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This paper questions the novelty of post-2000 development strategies, in particular the US’s Millennium Challenge Corporation and its ethos of ‘poverty reduction through economic growth.’ Using land as a lens, I explore recent eras of... more
This paper questions the novelty of post-2000 development strategies, in particular the US’s Millennium Challenge Corporation and its ethos of ‘poverty reduction through economic growth.’ Using land as a lens, I explore recent eras of development assistance and ask if the Millennium-era has been appreciably different from pre-2000 development. The backdrop of my study is an MCC-sponsored land reform in Lesotho. I use data drawn from fieldwork in Lesotho to argue that the logics and outcomes of the Development industry’s land policies have remained largely the same. Despite the anti-poverty rhetoric, the residents of a peri-urban village near Maseru, Lesotho’s capital, are more likely to be dispossessed of their land than they were before the MCC’s land reform began. The reform provided Lesotho with economic growth, but no apparent poverty reduction. I argue that the MCC’s land reform project in Lesotho demonstrates the continued primacy of economic growth in post-2000 international development. There is a gulf between economic growth and poverty reduction that is not addressed by Development practitioners who claim that growth itself is sufficient to reduce poverty. In the case of Lesotho, I argue that the work of Development and dispossession are linked, amounting to ‘Development by dispossession.’
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Maps are instrumental in the commodification of land and its exchange in markets. The critical cartography literature emphasizes the “power of maps” to (re)define property relations through their descriptive and prescriptive attributes.... more
Maps are instrumental in the commodification of land and its exchange in markets. The critical cartography literature emphasizes the “power of maps” to (re)define property relations through their descriptive and prescriptive attributes. But how do maps work to achieve these outcomes? This paper examines the notion of maps as “inscription devices” that turn land into a commodity that can be bought and sold by investors. It is based on the analysis of a land reform project in the Southern African country of Lesotho. In contrast to the prescriptive notion of maps as inscription devices we argue that cadastral maps are better understood as processual. Maps are only powerful in concert with contingent social forces in changing political and economic contexts. We use the example of cadastral mapping and land sales in a peri-urban village in Lesotho to make the case for a more dynamic notion of maps and mapping in understanding the work they do in making land investable.
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Development agencies are increasingly making decisions and evaluating success on the basis of an ever-growing supply of data. Some argue that the proliferation of data improves development outcomes for states and people targeted by... more
Development agencies are increasingly making decisions and evaluating success on the basis of an ever-growing supply of data. Some argue that the proliferation of data improves development outcomes for states and people targeted by agencies' interventions, as well as the accountability of those agencies. Others argue that problems of selection bias, a lack of longitudinal records, and misuse of data can ignore or even exacerbate the problems that development agencies seek to mitigate. In this paper, I investigate the measurement, evaluation, and data usage of the U.S.'s Millennium Challenge Corporation [MCC] to argue that too short-term a measurement horizon can mask the true outcome of a development intervention. I use research data from an MCC-sponsored land reform in Lesotho to argue that the agency's short assessment timeframe obscured the reality of the reform. When the MCC's five-year project in Lesotho, which explicitly targeted women's land access, ended in 2013, the land reform appeared to have been a success. However, only a year later, the reality looked much different in one village. Rather than having their land access secured or enhanced by the law, women in the village were being dispossessed by real estate developers, with the assistance of government bureaucrats. MCC's short-term data and measurement of outcomes, instead of the structures, mechanisms, and vulnerabilities that determine those outcomes, concealed a significant problem with the project. This illustrates both a problem with data-driven development projects, and a possible way to improve them.
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Appeared in the Mail and Guardian's 27 Feb. 2015 issue

Co-authored with Charles Fogelman and Jeffrey Smith
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In Lesotho, the state and the development industry often see development and macroeconomic growth as synonymous. This simplification represents the easy consensus that neoliberalism has won for a very specific view of how aid should... more
In Lesotho, the state and the development industry often see development and macroeconomic growth as synonymous. This simplification represents the easy consensus that neoliberalism has won for a very specific view of how aid should benefit poor people. This view puts economic growth front and center in conversations about development and assume growth is the driver of poverty alleviation: Economic growth is seen as the antidote to terrorism, the goal of foreign development assistance, and a result of lowered inequality. It also valorizes macroeconomic growth and argues that Lesotho is a success story in the neoliberal 'Africa Rising' narrative. This is marginally better than a racist, neocolonial Afro-pessimism that darkly hints that Africans are unable to govern or develop themselves, but not focused on policies that help bring about overall gains in life outcomes for poor people in Lesotho or anywhere else. US development policy toward Lesotho has always focused on macroeconomic growth. During the Cold War this was the idea behind Modernization Theory—get growth to 'take off' and you will keep countries away from communism and move them toward a prosperous, industrial future.
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Just two years after snap elections brought Lesotho’s first-ever coalition government to an early demise, the country is on the cusp of snap elections that will do the same to its second-ever coalition government. Perhaps unsurprisingly,... more
Just two years after snap elections brought Lesotho’s first-ever coalition government to an early demise, the country is on the cusp of snap elections that will do the same to its second-ever coalition government. Perhaps unsurprisingly, a new election seems unlikely to solve any of the kingdom's deeper political problems.
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This chapter examines the ways in which gendered structural inequality inhibits the just governance of land. Institutions of various kinds (legal, governmental, economic, social, and cultural) specify rules and norms for interaction.... more
This chapter examines the ways in which gendered structural inequality inhibits the just governance of land. Institutions of various kinds (legal, governmental, economic, social, and cultural) specify rules and norms for interaction. Rules and norms outline what types of action are permitted, required, or prohibited by certain groups of actors, as well as the formal and informal penalties for violating such rules and norms. Structural inequality exists when institutional rules and norms differentially restrict opportunities for certain groups to do and become things of value (e.g. being healthy, being employed, being educated) and differentially restrict the ability of certain groups to shape and define institutional rules and norms.