This blog is now at BarefootLawyers International!

This blog has now been migrated to the blog under BarefootLawyers International (www.barefootlawyers.org).

For those of you who have been following this blog closely (especially my students), you would have heard many announcements of my intention to migrate this DevLawGeek blog to the BarefootLawyers International website and blog. So it has finally happened.

I established BarefootLawyers International as part of my UC Berkeley visitorship and continuing connection. In personal terms, it is basically me growing up and finally establishing a more formal organization that, in 2013, is still essential to appear legitimate to most of society, especially the developing world, so that I can expand innovative activities with more people, and in a more formal manner.

So please do follow me on BarefootLawyers International, where we will hear more voices other than my own. See you there!

UC Berkeley CFP: Is There a New Development? Symposium 5-6 April 2013

UC Berkeley Center for Science Technology Medicine & Society: Call for Papers

The promise and politics of provincializing experts, models, and knowledge in the 21st century

Development, understood as a set of aspirations, an organizational field, sets of expertise, or a guiding imaginary has shifted in response to the post-colonial growth of democracy in the South, the rise of multi-stakeholder partnerships and sustainability discourses, and the frenzied search for innovative models by policy makers worldwide. The North to South transfer of aid and tools, a process in which Northern experts were central, has opened up to the transfer of policies – like impact assessments, ecosystem services, or public health programs – in which Southern experts are increasingly involved. A ‘local’ view of the world has been promoted as more sensitive and appropriate to local, real-world needs and customs for many decades by development scholars and practitioners. However, we are now seeing not only ‘local’ models and policies being developed in situ in democratic countries such as Chile, but we are also seeing the rise of ‘Southern’-led international cooperation agreements, and ‘Southern’ models travelling to the ‘North’. For example, transport policies from Bogota are being implemented in San Francisco, while multiple African nations are receiving development aid from Brazil and technical advice from Bolivia.

New Paper on Global Privatization by David Brown

J. David Brown, US Census Bureau Center for Economic Studies, Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), Heriot-Watt University - Centre for Economic Reform and Transformation (CERT), John S. Earle, George Mason University - School of Public Policy, Central European University (CEU) - Department of Economics, Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), and Scott Gehlbach, University of Wisconsin, Madison - Department of Political Science, Harvard University - Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies have a new piece on Privatization.