New Actors and Alliances in Development

This collection brings together an interdisciplinary group of scholars exploring how development financing and interventions are being shaped by a wider and more complex platform of actors than usually considered in the existing literature. The contributors also trace a changing set of key relations and alliances in development – those between business and consumers; NGOs and celebrities; philanthropic organizations and the state; diaspora groups and transnational advocacy networks; ruling elites and productive capitalists; and between ‘new donors’ and developing country governments. Despite the diversity of these actors and alliances, several commonalities arise: they are often based on hybrid transnationalism and diffuse notions of development responsibility; rather than being new per se, they are newly being studied as engaging in practices that are now coming to be understood as ‘development’; and they are limited in their ability to act as agents of development by their lack of accountability or pro-poor commitment. The articles in this collection point to images and representations as increasingly important in development ‘branding’ and suggest fruitful new ground for critical development studies.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Third World Quarterly.

Lisa Ann Richey is Professor of International Development Studies at the Department of Society and Globalisation, Roskilde University, Denmark. She is the author of Brand Aid: Shopping Well to Save the World with Stefano Ponte (2011), Population Politics and Development: From the Policies to the Clinics (2008), and the co-editor of "Women and Development: Rethinking Policy and Reconceptualizing Practice" (special issue of Women's Studies Quarterly, 2003). She works on new actors in international aid, citizenship and body politics, and gender and the global South.

Stefano Ponte is Professor of International Political Economy at the Department of Business and Politics, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark. He is interested in how the global economy is governed and in how developing countries and emerging economies fare in it. His work examines how standards, labels and certifications on social and environmental conditions of production shape agro-food value chains. In recent research, he has been examining the increasing importance of celebrities and branding in mobilizing ‘compassionate consumption’ and new forms of corporate social responsibility that are ‘distant and disengaged’. His most recent books are Brand Aid: Shopping Well to Save the World (co-author with Lisa Ann Richey, 2011) and Governing through Standards: Origins, Drivers and Limitations (co-editor with Peter Gibbon and Jakob Vestergaard, 2011).