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In the late 1990s Third Way governments were in power across Europe - and beyond, in the USA and Brazil, for instance. The Third Way experiment was one that attracted attention worldwide. The changes made by Left parties in Scandinavia, Holland, France or Italy since the late 1980s are as much part of Third Way politics as those developed in Anglo-Saxon countries. Since the early 1990s welfare reform has been at the heart of the Centre-Left's search for a new political middle way between post-war social democracy and Thatcherite Conservatism. For Tony Blair, welfare reform was key to establishing his New Labour credentials - just as it was for Bill Clinton and the New Democrats in the USA. Equality has been 'the polestar of the Left', and the redefinition of this concept by Giddens and New Labour marks a significant departure from post-war social democratic goals. The most useful way of approaching the problem of the Blair Government's 'Third Way' is to apply the term to its 'operational code': the precepts, assumptions and ideas that actually inform policy choice. The choice would be the strategy of public-private partnership (PPP) or the Private Finance Initiative (PFI), as applied to health policy. New Labour is deeply influenced by the thoughts and sentiments of Amitai Etzioni and the new communitarian movement. Repoliticisation is what stands out from all the contributions of reconstructing the Third Way along more progressive lines.
imaginaries and discourses that are used to mobilise livelihood initiatives within the digital economy may be seen as an instrument of power that installs new inequalities and which bypass the real needs of displaced people and refugees on the ground ( Madianou, 2019 ; Ramsay, 2020 ). Rather than creating the conditions for sustainable and inclusive forms of digital employability, top-down technology solutions facilitated through public-private partnerships in the
Introduction The promotion of female entrepreneurship in the global South has animated a great deal of feminist research on the World Bank, public-private partnerships and celebrity-endorsed initiatives. Hingeing on a ‘business case for gender equality’, it recasts the ‘Third World Woman’ ( Mohanty, 1984 ) as agentic and endlessly enterprising ( Wilson, 2011 ; Altan-Olcay, 2016 ; Roberts and Zulfiqar, 2019 ). Recent scholarship, however
public–private partnerships trend in humanitarian response and sustainable development, it builds on the liberal theory of peace through (free) trade. It seeks to harness foreign capital and work aid out of business to revive the shattered production and trade in cocoa and coffee in the conflict-marred Northeastern part of the Congo, 15 all the while appealing to the ethical American consumer to buy into luxury treats and support good causes. Both celebrity-led corporate
Chapter 2 A study in financial extraction: Lesotho’s national referral hospital Let us start with a concrete example of infrastructure as financial extraction to illustrate the types of deals being set up, quite lawfully, that serve to siphon money towards the wealthy. This is no easy task. Commercial confidentiality ensures that many of the financial arrangements underlying the deals remain secret, but detailed figures for many deals have emerged. One example is a controversial Public– Private Partnership for three filter clinics and a new 425-bed hospital in
(Harvey 1989), as those of the ‘entrepreneurial city’ (Jonas, et al. 2011; Quilley 2000; Ward 2003a; Ward 2003b; While, et al. 2004). According to Harvey, the entrepreneurial city privileges public–private partnerships as a way of delivering public services, at the same time as focusing on wealth generation rather than the direct provision of local public services. One of the reasons for this focus on entrepreneurial governance has been a concern with the relationship between this form of urban governance and its impact on local populations. Supporters of an
infrastructure routinely raise tariffs, leaving many poorer people without access to water or electricity. One IMF study found that 62 per cent of all renegotiated Public–Private Partnership (PPP) contracts resulted in higher tariffs. In Uganda, for example, Umeme, a privatised Ugandan power distributor, secured a price rise of 24 per cent in 2005 and then sought a further 37 per cent rise in 2007, leading to a court challenge by the Uganda Electricity Users Association (UEUA). Many poorer Ugandans were forced to steal electricity from the grid because of the high prices; the
No struggle for social justice that lacks a grounded understanding of how wealth is accumulated within society, and by whom, is ever likely to make more than a marginal dent in the status quo. Much work has been done over the years by academics and activists to illuminate the broad processes of wealth extraction. But a constantly watchful eye is essential if new forms of financial extraction are to be blocked, short-circuited, deflected or unsettled. So when the World Bank and other well-known enablers of wealth extraction start to organise to promote greater private-sector involvement in ‘infrastructure’, for example through Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs), alarm bells should start to ring. How are roads, bridges, hospitals, ports and railways being eyed up by finance? What bevels and polishes the lens through which they are viewed? How is infrastructure being transformed into an ‘asset class’ that will yield the returns now demanded by investors? Why now? What does the reconfiguration of infrastructure tell us about the vulnerabilities of capital? The challenge is not only to understand the mechanisms through which infrastructure is being reconfigured to extract wealth: equally important is to think through how activists might best respond. What oppositional strategies genuinely unsettle elite power instead of making it stronger?
the new target source, Public–Private Partnerships the inducement, and transforming infrastructure into an asset class the currently favoured means of raising the funds. A failure to entice the sums required from investors thus creates a major additional vulnerability for capital’s corridor programme: and, as such, it has turned infrastructure-as-asset-class into a potent emerging arena of struggle. How is the ‘production–consumption disconnect’ playing out today? How critical are the proposed ‘spatial connectors’ to smoothing the onward march of globalisation that
accommodate private initiative. Changing its name into Cooperative for American Relief to Everywhere, CARE reoriented its focus. By connecting private humanitarian relief activities with new institutions, public funding, and ideas drawn from modernization and development theories, the agency was instrumental in constructing a new type of public–private partnership in the field of food aid distribution. CARE