Paper short abstract:

This paper discusses the relationship between the World Bank, Western governments and Ethiopia during the 1974-1977 revolution, showing the different approach of the Bank's central office in Washington DC and the regional mission in Eastern Africa towards nationalization of foreign capital

Paper long abstract:

In recent years, a growing literature has revealed the prominent role of the World Bank in the making of North-South relations during the Cold War.

The relationship between the Bretton Woods organization and the Ethiopian ruling elite in the decade of the 1970s remains nonetheless largely unexplored, in spite of the fact that the World Bank was among the top-ranking donors of the Ethiopian state between 1969 and 1977.

This paper aims to fill this gap through an analysis of the complex relationship between the World Bank, the United States of America, the United Kingdom and the Ethiopian government during the troubled years of the revolution (1974-1977). In particular, the paper is focused on the negotiations between the World Bank and the Ethiopian government over the Grain Marketing Project, whose trajectory coincided with discussions between Addis Ababa and its former Western allies for compensation of foreign companies nationalized by the DERG.

Archival sources partially confirm the hypothesis that the World Bank was a tool of Western donors to discipline the behaviour of "recalcitrant" allies in the Global South during the Cold War, but also show how the Bretton Woods organization's conduct was shaped by the multiple and sometime overlapping logics of different offices and individuals along the Bank's administrative hierarchy. Methodologically, the paper is based on grey literature and archival sources from the World Bank Group archives and the British archives at Kew Garden, and the U.S. Agricultural Library in Washington DC.

Paper short abstract:

Provision of policy advice to African governments is a core activity of UN organizations. How do UN experts shape domestic policies in the absence of conditionalities? This paper argues that individual behaviour and networks, and not structural power relations, drive policy transfer by UN experts.

Paper long abstract:

The provision of policy advice in sectors such as agriculture, health or education is a core activity of United Nations organisations. In Sub-Saharan Africa, UN experts occupy an important space in policy development as countries tend to be aid dependent and government institutions have limited technical capacities.

The political economy literature often regards UN-induced policy reform in developing countries as the outcome of a coercive process, reflecting international power relations. UN experts are framed as technocrats that design and justify the use of conditionality mechanisms for policy reforms decided at political levels by donor countries or in UN headquarters. But how do UN experts influence African policy processes in the absence of aid conditionality? Do they carve a linear path to policy change or rather 'muddle through' a myriad of bureaucratic and interpersonal interactions?

Building on the concept of policy transfer, this paper traces the process of the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization's support to specific policy reforms in Senegal and Tanzania. Focusing on the micro-level, quotidian and bureaucratic negotiations between UN technical staff, government officials and other stakeholders, we apply a policy transfer analysis to identify the factors that enable or constrain the influence of UN experts on domestic policies. We argue that policy transfers from the UN to national governments cannot only be explained in terms of structural power relationships but also as the outcome of a multitude of petty interactions and knowledge co-creation by individual agents within and between UN agency, African government institutions and other organizations.

Paper short abstract:

The United-Nations' interventions include an aim to reinforce bioethical infrastructures. From a research at a crossroad of Social Studies of Science, Anthropology of Globalisation, Post-Colonial Studies and Political Sociology of Bioethics, this paper analyses such multilevel interventions.

Paper long abstract:

This paper deals with how UNESCO's Bioethics Declarations, Committees and Projects find themselves at a crossroad of global strategies and local negotiations for government and development. This proposal is part of an analysis of social and political dynamics within bioethics' institutionnalisations. For the last decades, circulations of documents, procedures, individuals and ideas have been manufacturing bioethics' principles on human rights and how it aims at norming social, legal and moral stakes of relationships to health, bodies, science and technology. Programs aiming at fighting against inequalities between regions regarding bioethical infrastructures carry presumptions of vertical transfers of knowledge and methods. In-depth and qualitative interviews as well as non-participatory observations at UNESCO's Headquarters and Regional Offices, national Ministries for the case of Senegal and at the last Global Summit of National Ethics and Bioethics Committees (Dakar, March 2018) enlighten the incentives of "reinforcing bioethics capacities of countries" (National Bioethics Committees in Action, UNESCO, 2010). UN-led workshops, conferences and networks of experts allow to identify mechanisms of the constructions of regulation and standardisation of-and-by bioethics: Professional and Governmental capacities are structured by an intensification of the activities of a scientific and administrative epistemic community regarding health and research ethics. The modes of encounters and collaborations of scientists and states representatives promoting certains standards will be discussed regarding the narratives of continuities and ruptures with/from the Northern and Historic referential in implementing bioethics infrastructures in Sub-Saharan Africa.