[We have the following call for papers for a special issue of the Canadian Journal of Development Studies, “Law, Governance and Development: Critical and Heterodox Approaches,” co-edited by Mark Toufayan and Siobhán Airey.]A noticeable trend of late is a growing engagement between insights across the field of “law and development” and a body of work that probes the relationship between law and governance at levels and scales that transcend that of the nation state, through instruments of rule that include and challenge inherited understandings about the nature and content of “law” and “legality”. At the same time, critical attention is being paid to the politics of ideas about development and the ways that particular kinds of development are promoted that underpin and direct this engagement.
These trends offer revealing insights into two facets of emerging research on law and governance, and how they relate to development. First, they highlight the significance – to questions of governance –of legal, economic and political ideas on the nature of development and its direction to particular ends, and how these underpin models of development. Within these, the role of/for law, regulation and other instruments of governance comes to the fore. Second, they highlight the under-recognized and under-theorized role of development as a project of governance in itself – how development rationalizes, frames and is key to how rights, subjectivities and relations between entities such as states, peoples, markets and the natural environment are conceptualized, distributed and institutionalized within and across existing governance frameworks via the rubric of “development.”
This bilingual Special Issue of the Canadian Journal of Development Studies seeks to bring these perspectives together to explore the underlying paradoxes, synergies and gaps in the governance of development initiatives pursued by a variety of actors. Through a mix of empirical, conceptual and normative work, it aims to reveal connections between institutional arrangements and instruments of governance on the one hand, and the politics of the projects pursued through the rubric of development, on the other. The approach taken thus helps foster deeper insight on the political ramifications of the role ascribed to law and legality in the governance of development.
We seek contributions, in English and French, which will expand knowledge on the nature of governance challenges to development and the role of law and legality therein. In particular, we welcome essays that draw on and put into conversation critical and heterodox thinking on these such as feminism, TWAIL and postcolonial scholarship, history and ethnography, critical geography, critical IR and political economy, Marxist and materialist perspectives, etc., and that focus on developments both within and between the Global North and South and on particular scales and sites of governance.
We invite submissions on engagements between law, governance and development from a wide
range of critical perspectives and that are attuned to the following themes:
• shifts in the levels of engagement (at the multilateral, transnational, regional, bilateral, national
and local levels, and across these)
• forms of engagement (changes to the kinds of actors, institutions and instruments through
which relationships are created and changed, material outcomes generated and subjectivities
and knowledge produced, with a particular focus on governance relationships)
• effects of this kind of engagement, particularly on marginalized groups and communities and
the natural environment within the Global South and North (the kinds of development that
are being proposed or privileged; implications for changes to the relationship between state
and market; and how and to whom benefit and risk is allocated)
Abstracts of 500-750 words, as well as a short CV, should be sent to mark.toufayan@uqo.ca and
siobhan.airey@ucd.ie by July 20, 2018. Decisions on selected articles will be made by August 3, 2018. Full drafts of no more than 9000 words will be due on November 2, 2018.
