DESCRIPTIF

Descriptif

Laura Mann, professor at the LSE Department of International Development, will be giving a talk titled “Naturalised Markets: Digitisation in Kenyan and Californian Agriculture” on April 10 at ULB. Dr Mann’s talk is part of the event “Journée de la Coopération”, organized in collaboration with CECID. 

ABSTRACT

Drawing on theories of ‘performativity’ within economic sociology, my book aims to show the increasing role of digital technology firms in helping bring the world into closer alignment with economic and scientific theories, albeit within a bumpy and politicised landscape. Policymakers in high income countries can legislate all sorts of permissible exceptions to neo-classical orthodoxy. They can carve out justifiable industrial policies and trade protections in the name of national security, environmental concerns, public safety, public morals and public health. And most crucially of all, they have enshrined the exception of intellectual property protection within the fabric of global economic governance. For unlike the “cosmopolitan” neo-classical economists who work in universities or international institutions, national level policymakers do not seek to maximise allocative efficiency or welfare in an abstract or global sense; rather they seek benefits for their own constituents (and political campaign supporters). Likewise, private entrepreneurs and business executives do not care if they are earning rents or profits; they simply want to make money. They lobby at every chance they get and use their market-power and powers of intermediation to mould the rent landscape around their interests. In contrast, policymakers and businesses in low- and middle-income countries have far less fiscal and policy space to shape governance, and far less market power to carve up their own exceptions and protect themselves from the coerced performativity of allocative efficiency. This asymmetrical governance environment shapes how tech firms build digital infrastructures across regions, and how digitisation itself re-mediates relationships between them. I explore the implications of these ideas within the context of Kenyan and Californian agriculture, exploring how digitisation is altering the landscape for development across high and low/middle-income economies.

Lieu : Auditoire DC2.206

Bâtiment D – Campus Solbosch

30 Av. Antoine Depage