Gabriella Carolini | Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) (original) (raw)
Papers by Gabriella Carolini
Oxford University Press eBooks, Apr 21, 2022
Oxford University PressOxford eBooks, Apr 21, 2022
Equity, Evaluation, and International Cooperation
This chapter introduces the five water-and-sanitation-related international cooperation projects ... more This chapter introduces the five water-and-sanitation-related international cooperation projects the book explores in the realm of urban development in Maputo. Spread across different neighborhoods in the city, these projects encompassed partners from Brazil, China, Italy, Japan, and Spain, none of whose cooperation projects emerged as especially successful from a material distribution standpoint. They also varied in their scope—from sewerage and drainage upgrading to solid-waste management. This expansive view allows for exploring the constitution of development cooperation projects and their day-to-day workings across a diverse spectrum of partners and urban challenges. What these projects reveal is the “turbidity” of development cooperation on the ground. Projects not only defy neat categorizations such as South–South, triangular, or traditional partnerships with Northern donors, but they also do not conform with national geographic boundaries and geopolitical narratives.
Equity, Evaluation, and International Cooperation
South–South Cooperation (SSC) is marked by deep contradictions in practice, shown in how the larg... more South–South Cooperation (SSC) is marked by deep contradictions in practice, shown in how the largest Southern economies pursue models of economic growth and hierarchical development partnerships of the sort long supported by orthodox international financial institutions and high-income countries in the North. This chapter examines whether other growing platforms for capacity development through SSC, such as the United Nations’ Water Operators’ Partnerships (WOPs) program, can instead deliver on the promises of SSC. Leveraging a case study of a cooperation partnership between water operators in Brazil and Argentina, the chapter explores whether the proximities that mattered to high-level learning in Maputo’s international cooperation project ecosystem were also relevant to the South American WOP. As the collaboration between water operators in Brasília and Salta showed, defying the WOP’s mentor–mentee model indeed proved an effective root for fostering high-level learning that matter...
Equity, Evaluation, and International Cooperation
This chapter provides an intellectual history of learning in development, and positions theories ... more This chapter provides an intellectual history of learning in development, and positions theories distinguishing different types of knowledge as especially valuable to evaluating knowledge production key to discretionary decision-making within international cooperation projects. It then considers evidence of these multiple dimensions of knowledge—from factual and conceptual to procedural and reflective knowledge—in water-and-sanitation-related international development cooperation projects studied in Maputo. Secondly, the analysis explores what kinds of proximities supported practitioners’ learning on the ground. Despite the anticipated added value of South–South Cooperation (SSC) as a special medium for advancing grounded high-level learning, the analysis shows that partners representing higher-income countries too could advance high-level know-how critical to discretionary decision-making. Further, beyond the geopolitical and technical ones favored by SSC discourses, heterarchical ...
Oxford University PressOxford eBooks, Apr 21, 2022
The Routledge Handbook of Financial Geography, 2020
Environment and Planning A, 2002
Denis Cosgrove's Linacre Lecture in the 2007 series was characteristically captivating, generous,... more Denis Cosgrove's Linacre Lecture in the 2007 series was characteristically captivating, generous, and scholarly. Undertaken during a remission phase in his courageous battle with cancer, Denis was on top form both in the lecture theatre and at dinner afterwardsö enthusiastically engaged with the people and ideas brought together by his appearance. He seemed to enjoy this return to Oxford and was delighted by the reinvigoration underway in the School of Geography, not out of any fond reminiscence for his days as an undergraduate here but because of its significance for the future of the discipline. Sadly, Denis died a little over a year after presenting his lecture and was chasing copyright queries associated with the version published as part of the special issue based on the series to the last. The special issue was dedicated to him. It is a fitting posthumous tribute to the outstanding quality of his work as well as the warm regard in which his fellow geographers held, and still hold, him that this last paper has been awarded an Ashby Prize as one of the best three published in Environment and Planning A in 2008. Denis and Carmen Cosgrove's six-year-old son, Leon, has received the prize money to be invested toward his college fund. (Sarah Whatmore)
Journal of the American Planning Association, 2020
Abstract Efficiency metrics in water and sanitation performance benchmarking are widely reference... more Abstract Efficiency metrics in water and sanitation performance benchmarking are widely referenced, even where the most serious challenge facing cities is actually extending the service reach of public water and sanitation systems. Critical scholarship on water governance gives water and sanitation planners reason to question whether such performance benchmarks are universally appropriate references. This is especially the case where there is not yet universal water and sanitation coverage. In such environments, the extensive use of efficiency-based benchmarks couple with the growth of financialization to create vulnerabilities for equity-based objectives. Citizen report cards represent an important, spatially informed alternative for assessing utilities’ performances.
plaNext - next generation planning, 2021
National authorities across Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa have implemented various forms o... more National authorities across Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa have implemented various forms of fiscal decentralization over the past three decades with equivocal results. The design of such reforms has long rested on theories based on the experiences of high-income countries’ efforts at increasing local autonomy, accountability, and basic service efficiencies. Critics of the global advocacy for fiscal decentralization, however, point to several challenges with its implementation across diverse political economies that differ significantly from those in high-income environments. Nonetheless, these critiques often obscure the impact that colonial regimes and their legacies have on current efforts to fiscally decentralize. In two postcolonial environments where fiscal decentralization projects have unrolled, namely Mozambique and Mexico, we show how colonial imprints remain critical to understanding efforts at fiscal decentralization. Our focus in these cases is on how race-based c...
En este estudio se explora como las politicas estructurales en America Latina y el Caribe dan for... more En este estudio se explora como las politicas estructurales en America Latina y el Caribe dan forma implicita y explicita a las experiencias de las comunidades que viven en diversas realidades rurales en la region. En particular, se presenta un analisis critico de una de las politicas estructurales mas importantes introducidas en la region durante las ultimas decadas, la descentralizacion fiscal. America Latina y el Caribe presenta una amplia variedad de exitos y fracasos relacionados con la descentralizacion fiscal, lo que dificulta que se lleve a cabo una evaluacion decisiva sobre los impactos de diversas reformas. No obstante, los supuestos basicos de las teorias de descentralizacion fiscal no reflejan de manera consistente las realidades de como se comportan los gobiernos subnacionales y los hogares a los que sirven, especialmente en las areas rurales. Se presentan estudios de casos de las experiencias de la Argentina, la Republica Dominicana y Mexico con las reformas de descent...
More than 900 million people currently live in urban slums and the number is growing as rapid urb... more More than 900 million people currently live in urban slums and the number is growing as rapid urbanization continues in the developing world. A Home in the City urges countries to strengthen their focus on the growing urban crisis and improving the lives of slum dwellers. Proposed are specific investments and policy changes required at local and national levels to create a vibrant, equitable and productive urban environment. It underscores the need for close strategic partnerships between local authorities and organizations of the urban poor for slum upgrading and improved urban management. From adopting citywide strategies and establishing adequate and affordable infrastructure and services, to building effective public transport and constructing low-income housing, it offers valuable methods to prevent future slum formation and to improve the lives of at least 100 million slum dwellers by 2020.
Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space, 2018
This paper seeks to illuminate the multiple ways in which South–South collaboration may reorganiz... more This paper seeks to illuminate the multiple ways in which South–South collaboration may reorganize knowledge production and learning processes across scales and beyond the unilateral transfer of expertise. Drawing on empirical evidence from a knowledge exchange partnership between water and sanitation operators in Salta, Argentina, and Brasília, Brazil, we provide a grounded, contextual account of the partnership to examine what was learned, under what circumstances, and with what potential effects. We contend that common claims by proponents of South–South cooperation around the centrality of shared geopolitical history are not enough to understand South–South cooperation at the project level. At this scale, we find that other forms of proximity, including organizational, linguistic, technological, and cultural, also matter in shaping the constitution of collaborative partnerships and the forms of learning that occur through them. In the case that we examine, partners’ multiple sha...
Journal of Planning Education and Research, 2018
This commentary calls for the deeper institutionalization of urban experiences in the global Sout... more This commentary calls for the deeper institutionalization of urban experiences in the global South into PAB-accredited planning programs in North America. While international “development” planning has been effectively questioned by the rise of the BRICS, transnational planning practice, and recent research emphasizing a relational accounting of international urban development, I urge that development studies—and critiques therein—remain an important backdrop to international planning education for one key reason. Knowledge of development’s trajectory as an idea and as a problematized practice in the global South facilitates a critical resistance to the (re-)technocratization of global planning education and practice. Three approaches to incorporating voices and experiences from the global South into North American planning curricula are suggested: harnessing case studies, practitioner networks, and examples of thought-leaders from the global South to enrich the diversity of referen...
International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 2017
In sub-Saharan African (SSA) cities like Maputo, land commodification is predictably fueled by pl... more In sub-Saharan African (SSA) cities like Maputo, land commodification is predictably fueled by plans for aspirational infrastructure serving elites. What is rather more peculiar, however, is the way in which the promotion of some fiscal policy reforms can also inadvertently support land commodification and the uneven development it (re)produces. This article describes how efforts to host both democratic fiscal reforms (via localized exercises like participatory budgeting) and to tap into international capital circuits to stir economic development (via aspirational infrastructure and urban redevelopment plans) can produce a Sisyphean dilemma. While gains in ordinary infrastructure investments (e.g. wells, water pumps) were achieved democratically in Maputo's KaTembe district with the participatory budget, these material (and political) improvements have been rendered irrelevant by better funded aspirational infrastructure projects for KaTembe (e.g. bridges, high-rise residential buildings, tourist facilities) supported by more opaque decisions made by the national government without residential input. Given the wide embrace of participatory budgeting in contexts of weak democracy across SSA cities and elsewhere, Maputo's experience serves as a timely alert of the risks run when this popular exercise is prematurely promoted, especially when wider-scaled property tax reforms could better redress uneven and undemocratic urban development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
Third World Quarterly, 2010
As the adoption and harmonisation of international public sector accounting standards and guideli... more As the adoption and harmonisation of international public sector accounting standards and guidelines strengthen, decision-making processes and definitions assumed in establishing accounting best practices become more critical objects of study. Especially for countries in the global South that are making efforts to converge with such international guidelines, a review is warranted of the creation of the UN's System of National
Oxford University Press eBooks, Apr 21, 2022
Oxford University PressOxford eBooks, Apr 21, 2022
Equity, Evaluation, and International Cooperation
This chapter introduces the five water-and-sanitation-related international cooperation projects ... more This chapter introduces the five water-and-sanitation-related international cooperation projects the book explores in the realm of urban development in Maputo. Spread across different neighborhoods in the city, these projects encompassed partners from Brazil, China, Italy, Japan, and Spain, none of whose cooperation projects emerged as especially successful from a material distribution standpoint. They also varied in their scope—from sewerage and drainage upgrading to solid-waste management. This expansive view allows for exploring the constitution of development cooperation projects and their day-to-day workings across a diverse spectrum of partners and urban challenges. What these projects reveal is the “turbidity” of development cooperation on the ground. Projects not only defy neat categorizations such as South–South, triangular, or traditional partnerships with Northern donors, but they also do not conform with national geographic boundaries and geopolitical narratives.
Equity, Evaluation, and International Cooperation
South–South Cooperation (SSC) is marked by deep contradictions in practice, shown in how the larg... more South–South Cooperation (SSC) is marked by deep contradictions in practice, shown in how the largest Southern economies pursue models of economic growth and hierarchical development partnerships of the sort long supported by orthodox international financial institutions and high-income countries in the North. This chapter examines whether other growing platforms for capacity development through SSC, such as the United Nations’ Water Operators’ Partnerships (WOPs) program, can instead deliver on the promises of SSC. Leveraging a case study of a cooperation partnership between water operators in Brazil and Argentina, the chapter explores whether the proximities that mattered to high-level learning in Maputo’s international cooperation project ecosystem were also relevant to the South American WOP. As the collaboration between water operators in Brasília and Salta showed, defying the WOP’s mentor–mentee model indeed proved an effective root for fostering high-level learning that matter...
Equity, Evaluation, and International Cooperation
This chapter provides an intellectual history of learning in development, and positions theories ... more This chapter provides an intellectual history of learning in development, and positions theories distinguishing different types of knowledge as especially valuable to evaluating knowledge production key to discretionary decision-making within international cooperation projects. It then considers evidence of these multiple dimensions of knowledge—from factual and conceptual to procedural and reflective knowledge—in water-and-sanitation-related international development cooperation projects studied in Maputo. Secondly, the analysis explores what kinds of proximities supported practitioners’ learning on the ground. Despite the anticipated added value of South–South Cooperation (SSC) as a special medium for advancing grounded high-level learning, the analysis shows that partners representing higher-income countries too could advance high-level know-how critical to discretionary decision-making. Further, beyond the geopolitical and technical ones favored by SSC discourses, heterarchical ...
Oxford University PressOxford eBooks, Apr 21, 2022
The Routledge Handbook of Financial Geography, 2020
Environment and Planning A, 2002
Denis Cosgrove's Linacre Lecture in the 2007 series was characteristically captivating, generous,... more Denis Cosgrove's Linacre Lecture in the 2007 series was characteristically captivating, generous, and scholarly. Undertaken during a remission phase in his courageous battle with cancer, Denis was on top form both in the lecture theatre and at dinner afterwardsö enthusiastically engaged with the people and ideas brought together by his appearance. He seemed to enjoy this return to Oxford and was delighted by the reinvigoration underway in the School of Geography, not out of any fond reminiscence for his days as an undergraduate here but because of its significance for the future of the discipline. Sadly, Denis died a little over a year after presenting his lecture and was chasing copyright queries associated with the version published as part of the special issue based on the series to the last. The special issue was dedicated to him. It is a fitting posthumous tribute to the outstanding quality of his work as well as the warm regard in which his fellow geographers held, and still hold, him that this last paper has been awarded an Ashby Prize as one of the best three published in Environment and Planning A in 2008. Denis and Carmen Cosgrove's six-year-old son, Leon, has received the prize money to be invested toward his college fund. (Sarah Whatmore)
Journal of the American Planning Association, 2020
Abstract Efficiency metrics in water and sanitation performance benchmarking are widely reference... more Abstract Efficiency metrics in water and sanitation performance benchmarking are widely referenced, even where the most serious challenge facing cities is actually extending the service reach of public water and sanitation systems. Critical scholarship on water governance gives water and sanitation planners reason to question whether such performance benchmarks are universally appropriate references. This is especially the case where there is not yet universal water and sanitation coverage. In such environments, the extensive use of efficiency-based benchmarks couple with the growth of financialization to create vulnerabilities for equity-based objectives. Citizen report cards represent an important, spatially informed alternative for assessing utilities’ performances.
plaNext - next generation planning, 2021
National authorities across Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa have implemented various forms o... more National authorities across Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa have implemented various forms of fiscal decentralization over the past three decades with equivocal results. The design of such reforms has long rested on theories based on the experiences of high-income countries’ efforts at increasing local autonomy, accountability, and basic service efficiencies. Critics of the global advocacy for fiscal decentralization, however, point to several challenges with its implementation across diverse political economies that differ significantly from those in high-income environments. Nonetheless, these critiques often obscure the impact that colonial regimes and their legacies have on current efforts to fiscally decentralize. In two postcolonial environments where fiscal decentralization projects have unrolled, namely Mozambique and Mexico, we show how colonial imprints remain critical to understanding efforts at fiscal decentralization. Our focus in these cases is on how race-based c...
En este estudio se explora como las politicas estructurales en America Latina y el Caribe dan for... more En este estudio se explora como las politicas estructurales en America Latina y el Caribe dan forma implicita y explicita a las experiencias de las comunidades que viven en diversas realidades rurales en la region. En particular, se presenta un analisis critico de una de las politicas estructurales mas importantes introducidas en la region durante las ultimas decadas, la descentralizacion fiscal. America Latina y el Caribe presenta una amplia variedad de exitos y fracasos relacionados con la descentralizacion fiscal, lo que dificulta que se lleve a cabo una evaluacion decisiva sobre los impactos de diversas reformas. No obstante, los supuestos basicos de las teorias de descentralizacion fiscal no reflejan de manera consistente las realidades de como se comportan los gobiernos subnacionales y los hogares a los que sirven, especialmente en las areas rurales. Se presentan estudios de casos de las experiencias de la Argentina, la Republica Dominicana y Mexico con las reformas de descent...
More than 900 million people currently live in urban slums and the number is growing as rapid urb... more More than 900 million people currently live in urban slums and the number is growing as rapid urbanization continues in the developing world. A Home in the City urges countries to strengthen their focus on the growing urban crisis and improving the lives of slum dwellers. Proposed are specific investments and policy changes required at local and national levels to create a vibrant, equitable and productive urban environment. It underscores the need for close strategic partnerships between local authorities and organizations of the urban poor for slum upgrading and improved urban management. From adopting citywide strategies and establishing adequate and affordable infrastructure and services, to building effective public transport and constructing low-income housing, it offers valuable methods to prevent future slum formation and to improve the lives of at least 100 million slum dwellers by 2020.
Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space, 2018
This paper seeks to illuminate the multiple ways in which South–South collaboration may reorganiz... more This paper seeks to illuminate the multiple ways in which South–South collaboration may reorganize knowledge production and learning processes across scales and beyond the unilateral transfer of expertise. Drawing on empirical evidence from a knowledge exchange partnership between water and sanitation operators in Salta, Argentina, and Brasília, Brazil, we provide a grounded, contextual account of the partnership to examine what was learned, under what circumstances, and with what potential effects. We contend that common claims by proponents of South–South cooperation around the centrality of shared geopolitical history are not enough to understand South–South cooperation at the project level. At this scale, we find that other forms of proximity, including organizational, linguistic, technological, and cultural, also matter in shaping the constitution of collaborative partnerships and the forms of learning that occur through them. In the case that we examine, partners’ multiple sha...
Journal of Planning Education and Research, 2018
This commentary calls for the deeper institutionalization of urban experiences in the global Sout... more This commentary calls for the deeper institutionalization of urban experiences in the global South into PAB-accredited planning programs in North America. While international “development” planning has been effectively questioned by the rise of the BRICS, transnational planning practice, and recent research emphasizing a relational accounting of international urban development, I urge that development studies—and critiques therein—remain an important backdrop to international planning education for one key reason. Knowledge of development’s trajectory as an idea and as a problematized practice in the global South facilitates a critical resistance to the (re-)technocratization of global planning education and practice. Three approaches to incorporating voices and experiences from the global South into North American planning curricula are suggested: harnessing case studies, practitioner networks, and examples of thought-leaders from the global South to enrich the diversity of referen...
International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 2017
In sub-Saharan African (SSA) cities like Maputo, land commodification is predictably fueled by pl... more In sub-Saharan African (SSA) cities like Maputo, land commodification is predictably fueled by plans for aspirational infrastructure serving elites. What is rather more peculiar, however, is the way in which the promotion of some fiscal policy reforms can also inadvertently support land commodification and the uneven development it (re)produces. This article describes how efforts to host both democratic fiscal reforms (via localized exercises like participatory budgeting) and to tap into international capital circuits to stir economic development (via aspirational infrastructure and urban redevelopment plans) can produce a Sisyphean dilemma. While gains in ordinary infrastructure investments (e.g. wells, water pumps) were achieved democratically in Maputo's KaTembe district with the participatory budget, these material (and political) improvements have been rendered irrelevant by better funded aspirational infrastructure projects for KaTembe (e.g. bridges, high-rise residential buildings, tourist facilities) supported by more opaque decisions made by the national government without residential input. Given the wide embrace of participatory budgeting in contexts of weak democracy across SSA cities and elsewhere, Maputo's experience serves as a timely alert of the risks run when this popular exercise is prematurely promoted, especially when wider-scaled property tax reforms could better redress uneven and undemocratic urban development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
Third World Quarterly, 2010
As the adoption and harmonisation of international public sector accounting standards and guideli... more As the adoption and harmonisation of international public sector accounting standards and guidelines strengthen, decision-making processes and definitions assumed in establishing accounting best practices become more critical objects of study. Especially for countries in the global South that are making efforts to converge with such international guidelines, a review is warranted of the creation of the UN's System of National