What is the impact of international economic law on developing countries?

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Just as at the time of Bretton Woods, international economic law is essential to discourage destructive national policies. But it is also vital to understand how law, regulations and institutions are located within a longer historical trajectory of colonialism, inequality and exploitation.

The Covid-19 pandemic and the climate crisis demonstrate how the world today is more connected economically, socially, politically and ecologically than at any other point in history.

Actions in one country have impacts, sometimes very serious ones, on the societies, environment and economies of other countries. The globalisation of economic markets and technological change affect how countries, companies and individuals conduct economic exchange, including trade in goods and services, capital investment and financial transfers.

These developments also accelerate the social and environmental costs of transnational economic activity. For example, while products, such as mobile phones, can be used in one part of the world, their production can criss-cross multiple other geographical regions. Similarly, raw materials can be extracted from one country to be manufactured into consumer products in another.

This means that the social or environmental costs of production – such as low wages, poor health and safety standards and/or air or water pollution – are not necessarily borne by the countries or communities where the final product is sold and used by consumers.

These changes underscore the critical importance of global collective action and international economic law – the set of global rules and institutions that regulate transnational economic transactions.

As discussion turns to how international economic law deals with contemporary global problems – such as managing global supply chains, settling trade disputes, overcoming sovereign debt crises and financing transitions to low-carbon economies – it is important to consider how the historical legacies of the current system can affect its capacity to do so effectively.

This will enable us to move beyond the economics discipline’s approach to international law, which is often limited to narrowly measuring the ‘effect’ of different laws and legal institutions on various economic indicators, such as growth, investment and poverty. Taking this approach will enable us to explore how law is itself developed in a colonial and imperial context, which may serve to reproduce and perpetuate colonial harms and exploitation.

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On recentring people’s voices to decolonise FinTech narratives

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In 2009, I was interested in studying the phenomenon of M-Pesa as a legal scholar—just a year after its launch and intense rollout. My standpoint enabled me to see the initial regulatory paradoxes that M-Pesa presented. In 2010, I began my PhD, exploring what a regulatory framework should look like. My analysis focused on the complexities presented by the storage and transfer of customer funds within mobile money systems. Central to my analysis were themes of financial regulation, consumer rights, financial stability, conceptualising ‘financial inclusion’, and the meaning of ‘banking the unbanked’. At the time, the study was significant, in understanding the contractual tensions between mobile money users and Safaricom, a non-bank entity, which provided services akin to a traditional bank’s deposit system—yet did not appear to be subject to the same regulatory restraints as conventional banks. Crucially, banks and financial institutions had historically dominated much of the financial system, through exclusionary practices due to colonialism. Therefore, M-Pesa caused much upheaval to established banks, but simultaneously provided hope for the excluded. Various actors extended this new hope, in the ‘success’ narrative of M-Pesa. Its beneficial use as a storage and transfer system was extolled as alleviating poverty, and the restatement of its trajectory was and continues to be modelled across the developing world. The global development and digitalisation agenda have subsumed M-Pesa’s pervasive influence, both valorising the pathways to ‘development’ and ‘innovation’ through FinTech with a singular aim of ‘financial inclusion.’

As a result, Kenya has become the site of contestation for overwhelming empirical research, interest, and knowledge production, particularly by Western scholars and institutions. A ‘gold rush’ has emerged, and the scramble for knowledge extraction has intensified across academic disciplines and across methodologies. Studies from Ghana, Senegal and Kenya dominate. The study of ‘development’ in all its iterations has gained a new development. However, much of the ways in which mobile money (M-Pesa) and FinTech are discussed and framed demonstrates a Western understanding of the everyday lives of the Kenyans who use it. Scholars, activists, and proponents often situate the premise of its use as being between two paradigms: advancing financial inclusion through the enhancement of global development aims, and its function as a tool that includes Kenyans in extractive cycles of financialisation. Both of these are true.

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On recentring women’s grassroots struggles to decolonise FinTech narratives

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Drawing realised by artist Pawel Kuczyński for Serena Natile’s book The Exclusionary Politics of Digital Financial Inclusion: Mobile Money, Gendered Walls

I came to the study of fintech as a feminist socio-legal scholar researching the gender dynamics of South-South migration. While doing fieldwork in Kenya for my PhD in 2012, I came across M-Pesa, a mobile money service used by locals as an instrument for transferring money from urban to rural areas. From the start of my research in 2011 to the completion of my PhD in 2016, ongoing studies on M-Pesa were mainly celebratory. It was acclaimed as an innovative instrument for poverty reduction, development, and gender equality and was enthusiastically supported by donors and international financial institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), as well as by tech entrepreneurs and corporate philanthropy. Its success story was so uncontested that I decided to change my research question to focus on the gender dynamics of digital financial inclusion, rather than on my initial interest, migration.

The key narrative of M-Pesa’s success in terms of gender equality was, and still is, that it facilitates women’s access to financial services, providing them with a variety of opportunities to improve their own livelihoods and those of their families, their communities, and ultimately their countries. In the specific case of M-Pesa, a basic-mobile-phone-enabled money transfer service is considered more accessible and available than transferring money via mainstream financial institutions such as banks, and more reliable and secure than informal finance channels such as moneylenders or the handling of cash via rotating credit and savings associations (ROSCAs). This claim is based on three assumptions: first, that women have less access to financial services than men have; second, that women would use their access to finance to support not only themselves but also their families and communities; and third, that digital financial services are better than informal financial channels because they overcome the limits of cash, ensuring traceability and security. These assumptions motivated advocacy and investment in digital financial inclusion projects and the creation of ad hoc programmes and institutions, all strongly focused on the question of how digital technology can be used to facilitate women’s access to financial services.

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Decolonising for Whom? Recentring grassroots struggles and voices in the ‘decolonising fintech’ narrative

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By Serena Natile and Joy Malala

Over the last few years ‘decolonisation’ has become an increasingly popular subject in Western academia. Broadly considered the process of recognising and undoing the intellectual and institutional structures that enabled and maintain the reproduction of imperial power, calls for decolonisation have opened uncomfortable debates about epistemological privilege, forcing us to confront biases and injustices and to revisit hidden histories and visions for the future. While these debates remain essential, particularly at a time of political authoritarianism, racism, and violence, they also highlight the contradictions in Western academia between decolonisation as a fashionable conceptual trend and its real commitment to justice.

In formerly colonised communities, generational consciousness of colonial oppression and struggles to recover land, property, wealth, and political institutions have created a lived experience of the long-term consequences of colonialism, usually conceptualised as ‘coloniality’, that is not a concept but a reality. This experience has shaped movements and protests in the Global South, including within universities. An example is the #FeesMustFall movement in South Africa, which followed the significant decline of government subsidisation of universities with discriminatory consequences for the disadvantaged Black population without historical wealth and economic privilege. Similar protests concern the recognition of and fight against pillars of colonial power including philanthropists such as British colonialist Cecil Rhodes, who accumulated wealth by appropriating land, enslaving people and extracting resources, and used that wealth to shape knowledge production.

Other significant protests involve resistance against neocolonial powers such as Western financial infrastructures, corporations and international institutions i.e. the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. A  recent example is the ongoing youth-led (Gen Z) round of protests in Kenya #rejectfinancebill2024, motivated by demands to reject the IMF-supported Finance Bill that, if approved, would have imposed a fresh round of government cuts to basic services and austerity measures on Kenyans. The young people protesting in the streets of Nairobi showed awareness of the colonial legacy and long-term impact of the 1980s structural adjustment policies (SAPs) on the lives of people – particularly those at the lower end of the income distribution, and demanded economic sovereignty as the only way to achieve social justice. The protests were successful in impeding the adoption of the Bill, but many young people paid with their lives, as the government deployed a deadly military response to the protests. 

The demands for decolonisation are based on ending economic and epistemological oppression, two interrelated aims, each grounded in colonialism. Reclaiming knowledge and the economic means that allow its production and dissemination has always been at the centre of decolonisation as an opportunity to remake societies, nations, and the world itself for the better. In its fight for justice, decolonisation is a grassroots struggle against colonial and neo-colonial rulers and rules, as well as against all global and local actors and structures that enable and reinforce those rules. For this reason, grassroots voices need to be at the centre of any decolonisation project.

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Anti-Colonial Solutions to climate change

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When we discuss the climate crisis in economics, we are often confronted with a debate resting on technical solutions, emissions paths, and energy use: a certain amount of time to go from coal to turbines means a certain amount of carbon dioxide emitted, which means a certain likely degree of global temperature change. In environmental economics, climate change and its associated environmental problems are often framed as ‘externalities’; that is, unfortunate and unintended spillovers caused by market mechanisms. Often, social issues are taken into account within this narrative through sunny phrases like “sustainable development” or “just transition.” The responsible parties are often individuals, states, or firms that are often thought to take action within the market. What does this debate look like if we take two different questions as starting points: not how to solve the climate crisis through market mechanisms and regulation, but how to solve the climate crisis while attending to the colonial legacy and exiting from contemporary neo-colonial accumulation patterns? Let us take a look.

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Misreading Indigenous Politics: A Eulogy for the Eurocentric Left

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Response to Thomas Meaney, “Red Power” in LRB (Vol. 46, No. 14, 18 July 2024)

In the latest issue of the London Review of Books under the title of “Red Power: Indigenous Political Strategies,” Thomas Meaney has written a review of three recent award-winning books by historians of Native North America: Pekka Hämäläinen’s Indigenous Continent; Ned Blackhawk’s The Rediscovery of America; and Nick Estes Our History is the Future. In some ways, the review is impressively learned. Meaney uses the occasion to canvass a generations-spanning array of scholarship on the history of Native North America and engages figures, events, and historiographic questions of which only a very small body of Native and non-native scholars on these topics are even aware.

Marks of erudition aside, Meaney is out to weave together a broader narrative that extends beyond the historical bona fides of these books. The key moment in setting up this narrative comes after Meaney has raised his readers’ hopes by opening with a quite historically literate summary of European settler expansionism and Indigenous peoples’ responses to it. In the paragraph that then really begins the substance of his review, Meaney pivots: “but recent roadmaps of the historiography either sidestep material questions or mistake a colonized mindset for progressivist one.” This is where Meaney divides the three books under review into three categories of political and historical errors: Hämäläinen’s revisionist history overstretches the notion of “empire” in his account of “Indigenous power” by labeling the Lakota (and in earlier work, the Comanche) as such. (I agree with this critique, so I leave it aside in this review). Blackhawk represents a trend of scholars of Native history and federal Indian law who “have so thoroughly internalized constitutional ideology that they seem not to notice how their cause has been instrumentalized by the most fanatically libertarian segment of American society.” And finally, “a nominally [!] left-wing Native scholarship” that romanticizes Indigenous experiences, engaging in a politics of authenticity. The latter is how Meaney represents the work of Lakota scholar Nick Estes.

After establishing these categories, Meaney argues that these various limitations are “all the more regrettable because the 20th century offered examples of Indigenous co-operation with the left, cases contemporary political theorists have examined with more care than their historian peers.” This is a strange thing to assert at the outset, given that there was no recognizable anticolonial “left” in the US settler colony that Native nations could possibly have “cooperated” with in the 19th century. The consensus on the necessity and inevitability of land dispossession and structural predation cut across almost all categories of white society, including almost all of those on the far left of the political spectrum. Moreover, this included, as many others have noted, some key figures in the history of African-American political thought such as Douglas and Du Bois. What these historians—particularly Blackhawk and Estes—ask us to do is to suspend some assumptions about what constitutes the commitments of “the left” at all, given the deep investments of American republicanism and many later iterations of US leftism (let alone the liberalism of the Democratic Party) in colonial dispossession or just racialized indifference.

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Is It Possible to ‘Decolonize’ Economics?*

Eiman Zein-ElabdinLeave a comment

Calls for decolonizing disciplines, fields, even businesses have proliferated. The goals and meaning are not always clear, but any decolonizing process necessarily entails deconstructive and reconstructive tasks. In Economics, the first task must challenge dominant and domineering paradigms – orthodox and heterodox – and expose mechanisms of exclusion in the profession (Zein-Elabdin and Charusheela 2004). The constructive task, at least in part, consists of developing a theoretical vocabulary of economic meaning and well-being based on contemporary understandings of ‘value’ and its genetic relationship to questions of power and justice. Amartya Sen has aptly noted that “what moves us, reasonably enough, is not the realization that the world falls short of being completely just – which few of us expect – but that there are clearly remediable injustices around us which we want to eliminate” (2009). I would argue that historical injustices, such as those brought about by colonialism or other forms of lasting domination, cannot be remedied without reconstructing the meaning of economic value and valuation. Confronting value, power, and justice as a mutually constitutive problem is a necessary step for any project of ‘decolonizing’ Economics.

More than a century ago, Thorstein Veblen noted that “economics is helplessly behind the times” (1898). His remark then was made in reference to the rise of Anthropology and new biological sciences. Today, this statement could well serve to depict the sluggishness of Economics to engage with postcolonial critique. Nowhere is this engagement more needed than in theories of value where a contemporary view is lacking. Value is a dauntingly complex concept; it is interpretive rather than discoverable. For the sake of this argument, I broadly frame it as a reference to what enables material sustenance and general well-being. Among other things, a new theoretical framework must seek to: a) revalue different types of work, especially those performed by women and ethnic and cultural subalterns; b) recalibrate ‘humans’ relationship with the ‘natural’ world; and c) redefine ‘poor’ countries’ contribution to life in ‘rich’ parts of the globe. So far, most economists have studied social disparities in income and wealth, ecological degradation, and global inequality as analytically separable problems without much attention to their common foundational reliance on major concepts of value inherited from industrial European modernity. In this brief commentary, I suggest that new, less “behind the times” interpretations of value in Economics are long overdue.

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Is women’s access to land path dependent? Evidence from Punjab (Pakistan)

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Women have historically been excluded from formal land rights in the Indian subcontinent. For its rural population, land remains the most prevalent and significant asset, making bequests of land parcels the main channel through which women can acquire land (Gazdar, 2003; Nelson, 2011; Agarwal, 1994).  Customary land rights prevented inheritance along gendered lines and in colonial times, these laws were codified to prevent the sale and purchase of land parcels (Nelson, 2011). To what extent and how have such gendered patterns of land ownership persisted in different areas of Punjab in Pakistan? To what extent is there path dependence in gendered land ownership? Those are the research questions I’ll tackle in this blog post.

In 2015, the Government of Punjab introduced a series of reforms aimed at enforcing women’s existing legal land rights in the process of inheritance. One enforcement mechanism introduced was making it the responsibility of local revenue officials to ensure that after the death of a landed individual, each heir would be transferred their inherited share in the land parcel by revenue officials even if the family did not initiate an inheritance mutation process. In addition, paper-based land records originating from the era of British colonial rule were digitized and stored in a central database. The new system made it mandatory to conduct in-person biometric verification of all heirs (male and female) of the deceased for an inheritance mutation case to move forward with the official transfer of land parcels. The introduction of these enforcement mechanisms made an historically exclusive inheritance mutation process more inclusive towards women. But fieldwork suggests that previous patterns of land ownership continue to be repeated in Punjab putting women at a disadvantage. In this blog post I unpack some of these findings, which raise questions about land reform alone as the solution to gendered division of land ownership. Instead, I find that the manner in which old patronage structures interacted with the British colonial system has had lasting implications on the way in which land is distributed.

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