Scholars have examined the impacts of neoliberal policies on women, children, small farmers and more, but little attention has been paid to the impact of these policies on orphans. The issue of orphan care is crucial now, and will become increasingly more urgent in the future. Even as HIV/AIDS rates are on the decline, more and more children are being orphaned by the disease. This paper examines the policies, positions and language of the World Bank and I.M.F. regarding orphans in order to understand the biases and assumptions within neoliberalism about orphans, and who is responsible for providing care for them. I then compare the assumptions, commitments, policies, and language of neoliberalism with those of community based organizations working with orphans in sub-Saharan Africa. To personify the effects that neoliberal policies have on orphans and orphan care, I interview orphan care providers in South Africa, Zimbabwe and Zambia. I conclude that the neoliberal approach relegates orphan care to the private sector (charities, extended families, NGOs). That approach is flawed in many ways. An alternative theoretical foundation, the Feminist Ethic of Care, argues for public sector support. The Feminist approach contends that care is not the "burden" of private citizens, but the "duty" of a democratic government.

The purpose of this study is to look at how women are represented in neoliberal discourses of development, if there has been a change on representation of women over the last three decades and how these discourses reflect broader developments in gender equality. The World Bank has been selected to serve as an instance of neoliberal development discourse and one World Development Report (WDR) from each decade is analysed. The theoretical perspectives include discourse analysis and the three Western main approaches to feminist development theory; Women In Development (WID), Woman And Development (WAD) and Gender And Development (GAD); the methodology is related to critical discourse analysis. The analysis suggests that the Bank discourse on women has changed from a predominant WID approach in the end of the 90s where women were mainly depicted as passive and poor objects, and moved closer towards a GAD approach in the latest WDR that constructs women as empowered agents with aspirations. Despite changes in Bank language use over time, the underlying message has remained the same; women are discursively framed as a means to enhance economic efficiency. The discursive changes in the analysed WDRs have to a large extent followed the global developments on discourses on women and gender equality, of which the Bank itself is a key influencer. The discursive construction of women in development, structured around efficiency and economic growth thus sustains, rather than challenges, the hegemonic power structures that sustain gender inequalities. The practical consequences of the current development discourse of constructing women as economic actors without addressing the root causes to their subordination will most likely translate into an increase in the workload of women on the ground while gender inequality and poverty continue to exist.

One of the major factors that affect economic growth is FDI - Forgein Direct Investment. BRICS is a newly formed trade bloc that includes 5 of the largest, most heavily populated, and most emerging economies in the world, their economies share various characteristics, yet they also have various differences. The purpose of the thesis is to find the determinants of FDI in this trade bloc. Those determinants were specifically chosen based on multiple accredited previous literature. In this thesis a panel data regression is performed for these 5 partners with data ranging from 1995 to 2018. The results of the thesis were both predicted and surprising, as two determinants were in accordance with the past literature, however the other two  determinants had other results, both of these variables had opposite signs compared to their predicted signs that were expected from the chosen previous literature. Our research tries to answer the question of how do these determinants affect FDI inflows, in order for countries to make strategies to attract it.

In the last 20 years, international donors have made efforts to increase the participation of minorities into development programmes. Despite these efforts, development actors continues to receive critique from postcolonial theorists for continuing to reinforce neocolonial and Western-centered tendencies onto minorities. Given this background, the purpose of this study is to investigate how indigenous peoples in Latin America and their issues are represented and allowed to participate in and challenge the development agenda. This is done by analysing how ‘indigeneity’ and indigenous peoples’ issues are portrayed in reports by international donors. Through a discourse analysis of two reports from the World Bank and ECLAC, this study finds that indigenous peoples are still not allowed to challenge the standard development agenda. Even though improvements have been made concerning explicit representations of indigenous peoples knowledges and values as inferior, the findings of this study show that indigenous peoples’ issues are often represented to be legitimate only when its moved to Western frameworks. These findings suggest that postcolonial attitudes towards indigenous peoples are still integrated in development programmes. This study however encourages further research of postcolonial attitudes towards indigenous peoples within international donors, and how international donors can improve in these aspects.

This study focuses on the debtor-creditor relationship between African states and the International Financial Institutions (IFIs). More specifically, it makes use of ‘post-positivist’ approaches as analytical tools and it compares the controversial Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs) with so-called ‘post-SAPs’ in order to establish whether the latter debt relief strategies are an improvement on the former. Post-SAPs include, amongst others, the Enhanced Heavily Indebted Poor Countries Initiative (HIPC II) and Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs). Jointly, the post-SAPs initiatives aim to make debt more sustainable, boost social spending and reduce poverty. The PRSP initiative in particular was full of promise (at least initially), as it entailed that debtors would rightfully be given the scope to create their own developmental strategies and that a blanket approach to development would be abandoned. Upon closer inspection the PRSP initiative is disappointing. The process itself is predetermined and there are additional IFI mechanisms (with traditional SAPs conditionalities) that should be read alongside this initiative. As the Great Recession starting in 2007 unfolded, the IFIs tended to stress the success and ‘resilience’ of HIPC II and PRSP countries. However, this study argues that supposed achievements are somewhat artificial and one needs to remain cautious about its long-term impacts. African economies experienced high economic growth rates in recent years, not because of World Bank and IMF endorsed policies, but because of debt relief and a commodity boom in the 2000s. The IFIs have not done anything to forge the developmental state in Africa. Several HIPC II and PRSP graduates are already starting to show signs of debt distress. Thus, there is a need to seriously rethink the roles of the World Bank and IMF in Africa. This study recommends that true adherence to the PRSP approach could be a first step to empower African states, and it calls for the establishment of an independent mechanism that will hold debtors and the IFIs accountable for unsustainable debt. / Dissertation (MA)--University of Pretoria, 2011. / Political Sciences / unrestricted

International organizations (IOs) operate in increasingly dense institutional networks. This means that IOs rarely act in isolation; instead, their decisions are shaped by the activities performed by other IOs in their issue area. However, existing literature focuses primarily on how individual IOs can solve cooperation problems in a vacuum. How and when can IOs broadly, and U.S.-led liberal IOs in particular, effectively pursue their mandates against the backdrop of institutional crowding? In a three-paper dissertation, I probe the evolution of multilateral cooperation networks and how they structure policymaking in liberal IOs. To explore these dynamics, I construct an extensive, hand-coded dataset of cooperation between organizations in the development and emergency lending issue spaces 1945-2018. This coding draws on the contents of thousands of organizational policy papers, program documents, and press releases. I then leverage quantitative methods, text analysis, and network modeling to analyze these data. I supplement the empirical results with semi-structured interviews and experimental research designs. While existing work suggests that IOs must make concessions to member states to prevent them from shopping between institutions or else restrict their mandates to reclaim monopoly authority, I show that IOs can achieve their mandates and combat complexity through cooperation. In the first paper, I show that such cooperation materializes most easily between IOs whose leading stakeholders are geopolitically aligned. This is because multilateral staff are selected and socialized by leading shareholders to hold beliefs similar to their own. In the second and third papers, I show how cooperation enables IOs to enforce more stringent policies and improve operational performance. On the whole, then, I show that U.S.-led IOs like the World Bank and IMF can coerce welfare-enhancing reforms in target states and promote good governance by cooperating with other organizations in their issue spaces, though geopolitical tensions between the U.S. and other leading IO member states may be obstructive.

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Over the past two decades Rwanda has done outstanding work that has promoted female empowerment. The development resulted in a majorit of women in parliament, ensuring girls' education and high female participation in the labor force. An inclusive private sector could further promote sustainable development and help meet the country's emerging goals. The field of literature on how enterprises within the private sector perfrom is borad. Several studies find that women are underperforming, and that accesing finance is a major challenge for female entrepreneurs in developing regions. This paper research if there is a gender gap in sales performance amongst Rwandan enterprises in 2019 and how bank funding affect firms' perfromance in term of annual sales. A cross-sectional study was conducted by utilizing the World Bank Enterprise Survey form 2019 constituting of 365 Rwandan firms. Ths tudy adopts OLS, quantile and interaction regression to examine the relationships between annual sales and gender of the entrepreneur. The results showed a rather large perfromance gap and that bank funding have a substational effect on a firm's perfromance. However, the study could not establish a significant interaction between bank funding and female led firms. In order to diminish the established gap, policies are needed to promote gender equality wihtin Rwandas's formal private sector.

The forced displacement situations have, for a considerable time, emerged as an important development challenge on the international cooperation agenda. While the policies and practices of international organizations have gained much scrutiny, what they are saying and what discourses they are producing is less visible in academia. With the World Bank in focus, as an actor with a new role within the international refugee protection regime, this study seeks to explore this production and shaping of discourse. Further, the aim also seeks to examine the influence of power and hegemony in relation to discourse on this international level. Through a postcolonial perspective this study employs a Critical Discourse Analysis that presents a mainly conventional discourse of forced displacement in the context of development. The strong influence of Eurocentrism found in the analysis suggest a continued power imbalance, questioning the real benefit for the people and places of concern.

Just twenty years after its entry into the World Bank and IMF, China had joined over 50 international organizations (IO) and had become involved with 1,275 international non-governmental organizations (INGOS). Previously one of the least connected states in the world, China is now one of the most connected on the measure of IO membership. Importantly, China’s behavior within IOs has “varied from symbolic to substantive” at various stages in its global participation. Consequently, China has exhibited a dichotomy of puzzling behavior in its interaction in IOs. Sometimes it complies when doing so appeared counter to internal interests, while other times it has undermined organizations it has greatly benefited from. These patterns have not always been consistent either since its participation has varied over time within different organizations. Why does China’s behavior within these organizations vary? Why does China join or create new IOs when it is already a member of a similar organization? I build upon a diverse body of political science research arguing that China looks beyond the satisficing aspect of whether the IO is good enough, and more to how its behavior can optimize achieving its desired interests. My theory posits that in the context of relative shifts in power, variation in China’s IO behaviors is predicated by the extent to which IOs conform to China’s national interests. This rational behavior approach (RBA) outlines four strategies: rule-taking, rule-breaking, rule-changing, and rulemaking. Furthermore, I argue that as an emerging state’s relative power increases over time, so does its bargaining power, leading to a more assertive rule-changing behavior as it attempts to adapt the organization to allow its ascendancy as a rule-maker. My research explores 40 years of the PRC’s participation within the World Bank Group and International Monetary Fund drawing from semi-structured, in-depth interviews with WB China directors, IMF China directors, the Chief Counsel for AIIB’s establishment, a WB president, Department of Treasury and State representatives, and Chinese nationals who have held key positions in both WB and IMF staff. This research also includes reviews of secondary literature exploring China’s interaction within these organizations and analysis of 40 years of annual reports, consultations, and transcripts obtained from archived organizational records. / Political Science