We still have a few places left for speakers at our event on private financing for development. Please let me know if you're interested!
Many thanks,
Jessie Sklair
CALL FOR PAPERS - EXTENDED UNTIL 5th SEPT 2018
*apologies for any cross-posting!*
New Private Financing for Development: Latin America in comparative perspective
One-day conference at the Institute of Latin American Studies,
School of Advanced Study, University of London, on 23rd November
2018
Keynote speaker: Professor Benjamin Selwyn, Dept. of International Development, University of Sussex
Recent decades have seen an ideological shift in international development, from a macro-economic approach based on the implementation of structural adjustment
policies, to a ‘human capabilities’ approach posited
on the entrepreneurial potential of the world’s poor to create and sustain new global markets. Central to this shift is a changing role envisioned for the private sector, with corporate
and financial actors now engaging directly in the design of market-based models for social impact, amidst a growing discourse on the necessity of private finance to meet the costs of development. Nation states and development NGOs are now tasked with mobilising
this private finance, through diverse public-private partnerships (PPPs) and ‘blended finance’ models, across
sectors including education, health, the environment and access to financial services. These trends are crystallised in the high corporate engagement seen in the design of the UN’s Sustainable
Development Goals (SDGs), and widely repeated claims that private finance will be essential to meeting what UNCTAD has identified as a $2.5 trillion annual financing gap for achieving
them.
As diverse new models for private financing take hold, development is increasingly financialised within the market frameworks of global capitalism, and
development solutions are posited on the dual motives of social impact and financial profit making. How is the private sector’s contribution to
development reconfigured through these initiatives? How are the concepts of poverty and social impact measured and defined by them? What are the impacts of these trends on development policymaking, and how is this experienced on the ground? Where do enduring
issues of economic and social justice sit within this landscape? And can we envisage alternative development models in this arena, able to transcend capitalist profit-seeking priorities?
Alongside these themes, this conference will examine the tensions between local and global frameworks around private financing for development, taking
Latin America – which has not been a common geography for scholarship in this area - as a regional case study
within a broader comparative framework. We will also explore the influence of changing political contexts on private development finance, such as Latin America’s ‘pink tide’ and its recent
ebbing as right wing political elites have reasserted their authority within the region. To these ends, this one-day conference will bring together an interdisciplinary group of scholars
working in Latin American and beyond. We welcome contributions on (but not limited to) the following themes:
