Development ethics emerged as a joint critique of economic development research and practice, giving rise to three alternative traditions: human development, sustainable development, and participatory development. The ethical issues surrounding the mainstreaming of these schools have implications for investigators. In this article, I revisit the transformative values at the root of these traditions to articulate common research principles for an international and interdisciplinary field. Ethicists are asking development researchers to deliver actionable and multiparadigmatic understanding by improving measures, aligning values and approaches, and decolonizing knowledge. While these emerging research models can strengthen development relevancy and impact, they are challenging to facilitate and vulnerable to elite co-optation. Not only should the production of knowledge be rigorous and accurate, but scholars also have a responsibility to query power and embrace difference. The principles presented in this article comprise a set of shared values that may be used as a practical guide for planning, conducting, and evaluating development research across methods, topics, and disciplines.

Many scholars assert that the U.S. state promotes free market economic policies abroad through the leverage it wields within international financial institutions (IFIs), such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Other scholars have focused on U.S. bilateral aid programs, such as those implemented by USAID, and their emphasis on free market economic policies. In many middle-income countries, though, IFIs and U.S. development agencies do not maintain economic development programs. If the U.S. state cannot promote free market policies through IFIs and its bilateral development agencies, how does it promote them at all in middle-income countries? In this paper, I provide a case study of U.S. foreign policy toward Venezuela, a middle-income country, under the government of President Hugo Chávez (1999–2013). I draw on interviews with U.S. state elites, including several former ambassadors and State Department employees, and U.S. state documents to show how the U.S. encourages free market economic reforms through its support for civil society organizations that embrace these reforms. In particular, I focus on the work of the Center for International Private Enterprise, which has explicitly linked political freedom with economic freedom. Through this organization, the U.S. works with free market think tanks and promotes free market initiatives, all in the form of political rather than economic assistance.

The rise of participatory democracy in urban Latin America has increased citizen deliberation in local politics, improved access to state officials and given residents greater control over municipal budgets. Simultaneously, welfare state retrenchment across the region has ensured the continued importance of the informal sector in securing citizen livelihoods, including informal political arrangements such as clientelism. Given their documented co-existence, how do informal political strategies operate in this new landscape of formal, local democracy? To answer this question, this article analyzes 21 semi-structured interviews with urbanists in Mexico City who evaluate the informal tactics of two groups that mobilize through participatory democratic initiatives: street vendor unions and white collar neighborhood councils. Urbanists regularly denounce informal, corporatist-clientelistic political strategies when they are used by street vendor groups. However, when deployed by white collar neighborhood councils, these tactics are tolerated and even celebrated. The differential reception of informal political tactics by city officials draws attention to how they construct the legitimacy or illegitimacy of informal political action. I argue that considering legitimacy adds a new analytical category to studies of informal politics that captures which groups are able to use informal tactics to advance their claims in local participatory democracy.

Although existing studies of international women’s rights norm diffusion demonstrate the importance of international linkages for fostering change, few examine their influence on individual attitudes. Of those that do, none consider how ties to different world cultural domains—world polity vs. world society—impact this process, despite their divergent roots. Whereas world polity via CEDAW facilitates diffusion by holding states accountable, world society via women’s international NGOs (WINGOs) appeals to citizens by encouraging activism and awareness. Focusing on trends in developing nations, which remain underexamined but theoretically relevant, I assess the unique effect of each on diffusion to attitudes. I further expand the literature to examine the direct and interactive effects of national-level compliance (quotas) on this process. Using a multilevel analysis of World Values Survey data from 31 developing nations, I demonstrate that the duration of CEDAW ratification (world polity) and nationally mandated legislative quotas (national-level compliance) directly facilitate this diffusion, but WINGOs (world society) alone do not. Yet, where quotas exist and global ties are sufficient, WINGOs become significant, and CEDAW’s effectiveness increases. These results suggest that world polity and world society are both salient for diffusion to attitudes but should be considered separately and in conjunction with national-level outcomes that moderate their effects.

Research has highlighted the relationship between production expansion and the creation of sacrifice zones in advanced capitalist economies. Yet, less attention has focused on the establishment of such regions within authoritarian, state-socialist countries. We draw theoretical and conceptual insights from treadmill of production theory and the Gramscian theory of hegemony to delineate the interaction between legitimation processes used by authoritarian states to justify the physical destruction of the environment. Our analysis focuses on the historic case of environmental destruction in Czechoslovakia’s North Bohemian coal mining region. We analyze data from various sources, including in-depth interviews with residents, state media articles, and state archival sources. We find that the interactive processes of coercion, domination, and consent were used to propel the development and legitimation of environmental exploitation in this area. We argue that these processes, and the resultant sacrifice zones, are a central component of the treadmill of production. We conclude by discussing the implications of our results for further analyses of sacrifice zones.

I review three key claims regarding the impact of production globalization on manufacturing workers worldwide, and subject them to empirical scrutiny. Some argue that production globalization causes a “race to the bottom” that leads to a downward convergence of manufacturing workers’ labor power worldwide. Others suggest instead that production globalization leads to an upward convergence of labor power among manufacturing workers worldwide. A third perspective is agnostic with respect to the average level of this labor power, but predicts divergence between the global North and global South. Using a novel empirical approach to cross-national and temporally comparable measurement of manufacturing labor market power, I show that both the (country-average) level and (between-country) dispersion of labor market power have increased worldwide since the mid-1960s. To explain these trends, I juxtapose insights from Heckscher-Ohlin trade theory with those from the interdisciplinary literature on global value chains and production networks. Both predict that globalization should increase labor market power more in the global North than in the global South. However, the former focuses on labor demand shocks from international trade, while the latter focuses on relationships between firms in the North and South in light of the strategic behavior of network/chain leaders. Augmenting the empirical approach to the measurement of the aggregate positional power of national manufacturing firms developed elsewhere, I show that both international trade and positional power matter for the distribution of manufacturing labor-market power worldwide, but the latter effects are stronger. I conclude by positioning these results within larger debates about the fate of labor in a globalized manufacturing economy.

An extensive literature is dedicated to examining the proliferation of private sector-led, market-based approaches to address gender inequality. Drawing on insights from feminist environmentalism and environmental sociology, I explore how and why this phenomenon is connected to the environmental crisis. First, I analyze the World Bank’s gender strategy papers for 2001–2023. I highlight the organization's role in entrenching a neoliberal discourse of women's empowerment that erases socio-ecological contexts. Next, I provide an overview of Project Shakti, a women’s empowerment program run by Hindustan Unilever, a subsidiary of the Unilever conglomerate and a corporate partner of the World Bank. Secondary data on program outcomes show that the organization’s selective use of gendered ideologies has increased HUL's rural market share. On the other hand, the benefits for participants are less clear, particularly when considered in the context of the program’s social and environmental footprint. Finally, I present the Exxon Mobil's Foundation's gender portfolio to illustrate how exclusive networks and non-participatory program evaluations have been used by private sector actors to normalize an understanding of women's wellbeing that is devoid of environmental considerations. Together, these cases illustrate how feminist ideals have been used to support elite economic agendas with high environmental costs, while also marginalizing those who seek sustainable development through systemic reform. This phenomenon exacerbates an environmental crisis that disproportionately affects the people these programs purport to empower.

Stakeholders in the transnational aid sector are increasingly calling for more aid “localization”: relying more on local workers to implement aid projects in their respective home countries. This paper asks: What do aid organizations expect from their local employees, and how do these expectations shape local employees’ work routines? Drawing on data collected from over seven months of fieldwork in Jordan, a major global aid hub, I find that organizations hold cultural assumptions about local workers that shape their recruitment and their expectations of their local employees. Furthermore, these assumptions and expectations are much more ambivalent and conflictual than existing scholarship suggests. Employers want locals who are “Westernized professionals”: impartial, objective, transparent, and dispassionate workers. But they also expect local employees to act in “non-Western” ways, as “traditional locals” (reifying orientalist tropes related to corruption and Arab culture), to make aid projects work. Echoing Bhabha’s argument that colonial subject stereotypes are strategically ambivalent—“almost the same, but not white”—I show how locals engage in specific types of extra work for their employers—what I call hybridized labor—to try to meet these conflicting expectations.

A growing body of scholars in natural resources management have called for the examination of the roles of social capital and social networks in the effective maintenance of community-based projects. Yet, the role of social capital in collective action cannot be effectively understood without studying agency. The goal of this study is to examine how agents’ individual characteristics and their structural social capital, along with broader cognitive social capital elements, shape possibilities for empowerment at the community level. Drawing from an embedded comparative case study of two community-based ecotourism projects in Ghana, we employed a mixed-methods approach combining Lin’s social capital model and Krishna’s agency model to identify and characterize legitimate agents of change in each community, as well as to evaluate the structure of their discussion and nomination networks (i.e., structural social capital). Differences between communities in the network structure of agents, as well as in their types and levels of engagement, resourcefulness, visions and perceptions of socio-ecological context, exposed key barriers to social capital mobilization. Overall, our results indicate that greater community empowerment is reported where greater community trust and a greater cohesiveness of agents with access to external resources are reported. Altogether, this study adds to past efforts in illustrating how a mixed-methods examination of change agents in a CBNRM setting can surface internal opportunities for and constraints on social capital mobilization toward community empowerment.