
turn induced forced migration in many
African countries. In Ghana since the
1990s there have been violent clashes
between ethnic Dagombas and
Konkombas, Nchumurus and Gonjas
and in Nigeria over land ownership and
farming rights.
Contemporary migration in the Western
African sub-region has also been
influenced by conflicts. Liberia, Sierra
Leone, Togo and Côte d’Ivoire have all
experienced conflicts in recent times,
leading to the dispersal of nationals
of these countries into the region and
elsewhere. Liberia’s contagious civil war,
which started in 1989, soon engulfed
neighbouring countries, almost turning
into a regional conflict and destabilizing
the entire West African sub-region.
Nearly 70 per cent of Liberia’s
population was displaced during the
war in that country and about 750,000
people were internally displaced within
Côte D’Ivoire when civil war broke out
in 2002.
West African Policy Response
to Intra Regional Migration
The role of West African states and
regional blocs have been important
in shaping migration dynamics Africa.
Although many African states do not
have clear policies on mobility, the
creation of regional blocks such as the
Economic Community of West African
States (ECOWAS), the Southern African
Development Community (SADC)
and the Maghreb Union have had
an impact on inter-regional mobility
and particularly on the direction of
labour migration flows. The creation
of ECOWAS in 1975 has promoted a
progressive abolition of obstacles to
the free movement of people, services
and capital in the region. Despite these
provisions, the free movement of labor
is still severely impaired by the fact
that regional and national regulations
are not synchronized, thus impinging
on the practical implementation of the
migration policies across borders in the
region. A number of member States
have implemented their own migration
policies that remain more restrictive
and highly sensitive to the fluctuations
in their labor markets. For example,
massive expulsions of migrants by
Nigeria and Côte d’Ivoire in 1983 and
1986 respectively occurred after the
approval of
the ECOWAS Protocol on the Free
Movement of Persons and the right
of Residence and Establishment in
1980, which guaranteed free entry of
Community citizens without visa for
ninety days. At the continental level, the
Africa Union’s Strategic Framework for
policy on migration adopted in 2004,
and to a less explicit extent, the New
Partnership for Africa’s Development
(NEPAD), include the promotion of
labour mobility among their key aims
and the recognition that migration
is an important engine for regional
cooperation and integration. These
frameworks and policies have the
potential to address and manage
intra-regional migration in West Africa.
What appears to be lacking now is a
translation of these frameworks into
workable programmes at national levels.
Conclusions and Implications
for a Responsive Migration
Agenda
This overview of contemporary
migration patterns and trends in
West Africa has shown that although
migration on the African continent is
generally characterized by tremendous
diversity, there are also commonalities in
the West African region. A clear feature
in these trends is that although there
has been an increase in trans-Saharan
and trans-Mediterranean migration
to the Maghreb and Europe, intraregional migration within West Africa
remains far more important, at least
in terms of numbers and significance
in people’s livelihood portfolios, than
migration from West Africa to the
rest of the world. While emigration
from many West African countries still
largely follows colonial patterns, there
has been an increasing diversification
in destinations and in the gender
distribution of migrants since the 1990s.
The current demographic, economic
and political situation in West Africa
is likely to continue to fuel emigration
both within and out of the region. The
diversities and inequalities between
countries in the region imply that
intra-regional migration is inevitable.
The huge and growing economic
differentials between the West African
sub-region and the North will also
continue, for the foreseeable future, to
attract migrants in spite of tightened
entry requirements and controls,
including policing by the EU agency
FRONTEX.
This means that more responsive
policy-making that would take these
issues into consideration in designing
comprehensive migration policies
will be needed. As a first step, it is
important that governments of West
African countries take advantage of
the current existing regional migration
policy frameworks to work out a West
Africa-owned approach to migration
management that would take account
of not only the issues of growing
south-north migration, but also issues
of intra-regional as well as internal
migration and which will take account
of the realities in the lives of individual
migrants and their families. Such an
approach will need to see migration not
simply as an outcome of poverty, but as
an important livelihood diversification
strategy in the fight against poverty.
This will require that migration be fully
recognized by both northern partners
and southern governments as an
intrinsic part of broader processes of
structural change in West Africa rather
than as just another development
problem to be solved.
Mariama Awumbila is Head, Centre for Migration
Studies at the University of Ghana, Legon. Website:
www.ug.edu.gh/centres
www.cmsgh.org
11
International Female Migration
and Trafficking Continuum
in Asia
Yu Kojima
As a social phenomenon, the evolution
of international trafficking in women
and girls appears to be closely linked
with two areas: i) changing demands for
women’s labour in the global political
economy and ii) the changing patterns
of international migration. The shift in
the role of women in migration from
being the dependent of male migrants
to becoming the major economic
agent in many developing countries
has become increasingly visible, partly
in response to the global economic
restructuring process beginning in the
late 1980s. Massive gender-selective
mobility has been induced in step
with the expansion of manufacturing
industries in developing countries.
Increasingly, this flow of female migrants
from developing countries has diverged
into the sectors of private care services
(PCS) and commercial sexual services
(CSS) located in the ‘global cities’. This
is mainly to satisfy growing demand
of migrant labour by high-income
professionals/expatriate communities
in cities such as New York, Hong Kong
and Manila (Sassen, 1998& 2002). State
policy has also accelerated gendered
patterns of migration, as particularly
evident in the case of female migration
for PCS and CSS. Women with limited
employment opportunities in less
developed economies are deliberately
channelled into particular sectors
through a combination of labour
migration and immigration policies by
governments on both sides. As part of
their economic strategy, governments
of Asia and Europe with serious labour
shortages have encouraged migrant
labour use by adopting training
schemes to share corporate skills and
specific quotas for service sectors jobs
such as entertainers and house maids.
Equally, governments keen to secure
alternative forms of revenue have
been drawn to the possibilities of their
citizens contributing such labour abroad
through massive government promotion
of female migratory work (Abella and
Abrera-Mangahas, 1995; Wille and Passl,
2001).
From an empirical perspective, two
key characteristics can be drawn from
a rising trend in female migration
in the Asian region: i) fluid and
unregulated employment patterns
that share features with trafficking
in women and girls and ii) the
marginalized socioeconomic status of
female migrants in terms of gender,
class, ethnicity, race and occupation.
In the absence of an international
instrument providing labour standards
for workers in PCS and CSS, female
migrant workers are often denied or
have limited access to labour benefits
and protection (Ramirez-Machado,
2000; Anti-Slavery International, 2003).
The vulnerable social status of female
migrants in PCS and CSS is further
reinforced by discriminatory practices
which are grounded on sexist and racist
assumptions. A common management
practice that determines the treatment
of female migrants workers based on
nationality rather than educational
background or skills is such an example
(Yeoh and Huang, 1998).
In legal terms, human trafficking and
migrant smuggling are considered
two distinctive categories. What
differentiates trafficking from
smuggling is the element of consent.
While an element of force is a major
determination of trafficking, the UN
Trafficking Protocol (2000) definition
stipulates the irrelevance of consent
by the trafficked person in determining
whether human trafficking has taken
place. In contrast, the smuggling of
migrants is defined by an element of
consent, regardless of the reality that
it often takes place in dangerous and
degrading conditions (UNODC 2006).
Nevertheless, empirical evidence
suggests that both undocumented
and documented female migrants
increasingly find themselves in situations
where they are trapped in conditions
of trafficking/exploitative migration
for limited episodes within their entire
migration experience. The narrow
scope of legal definitions therefore, has
downplayed the fact that smuggled
migrants are as equally vulnerable to
exploitation as trafficked individuals,
while trafficked women are victimized by
being stripped of their autonomy.
Our study conducted in Thailand,
Laos, Cambodia and Sri Lanka
(Kojima, 2007) further demonstrates
two distinctive situations that draw
women and girls into trafficking. The
first situation is related to high mobility
in job placement. Women move from
one job to another not only to satisfy
their immediate needs but also as the
result of the management strategy
widely adopted in PCS and CSS.
Undocumented migrants who are
smuggled into a country without any
legal documentation or legitimate visas
often experience trafficking during their
first job placement or in subsequent
employment. In this respect, trafficking
episodes tend to be sporadic and
spread throughout the overall migration
experience.
The second situation which makes
women and girls more vulnerable to
being trafficked is through bilateral
labour migration agreements for female
12
understanding of their position and
status in the migration process.
Empirical data also suggests that
particular decisions made by women
and girls contribute to shaping their
vulnerability in the migration process.
The level of vulnerability changes
according to their bargaining capacity.
It is also shaped by external factors such
as their relationship with employers and
colleagues, conditions of employment
and forms of resistance, if any. In sum,
vulnerability and the tolerance threshold
of women and girls, alongside the
complexity and dynamics of their selfimage, are highly significant because
they demonstrate how women and girls
undergo trafficking experiences on
the continuum of the overall migration
process.
Bangkok Post 22 July 2004
migrants for PCS and CSS. These
agreements often mandate women to
accept conditions that compromise their
basic socioeconomic rights as workers
and citizens. This suggests that women
who migrate as documented migrants
are, in practice, as equally vulnerable to
abuse and exploitation by employers
and agents as women who are
undocumented migrants. Consequently,
documented female migrants who lose
their legal status as they attempt to fulfil
their survival needs are not uncommon.
These women become undocumented
migrants or worse, they are trafficked
into exploitative working conditions.
By placing trafficking on a continuum
of the overall migration process, some
key theoretical and policy implications
can be drawn. Mindful of the significant
contribution yielded by economic
migration paradigms, emerging issues
surrounding female migration for
PCS and CSS highlight the need for
a theoretical inquiry into how gender
relations and individual identity
structure migration processes and
define the scope of women’s agency,
choices and preferences. Growing
evidence suggests that international
migration processes involving women
and girls in care and sex work cannot
be accounted for by economic factors
alone. Family violence and strong
personal aspirations are viable factors
that lead women and girls to decide
to migrate (Phetsiriseng, 2003; SWAN,
2002) while feelings of deprivation are
individual and gendered (Curran and
Saguy, 2001). The migration process is
further structured by changing gender
dynamics within individual households
in communities where migration has
become established as an acceptable
livelihood option.
In this context, a more profound
understanding of female migration can
be gained through rigorous analysis of
the sociological aspect of the coping
strategies and vulnerability of women
and girls in migration. The migration
process is composed of a series of
decisions made by the individual
concerned. Women and girls who wish
to migrate or to extend the migration
process are constantly under pressure
about whether to accept a new job
offer or to remain in their present job.
This is where the individuals’ threshold
of tolerance is relevant, since it
shapes their choices and preferences.
Depending on the shifting scope of
individual tolerance, women and girls
develop different types of coping
strategies alongside their own unique
Recognizing trafficking as an integral
component of female migration for
PCS and CSS also poses some serious
challenges in policy implementation. It
questions the relevance of the victim or
criminal framework commonly adopted
in migrant screening processes in terms
of identification of trafficked victims and
in regulations to safeguard participants
in official migration schemes. The
notion of ‘victimhood’ prominent in
present legal measures does not fully
reflect the process and context of
migration experienced by the women
and girls concerned. Consequently, the
narrow conditions set forth as proof
of victimhood in screening criteria
may exclude many women and girls
in exploitative migration who deserve
legal redress.
In this connection, two key civil
society-driven initiatives undertaken in
Thailand are noteworthy (with special
acknowledgement to the members of
the Foundation for Women for sharing
this information). First is the amendment
of the Trafficking Act (1997) initiated
by human rights advocate groups to
reflect the practical needs and realities
of those who are involved in exploitative
migration. The second key development
is related to a new strategy that
taps into the Domestic Violence Act
(2007). Rights advocate groups in
Thailand have launched a campaign
to promote the use of this new legal
framework to promote more timely
and effective intervention in reporting
13
and investigating labour exploitation
involving migrant domestic workers.
Moving away from the conventional
approach that relies on the
government’s sole role in protection
of migrant domestic workers, this
campaign plays a significant role in
reporting incidents of violence against
domestic workers. By linking the
maltreatment of migrant domestic
workers with domestic violence, the
campaign also attempts to challenge
the sociocultural norms that condone
gender and ethno-racial discriminatory
practices prevailing within households.
This is a highly relevant point as
violent practices against domestic
workers are often under-reported
as job expectations and rules often
applied to migrant domestic workers
are commonly drawn from the family
virtues and house rules of her employer,
thus disguising the abuse of domestic
workers (interview with an NGO
executive, 2009).
In sum, policy remedies that rely on the
establishment of migrant labour law
that does not necessarily question the
associated cultural valuing mechanism
is insufficient for resolving the gender
and racial injustice evident in the
context of female migration for care
and sex work. Shifting away from such a
‘transitional’ strategy, thus, we suggest
a transformative policy strategy that is
based on a critical inquiry of the social
and cultural norms and values that
reinforce the institutional practice of
disrespect and demeaning treatment
of migrant women and girls in these
sectors. In this respect, emphasizing
the potential of civil society in pursuing
social transformation from a women’s
rights perspective, the Domestic
Violence Act in Thailand promises
to break new ground. It calls for the
advancement of migrant workers’ status
by focusing on revaluing the norms
associated with female migration.
This strategy also provides new scope
in the fight against gender violence
in migration by shifting the focus of
criticism away from individual men to
the masculine structure and associated
social practices that justify gender
violence. Practitioners in other regions
and international agencies could
benefit from lessons learnt by the Thai
experience.
Yu Kojima acquired her PhD degree from ISS in
2007. Her most recent work and interest includes
trafficking/smuggling of Burmese migrant families
into the fishery sector in Southern Thailand with
particular focus on the agency of child migrants.
Internal Migration in China
Delia Davin
From the start of China’s economic reforms in the early 1980s, tens of millions of rural
people began to seek employment in the urban areas. There they hope to find higher
building a new house or putting a
relative through school. They then
returned to live either in their home
village or in nearby small towns.
incomes, to acquire useful skills and to see something of life beyond their villages.
According to the 2000 census, they numbered over 120 million. More recent estimates
have been as high as 150 million.
This migration has been especially
striking because in Maoist times
mobility was severely restricted. Few
people moved at all, and rural to urban
migration was particularly difficult.
When the restrictions were relaxed in
the period of economic reforms, a clear
distinction was maintained between
people with rural residence papers
(nongye hukou) and those with urban
residence (feinongye hukou). Only the
latter had the unconditional right to live
in the urban areas and full entitlement
to urban welfare and health and
education provision. Rural migrants in
the urban areas (mingong) on the other
hand, retained their right to a share of
land in their villages. Much migration
was circular. Young people went to the
urban areas for a few years until they
had saved enough to achieve such goals
as marrying, setting up a small business,
Labour migration was stimulated
by China’s rapid economic growth.
Established cities attracted migrants to
work in manufacturing, in the service
sector, on construction sites, and also
as petty traders, while booming export
industries in the coastal zones created a
tremendous demand for assembly-line
labour. Increased economic inequality
since the 1980s between the poor
agricultural provinces of the interior
and the industrializing coastal regions
provided more incentives to migrate.
Migration brought considerable
advantages to rural people and the
cut in migrant employment that has
14
accompanied the current recession has
inevitably caused them losses.
Migrant life in the cities
Although migration has been legally
permitted since the 1980s, migrants
continue to suffer considerable
discrimination in the cities. Most
mingong have some high school
education and are well educated by the
standards of their own communities. In
urban areas, however, they are looked
down on. Marked out by regional
accents, unsophisticated appearance
and most of all by their rural residence
papers (hukou), they are excluded
from the better jobs. They cluster in
heavy, dirty work such as cleaning or
construction, and in unskilled assemblyline manufacturing. They do not enjoy
the subsidized health care or education
to which urban residents are entitled.
Construction workers are usually
accommodated by their employers in
shacks, while factory workers are housed
in cheaply built dormitories. Other
mingong tend to congregate together
in shanty towns on the outskirts of
towns. Helped by friends or relatives to
find jobs and housing, they often live
and work with people from their home
region. In the early years, most migrants
were young, single and male. However,
as migration chains became established,
many women also went to the urban
areas, usually either as factory or service
workers.
the early years. They were frequently
subjected to roundups and trucked
out of town if their papers were not in
order. However, the authorities came to
recognize the utility of rural migration.
Cheap migrant labour made China
attractive to foreign investors and kept
manufacturing costs low. Migration also
eased the problems of labour surplus
in the countryside and remittances
contributed to rural development and
poverty alleviation. The state therefore
began to develop policies intended to
control rather than to prevent migration.
Migrant settlement was permitted
in small and medium-sized towns. In
larger urban settlements, a system of
temporary residence permits allowed
the state to monitor migrant workers
and assisted in urban planning and the
maintenance of social order. There was
official concern that rural migrants might
undermine the success of the one-child
family policy in urban areas and married
women migrants are therefore required
to show ‘birth-planning cards’ issued
in their home towns, recording their
fertility history and the contraception
they use.
Labour protection and the
migrant labourers
The Chinese state has shown
considerable ambivalence toward
labour protection in relation to the
migrant labour force. The 2005 Labour
Law, further strengthened by the 2008
Labour Contract Law, requires that
every worker should have a contract,
that the maximum work week should
be 40 hours with one day off, that
overtime should be paid and that wages
may not be delayed. Women workers
have maternity rights, child labour is
prohibited and working conditions are
required to be safe and sanitary. These
laws are almost universally violated
where migrants are employed, and there
is insufficient effort at enforcement.
Newly-arrived mingong, ignorant of
their rights, will often work under almost
any conditions.
Workers can take disputes to a
mediation committee or to the official
trade union. In some cases such action
helps, but often official bodies have
been unwilling to intervene on the
side of migrants. Local protectionism
opposes real changes in the system.
Local governments benefit from
Migrants’ lives are hard and insecure.
Employers facing cut-throat
competition in both the construction
and manufacturing industries attempt
to keep their labour costs as low
as possible. Pay and conditions are
therefore poor, especially at the lowest
level of subcontracting. In the worst
cases, employers pay less than has been
promised, or do not pay at all. Most
factory workers work 10 to 12 hours
a day, many have no regular day off.
Health and safety standards are poor
and there is a high rate of work-related
accidents and ill health. Migrants who
are sick or injured must usually pay for
their treatment themselves, and if they
are unable to work, they return to their
villages.
Urban reactions and
government policy
Migrants have often been seen as a
threat to social order, especially in
Migrants in Guiyang, August 2009
15
investment in their areas and from the
fees they levy on migrant workers. They
do not wish to drive investment away
to areas where easier labour regimes
prevail.
Under pressure from international
organizations, some multinational
firms have made efforts to ensure
minimum wages and good working
conditions at the factories from which
they source their goods in China. But
subcontracting makes such codes
difficult to enforce. Moreover, the
multinationals push subcontractors to
produce at lower prices. While some
foreign companies welcomed the
Chinese labour laws, others lobbied
against them and threatened to take
investment elsewhere. Local Chinese,
Hong Kong, Korean, and Taiwaneseinvested enterprises have tended to
show the least interest in maintaining
minimum pay and good working
conditions. Chinese non governmental
organizations such as the All-China
Women’s Federation and the Youth
Federation, along with international
ones such as the Asia Foundation and
Oxfam Hong Kong, are increasingly
involved in welfare, advice and rights
education work with Chinese migrant
workers.
Links with home
Migrants endure hardship to send
money to their families or save for
their futures. If successful they may
earn in a month what they would
receive in a year working on the land.
Although some rural migrants dream
of settling down in the cities, for the
majority it is too difficult. Some settle
in smaller cities and towns which allow
long-term settlement for migrants
who meet economic criteria, such as
having a permanent job or buying
their own apartment. Other migrants
go home to get married. Afterwards,
if earning opportunities at home are
scarce, one or both spouses may
‘go out’ again, leaving any child for
grandparents to care for. Migration
takes an essentially circular form, in
which migrants move between rural
and urban areas but regard the village
as home. As older migrants settle
back in the villages, younger ones take
their place in the urban workforce.
Migrant-exporting provinces such as
Sichuan have sometimes raised the
complaint that they function as nurseries
and old people’s homes, producing
labourers whose productive years
are spent elsewhere. More recently,
some migrants have begun to settle
permanently in the destination areas.
In general, however, big cities resist
granting permanent residence to
incomers unless they are highly qualified
or exceptionally wealthy.
Impact on the rural areas
Large-scale migration has both negative
and positive effects on the rural areas.
Age and gender ratios in the sending
areas are distorted. There is a lack of
people in their early twenties in some
villages, while in others it is mainly men
who are missing. Many children grow up
with absent fathers. Others are brought
up by their grandparents because both
parents are working away. Old people
and women have heavier farm work
burdens.
On the positive side, migrants send
remittances and bring back knowledge
and capital. Knowing that they will
return one day, migrants maintain
close contact with their families.
Remittances increase the disposable
income of farming families: they are
invested in new housing, education and
small enterprises, thus raising living
standards in the villages. Returning
migrants may set up building firms,
tailoring shops, restaurants, or other
small businesses in the sending areas,
using skills, entrepreneurial know-how,
and contacts acquired during their time
as a migrant. Migrants influenced by
urban lifestyles also bring back new
ideas. They press for electricity, running
water and improved sanitation and
introduce new technology such as the
use mobile phones into the area. They
understand life beyond the village, have
smaller families and attempt to improve
their children’s life chances through
education.
Recent developments - the
impact of recession
China’s export industries, in which so
many migrants work, are inevitably
vulnerable to international recession.
As world trade began to slow in the last
months of 2008, many factories in the
previously vibrant coastal areas closed
down. In February 2009 it was estimated
that 20 million migrant workers who had
returned to their villages for Chinese
New Year would be staying there. They
had been laid off and had despaired of
finding another job. It was feared that
the knock-on effects would be falling
living standards in the countryside as
remittances dried up. Children would
be pulled out of school and housebuilding postponed. Young people
who thought that they had escaped the
drudgery and boredom of village life
for ever would be angry and depressed
at their enforced return. Those who
still sought jobs as migrant labourers
would be willing to accept even lower
wages. There was even speculation that
political stability could be affected.
In fact the recession seems to have had
limited impact. Some incidents in which
aggrieved workers demonstrated or
rioted have been reported but these
have been small-scale and scattered.
Migrants may be angry or frustrated but
they lack organization and the fact that
when unemployed they have to return
to their home villages, makes concerted
action difficult. Moreover, job loss does
not mean destitution. Most have some
personal savings – the savings rate
among Chinese workers is impressively
high. Their landholdings in their rural
homes also provide some security.
The Chinese government was of
course anxious to mitigate the
negative effects of the recession. The
central government instructed local
government to set up training and job
creation schemes for the unemployed.
The major sending provinces have
increased provision for migrant
training courses - Guangxi Province
for example has allocated $35 million
to free education for migrants. Other
provinces have put millions into startup loans for migrant businesses. The
central government has also attempted
to stimulate domestic demand as a
substitute for export demand and to
create jobs wherever possible. However,
there is a limit to what can be done for
China’s migrant labourers. Their jobs
were created by the export boom and
until the recession in world trade eases
their employment is not likely to recover
its former levels.
Delia Davin (Emeritus Professor of Chinese Studies)
taught Chinese economic history at the University of
York and Chinese development at the Department
of East Asian Studies at the University of Leeds. She
retired in 2004 but is still a regular visitor to China
and continues to write and do research.
16
Remittances, Political Economy,
and Economic Development
Ilene Grabel
Remittances are the international
financial flows that arise from crossborder movements of people. In
recent years, remittances have
begun to receive attention from
a number of quarters, including
academics, policymakers, bankers,
non-governmental organizations, and
activists working on behalf of migrant
communities. For a time, and especially
in the policy community, it seemed that
remittances were being positioned as
the next great development panacea,
following a professional tendency that
Hirschman (1965) noted long ago.
The initial euphoria about remittances
has subsided, and has given way to
more nuanced assessments of their
developmental contributions.
This more sober view of remittances
is welcome. The vast body of work on
the subject raises as many questions
as it answers, particularly for scholars
interested in the political economy of
development and international financial
flows to developing countries.
Here we relate remittances to other
capital flows to the developing world
(bank loans, foreign direct investment
(FDI) and portfolio investment, and
official development assistance, ODA).
Our goals here are to draw together
findings from the rapidly growing multidisciplinary study of remittances, and
to identify what we know, what we do
not yet know, and what we still need to
know about their economic, political
and social consequences.
Remittances raise a range of important
political economy concerns. One
is the contribution of remittances
to what I term public moral hazard.
Specifically, remittances cause states
in the developing world to reduce
expenditures on public goods
that have traditionally depended
on public support - such as public
investment in infrastructure - and on
human capital and social services,
and protect governments from the
political consequences of poor policy
choices and/or those that induce social
dislocation.
Empirical Dimensions and
Lacunae
Officially recorded remittances to
developing countries are estimated
to reach $328 billion in 2008, up from
$285 billion in 2007 (see table 1). The
World Bank forecasts that the slowdown
in remittances that began in the 3rd
quarter of 2008 will deepen in 2009
because of the global financial crisis.
The majority of remittances do not flow
to the poorest developing countries
(table 1). However, when compared to
GDP and import income, remittances
are relatively more important to
low-income than to middle-income
countries. Remittances are far less
concentrated in large developing
economies than are other types of
international private capital flows.
In 2007, remittances were more than
twice as large as ODA inflows, and
nearly half as large as FDI and PI. The
importance of remittances relative
to other international capital flows to
developing countries is expected to
continue into 2009. In many developing
countries, recorded remittances are the
largest source of external finance of
any sort. And, for many small countries,
remittances are the main source of
income. Moreover, remittances are
less volatile than other international
private capital flows, that in general
have been pro-cyclical (i.e. remittance
flows increase during economic booms
and decrease during slowdowns) in
relation to world economic fluctuations.
Up until the current global financial
crisis, remittances were strongly
counter-cyclical (i.e. remittance flows to
developing countries increase following
economic and political crises and
natural disasters in recipient countries).
Economic, Political and Social
Effects of Remittances
In what follows, I examine some of the
diverse and cross-cutting economic,
political and social consequences of
remittances.
1. Savings, private investment by
small businesses and agriculturalists,
and investments in human capital
There is unambiguous evidence
that once basic needs are met,
remittances are used for savings,
debt repayment, consumer durables,
land and housing purchases, small
enterprise development and agriculture,
and investments in education and
healthcare. Indeed, these effects are
largely responsible for the enthusiasm
about remittances among policymakers.
It is clearly important that remittances
support these investments. But these
achievements must be placed into a
broader context. It is widely known
that the formal banking system and the
state in the developing world have long
underserved the poor, small business
and agriculture, as far as the provision
of credit. This problem has become
more severe in the neo-liberal era as
states have dismantled long-standing
programmes that provided some
assistance through the provision of
working capital at subsidized rates. And
so, it may be that remittances now patch
over the gaps in public funding and
bank financing that have grown ever
larger thanks to neo-liberal policy.
States in the developing world have also
long under-invested in human capital.
But this situation, too, has become
far more severe in the neo-liberal era
when state support for education
17
and public health has been curtailed
radically and essential public services
have been privatized. Though the hard
numbers have yet to be assembled, it is
reasonable to assume that these large
shortfalls in support for small business,
agriculture and human capital could
not possibly be filled by remittances. In
this connection, it is worth recalling that
only 8.7 per cent of remittances to the
developing world in 2007 went to the
poorest countries, and these flows were
themselves concentrated in particular
regions within these countries.
In this context, I think it is important
to learn whether remittances create
a public moral hazard on the part of
developing country governments.
That is, by partially resolving important
bottlenecks, do remittances actually
encourage states in the developing
world to ignore their traditional
responsibilities because they perceive
(or hope) that remittances will fill various
voids?
2. Public investment in infrastructure
and other public projects
There is some evidence that in certain
countries remittances support some
public investment by providing capital
for health clinics, land, wells, irrigation,
equipment, and schools in particular
communities. Most of the financing
for public investment by remittances
comes from organized ‘Home Town
Associations’ of migrants that have
pooled and channeled remittances for
public projects in their towns of origin.
There are anecdotal studies of the
activities of Home Town Associations
around the world but these localized
studies are not conducted with sufficient
rigor to allow us to assess the scale
of the positive contribution made by
remittances to public investment across
the developing world.
If remittances catalyze public investment
that would not otherwise occur, then
naturally the net effect is positive.
But if remittances crowd-out public
investment by inducing a public moral
hazard, then their contribution may be
marginal or even negative. It may thus
be that these new institutional forms
mask a net reduction in public finance.
Public moral hazard might unfold
behind the backs of those sending and
receiving remittances.
3. Remittances and economic and
social instability
A very interesting role played by
remittances is that they function
as a form of social insurance that
sustains consumption and household
investments in human capital by
providing critical support after
economic, financial and political crises
and natural disasters. The material
support provided by remittances
to the vulnerable during crises is an
achievement that cannot be dismissed.
But, in my view, the relationship
between remittances and economic
shocks is more complex than is
generally understood.
One aspect of this complexity concerns
the relationship between remittances
and the neo-liberal regime. In this
environment, states have curtailed
the social programmes and public
institutional arrangements that
traditionally helped the vulnerable to
shoulder shocks (and, in some cases,
even reduced the likelihood that these
shocks would occur). In the absence
of public shock absorbers, remittances
function as private mechanisms that
displace the burden of adjustment to
shocks onto transnationally-dispersed
family networks. Moreover, neoliberalism creates an environment
wherein shocks become more frequent
and severe and thus where the shock
absorption role of remittances becomes
all the more necessary.
However, the destabilizing role of
remittances should not be ignored;
there are a few cases were remittances
are actually an independent channel
of destabilization. The case of Albania
is particularly interesting in this
connection, as research by Korovilas
(1999) makes clear. Remittances
from Albanians working in Italy and
Greece fueled pyramid schemes in
the country during 1995-96. These
remittance-financed pyramid schemes
attracted deposits equal to almost
half of Albania’s GDP in 1996. The
pyramid schemes collapsed in 1997,
leading to serious economic and
political destabilization, which was only
stabilized by a new round of migration
and remittances from Albanians.
Finally, by linking the economies of
nations so closely, remittances can
be seen as yet another channel of
contagion that can transmit economic
instability or contraction from one
country to another. For example, the
economy of Burkina Faso contracted
quite dramatically when remittances of
Burkinabè working in the Côte D’Ivoire
dried up following an economic and
political crisis there (Mutume, 2005).
On the issue of forcible deportation,
there are some interesting issues that
warrant investigation. It is obvious
that forcible deportation brings a halt
to remittances, but what we are also
starting to see is that the slowdown
of remittances is triggering housing
market crises in the developing world
because remittances are so often used
to support home and land purchases in
migrants’ country of origin. In addition,
there is anecdotal evidence from El
Salvador that forced deportations have
also placed the Salvadorean state under
considerable pressure because it is now
faced with the challenge of providing
healthcare and education for returnees,
as well as with generating the growth
necessary to provide them with jobs.
Up until the current global economic
crisis, there was some evidence that
remittances remained stable when
there was an economic downturn in the
sending country (Ratha, 2003:163). But
at present, the depth and the spread
of the crisis is causing remittances to
exhibit pro-cyclicality.
4. Public sector borrowing costs
and credit ratings
An unexpected effect of remittances
is that they have been used in some
countries to lower government
borrowing costs and lengthen debt
maturities on public issues. Brazil, El
Salvador, Mexico, Panama and Turkey
have securitized remittances along with
other ‘future-flow receivables’, such as
telephone and credit card receivables
(Ketkar and Ratha, 2009). Remittancesecuritized bonds have been issued on
terms that are considerably less costly
to the government than non-securitized
public bonds, and they receive higher
credit ratings, something that gives the
government access to a wider range of
investors.
It is quite easy to see the benefits of
securitizing remittances to developing
18
example, the Indian government has for
some time been selling diaspora bonds
as a vehicle to support the government
budget and to keep the diaspora
financially engaged with the country
(Ketkar and Ratha, 2009).
country governments. But there are
significant obstacles in the way of
more widespread use of securitization.
Not least of these obstacles is the fact
that there are high, fixed legal costs
associated with structuring these deals.
Moreover, the benefits of greater access
to credit at more favourable terms
must be weighed against the costs of
greater debt burdens and the addition
of inflexible securitized debt. Today’s
global financial crisis makes clear that
policymakers in developing countries
should exercise extreme caution when
considering further securitization of
remittances or any other future financial
flow.
5. Political effects of remittances
The Eritrean government has attempted
to direct individual remittances
into government channels. Since
independence, the country’s diaspora
has been asked to pay two per cent of
their income to the state as a ‘healing
tax’. During the conflict with Ethiopia,
even greater demands were made of
the diaspora. Indeed, Van Hear (2003)
notes that contributions by the diaspora
financed much of the conflict, an issue
to which we return below.
There is very little research undertaken
to date on the political consequences
of financial engagement via remittances
sent by diaspora communities. The
Philippines, Eritrea, Mexico and India
have active policies that specifically aim
at keeping diasporas engaged with
the country through remittances. For
As beneficial as the remittances can be
as a source of finance for the country of
origin, it is important to investigate the
political consequences of remittances
from diaspora communities. On the one
hand, remittances from the Philipinne
diaspora were thought to provide
crucial support to pro-democracy forces
that ultimately toppled Marcos. But, in
other cases, the effects have not been
so benign. Remittances have been
used to provide funding for civil and
border wars and have also provided
crucial support for some cessessionist
movements. There has been some
research on this matter that deals with
the Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora in the
UK, the Indian Hindu diaspora, and the
Eritrean diaspora in connection with
the border war with Ethiopia. There is
also the need to investigate whether
remittances leverage the political voice
(in the sense of Hirshman) of diaspora
communities unduly relative to those at
home.
Research on remittances and domestic
politics should also consider their effect
on national economic policy choices.
There are some reasons to expect
that the Dutch disease (i.e. the real
currency appreciation that is generated
by large inflows of capital) and other
economic effects of remittances make
it harder for a government to sustain
particular policy regimes, such as
Table 1. Migrant Remittances to Developing Countries (US$ billion, current dollars)*
INFLOWS
-All developing countries
1990
2000
31
84
2006
226
2007
285
2008
est.
328
2009
Remittances as a share of
forecast
2007 GDP (%)
range
304-313
2.0%
By country income group:
-Low-income countries
5
8
29
25
31
29-30
6.0%
-Middle-income countries (MIC)
26
76
197
261
297
275-282
1.8%
By regions:
-East Asia and the Pacific
3
17
53
65
78
74-76
1.4%
-Europe and Central Asia
3
13
39
51
57
49-50
1.8%
-Latin America & the Caribbean
6
20
57
63
64
60-61
1.7%
-Middle East & N. Africa
11
13
27
32
34
32-33
4.6%
-South Asia
6
17
40
55
74
71-74
3.1%
Sub-Saharan Africa
2
5
11
19
20
18-19
2.6%
*Dilip Ratha, Sanket Mohapatra, and Ani Silwal, ‘Outlook for remittances flows, 2009-11,’ Migration and development brief No. 10;
July 13, 2009; Migration and remittances team, Development prospects group, World Bank.
19
export-oriented growth. However,
there are other cases that suggest
that remittances can actually protect
national governments and particular
sectors from the consequences of
misguided policy decisions (see
point 3 above). In this connection,
we can think of the protection that
remittances offer to governments as
the public sector equivalent of the
social insurance function that they
play for households. Thus, the support
provided by remittances makes it
possible for governments to overlook
the problems that lead to migration and
the dislocation induced by neo-liberal
policy.
One final political economy issue is
whether recent recognition of the
empirical significance and self-insurance
aspect of remittances is having an effect
on the proclivities of wealthy countries
as far as ODA. That is, do we have
a reversal of the usual ‘crowding out
effect’ - in this case, are remittances
(a private flow) discouraging ODA (a
public flow) by providing a rationale or
justification for governments that may
already have political reasons to curtail
ODA? In this context, I should note that
skeptics of ODA and of international
aid bureaucracies have embraced
remittances as part of what has been
called the new ‘privatized foreign aid’
(Adelman, 2003).
Conclusions
There is still much that we need to know
about remittances. Nevertheless at
this preliminary point, we can already
start to see that the political economy
effects of remittances are complex,
contradictory, contingent upon many
factors that vary from cases to case and
so are not amenable to generalizations.
In this sense, remittances carry with
them complexities that are no less
significant than those that have been
illuminated by the study of other types
of international capital flows. Thus, we
should be neither disappointed nor
surprised when future research reveals
that remittances do not have uniform
or unambiguous political economy
implications.
change dramatically as a consequence
of the current global economic crisis.
In the context of the crisis, it appears
that remittances are behaving procyclically, making them more like other
international private capital flows. This
suggests that those members of the
policy community who, just a few years
ago, celebrated the developmental
impact of remittances may be
compelled now to recognize that
these and other international private
capital flows are neither substitutes for
ODA nor for economic development
strategies that mobilize and channel
domestically-generated resources in the
service of development.
Ilene Grabel is a Professor of International Finance
and Co-Director of the Graduate Program in Global
Finance, Trade and Economic Integration at the
Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the
University of Denver (USA). She is co-author (with
Ha-Joon Chang) of Reclaiming Development: An
Alternative Policy Manual (London: Zed Books,
2004; US distributor: Palgrave Macmillan, second
printing 2005).
We should also not be surprised to
learn that conventional wisdom on the
developmental role of remittances may
Migrants: Suitable brokers of
development?
Lothar Smith and Ton van Naerssen
In 2007, leaders of Africa and Europe
met at the EU-Africa Summit, in
Lisbon, to discuss cooperation on
development and migration between
the two continents. One of the main
outcomes of these talks was the
Joint Africa-EU Strategic Partnership
framework, in which African migrants
were explicitly – for almost the first
time – given an important role in the
promotion of sustainable development
in the continent. This reflects a trend;
international migration and its impact
on development processes is currently
one of most discussed issues in
development policy circles. In this short
article we present a ‘state of the art’ of
migration and development, reviewing
some of the pros and cons of this new
approach.
Overseas migrants can play a positive
role in the social and economic
development of countries of settlement
as well as in their countries of origin.
Both World Bank and International
Organization for Migration reports
have influenced this discourse and
contributed to recent policies. The
conferences of the Global Commission
on International Migration (GCIM) in
2005 and the UN High-Level Dialogue
on Migration and Development in
2006 also highlighted that international
migration contributes to poverty
alleviation and economic growth
worldwide and pointed to the huge
potential for development to benefit
from migration in countries of
emigration and immigration.
Migrants’ financial remittances,
knowledge transfer, investments
and trade all have an impact on how
localities, regions and countries of
origin of migrants develop and change.
Although economic growth generated
by remittances is generally considered
positive, there are criticisms of wasteful
consumption (e.g. large houses being
constructed). There is however a general
consensus that private remittances need
to be shielded from the intervention of
governments. At the same time, more
20
Engaging African Diaspora in Europe / African Diaspora Policy Centre
collective forms of peer support for
migrants, notably through transnational
community organisations (TCOs), are
increasingly recognised as playing a vital
role in successful migration experiences
and impacts.
Transnational community
organisations
Migrants often establish their own,
ethnic or locality-based networks in
countries of settlement. These local,
regional or national associations often
help them create a ‘home away from
home’ feeling of risk-sharing and ‘social
capital’. Newcomers in a foreign and
largely unknown environment can thus
be accommodated and helped to ‘learn
the ropes’, sometimes even helping the
newly arrived migrant to start up their
own business. TCO’s vary greatly in age,
size, formal status and key goals. Some
TCOs primarily lobby for equal rights
and access to facilities. These are often
formalized so that specific migrants’
voices can be heard and recognized by
the authorities concerned. Other TCOs,
including neighbourhood groups, may
not be based as explicitly on specific
national identities, but may be regional
or inter-regional. They tend to remain
small in size and are often informal and
relatively harder to research, being
mostly invisible to outsiders.
Most often the main aim of TCOs is to
support their fellow countrymen and
women in the process of adaptation
to the specific circumstances in the
country of settlement – temporary or
not. TCOs can be vital to a successful
integration process in the new society.
In this way, migrants come to be part of
new networks, yet remain embedded
in transnational networks that connect
them to their countries and regions of
origin. Thanks to increasingly global
transport and communications networks
(TV, video, mobile phone, and internet
among others), migrants can stay in
touch with their families and friends
‘at home’ and elsewhere abroad. This
process contributes to the formation
of their newly acquired transnational –
double- or multi-rooted - identities.
Although these transnational networks
often start out as the initiative of
individual migrants, over time they
may develop into collective efforts
in which not only migrants but also
host and ‘home’ country individuals
and communities can play important
roles. Thus TCOs are established
whereby, through socially organized
bonds between migrants and their
areas of origin, social and economic
development can be achieved
through organized remitting and local
development activities. Indeed, with
time, making collective contributions
to development at ‘home’ can become
an explicit goal of many TCOs. They
may commit themselves to small-scale
development projects and programmes
in the field of education, health, and/
or infrastructure in their communities
and regions of origin. TCOs can help to
collectively transfer skills and knowledge
through contacts with networks of
professional migrants, such as medical
doctors, agronomists and engineers
amongst others. Such initiatives can
help to create a transnational sense of
identity.
Many governments have become more
aware that TCOs can play a positive
role in local development, and this has
produced all kinds of efforts to capitalize
on emigrants’ collective initiatives. A
well known example is the growing
role of Mexican TCOs in the United
States. Many of these organizations are
referred to as ‘hometown associations’.
Over time, they have become
involved in developmental initiatives
in and around their hometowns. The
Mexican government discovered
that it could tap into this potential by
implementing policies targeting its
countrymen and women abroad to
gain their participation in development
projects. For instance, the government
programme Tres-por-Uno, which
involves the federal, state and municipal
governments, provides 3 US$ for every 1
US$ collected and transferred home by
migrants.
From co-development to the
Global Forum
Governments of Western countries,
UN institutions and civil society
organizations have begun to
show a growing interest in TCOs
as development agents. From a
developmental point of view, efforts to
promote cooperation between state
agencies, development cooperation
organizations and migrants’ business
and professional networks is of great
significance. Indeed the concept of
networking now runs through nearly
all current international migration
programmes. For instance in the
Netherlands, we find various TCOs
partnering the Ministry of Foreign
Affairs in a range of initiatives. Such
TCOs include the African Diaspora
Policy Centre (bridging African migrant
communities and policy makers at EU
level), the Global Society Foundation
(capacity-building training to migrant
organizations) and SEVA Network
Foundation (development activities
based on Hindu philosophy). Such
cooperative initiatives take place within
a broader framework of a diverse
network of actors.
There are also European multilateral
initiatives, such as the Cotonou
Agreement, an initiative taken together
with African, Caribbean and Pacific
(ACP) countries and the partnership
between countries of the Mediterranean
region. Globally, an important step
was taken with the first meeting of
the Global Forum on Migration and
Development (GFMD), in Brussels, in
July 2007. This meeting was preceded
by a meeting between invited civil
society organisations, including TCOs,
which were to improve cooperation at a
21
global level. The GFMD meeting turned
out to be relatively successful, in the
sense that further cooperation arose,
with a second meeting in Manila in
2008. A third meeting is to take place in
Greece in November 2009.
In the wake of governmental interest
in TCOs as partners in development
aid, development agencies and
TCOs have also begun to develop
partnerships. At present, small-scale
projects, peace and reconstruction
initiatives and return migration have
been given a place on the agenda. This
agenda could be broadened further by
paying attention to and encouraging
collective remittances, transnational
entrepreneurship opportunities, private
investments and tourism by migrants,
their descendants and relations to their
countries of origin. Special attention
should also be paid to opportunities
for TCOs to engage in programmes
in the field of good governance and
democratization processes in their
countries of origin. Increasingly, TCOs
are also accepted as partners in peace
making and conflict resolution.
Can TCOs make a difference
(and for whom)?
The positive role of TCOs in
development cooperation now seems
to be taken for granted. But is it really
such a simple and given matter? First
of all, much depends on patterns
of migration, past and current, and
on the composition and relative size
of the migrant population. All kinds
of migrants – whether classified as
labour migrants, refugees, permanent
migrants, temporary migrants, or
otherwise - maintain links with their
countries of origin, but the nature of
these ties will vary, and the consequent
impact will also influence the
development of home areas in very
different ways. In the current discourse,
there is a tendency to treat diaspora and
migrant associations as a homogenous
category. But this does not reflect the
reality that migrant communities are
diversified along lines of class, ethnicity,
religion, gender, age, geographical
location and political orientation.
Second, social networks and knowledge
of different cultures can be both
a strength and weakness of TCOs
as actors concerned with initiating
development processes in the countries
of origin. Social networks are useful
but can also constrain development
since strong links and obligations may
produce their own forms of inefficiency.
Local knowledge and local relations are
important but cannot always make up
for the lack of professional and technical
skills where economic development is
concerned. Where larger infrastructural
projects are needed, for instance, such
expertise will be essential.
Third, whilst abroad, although keeping
in touch, there will be changes in the
‘home’ environment that many long
term migrants may be less aware of
than those who remain ‘at home’.
Migrants may be westernized by their
education, their economic outlook
and, in some cases, may come to be
considered virtual outsiders in their
own, or their parents’, places of origin.
TCOs may strive to engage positively
with democratic political debate, and
may see themselves as playing a part
in efforts to strengthen civil society.
However not everyone will welcome
such engagement as in many less
developed countries patron-client
relations and authoritarian positions
prevail.
Fouth, TCOs can be more effective
agents of development than traditional
NGOs because of their strong sense
of engagement and motivation. Their
objectives are often clearly spelled out
and they tend to have long term ties
to the region concerned, as well as
often quite intimate knowledge of local
circumstances.
Clearly then, it is still too early to
say how and to what extent local
knowledge and transnational social
capital are decisive for the success
of local development projects.
Development-oriented TCOs may
indeed possess such valuable and
specific skills as knowledge of the
cultures and languages in which people
work, but these by themselves are rarely
sufficient to give such organizations any
privileged positions in development
cooperation programmes more
generally. The targets of development
are located in the home countries of
the TCOs, and not in the global North,
where they are based. The major
criteria for funding are the professional
quality of the implementers, the
quality of the project design and
the involvement of local agents.
The last factor raises difficult issues,
including whom TCOs should seek to
cooperate with? It has been suggested
that a more prominent role by local
governments as stakeholders and
partners can encourage the involvement
of migrants in local development. Yet
a study in Ghana has demonstrated
that substantial conflict can arise over
whether collective remittances are
distributed by traditional chiefs, local
development councils or development
NGOs (or TCOs). Development can
thereby become an even more fraught
process than before.
Finally, the fact that the concept
of development itself is contested
continues to often be overlooked.
Besides economic development,
the term contains all kinds of other,
often inter-related, aspects. Indeed
‘development’ has been defined as
sustainable economic growth, as social
advancement, as increasing equity, as
increasing democracy and freedom,
or as various combinations of these.
While this reveals the complexity and
multidimensionality of the linkage
between international migration
and development, it would be of
additional value to also focus on whose
development it is we are speaking
about by exploring the roles played by
TCOs and other actors such as the state,
development NGOS and local NGOs.
Given the heterogeneity of TCOs
and their strongly varying interests,
the challenge is to try and realize firm
ties between TCOs and development
cooperation agencies in host countries
as well as the major actors in the
countries of origin. However, this should
not be realized at the expense of more
spontaneous and informal initiatives and
processes of transnational development
cooperation. This requires sufficient
room for new approaches such as
transnational dialogues and capacity
building programmes in order to
develop new forms of sustained modes
of transnational cooperation.
Lothar Smith ([email protected]) is assistant professor
in development geography at Radboud University
Nijmegen and member of the Migration and
Development Research Group.
Ton van Naerssen ([email protected]) is senior
researcher at the same research group.
22
Environment and Development:
the contributions of Hans
Opschoor
Lorenzo Pellegrini
This interview is to mark the valedictory
lecture of Professor Opschoor. During
our hour-long discussion, Hans provided
an impressive overview of the past
decade at ISS, of relevant issues for
the environment and development
debate since the 1970s and other
topical questions. (I refer the reader to
the full text of Hans’ valedictory for a
more detailed exposé of his thoughts
on climate change - http://www.iss.
nl/News/Valedictory-Address-HansOpschoor).
You first came to ISS in 1996 when
you became Rector of the Institute.
What were the reasons for your
interest in ISS? What were the most
important issues you had to deal with
during your rectorship?
Hans Opschoor during field work, Botswana 1979
I came to ISS in 1996 and served two
terms as Rector (from 1996 till the end of
2004), seizing the opportunity to make
changes in management and to further
my own research agenda on global
environment and development. I found
ISS to be an extremely stimulating
place: it is a truly international institute
because of the origin of both students
and staff and it is an ideal place to
learn and gain perspective. ’Things
look different depending on where you
stand‘, as Gunnar Myrdal reminds us,
and ISS offers an excellent observation
point. As Rector, one of my main
objectives was to move ISS away from
being an educational institute and
to focus on international capacity
development and research. I felt we
had to specialize in what we do best:
multidisciplinary research matched
by an attempt to produce research
that matters, i.e. to understand and
also to change things. We started to
move towards a policy aiming at the
development of research potential
arising from experience gained in a
range of projects in the global South.
This research, which would be policy
relevant and scientifically sound, would
radiate back into quality capacity
development and teaching.
It is now once again a time of change
for ISS. What is your own perspective
on the merger with Erasmus
University Rotterdam (EUR)?
This merger represents a challenge
and also an opportunity for ISS. The
challenge is to raise interest in EUR
for the type of work we do and in
issues related to global development.
Potential opportunities arise from
potential linkages between ISS and the
social sciences and medical faculties
of EUR and, more in general, from the
possibility of ISS being able to expand
its research interests into areas where
EUR is already present. ISS can certainly
add an international perspective to
the rest of EUR. In this context, I am
thinking about issues such as poverty
and migration in the Netherlands
itself. Further complementarities arise
from the fact that EUR does not have a
development economics component
anymore, while this is a strong field for
ISS.
You came from being the director
of the Institute of Environmental
Studies (IVM) of the Free University
Amsterdam (VUA) to ISS. Can
you tell me how environment and
development issues came to be your
main interest?
23
I started my career as a welfare
economist. In the 1970s my work
already focused on environment and
development, and especially on poor
people’s coping mechanisms with
respect to environmental stress. In
1971 I started working on what later
would be called environmental and
ecological economics. This research
resulted in several studies on themes
such as environmental spaces, focusing
on resource origin and resource use to
highlight how asymmetries are bound to
create problems. Other themes relate to
irreversibilities, inequality and scarcity,
biodiversity, agriculture, and more
recently, of course, to climate change.
In the 1980s I became Director of the
Institute of Environmental Studies. The
main concerns there at the time were
European environmental issues, but
development issues were increasingly
recognizsed as being important too.
The focus of my attention has been
on the costs and benefits of climate
change, on adaption and mitigation.
One continuing concern was always
how to share the carbon space across
individuals and countries and how to
distribute responsibilities for staying
within these limits. Also, I worked on
issues in the field of environment and
poverty.
Your contribution to the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change (IPCC) reports in 2001
and 2007 brings us to one of the
main issues in the current debate
on environment and development:
climate change.
The issue of ‘shared but differentiated
responsibilities’ arose from the 1992 Rio
Conference and was incorporated in the
United Nations Framework Convention
on Climate Change (UNFCC) in 1992.
The Kyoto Protocol should then have
applied the concept, but the mitigation
measures for the North and adaptation
provisions for the South were far too
modest. Now we are in the middle
of negotiations for the post-2012
agreements. Certainly China and India
should be part of the deal, but the
question remains: who should pay,
and how should we pay for the costs
associated with any agreement? How
is the principle of differentiated but
shared responsibilities going to work in
an agreement that is ambitious in terms
of both mitigation (i.e. greenhouse gas
emissions abatement) and adaptation
(i.e. adjustment to climate change)
measures?
Experiences of local development and
environmental objectives have been
associated with the Clean Development
Mechanism (CDM) initiative, which
was a Brazilian proposal inspired by
northern actors. Unfortunately the
implementation of these projects was
flawed. While looking at efficiency
measures (i.e. at achieving emission
reductions in the least expensive
way) the instrument basically allows
the North to grab the cheapest
abatement options that are often
available in developing countries. On
the receiving end, most initiatives are
being undertaken by China, Brazil
and India, but very little by African
countries. Eventually, it is the countries
that are growing anyway that get their
investment in new/clean technologies
supported by the North. A final problem
is that CDM deals only with the state
and with private enterprise; local
perspectives are neglected and the
bottom-up approach has remained
theoretical at best.
Another scheme to involve and make
developing countries partners and
beneficiaries in the policies to fight
climate change is emission trading with
a cap and distribution mechanism. The
problem is that the current experience
within the EU is not convincing: there
were technical problems since the
emission rights were given for free and
the whole trading scheme amounts
to a commoditization of pollution.
Market mechanisms might not work
anywhere: if they failed in Europe, that
is often considered the top notch in
terms of environmental policies, what
can we expect from China and India?
When societies developed markets
in the north, economists qualified
markets by studying so-called ‘market
imperfections’: market failures including
externalities and a lack of concern
for future generations. Traditionally
we turned to government policies
(e.g. taxation) as ways to correct
these problems, while in a neoliberal
approach more markets are being
established to solve the problems
created by already existing markets.
We need to understand the perspective
of the poor and start to think and build
policies that are based on collective
action. The issue here is to stop thinking
as mainstream economists applying
our science and our theories in a
deductionist fashion by seeing every
problem through the prism of markets.
The English saying goes that ‘if you
only have a hammer everything looks
like a nail’. If we economists only use
neoclassical economics and market
theory, we are only going to see market
failures that can be corrected by marketbased adjustments.
In any case, trading mechanisms will
result in pricing carbon that, in turn, will
have an impact on income distribution.
We are not paying enough attention
to the distributional effects that these
mechanisms can have, especially at the
individual level. One crucial issue here
is consumption and emission related
to the satisfaction of basic needs.
These emissions should be seen as
entitlements whereas emissions related
to luxurious consumption and wasteful
production modes should be the ones
to abate. Unfortunately, there is no
distinction at the moment, nor is there
is a clear debate about the distribution
of responsibilities within countries.
Looking only at nations obscures the
fact that in developing countries elites
are contributing to emissions.
The UN initiative Reduced Emissions
from Deforestation and Degradation
(REDD) is meant to create global
environmental benefits, but it displays
the same handicaps mentioned
above. There are issues related to the
consideration of indigenous people
and their territories that should be
the subject of new environmental
regulations. The new constraints should
be matched by compensation, but it
is unclear how things will play out in
practice. The mechanism does not
consider people’s needs and there are
only state to state deals. There can,
however, be no trickle down of benefits
– from the state to poor individuals –
unless there is prior assurance that local
people will benefit and that no damage
to their livelihoods will be done. An
upfront developmental orientation is
needed, but missing.
The current DevISSues is focused on
migration: how is migration linked to
the environmental issues you have
been studying?
24
Migration can be understood as an
extreme response option to stresses,
including environmental stress. The
number of people that might choose
this adaptation measure and ‘decide’
to migrate because of climate change
could reach anywhere between one and
three billion over the next 50 years. The
main forces will be drought in Africa and
the melting of ice caps in the Himalaya
regions that, in turn, will affect major
rivers in China and India, causing water
scarcity problems and a rise in sea
levels.
Given the potential size of this
migration, the issue needs to be taken
very seriously as even forecasts of ‘only’
500 million people migrating would
have enormous consequences. In
developing countries in particular, the
poorest have the least possibilities to
adapt and migration might be their only
option.
Alternative adaption strategies can be
encouraged directly (e.g. building dykes
to avoid floods) but also indirectly (e.g.
developing local and regional capacities
to cope with floods and storms). It is
development per se that helps the
poor to adapt, hence measures that are
conducive to lifting the poor out of their
poverty are ultimately helping them
to cope and adapt to environmental
stresses. Indirect measures to
discourage migration include
developing capabilities to predict
climate change effects and measures
to facilitate migration. Other examples
include insurance (community-based
and national) to deal with damage
caused by extreme weather events.
In any case, we know that people will
migrate and some migrations might
even be a result of climate-related
adaption strategies (e.g. dam building).
The environmental problems driving
migration are exacerbated by increasing
competition for land due to high
energy needs in the north. Energy
use is essentially an addiction and,
accepting that our energy systems are
not sustainable, we need to look more
closely at carbon-free and carbon-poor
alternatives: sun, wind, nuclear, biomass.
Biomass in particular is problematic,
especially when its production
competes with food production and
forest space. There are different
generations of biomass: first (crops),
second (dead wood, residues and
shrubs) and third (algae). The first
one in particular is problematic as
the crops it depends upon (maize,
corn, sugar cane, rape seeds) and the
diffusion of the use of these crops for
energy purposes, will certainly result
in environmental and developmental
problems. Second generation biomass
and third generation might have more
potential to provide for some energy
needs without adverse impacts on
development. Indeed, some second
and third generation biomasses can
easily satisfy the energy needs of
marginal communities and contribute to
decreasing oil dependence.
Now scarcities and competition for land
are manifest when there are price hikes
of primary commodities, but inevitably
these problems will become more
prominent in the future.
To conclude, what do you think are
the upcoming issues for academics
interested in environment and
development?
Some of the issues I mentioned pose
challenges that will need engaged
research for a number of years: I’m
referring to all the issues linked to
climate change and energy and
especially the issues of land and
water scarcity. We need to look at
how globalization influences these
phenomena and shapes institutional
responses.
Now that the neoliberal paradigm is
contested in terms of its environmental
and developmental outcomes, a
pending issue is to analyse the
implications in terms of institutional
structures beyond market mechanisms.
Last year’s economic crisis has lead to
a requirement for new institutions, new
responses and a new developmental
model. Unfortunately, the G20 did not
rise to this challenge, merely focusing
on marginal regulation changes and
strengthening existing institutions. We
need to regain the control of markets
that was lost with globalization, that is
clear. The challenge is how to do this:
how to build mechanisms to substitute
some of the functions of markets?
We cannot look back, because the
environmental and socioeconomic
challenges we are facing are new. We
need genuinely innovative solutions
that can help us structure the
institutions able to face contemporary
developmental challenges.
Hans Opschoor is Professor of Economics of
Sustainable Development at ISS ([email protected]).
Lorzenzo Pellegrini is lecturer in Development
Economics at ISS ([email protected]).
A roundtable with Human Rights Defender
Tulip Award winner Justine Masika Bihamba
Helen Hintjens (ISS staff): Were you
surprised to be nominated for the
Tulip Award?
I can say I was astonished to receive
this award. It is very encouraging. When
he heard about it, the Governor [of
North Kivu province, ed.] said. ‘Oh,
Justine, I thought you only made noise
here in Goma, now I see your noise
is heard even outside!’ It was a very
strong signal, and very powerful and
encouraging to get this award. And we
hope some positive changes can be
made as a result.
Helen Hintjens: Could you tell us how
your organization started up?
25
Well, about six years ago we began to
realize fully how huge a problem sexual
violence against women had become.
We formed an organization out of 36
separate groups and were able to deal
with different aspects of the sexual
violence problem. Each group focused
on what it did best and the overall result
was that we could start to pursue the
three main goals we set ourselves:
•
To arrange help and treatment,
including psychosocial assistance,
for the victims of rape;
•
To raise awareness of the problem
of sexual violence in Eastern DRC ;
•
To make those responsible for
tackling the issue take their duties
more seriously and to ensure those
who committed crimes are brought
to justice through the courts.
On the first two goals we have made
some progress. It has been difficult, but
we are achieving results. With justice,
however, there is a problem. There are
three Tribunals in the Kivu region. But
the judicial process is very slow and
is corrupt. There can be reprisals and
cultural traditions weigh heavily against
achieving justice, especially relating
to sexual violence. Even so, over 200
organizations now work in North Kivu
on this issue. In our own organization
we have worked with 8,133 women who
have experienced rape or other forms
of sexual violence. Translating this work
into legal cases has been difficult; of
the more than 8000 women, only 280
women have brought any charges
against those who attacked them. And
of these 280, only 68 have had their
cases completed, with prison sentences
of between 5 and 20 years. On the
other hand, women should be receiving
some kind of compensation, as victims
of sexual violence, but so far this has
proven impossible. Victims have to pay
15 per cent of the total sum awarded to
them to the Public Treasury. Since this is
asked for in advance, and most women
do not have this amount of money, they
cannot receive compensation.
We observed that rape was a social
problem. Women have been raped in
front of children, husbands and relatives.
This means everyone in the community
comes to be affected. So we went out
to a number of villages (we currently
basic points yesterday when I was at the
ceremony and reiterated these when I
spoke personally with the Ministers after
the event:
work in five) and started to speak to
the leaders. These included teachers,
nurses, youth and women leaders and
also elders and chiefs. We first asked
them if they felt there was a problem
of sexual violence in their village. We
already knew that raped women were
rejected by many communities and we
wanted to tackle this problem. There
was a lot of work to do, but we had to
move slowly; and this took time. By
working with local leaders, we felt we
could achieve something longer-lasting
in terms of prevention and attitude
changes. We hoped leaders might set
a good example in terms of behaviour
and attitudes towards rape and other
forms of sexual violence.
Ed Maan (Hague Academic Coalition
staff): In your acceptance speech
yesterday [i.e. at the award ceremony]
you referred to the role of the outside
world. Do you feel our Dutch political
leaders took your demands seriously?
Also, how can we, as academics, play
our part?
Yesterday the Ministers told me that
they had taken note of what I said.
I spoke with them again after the
larger meeting, over dinner, and they
reassured me that they would take my
points into consideration. I made four
•
We want a reinforced and
‘time-bound’ MONUC [UN
Mission in the DRC, ed.] with a
clear mandate to disarm. There
is a weak state in DRC and this
creates a problem of human rights
violations with impunity. Since 28
August 2008, fighting has returned
to Kivu and the region of Eastern
DRC. We ask for a sustainable
peace, a lasting peace. MONUC,
instead of protecting civilians, has
watched them being killed in the
most horrible ways. MONUC has
witnessed, rather than prevented,
war crimes in Eastern DRC. We
need an additional armed force. We
want something like the force sent
to Ituri in 2002-3, which was able to
disarm the various groups fighting
at that time. We want MONUC
reinforced and with a clear mandate
to disarm and the force to be in
place for a finite period.
•
We want the extraction of
minerals and the import of arms
to be more effectively controlled.
Justine Masika Bihamba with women in North Kivu Province
26
The wealth of the Congo has not
been a blessing but a curse. It has
brought pillage and perpetuation
of the small arms trade, linked to
the protection of illegal routes of
mineral extraction. We do not make
weapons in Africa. Weapons are
made in the West. So if there are
weapons, they come from outside.
We want certification of exports to
be inspected and reinforced, in line
with international agreements, for
example on blood diamonds.
•
•
Third, we want mixed tribunals
in Eastern DRC to try cases,
including cases of sexual violence.
There have been many crimes.
Waiting for the ICC is not an option:
it will take too long and very few
cases will ever come to trial. Mixed
tribunals, which could be supported
by the ICC and the information
that they have gathered but take
place in Kivu, would be the best
way forward for justice. We need to
overcome impunity.
Women human rights defenders
need special protection. Even
compared with male human rights
defenders, who are themselves
vulnerable to attack, women are
more so. Women are considered
inferior and when they are attacked,
they find little or no support from
their male colleagues, even human
rights defenders themselves. There
is no defence for women defenders
and this needs to be addressed.
The Minister of Cooperation went
into concrete details on some of the
proposals I had made. I proposed a
programme of restorative justice in the
East of Congo (DRC). At the moment
one programme already in existence
is being supported by the Dutch and
is known as REJUSCO. The Minister
wanted to know if this was helping at
all. Mostly it operates only in Kinshasa,
so I suggested that working through
Kinshasa might mean that the effects
are not felt that much in Kivu. Perhaps
this work needs to move outside
Kinshasa and I suggested a pilot project
in Eastern DRC might be a good idea.
I think researchers and research
institutes are there to do the important
job of explaining how things are so
that leaders understand the key issues.
The job of academics is surely to do
the analysis for the leaders and help
them see more clearly what matters.
REJUSCO is interesting as it is not
linked with the DRC government – it
was run for some time by a Belgian
staff member alongside Congolese
staff recruited locally. Our proposal is
to create mixed tribunals. The Minister
was concerned that these initiatives
should not run on parallel tracks, and
wanted to see an overview of the justice
sector in Kivu and DRC. The Minister
asked me, what should we do, meaning
the Netherlands government. If the
justice system worked well, then the
UN soldiers would not need to come to
DRC to try and stop the fighting.
Dubravka Zarkov (ISS staff): You
mentioned your work with local
leaders. Can you explain what means
you use to work with these leaders? I
imagine it may not always be easy.
Yes, we work in five villages and our
strategy has been to first ask the leaders
whether there are any rapes in their
village that they are aware of. Then
we ask them what they think of the
situation, what they feel they can do;
they often give their own response to
the situation. We ask them, do they
think that the woman consented? It
took us more than a year to start being
able to work constructively on questions
of prevention and getting them to
appreciate that rape and sexual violence
are a problem for the society and not
the fault of the woman.
Harry Hummel (Tulip Award staff):
We have heard quite a lot about
what is expected or wanted from
the European countries; a fighting
force, help with mixed tribunals and
economic controls. I am wondering;
this seems almost like a recolonization
proposal for the Congo? Can you
comment on that?
You have to remember that we in DRC,
Zaire before, had thirty five years of
dictatorship, and there have followed
ten years of civil war. Before that we
had colonialism of a very brutal kind.
To get out of this situation we are in, a
very bad situation, we do need some
help, this is quite true. We recognize
our weaknesses and need support
to enable us to pick ourselves up off
the ground again. Even after the socalled democratic elections, there is
neither peace nor democracy. The East
remains trapped in cycles of fighting
and violence, including rising sexual
violence. At the elections only those in
Kinshasa and the West got peace. We
did not. We don’t get peace because
our neighbours continue to pillage
resources from Congo. For Congolese
people to start to reconstruct DRC, will
definitely need a helping hand till we
get back on our feet.
Dubravka Zarkov: You spoke of mixed
tribunals. Some kind of mixed justice
system has been tried in Rwanda,
combining traditional and modern
elements, in the form of gacaca. The
experience there suggests it is not
easy to get sexual crimes judged
along with other war crimes. The
results are mixed. Why are you so
hopeful a mixed tribunal in Kivu can
do better?
There have been crimes, including
sexual crimes and rapes against women.
These crimes have taken place and
they need to be judged and justice
needs to be done, because these
are crimes. I followed gacaca from a
distance and I know that there has
been corruption of the process. For
instance, I know somebody personally
who has been accused and judged
falsely because somebody else wanted
their job. This person, who was falsely
accused, has been freed now, but he
is now unemployed. Mixed tribunals
would have to arrest rape perpetrators
(suspects) in the context of a wider task
of achieving transitional post-conflict
justice, adapted to the special situation
in Eastern DRC. We need the Tribunal
to operate rapidly and efficiently and be
well adapted to the context. Of course
mixed tribunals would not hear only
rape cases, but all war crimes, including
massacres, torture and other abuses.
In response to your question, perhaps
we’d propose that sessions on sexual
violence and rape could be held as
closed, rather than open, court sessions.
Helen Hintjens: How does getting
this award help in your work? Does it
create any problems as a human right
defender? Or does it help?
It definitely helps. The situation for
women human rights defenders like
myself is extremely difficult. I myself
have been attacked. I really do not have
the words, words fail me, when I try to
explain to you how people involved in
the defence of human rights continue
27
with our work every day, day in and
day out, in the context that you find
in Eastern DRC. When I was attacked,
I put in a complaint, but nothing was
done. So I asked to see the Governor of
the Province, and he intervened on my
behalf, and this was positive, because
since then the complaint, which had
been lodged with the military, was acted
on. What human rights defenders in
Eastern DRC face in their daily work is
very serious. As Christians we get up
every morning and pray for strength. We
place our faith in God. Every day people
are arrested, put in prison – and we live
in the midst of miracles, since we live
right next to those who violate the most
basic human rights and do not want us
to denounce them. They can threaten us
or even come to kill us at any time.
We also draw power and energy
from contacts with international
organizations, contacts which are almost
daily. These contacts help put pressure
on the authorities – even when these
authorities pretend not to listen to what
the international community says. It
is absolutely vital to us, especially to
women human rights defenders, that
we have these contacts on the outside
who can help in case we are threatened.
How else would we ever be able to
escape the threats we get? Sometimes
people’s lives are threatened and they
need help for example to be able to
move, say, either to Kinshasa, Kampala
or further afield. Otherwise they would
be attacked and could be killed just to
silence them. People have been killed in
just this way. Despite all the difficulties
in Kinshasa, human rights defenders
are safer there than in Goma or the
Kivus. Yes, we need this international
recognition.
Well it worked in Ituri, with the Artemis
force. The good thing was, that force
was finite and their job was to disarm.
They did the job of disarming the
armed groups that were fighting in Ituri
and now the same is needed for the
Kivus. There needs to be a mandate for
demilitarization of the armed groups
and militias so that the force stationed
there for disarming these groups is not
on the ground for too long, and does
not itself become involved in mineral
trading and dealing activities.
Translated from French and transcribed by Helen
Hintjens
This roundtable was held on 11 December 2008
Eno Ufot Ekuere (ISS student): I am
interested in your suggestion of an
international, reinforced intervention
force, and I know that problems of
resource pillage are severe; we are
also familiar with those problems in
West Africa. But how can an armed
force effectively hope to control the
exploitation of mineral resources?
at ISS between Justine Masika Bihamba (winner of
the first ever Dutch Human Rights Defender Tulip
Award) and staff and students of ISS. Ms Masika
Bihamba’s NGO, Women’s Synergy for the Victims
of Sexual Violence, is based in Goma, Eastern DRC
(Democratic Republic of Congo). Thanks to Harry
Hummel for helping set up this event at ISS, which
also acted as host for the Award Secretariat. For
more details see: http://www.humanrightstulip.org/
eng/content/view/full/140
ISS News
The ISS’ 57th Dies Natalis was held in November. On this
occasion Professor Jan Breman received an Honorary
Doctorate from the International Institute of Social Studies
and delivered his acceptance speech entitled ‘The Great
Transformation in a Globalized Perspective’ and Professor
Peter A.G. van Bergeijk delivered his inaugural address
entitled ‘I Come to Bury Globalization, not to Praise It’. The
accompanying art exhibition, ‘Antidotes from the dismal
science’ showed art work by several economists. The photos
and speeches from the occasion can be seen on the ISS
website at http://www.iss.nl/Conferences-Seminars-PublicDebates/Dies-Natalis-2009.
In September ISS opened the
new academic year for the MA
programme in Development
Studies. For the first time in ISS’
history the number of new MA
students has exceeded 200. The
new students represent 51 countries
from all regions of the world and their average age is 31.
Representing 58 per cent of the total, female students are a
majority. The ISS MA programme runs for 15,5 months: it starts
in September and ends in December of the following year.
Hence, between September and December there are two
batches of MA students. Apart from its MA programme, ISS
offers a Doctoral programme and Diploma programmes.
Every two months, ISS sends out an electronic newsletter full
of information about events at ISS, new publications by ISS
staff and other items of interest. If you would like to subscribe
to this newsletter please send an email to [email protected]
Professor David Dunham has retired from ISS
after 40 years spent here, first as a student and
later as lecturer. DevISSues wishes him all the
best.
Dr Sylvia Bergh has
replaced Dr Kristin Komives
on the ISS Research
Committee. Another new member of the
Research Committee is Pedro Goulart, ISS
Doctoral fellow.
Dr Murat Arsel
has replaced Dr Ben White on the
Development and Change Editorial
Board.
1
28
Development
Developmentand
andChange
Change
The journal Development and Change is published six times a year by Blackwell Publishers (Oxford, UK) on behalf of the
The journal Development and Change is published six times a year by Blackwell Publishers (Oxford, UK) on behalf of the
Institute of Social Studies. For more information, see the ISS website or email us at d&[email protected]. Available online at
Institute of Social Studies. For more information, see the ISS website or email us at d&[email protected]. Available online at
http://www.blackwellpublishers.co.uk/online. Special rate available to ISS alumni.
http://www.blackwellpublishers.co.uk/online. Special rate available to ISS alumni.
Tor A. Benjaminsen,
Tor A. Benjaminsen,
Faustin P. Maganga and
Faustin P. Maganga and Jumanne Moshi Abdallah
Jumanne Moshi Abdallah
Toby Carroll
Toby Carroll Maria F. Tuozzo
Maria F. Tuozzo Sarinda Singh
Sarinda Singh Juan Pablo Galvis
Juan Pablo Galvis Xun Wu and M. Ramesh
Xun Wu and M. Ramesh Stefan Kühl
Stefan Kühl Volume
Volume4040
Number
Number3 3
May
May2009
2009
The Kilosa Killings: Political Ecology of a Farmer–Herder Conflict in Tanzania
The Kilosa Killings: Political Ecology of a Farmer–Herder Conflict in Tanzania
‘Social Development’ as Neoliberal Trojan Horse: The World Bank and the Kecamatan
‘Social Development’ as Neoliberal Trojan Horse: The World Bank and the Kecamatan
Development Program in Indonesia
Development Program in Indonesia
World Bank Influence and Institutional Reform in Argentina
World Bank Influence and Institutional Reform in Argentina
World Bank-directed Development? Negotiating Participation in the Nam Theun 2
World Bank-directed Development? Negotiating Participation in the Nam Theun 2 Hydropower Project in Laos
Hydropower Project in Laos
Developing Exclusion: The Case of the 1961 Land Reform in Colombia
Developing Exclusion: The Case of the 1961 Land Reform in Colombia
Health Care Reforms in Developing Asia: Propositions and Realities
Health Care Reforms in Developing Asia: Propositions and Realities
Capacity Development as the Model for Development Aid Organizations
Capacity Development as the Model for Development Aid Organizations
BOOK REVIEWS
BOOK REVIEWS
Volume
Volume4040
Number
Number4 4
July
July2009
2009
Leonardo Vera
Reassessing Fiscal Policy: Perspectives from Developing Countries
Leonardo Vera
Reassessing Fiscal Policy: Perspectives from Developing Countries
Nikita Sud
The Indian State in a Liberalizing Landscape
Nikita Sud
The Indian State in a Liberalizing Landscape
Halleh Ghorashi and
The Iranian Diaspora and the New Media:
Halleh Ghorashi and The Iranian Diaspora and the New Media:
Kees Boersma
From Political Action to Humanitarian Help
Kees Boersma From Political Action to Humanitarian Help
Philippe Le Billon and
Building Peace with Conflict Diamonds?
Philippe Le Billon and Building Peace with Conflict Diamonds?
Estelle Levin
Merging Security and Development in Sierra Leone
Estelle Levin Merging Security and Development in Sierra Leone
Brian Dill
The Paradoxes of Community-Based Participation in Dar es Salaam
Brian Dill
The Paradoxes of Community-Based Participation in Dar es Salaam
Gabriel Medina, Benno
Loggers, Development Agents and the Exercise of Power in Amazonia
Gabriel Medina, Benno Loggers, Development Agents and the Exercise of Power in Amazonia
Pokorny and Bruce Campbell
Pokorny and Bruce Campbell
Huck-ju Kwon and
Economic Development and Poverty Reduction
Huck-ju Kwon and Economic Development and Poverty Reduction
Ilcheong Yi
in Korea: Governing Multifunctional Institutions
Ilcheong Yi
in Korea: Governing Multifunctional Institutions Working
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Gender, poverty and social justice / Amrita Chhachhi and Thanh-Dam Truong
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Land reform in Bolivia: the forestry question / Lorenzo Pellegrini and Anirban Dasgupta
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