Kate Meagher - Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Journal Articles by Kate Meagher
Papers by Kate Meagher
Boydell and Brewer eBooks, Dec 31, 2010
Development and Change, Jul 1, 2021
ABSTRACT The worrying welfare and political risks of expanding informal economies have put concer... more ABSTRACT The worrying welfare and political risks of expanding informal economies have put concerns about economic inclusion at the heart of contemporary development thinking — concerns further intensified in the wake of the COVID‐19 pandemic. Amid a collective ‘will to include’, this Debate adopts an infrastructural lens to decipher the distributive and governance implications of the complex institutional, financial and digital linkages through which informal workers and consumers are being included in the circuits of contemporary market economies. Looking beyond imaginaries of seamless linkages, the articles in this Debate examine the specific processes through which these inclusive connections engage with informal actors, focusing on how they work and for whom. Articles focus on various types of inclusive infrastructures that connect deprived communities to jobs, resources and social citizenship, ranging from social protection systems to employment linkages and services for hard‐to‐reach populations. With a view to cutting through the ideological blurring of inclusive discourses, this Introduction will examine the strategies of legibility and regulatory restructuring effected through inclusive infrastructures. It reveals the hidden politics of inclusive linkages, reflects on the techniques of governance operating through socio‐technical connections, and examines processes of resistance and failed connections reworking inclusive infrastructures from below. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Development & Change is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)
Africa Development, Dec 25, 2009
The Nigerian Civil War evokes images of ethno-regional strife followed by simmering ethnic tensio... more The Nigerian Civil War evokes images of ethno-regional strife followed by simmering ethnic tension. However, political perspectives on the legacies of Biafra tend to gloss over the more integrative and constructive economic effects of the Civil War and its aftermath. While the Nigerian Civil War devastated Igbo business activities across Nigeria, and precipitated a mass return of Igbo migrants to their home area, it also laid the foundation for a consolidation and rapid development of Igbo informal enterprise, which has had integrative rather than divisive social and economic consequences for Nigeria as a whole. Operating below the radar of political competition, the demands of informal enterprise development have nurtured strong inter-ethnic and interregional links between the Igbo, Hausa, Yoruba and other Nigerian as well as non-Nigerian groups. With a particular focus on Igbo informal manufacturing, long-distance trading networks and informal money changing, this paper will consider the role of the informal economy in the development of popular structures of national unity. It will also show that these processes of economic integration from below have increasingly been strained by political struggles from above, creating a tide of violence and ethnic polarization that, even more than the Civil War, threatens to unravel the underlying social fabric of Nigerian nationhood.
Journal of International Development, Aug 1, 2015
This article examines how the Post-2015 commitment to economic inclusion affects informal economi... more This article examines how the Post-2015 commitment to economic inclusion affects informal economic actors in developing countries. It highlights the selective dynamics of inclusive market models which generate new processes of exclusion in which the most vulnerable continue to be left behind. The case of Nigeria reveals how inclusive market initiatives reinforce parallel processes of informalization, poverty and Islamic extremism in the north of the country. Fieldwork in northern Nigeria shows that inclusive initiatives are intensifying competitive struggles within the informal economy in which stronger actors are crowding out poorer, less educated and migrant actors, exacerbating disaffection and vulnerability to radicalization.
Social Science Research Network, 2013
This paper challenges the notion that taxing the informal economy provides a mechanism for increa... more This paper challenges the notion that taxing the informal economy provides a mechanism for increasing popular political voice and rebuilding the social contract. Drawing on recent fieldwork in northern Nigeria, the paper considers how taxation of informal activities affects inter-group and state-society relations in a context of intense religious conflict. The research focuses on a range of different activities, including motorcycle taxis, tyre traders, pepper soup joints and tailors, with a focus on the effect of religious violence on their activity, attitudes to taxation, and relations with the state. The paper explores the limits of the ability of taxation to build public accountability in divided societies, and raises concerns about the potentially negative effects on popular representation of repuroposing informal occupational organizations to collect taxes.
Routledge eBooks, Nov 1, 2017
In the era of globalization, the concept of global value chains has put commodities, connections ... more In the era of globalization, the concept of global value chains has put commodities, connections and capitalist markets at the centre of stories about value, obscuring the role of labour and livelihoods in value creation. Faced with concerns about rising unemployment and high levels of informality, global value chains are seen as the means of creating value in workers. This is especially true of poor informal labour in African countries, where poverty and informality have increasingly been attributed to a lack of connections with the global economy. Despite growth rates averaging 3-5% annually since 2004, poverty has remained stubbornly high, afflicting over 40% of the population across the continent, unemployment has risen to alarming levels, and burgeoning informal economies employ 85.8%
Price: DKK 25.00 (VAT included) DIIS publications can be downloaded free of charge from www.diis.dk
Review of African Political Economy, Mar 1, 1990
This study of informal and parallel trade in Uganda's Arua District shows that such trade... more This study of informal and parallel trade in Uganda's Arua District shows that such trade has a long history back through colonialism. Its roots do not lie in the distortions of post‐colonial state intervention, as the current conventional view would have it, but in the activities of the colonial state in imposing borders and divergent currencies and in implementing trading
Routledge eBooks, Dec 21, 2021
Africa Development: a Quarterly Journal of CODESRIA, 1995
Africa, Aug 1, 2005
for well-researched studies, written from a political economy perspective, built on the accumulat... more for well-researched studies, written from a political economy perspective, built on the accumulation of hard-won evidence, oral and documentary, that throw light on the central questions of the use and abuse of political power and the accumulation and distribution of wealth.
African Studies Review, Dec 1, 2007
Axel Harneit-Sievers. Constructions of Belonging: Igbo Communities and the Nigerian State in the ... more Axel Harneit-Sievers. Constructions of Belonging: Igbo Communities and the Nigerian State in the Twentieth Century. Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2006. ix + 388 pp. Photographs. Maps. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $75,00, Cloth. The Igbo of southeastern Nigeria have become something of a cultural archetype in contemporary debates on African modernity. While some regard them as icons of ethnic entrepreneurship and indigenous democracy, others represent them as culturally disposed to criminality and violent vigilantism. Axel Harneit-Sievers cuts through these divergent perspectives in an insightful and historically detailed examination of Igbo identity formation from pre colonial times to the present. His new book, Constructions of Belonging, considers how precolonial social organization has intersected with colonialism, Christianity, postcolonial state formation, and the legacy of defeat in the Nigerian Civil War to shape the fractious dynamism of contemporary Igbo society. Focusing on the interplay of culture, agency, and historical change, the author traces the ways in which the segmentary institutions of a stateless society have responded to the imposition of a modern state by "appropriating" it in their own way to achieve a form of "autonomous integration." Following the lead of Peter Little's analysis of Somalia, this book argues that, in an era of authoritarian and nonperforming states, segmentary societies can provide valuable institutional resources for the development of a resilient and democratic civil society. Complex questions of culture, political intervention, and institutional change are dealt with in a clear, meticulously researched, and well-structured narrative. In four sections the book covers the nature of precolonial organization; the external influences generated by colonialism, Christianity, and the postcolonial state; the internal transformations wrought through hometown associations and chieftaincy institutions; and a set of case studies of different Igbo communities that illustrate the complex and varied ways in which historical and contemporary influences have been woven together in the construction of Igbo identity. The case studies offer rich accounts of the interaction of institutional dynamism, political opportunism, and organizational fragmentation, which have underpinned the contemporary history of the Igbo. Throughout the book, the institutions of Igbo society are treated as changing historical artifacts that have arisen in varied forms, have been altered, created, or abolished by colonial administrations, and have remained sites of struggle among Igbo politicians, historians, and a variety of "cultural workers. …
Journal of Modern African Studies, Aug 18, 2014
Routledge eBooks, Jul 14, 2020
Journal of Development Studies, Mar 22, 2016
Images of an 'African Boom' have presented us with labour markets full of dynamic potential: a de... more Images of an 'African Boom' have presented us with labour markets full of dynamic potential: a declining dependency ratio; low levels of unemployment; and a vibrant middle class. This buoyant view of African labour markets conceals a less encouraging reality of catastrophic youth unemployment and expanding informality. How has the continent known for the world's highest share of informal labour become a beacon of prosperity? This article will explore the reality beneath the outbreak of informal economic optimism, and consider why African labour markets are being painted in such rosy colours.
Review of African Political Economy, Mar 1, 2003
... inflows of donor capital in the early 1990s to fund structural adjustment and democratisation... more ... inflows of donor capital in the early 1990s to fund structural adjustment and democratisation revived the ... those with greater promise, and with new strategies to combat the impact ofliberalisation on profits ... billion F CFA in 1983-86 to 54.6 billion F CFA (pre-1994 values) in 1993 ...
Development and Change, May 1, 2007
Small enterprise clusters are viewed as an important means of promoting competitive small-firm de... more Small enterprise clusters are viewed as an important means of promoting competitive small-firm development even in contexts of unstable markets and weak states. Yet the emergence of successful enterprise clusters in developing regions of Southern Europe, Asia and Latin America contrasts with their conspicuous absence in Africa. This article challenges ahistorical and culturalist explanations regarding the lack of successful enterprise clusters in Africa through a comparative analysis of three dynamic and increasingly globalized informal manufacturing clusters in two different regions of Nigeria. Focusing on a Muslim Yoruba weaving cluster in the town of Ilorin in southwestern Nigeria, and two Christian Igbo shoe and garment clusters in the town of Aba in southeastern Nigeria, this article explores the role of culture, religion and the state in shaping informal economic governance in an African context. An account of the varied and complex history of these Nigerian enterprise networks reveals both their capacity for institutional innovation and economic linkages across ethnic, religious and gender boundaries, as well as their vulnerability to fragmentation and involution in the context of liberalization, state neglect and political opportunism. Far from demonstrating the inadequacies of African cultural institutions, the slide of African entrepreneurial networks into social disorder and economic 'ungovernance' 1 is traced to the destructive impact of neoliberal reforms in a context of poverty and formal institutional exclusion. 1. In recent years the term 'ungovernance' has entered the political discourse on non-state forms of organization (see Leander, 2002, especially footnote 2).
Boydell and Brewer eBooks, Dec 31, 2010
Development and Change, Jul 1, 2021
ABSTRACT The worrying welfare and political risks of expanding informal economies have put concer... more ABSTRACT The worrying welfare and political risks of expanding informal economies have put concerns about economic inclusion at the heart of contemporary development thinking — concerns further intensified in the wake of the COVID‐19 pandemic. Amid a collective ‘will to include’, this Debate adopts an infrastructural lens to decipher the distributive and governance implications of the complex institutional, financial and digital linkages through which informal workers and consumers are being included in the circuits of contemporary market economies. Looking beyond imaginaries of seamless linkages, the articles in this Debate examine the specific processes through which these inclusive connections engage with informal actors, focusing on how they work and for whom. Articles focus on various types of inclusive infrastructures that connect deprived communities to jobs, resources and social citizenship, ranging from social protection systems to employment linkages and services for hard‐to‐reach populations. With a view to cutting through the ideological blurring of inclusive discourses, this Introduction will examine the strategies of legibility and regulatory restructuring effected through inclusive infrastructures. It reveals the hidden politics of inclusive linkages, reflects on the techniques of governance operating through socio‐technical connections, and examines processes of resistance and failed connections reworking inclusive infrastructures from below. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Development & Change is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)
Africa Development, Dec 25, 2009
The Nigerian Civil War evokes images of ethno-regional strife followed by simmering ethnic tensio... more The Nigerian Civil War evokes images of ethno-regional strife followed by simmering ethnic tension. However, political perspectives on the legacies of Biafra tend to gloss over the more integrative and constructive economic effects of the Civil War and its aftermath. While the Nigerian Civil War devastated Igbo business activities across Nigeria, and precipitated a mass return of Igbo migrants to their home area, it also laid the foundation for a consolidation and rapid development of Igbo informal enterprise, which has had integrative rather than divisive social and economic consequences for Nigeria as a whole. Operating below the radar of political competition, the demands of informal enterprise development have nurtured strong inter-ethnic and interregional links between the Igbo, Hausa, Yoruba and other Nigerian as well as non-Nigerian groups. With a particular focus on Igbo informal manufacturing, long-distance trading networks and informal money changing, this paper will consider the role of the informal economy in the development of popular structures of national unity. It will also show that these processes of economic integration from below have increasingly been strained by political struggles from above, creating a tide of violence and ethnic polarization that, even more than the Civil War, threatens to unravel the underlying social fabric of Nigerian nationhood.
Journal of International Development, Aug 1, 2015
This article examines how the Post-2015 commitment to economic inclusion affects informal economi... more This article examines how the Post-2015 commitment to economic inclusion affects informal economic actors in developing countries. It highlights the selective dynamics of inclusive market models which generate new processes of exclusion in which the most vulnerable continue to be left behind. The case of Nigeria reveals how inclusive market initiatives reinforce parallel processes of informalization, poverty and Islamic extremism in the north of the country. Fieldwork in northern Nigeria shows that inclusive initiatives are intensifying competitive struggles within the informal economy in which stronger actors are crowding out poorer, less educated and migrant actors, exacerbating disaffection and vulnerability to radicalization.
Social Science Research Network, 2013
This paper challenges the notion that taxing the informal economy provides a mechanism for increa... more This paper challenges the notion that taxing the informal economy provides a mechanism for increasing popular political voice and rebuilding the social contract. Drawing on recent fieldwork in northern Nigeria, the paper considers how taxation of informal activities affects inter-group and state-society relations in a context of intense religious conflict. The research focuses on a range of different activities, including motorcycle taxis, tyre traders, pepper soup joints and tailors, with a focus on the effect of religious violence on their activity, attitudes to taxation, and relations with the state. The paper explores the limits of the ability of taxation to build public accountability in divided societies, and raises concerns about the potentially negative effects on popular representation of repuroposing informal occupational organizations to collect taxes.
Routledge eBooks, Nov 1, 2017
In the era of globalization, the concept of global value chains has put commodities, connections ... more In the era of globalization, the concept of global value chains has put commodities, connections and capitalist markets at the centre of stories about value, obscuring the role of labour and livelihoods in value creation. Faced with concerns about rising unemployment and high levels of informality, global value chains are seen as the means of creating value in workers. This is especially true of poor informal labour in African countries, where poverty and informality have increasingly been attributed to a lack of connections with the global economy. Despite growth rates averaging 3-5% annually since 2004, poverty has remained stubbornly high, afflicting over 40% of the population across the continent, unemployment has risen to alarming levels, and burgeoning informal economies employ 85.8%
Price: DKK 25.00 (VAT included) DIIS publications can be downloaded free of charge from www.diis.dk
Review of African Political Economy, Mar 1, 1990
This study of informal and parallel trade in Uganda's Arua District shows that such trade... more This study of informal and parallel trade in Uganda's Arua District shows that such trade has a long history back through colonialism. Its roots do not lie in the distortions of post‐colonial state intervention, as the current conventional view would have it, but in the activities of the colonial state in imposing borders and divergent currencies and in implementing trading
Routledge eBooks, Dec 21, 2021
Africa Development: a Quarterly Journal of CODESRIA, 1995
Africa, Aug 1, 2005
for well-researched studies, written from a political economy perspective, built on the accumulat... more for well-researched studies, written from a political economy perspective, built on the accumulation of hard-won evidence, oral and documentary, that throw light on the central questions of the use and abuse of political power and the accumulation and distribution of wealth.
African Studies Review, Dec 1, 2007
Axel Harneit-Sievers. Constructions of Belonging: Igbo Communities and the Nigerian State in the ... more Axel Harneit-Sievers. Constructions of Belonging: Igbo Communities and the Nigerian State in the Twentieth Century. Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2006. ix + 388 pp. Photographs. Maps. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $75,00, Cloth. The Igbo of southeastern Nigeria have become something of a cultural archetype in contemporary debates on African modernity. While some regard them as icons of ethnic entrepreneurship and indigenous democracy, others represent them as culturally disposed to criminality and violent vigilantism. Axel Harneit-Sievers cuts through these divergent perspectives in an insightful and historically detailed examination of Igbo identity formation from pre colonial times to the present. His new book, Constructions of Belonging, considers how precolonial social organization has intersected with colonialism, Christianity, postcolonial state formation, and the legacy of defeat in the Nigerian Civil War to shape the fractious dynamism of contemporary Igbo society. Focusing on the interplay of culture, agency, and historical change, the author traces the ways in which the segmentary institutions of a stateless society have responded to the imposition of a modern state by "appropriating" it in their own way to achieve a form of "autonomous integration." Following the lead of Peter Little's analysis of Somalia, this book argues that, in an era of authoritarian and nonperforming states, segmentary societies can provide valuable institutional resources for the development of a resilient and democratic civil society. Complex questions of culture, political intervention, and institutional change are dealt with in a clear, meticulously researched, and well-structured narrative. In four sections the book covers the nature of precolonial organization; the external influences generated by colonialism, Christianity, and the postcolonial state; the internal transformations wrought through hometown associations and chieftaincy institutions; and a set of case studies of different Igbo communities that illustrate the complex and varied ways in which historical and contemporary influences have been woven together in the construction of Igbo identity. The case studies offer rich accounts of the interaction of institutional dynamism, political opportunism, and organizational fragmentation, which have underpinned the contemporary history of the Igbo. Throughout the book, the institutions of Igbo society are treated as changing historical artifacts that have arisen in varied forms, have been altered, created, or abolished by colonial administrations, and have remained sites of struggle among Igbo politicians, historians, and a variety of "cultural workers. …
Journal of Modern African Studies, Aug 18, 2014
Routledge eBooks, Jul 14, 2020
Journal of Development Studies, Mar 22, 2016
Images of an 'African Boom' have presented us with labour markets full of dynamic potential: a de... more Images of an 'African Boom' have presented us with labour markets full of dynamic potential: a declining dependency ratio; low levels of unemployment; and a vibrant middle class. This buoyant view of African labour markets conceals a less encouraging reality of catastrophic youth unemployment and expanding informality. How has the continent known for the world's highest share of informal labour become a beacon of prosperity? This article will explore the reality beneath the outbreak of informal economic optimism, and consider why African labour markets are being painted in such rosy colours.
Review of African Political Economy, Mar 1, 2003
... inflows of donor capital in the early 1990s to fund structural adjustment and democratisation... more ... inflows of donor capital in the early 1990s to fund structural adjustment and democratisation revived the ... those with greater promise, and with new strategies to combat the impact ofliberalisation on profits ... billion F CFA in 1983-86 to 54.6 billion F CFA (pre-1994 values) in 1993 ...
Development and Change, May 1, 2007
Small enterprise clusters are viewed as an important means of promoting competitive small-firm de... more Small enterprise clusters are viewed as an important means of promoting competitive small-firm development even in contexts of unstable markets and weak states. Yet the emergence of successful enterprise clusters in developing regions of Southern Europe, Asia and Latin America contrasts with their conspicuous absence in Africa. This article challenges ahistorical and culturalist explanations regarding the lack of successful enterprise clusters in Africa through a comparative analysis of three dynamic and increasingly globalized informal manufacturing clusters in two different regions of Nigeria. Focusing on a Muslim Yoruba weaving cluster in the town of Ilorin in southwestern Nigeria, and two Christian Igbo shoe and garment clusters in the town of Aba in southeastern Nigeria, this article explores the role of culture, religion and the state in shaping informal economic governance in an African context. An account of the varied and complex history of these Nigerian enterprise networks reveals both their capacity for institutional innovation and economic linkages across ethnic, religious and gender boundaries, as well as their vulnerability to fragmentation and involution in the context of liberalization, state neglect and political opportunism. Far from demonstrating the inadequacies of African cultural institutions, the slide of African entrepreneurial networks into social disorder and economic 'ungovernance' 1 is traced to the destructive impact of neoliberal reforms in a context of poverty and formal institutional exclusion. 1. In recent years the term 'ungovernance' has entered the political discourse on non-state forms of organization (see Leander, 2002, especially footnote 2).
Development and Change, Aug 9, 2012
In this article, I explore the recent revalorization of non-state forms of order and authority in... more In this article, I explore the recent revalorization of non-state forms of order and authority in the context of hybrid approaches to governance and state building in Africa. I argue for a more empirical and comparative approach to hybrid governance that is capable of distinguishing between constructive and corrosive forms of non-state order, and sharpens rather than blurs the relationship between formal and informal regulation. A critique of the theoretical and methodological issues surrounding hybrid governance perspectives sets the scene for a comparative analysis of two contrasting situations of hybrid security systems: the RCD-ML of eastern DR Congo, and the Bakassi Boys vigilante group of eastern Nigeria. In each case, four issues are examined: the basis of claims that regulatory authority has shifted to informal security systems; the local legitimacy of the security forces involved; the wider political context; and finally, whether a genuine transformation of regulatory authority has resulted, offering local populations a preferable alternative to the prior situation of neglectful or predatory rule. I argue that hybrid governance perspectives often essentialize informal regulatory systems, disguising coercion and political capture as popular legitimacy, and I echo calls for a more historically and empirically informed analysis of hybrid governance contexts. I would like to thank an anonymous referee and a not-so-anonymous reviewer, Timothy Raeymaekers, for helpful comments on this paper. The views expressed and any ensuing errors are of course my own.
We brought together ICT activists, social entrepreneurs, and key actors in private ICT-based comp... more We brought together ICT activists, social entrepreneurs, and key actors in private ICT-based companies, with government officials, civil society actors, academics and informal economy activists from across Africa, including Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya, Somalia and South Africa, along with ICT and informal economy specialists from the UK, Ireland, USA and Croatia. Conference participants worked together to explore how the rapidly changing landscape of ICTs are affecting informal livelihoods and to consider their actual as opposed to their assumed effects on informal workers and consumers. We were confronted by significant sectoral differences in the way ICTs are used, differences in the organization of informal activities and livelihoods, as well as regulatory differences in how different African countries grapple with the disruptive possibilities and challenges of ICTs and large informal economies.
In each sector, 5 broad questions underpinned our inquiry:
How are ICTs reshaping livelihoods and value chains within the informal economy?
Which actors are currently empowered and included, and which are currently disempowered or displaced through the application of ICTs?
How might design and decision-making processes be more inclusive of the concerns of informal actors?
What appropriate forms of regulation or promotion of new business models are needed to protect vulnerable informal actors from unforeseen consequences of ICT interventions?
How can civil society groups better raise awareness within tech communities, African policy circles and informal associations about both the potential opportunities and risks of ICT-led restructuring of sectoral activities and associated informal livelihoods.