By Keetie Roelen
“You need a new vacuum cleaner? Can you prove that your current one is really broken?”
This was the response Hanny received from the welfare office in the Dutch city of Tilburg when she asked them for support with replacing her broken appliance. More precisely, it was the response following her second request, after her first appeal was met with the suggestion that she could use a broom to sweep her floors.
Continue reading “Why We Need Empathy to Tackle Poverty”
By Will LaFleur
What is the relationship between extractivism, agriculture, and a sustainable future? As I started the fieldwork for my doctoral studies, this question sat at the heart of my inquiry. Developing a critical response started with renewing an analytical and theoretical conception of extractivism before I even began the fieldwork. That meant, first of all, framing extractivism historically.
Continue reading “What Would it Take to Build a Post-Extractivist Agriculture?”
By Sara Vélez Zapata and Gonzalo A. Vargas
In early November, Indigenous communities in the Brazilian Amazon raised their voices, reminding us that without forests there is no future: “sem floresta, não há futuro”. During the UN Climate Change Conference (COP 30), global leaders discussed how to protect tropical forests as a collective effort. However, it ended without a binding agreement to stop deforestation. Given that tropical forests are often found in countries with fragile institutional contexts, what can we learn from communities’ achievements over the last few years?
Continue reading “Against all Odds: How Local Communities Achieve Forest Conservation in Colombia”
By Maaike Matelski and Lise Woensdregt
Within the field of development research and practice, there is a growing awareness that interventions aimed at supporting emancipation struggles in the Global South should prioritize local actors and agendas. Consequently, community-based organizations (CBOs) are increasingly considered vehicles of change. But who are the communities that constitute these CBOs? To complement existing literature on CBOs that focuses primarily on Northern case studies, we decided to analyse this question in relation to two types of CBOs engaged in advocacy work in Kenya. Our findings testify to the diversity of identities, forms and goals of organizations that come under the banner ‘community-based’.
Continue reading “Analyzing Community Representation in the Kenyan Aid Chain”
By Jan Orbie, Antonio Salvador Alcazar III and Tinus Sioen
The notions of ‘developing countries’ and ‘development cooperation’ have been waning in discourses by scholars, policymakers and civil society actors. At least rhetorically, the colonial and patronising nature of these notions has been recognised at the European Union (EU) level. For instance, the Development Commissioner has been rechristened as the ‘Commissioner of International Partnerships’ since 2019. In recent years, the EU has pursued plenty of ‘partnerships’ in areas such as climate, energy, trade and deforestation.
Continue reading “Trading with the ‘Jungle’: The European Union’s Generalised Scheme of Preferences”
