Kate Meagher
Biographic Data
| ID | 92526 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Kate Meagher |
| GIVEN NAMES | Kate |
| FAMILY NAME | Meagher |
| SIGNATURE | MEAGHER K |
| AFFILIATIONS | London School of Economics and Political Science |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9859-0827 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 43 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 478 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 41 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1990 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 13 |
Decolonizing Development Studies
Focusing on the project of decolonizing Development Studies, this thought piece reflects on tensions between Decolonial Studies and the critical political-economy of Development, known as Critical Development Studies. It highlights the divergent approaches to addressing epistemic inequalities between these two streams of Development thinking, demonstrating that Critical Development Studies has a longer history of valorising development knowledge …
Crisis Narratives and the African Paradox
This article challenges the role of COVID-19 crisis narratives in shaping social policy choices in Africa. The COVID-19 pandemic has focused attention on Africa's vast informal economies, both as a symbol of the continent's intense vulnerability to the ravages of the pandemic, and as a puzzle in the face of the uneven and limited effects of COVID-19 across the continent. Indeed, an examination of statistical and documentary evidence reveals an in…
A Transformative Economist
Introduction
This introductory article looks beyond the conventional framing of open access (OA) debates in terms of paywalls and copyrights, to examine the historical processes, institutional and digital infrastructures, and political dynamics shaping the effects of OA in development research. From a historical perspective, it focuses on tensions and crises in the relationship between scholarly and corporate publishing ecosystems. The spectrum of open access…
Informality and the Infrastructures of Inclusion
The worrying welfare and political risks of expanding informal economies have put concerns about economic inclusion at the heart of contemporary development thinking - concerns further intensified in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Amid a collective 'will to include', this Debate adopts an infrastructural lens to decipher the distributive and governance implications of the complex institutional, financial and digital linkages through which inf…
Overcoming Boko Haram
Book summary page views Book summary page views help Close Book summary page views help Book summary views reflect the number of visits to the book and chapter landing pages. Total views: 0 * Loading metrics...
Illusions of Inclusion
The 2019 World Development Report (henceforward WDR 2019) on The Changing Nature of Work examines how livelihoods are being transformed by globalization and digital technologies, and offers a path to a fairer, more inclusive social contract for the world's beleaguered labour forces.Addressing fears about the negative effects of inequality, automation, and de-industrialization, WDR 2019 reassures the reader with narratives of creative destruction,…
Working in Chains
This article examines how global value chains alter the processes of value creation by reshaping the institutional systems that govern the livelihoods of poor rural workers in contemporary Africa. In connecting rural workers to distant markets, global value chains reconfigure local modes of organization and resource use, translating and redistributing value in unexpected ways. The capacity of global linkages to resolve problems of rural poverty a…
Reflections of an Engaged Economist
Globalization, Economic Inclusion and African Workers
Cannibalizing the Informal Economy
Taxing Times
This paper challenges the notion that taxing the informal economy provides a mechanism for increasing popular political voice and rebuilding the social contract. It contends that current arguments for taxing the informal economy suffer from a Eurocentric understanding of taxation and state formation, and a fiscally essentialist and undifferentiated notion of the informal economy. Drawing on fieldwork in northern Nigeria, this paper shows that his…
Introduction
This introductory article explores the transformative potential of global connections for African workers. It challenges recent claims that African workers have become functionally irrelevant to the global economy by examining the shift of global demand for African workers from formal to increasingly informalised labour arrangements, mediated by social enterprises, labour brokers and graduate entrepreneurs. Focusing on global employment connectio…
The Scramble for Africans
Images of an 'African Boom' have presented us with labour markets full of dynamic potential: a declining dependency ratio; low levels of unemployment; and a vibrant middle class. This buoyant view of African labour markets conceals a less encouraging reality of catastrophic youth unemployment and expanding informality. How has the continent known for the world's highest share of informal labour become a beacon of prosperity? This article will exp…
Leaving No One Behind
This article examines how the Post-2015 commitment to economic inclusion affects informal economic actors in developing countries. It highlights the selective dynamics of inclusive market models that generate new processes of exclusion in which the most vulnerable continue to be left behind. The case of Nigeria reveals how inclusive market initiatives reinforce parallel processes of informalization, poverty and Islamic extremism in the north of t…
Smuggling ideologies
Journal Article Smuggling ideologies: From criminalization to hybrid governance in African clandestine economies Get access Kate Meagher Kate Meagher * *Kate Meagher ([email protected]) is Associate Professor of Development Studies at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar African Affairs, Volume 113, Issue 453, October 2014, Pages 497–517, https://doi.org/1…
The Jobs Crisis Behind Nigeria's Unrest
Celebration of Nigeria's economic recovery sits awkwardly with the realities of catastrophic poverty and unemployment in both the north and the south of the country
Asr Forum
This article examines processes of economic inclusion in divided societies, with a focus on both religious and formal-informal divides. Drawing on recent fieldwork in the northern Nigerian cities of Kano and Kaduna, the article challenges the assumption that identity-based informal organization intensifies violent social divisions, and that taxation and linkages with the state foster more stable and inclusive governance. A range of informal secto…
Asr Forum
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Weber meets Godzilla
This paper explores the cultural foundations of contemporary network capitalism in East Asia, and its implications for African enterprise development. It considers how neo-Weberian perspectives on the cultural determinants of East Asian network success have served to validate intensified processes of labour exploitation while glossing over the role of the state in making networks work for development. It is argued that the ideology of the Confuci…
The Strength of Weak States? Non-State Security Forces and Hybrid Governance in Africa
In this article, I explore the recent revalorization of non-state forms of order and authority in the context of hybrid approaches to governance and state building in Africa. I argue for a more empirical and comparative approach to hybrid governance that is capable of distinguishing between constructive and corrosive forms of non-state order, and sharpens rather than blurs the relationship between formal and informal regulation. A critique of the…
Afro-Regions
Regional integration stands out as one of the hardiest perennials of the African academic landscape. Despite persistent accounts of failure, African regionalism manages to reinvent itself every decade or so, triggering a new round of critique and denunciation. Disillusionment with the state-led regionalism of the 1960s and 1970s shifted attention during the 1980s to informal cross-border trade as a force for regional integration ‘from below’, rep…
Informal Economies and Urban Governance in Nigeria
This article examines how popular organizational strategies and coping mechanisms affect broader trajectories of urban governance in contemporary Africa. Does the proliferation of informal livelihood networks and associations foster economic empowerment and popular political participation, or do these informal processes breed poverty and organizational chaos? This article explores the link between popular organizational strategies and structural …
The politics of vulnerability
Informality, Religious Conflict, and Governance in Northern Nigeria
This article examines processes of economic inclusion in divided societies, with a focus on both religious and formal-informal divides. Drawing on recent fieldwork in the northern Nigerian cities of Kano and Kaduna, the article challenges the assumption that identity-based informal organization intensifies violent social divisions, and that taxation and linkages with the state foster more stable and inclusive governance. A range of informal secto…
The Strength of Weak States? Non-State Security Forces and Hybrid Governance in Africa
In this article, I explore the recent revalorization of non-state forms of order and authority in the context of hybrid approaches to governance and state building in Africa. I argue for a more empirical and comparative approach to hybrid governance that is capable of distinguishing between constructive and corrosive forms of non-state order, and sharpens rather than blurs the relationship between formal and informal regulation. A critique of the…
Hijacking civil society
Analyses of the rise of violent vigilantism in Africa have focused increasingly on the 'uncivil' character of African society. This article challenges the recourse to cultural or instrumentalist explanations, in which vigilantism is portrayed as a reversion to violent indigenous institutions of law and order based on secret societies and occultist practices, or is viewed as a product of the contemporary institutional environment of clientelism an…
Crisis, Informalization and the Urban Informal Sector in Sub-Saharan Africa
Neo-liberal theories of informality have emphasized the potential of the informal sector for independent employment creation and growth. An alternative perspective is provided by the structuralist 'informalization' approach which regards the expansion of informal activity as part of the restructuring strategy of the formal sector in the face of economic recession. The informalization perspective challenges the traditional notions of the informal …
Cannibalizing the Informal Economy
A Back Door to Globalisation? Structural Adjustment, Globalisation & Transborder Trade in West Africa
Neo-liberal economic reforms were widely expected to rein in Africa's unofficial transborder trade through liberalisation and closer integration into the global economy. Instead of disappearing in the face of structural adjustment and globalisation, however, West African transborder trading systems have been restructured and globalised. This article analyses how the West African experience of economic restructuring has led to an expansion and dee…
The hidden economy
This study of informal and parallel trade in Uganda's Arua District shows that such trade has a long history back through colonialism. Its roots do not lie in the distortions of post‐colonial state intervention, as the current conventional view would have it, but in the activities of the colonial state in imposing borders and divergent currencies and in implementing trading networks. More recently and as part of adjustment programmes, attempts to…
The Scramble for Africans
Images of an 'African Boom' have presented us with labour markets full of dynamic potential: a declining dependency ratio; low levels of unemployment; and a vibrant middle class. This buoyant view of African labour markets conceals a less encouraging reality of catastrophic youth unemployment and expanding informality. How has the continent known for the world's highest share of informal labour become a beacon of prosperity? This article will exp…
Asr Forum
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Social capital or analytical liability? Social networks and African informal economies
The rise of the ‘social capitalist’ paradigm has turned social networks into a concept that conceals more than it reveals. In this article I argue that the essentialism and cultural determinism of ‘social capitalist’ perspectives have seriously distorted the contemporary understanding of African informal economies. Attention is directed to more institutionally sensitive network perspectives that focus on how the economic performance of networks i…
Informal Economies and Urban Governance in Nigeria
This article examines how popular organizational strategies and coping mechanisms affect broader trajectories of urban governance in contemporary Africa. Does the proliferation of informal livelihood networks and associations foster economic empowerment and popular political participation, or do these informal processes breed poverty and organizational chaos? This article explores the link between popular organizational strategies and structural …
Introduction
This introductory article explores the transformative potential of global connections for African workers. It challenges recent claims that African workers have become functionally irrelevant to the global economy by examining the shift of global demand for African workers from formal to increasingly informalised labour arrangements, mediated by social enterprises, labour brokers and graduate entrepreneurs. Focusing on global employment connectio…
Social capital, social liabilities, and political capital
This article addresses the question of why social networks have failed to promote economic development in Africa when they have been associated with economic growth in other parts of the world. Detailed field research traces the role of social networks in the economic organization of two dynamic informal enterprise clusters in the town of Aba in south-eastern Nigeria, an area renowned for the density of its popular economic networks and for the r…
Leaving No One Behind
This article examines how the Post-2015 commitment to economic inclusion affects informal economic actors in developing countries. It highlights the selective dynamics of inclusive market models that generate new processes of exclusion in which the most vulnerable continue to be left behind. The case of Nigeria reveals how inclusive market initiatives reinforce parallel processes of informalization, poverty and Islamic extremism in the north of t…
Informality and the Infrastructures of Inclusion
The worrying welfare and political risks of expanding informal economies have put concerns about economic inclusion at the heart of contemporary development thinking - concerns further intensified in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Amid a collective 'will to include', this Debate adopts an infrastructural lens to decipher the distributive and governance implications of the complex institutional, financial and digital linkages through which inf…
Manufacturing Disorder
Small enterprise clusters are viewed as an important means of promoting competitive small-firm development even in contexts of unstable markets and weak states. Yet the emergence of successful enterprise clusters in developing regions of Southern Europe, Asia and Latin America contrasts with their conspicuous absence in Africa. This article challenges ahistorical and culturalist explanations regarding the lack of successful enterprise clusters in…
Smuggling ideologies
Journal Article Smuggling ideologies: From criminalization to hybrid governance in African clandestine economies Get access Kate Meagher Kate Meagher * *Kate Meagher ([email protected]) is Associate Professor of Development Studies at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar African Affairs, Volume 113, Issue 453, October 2014, Pages 497–517, https://doi.org/1…
Asr Forum
This article examines processes of economic inclusion in divided societies, with a focus on both religious and formal-informal divides. Drawing on recent fieldwork in the northern Nigerian cities of Kano and Kaduna, the article challenges the assumption that identity-based informal organization intensifies violent social divisions, and that taxation and linkages with the state foster more stable and inclusive governance. A range of informal secto…
Trading on faith
The pressures of economic crisis and reform that have gripped African societies have been accompanied by a proliferation of new religious movements. Amid concerns about the political impact of religious revivalism, little attention has been devoted to their economic implications. Focusing on the remarkable coincidence between the withdrawal of the state, the rise of religious movements, and the dramatic expansion of the informal economy, this pap…
The Informalization of Belonging
The Nigerian Civil War evokes images of ethno-regional strife followed by sim- mering ethnic tension. However, political perspectives on the legacies of Biafra tend to gloss over the more integrative and constructive economic effects of the Civil War and its aftermath. While the Nigerian Civil War devastated Igbo busi- ness activities across Nigeria, and precipitated a mass return of Igbo migrants to their home area, it also laid the foundation f…
Cultural Primordialism and the Post-Structuralist Imaginaire
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Congo‐Paris
Journal Article Congo‐Paris: Transnational traders on the margins of the law Get access Kate Meagher Kate Meagher Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar African Affairs, Volume 100, Issue 398, 1 January 2001, Pages 152–154, https://doi.org/10.1093/afraf/100.398.152 Published: 01 January 2001
Illusions of Inclusion
The 2019 World Development Report (henceforward WDR 2019) on The Changing Nature of Work examines how livelihoods are being transformed by globalization and digital technologies, and offers a path to a fairer, more inclusive social contract for the world's beleaguered labour forces.Addressing fears about the negative effects of inequality, automation, and de-industrialization, WDR 2019 reassures the reader with narratives of creative destruction,…
Reflections of an Engaged Economist
Institutionalising the bio-revolution
The contention that the new biotechnology can be directed to serve the interests of smallholders ignores the international institutional pressures created by the new technology. In contrast to the public character of the Green Revolution, the 'bio-revolution' involves forces for the privatisation of research, and patent protection of biotechnological products. This article documents how the market, rather than the needs of smallholders, is determ…
Introduction
This introductory article looks beyond the conventional framing of open access (OA) debates in terms of paywalls and copyrights, to examine the historical processes, institutional and digital infrastructures, and political dynamics shaping the effects of OA in development research. From a historical perspective, it focuses on tensions and crises in the relationship between scholarly and corporate publishing ecosystems. The spectrum of open access…
The hidden economy
This study of informal and parallel trade in Uganda's Arua District shows that such trade has a long history back through colonialism. Its roots do not lie in the distortions of post‐colonial state intervention, as the current conventional view would have it, but in the activities of the colonial state in imposing borders and divergent currencies and in implementing trading networks. More recently and as part of adjustment programmes, attempts to…
Institutionalising the bio-revolution
The contention that the new biotechnology can be directed to serve the interests of smallholders ignores the international institutional pressures created by the new technology. In contrast to the public character of the Green Revolution, the 'bio-revolution' involves forces for the privatisation of research, and patent protection of biotechnological products. This article documents how the market, rather than the needs of smallholders, is determ…
Peasant society and the environment in Rural Kano∗
Crisis, Informalization and the Urban Informal Sector in Sub-Saharan Africa
Neo-liberal theories of informality have emphasized the potential of the informal sector for independent employment creation and growth. An alternative perspective is provided by the structuralist 'informalization' approach which regards the expansion of informal activity as part of the restructuring strategy of the formal sector in the face of economic recession. The informalization perspective challenges the traditional notions of the informal …
Shifting the Imbalance
In many African countries, high rates of migration have often been blamed on the "urban bias" in the resource allocations of the state. While the urban areas have benefited from investments, the rural areas have suffered depletion, thereby widening the gap in incomes and basic facilities between the two areas. Inevitably, there has been massive migration from rural to urban areas in search of the "good life." This population explosion in urban ar…
The Invasion of the Opportunity Snatchers
Congo‐Paris
Journal Article Congo‐Paris: Transnational traders on the margins of the law Get access Kate Meagher Kate Meagher Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar African Affairs, Volume 100, Issue 398, 1 January 2001, Pages 152–154, https://doi.org/10.1093/afraf/100.398.152 Published: 01 January 2001
A Back Door to Globalisation? Structural Adjustment, Globalisation & Transborder Trade in West Africa
Neo-liberal economic reforms were widely expected to rein in Africa's unofficial transborder trade through liberalisation and closer integration into the global economy. Instead of disappearing in the face of structural adjustment and globalisation, however, West African transborder trading systems have been restructured and globalised. This article analyses how the West African experience of economic restructuring has led to an expansion and dee…
Social capital or analytical liability? Social networks and African informal economies
The rise of the ‘social capitalist’ paradigm has turned social networks into a concept that conceals more than it reveals. In this article I argue that the essentialism and cultural determinism of ‘social capitalist’ perspectives have seriously distorted the contemporary understanding of African informal economies. Attention is directed to more institutionally sensitive network perspectives that focus on how the economic performance of networks i…
Cultural Primordialism and the Post-Structuralist Imaginaire
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Social capital, social liabilities, and political capital
This article addresses the question of why social networks have failed to promote economic development in Africa when they have been associated with economic growth in other parts of the world. Detailed field research traces the role of social networks in the economic organization of two dynamic informal enterprise clusters in the town of Aba in south-eastern Nigeria, an area renowned for the density of its popular economic networks and for the r…
Walking the Tight Rope
Hijacking civil society
Analyses of the rise of violent vigilantism in Africa have focused increasingly on the 'uncivil' character of African society. This article challenges the recourse to cultural or instrumentalist explanations, in which vigilantism is portrayed as a reversion to violent indigenous institutions of law and order based on secret societies and occultist practices, or is viewed as a product of the contemporary institutional environment of clientelism an…
Manufacturing Disorder
Small enterprise clusters are viewed as an important means of promoting competitive small-firm development even in contexts of unstable markets and weak states. Yet the emergence of successful enterprise clusters in developing regions of Southern Europe, Asia and Latin America contrasts with their conspicuous absence in Africa. This article challenges ahistorical and culturalist explanations regarding the lack of successful enterprise clusters in…
The Informalization of Belonging
The Nigerian Civil War evokes images of ethno-regional strife followed by sim- mering ethnic tension. However, political perspectives on the legacies of Biafra tend to gloss over the more integrative and constructive economic effects of the Civil War and its aftermath. While the Nigerian Civil War devastated Igbo busi- ness activities across Nigeria, and precipitated a mass return of Igbo migrants to their home area, it also laid the foundation f…
Trading on faith
The pressures of economic crisis and reform that have gripped African societies have been accompanied by a proliferation of new religious movements. Amid concerns about the political impact of religious revivalism, little attention has been devoted to their economic implications. Focusing on the remarkable coincidence between the withdrawal of the state, the rise of religious movements, and the dramatic expansion of the informal economy, this pap…
The politics of vulnerability
Identity Economics
This book is essential reading for those interested in the role of the informal economy in contemporary processes of growth and economic governance in Africa. Why have informal enterprise networks failed to promote economic development in Africa? Although social networks were thought to offer a solution to state incapacity and market failure, the proliferation of socially embedded enterprise networks across Africa has generated disorder and econo…
The Tangled Web of Associational Life
Afro-Regions
Regional integration stands out as one of the hardiest perennials of the African academic landscape. Despite persistent accounts of failure, African regionalism manages to reinvent itself every decade or so, triggering a new round of critique and denunciation. Disillusionment with the state-led regionalism of the 1960s and 1970s shifted attention during the 1980s to informal cross-border trade as a force for regional integration ‘from below’, rep…
Informal Economies and Urban Governance in Nigeria
This article examines how popular organizational strategies and coping mechanisms affect broader trajectories of urban governance in contemporary Africa. Does the proliferation of informal livelihood networks and associations foster economic empowerment and popular political participation, or do these informal processes breed poverty and organizational chaos? This article explores the link between popular organizational strategies and structural …
Weber meets Godzilla
This paper explores the cultural foundations of contemporary network capitalism in East Asia, and its implications for African enterprise development. It considers how neo-Weberian perspectives on the cultural determinants of East Asian network success have served to validate intensified processes of labour exploitation while glossing over the role of the state in making networks work for development. It is argued that the ideology of the Confuci…
The Strength of Weak States? Non-State Security Forces and Hybrid Governance in Africa
In this article, I explore the recent revalorization of non-state forms of order and authority in the context of hybrid approaches to governance and state building in Africa. I argue for a more empirical and comparative approach to hybrid governance that is capable of distinguishing between constructive and corrosive forms of non-state order, and sharpens rather than blurs the relationship between formal and informal regulation. A critique of the…
The Jobs Crisis Behind Nigeria's Unrest
Celebration of Nigeria's economic recovery sits awkwardly with the realities of catastrophic poverty and unemployment in both the north and the south of the country
Asr Forum
This article examines processes of economic inclusion in divided societies, with a focus on both religious and formal-informal divides. Drawing on recent fieldwork in the northern Nigerian cities of Kano and Kaduna, the article challenges the assumption that identity-based informal organization intensifies violent social divisions, and that taxation and linkages with the state foster more stable and inclusive governance. A range of informal secto…
Sociology (31 works) · Political science (28 works) · Economics (24 works) · Politics (19 works) · Political economy (16 works) · Law (14 works) · Economic growth (13 works) · Informal sector (11 works) · Microfinance and Financial Inclusion (11 works) · Corporate governance (10 works)