Concept Caching: Social Contrasts in Mumbai, India

From our Concept Caching image cache that hopes to promote student spatial awareness by relating specific features on the Earth’s surface with their visual character and GPS coordinates. Through the site photographs and GPS coordinates demonstrate core concepts in geography.  Images are “cached” for viewing by core concept and by region.  Images are certainly useful for introducing visual content to students in all Geography classes.

The first successes for the microfinance industry came from India with the Grameen Bank.  However, as discussed in the post Geography Directions: NGOs and Microfinance, the industry has come a long way since those days, in particular through its integration into the neo-liberal framework of development that entangles NGOs, governments, donor agencies and on the ground expectations.  This image provides the visual companion for the areas most commonly served by microfinance NGOs in India: cities.  Indian cities, like Mumbai, are some of the most unequal places in the world.  At its heart, microfinance is intended to service the financially excluded and to help alleviate poverty.  However, as the post describes, the clustered geography of these microfinance NGOs into cities has likely contributed to several trends that may no longer best serve these intentions.

Geography Directions: NGOs and microfinance

From our Geography Directions site reviewing Wiley-Blackwell’s Geography Compass review journal covering the entire discipline.  Keep up with cutting edge academic geography.  These articles may be useful for introducing students to the discipline or may be appropriate for upper division Geography classes.

On 29 July 2010 The New York Times reported that one of the world’s largest microfinance organizations, India’s SKS Microfinance, was preparing to launch on the Indian stock market. Whilst not the first, SKS was one of the biggest, and it caused controversy because a US-based non-profit microfinance group invested in SKS, Unitus, had said it would close down its microfinance activities after the launch. Muhammad Yunus, winner of the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize jointly with the microfinance pioneer he co-founded (Grameen Bank), criticized the move as encouraging profit maximisation. The launch ultimately raised around $350m. Besides launching on the stock market, Indian microfinance institutions are also pursuing securitization, with micro-loans being pooled into marketable securities.

A 2010 article by Bipasha Baruah looks at the role of NGOs in microfinance. Baruah acknowledges the success of NGO microfinance in extending credit to financially excluded groups, particularly women, but points to problems of sustainability, with many smaller microfinance NGOs dependent on donor funding and government subsidies, partly because many provide social services such as rights awareness and literacy classes alongside microcredit. Particularly for these less financially focussed NGOs, attempts to provide links for the poor into the formal banking system can serve poverty reduction well, since this offers a much broader range of financial instruments, including savings accounts, which NGOs cannot legally provide. Baruah highlights doubts in the literature about the long-term impact of microcredit on income levels of the poor, whilst noting benefits in consumption smoothing and women’s control over household resources. Studies also show concentration of NGOs in urban and better-developed areas, with less activity in very rural and very poor areas, following a certain market logic which in some cases leads to competition between microfinance NGOs in relatively well-served areas, at the expense of covering areas with greater financial exclusion. Contradictions between financial sustainability and reaching the poorest may also appear, with NGOs in some cases “moving up the poverty scale” to focus on those more able to borrow and repay.

Beyond this, Baruah argues that “the use of microfinance carries implicit neo-liberal assumptions about how development should occur.” She highlights literature showing that borrowers often lack economies of scale, complementary inputs, key skills, or other requirements for succeeding in an often highly competitive marketplace with limited microcredit funds. Uncoordinated access to microcredit can often lead to an overexpansion of particular local industries, limiting the poverty alleviation benefits and making microcredit, in one commentator’s words, “a glorified form of subsistence.” Some NGOs have recognised these problems and attempted to support borrowers with various aspects of enterprise development, including information and training. Some NGOs also organise women to pool their labour or act as unions to demand increased wages and better working conditions, and Baruah suggests pressing for government employment programs to support the poorest, who are often unwilling to seek credit because they lack the other resources needed to use such credit effectively. Baruah concludes that overall microfinance “is firmly embedded within a neo-liberal framework that seeks to increase access to existing financial resources without really challenging the entrenched status quo of unequal power relations between different groups of people,” and that this is precisely why microfinance has enjoyed such great support from governments, NGOs and donor agencies.

By Robin de la Motte

To view the original article please visit the Geography Directions Blog.

Concept Caching: Container Ship, Rotterdam

From our Concept Caching image cache that hopes to promote student spatial awareness by relating specific features on the Earth’s surface with their visual character and GPS coordinates. Through the site photographs and GPS coordinates demonstrate core concepts in geography.  Images are “cached” for viewing by core concept and by region.  Images are certainly useful for introducing visual content to students in all Geography classes.

One of the most significant trends that have contributed to globalization has been the tremendous advancements in transportation and communications technologies.  Although globalization processes have always been at work as long as people have moved and interacted with one another, the scale and pace of 21st century globalization has brought remarkable change and convergence.  Economic geographers do caution, however, of the growing unevenness or ‘regionalization’ that is associated with globalization.  This image and its caption speak to such clusters and changes, as the port city of Rotterdam (itself a case study in the changing geographies of globalization) will overtake another locality in the ranking of world’s busiest ports.  It also highlights the constant maintenance required for global competition and success; often cited as globalization winners and losers.

Political Economy and Global Europe: A two-part spatial saga

Part One

Economic Geography and the Global Recession:  The uneven geographies of economic and financial globalization

The 2008 global recession both revealed and complicated many existing notions of the interconnections and interdependencies that make up the web of the world economy.  Focusing on the European world region provides a very interesting, and at times mind-boggling, example of this web and how it links people, institutions, and futures across all geographical scales.  The global recession began in the United States, but it has undermined the established, overarching economic theories of Western, capitalist institutions as well as institutionalized lifestyles of European peoples.  Part One will focus on the unevenness of the world economy and how a select few, speculating on local markets caused a global recession.

Economic Geography and Uneven Globalization

In order to understand these complexities, one must turn to some kind of theory of the world economy.  Economic geography provides an excellent approach for its focus on the spatial patterns of economic activity and the economic processes that shape and change those patterns.  Economic geographers see that the contemporary, globalized economy has emerged along with technological advancements in communication and transportation, which have engendered a truly global financial system and have necessitated the creation of global governance structures to “coordinate” trade and development.  Yet, economic globalization is a very spatially uneven phenomenon.  That if anything, some economic geographers have argued that it is ‘regionalized’, as the actual geographies of trading, production and consumption, finance, and development convey.  This unevenness is most significant in the concentration of power that qualifies globalized networks, especially in finance.  It is the decisions of a few, concentrated in specific locales that can influence sweeping global trends.  The consequences of this unevenness are best seen in the 2008 global recession.

The Local Making of a Global Recession

True to the unevenness and complexities of the global financial system, the story of Europe’s Debt Crisis does not actually begin in Europe.  Instead, the 2008 global recession was set up as a house of cards built on rampant spending and loose lending in the US housing market.  The big players of the global financial system were wooed by seemingly lucrative investments in the mortgages and rising home prices of select local contexts in specific US-states, notably California.  Both European and American investment banks fueled the frenzy by crafting complicated bundles of these mortgages into their investment portfolios.  As long as home values and borrowers were buoyant, these portfolios were literally money in the bank.  However, this buoyancy was illusory; much of these mortgages were predatory and the loans were undersigned with doubtful prospect for repayment.  Further, the overconfidence in the market led to an oversupply of homes which eventually slowed the housing market, instituting a downward spiral of home prices, foreclosures and more empty homes.  This hit directly at the inflated portfolios of US and European investment banks, which were loaded up with convoluted packages of these insolvent mortgages.  When home values tanked and loans defaulted, these portfolios were rife with toxic assets and significantly devalued.  In these banks, assets and capital vanished, leading to the first ripple of a financial crisis.  Ultimately, this crumbling of the major global investment banks (nearly all concentrated in the US and Europe), triggered the dwindling of available capital for lending and borrowing at all scales, now commonly recognized as a “credit crunch.”  Further investing was limited by the credit crunch, but also by a reversal in lending ideology that saw many ventures as increasingly risky even to those banks not initially affected.  This had far reaching impacts in places like India, Asia, Latin America and beyond.

From Private to Public:  the European Debt Crisis

Ultimately, the insolvency of private lending institutions made its way onto public balance sheets, as US and European governments sought to stabilize their markets through bank bailouts and the purchase of toxic assets.  Following the bailouts and the decline in global lending, global economic activity overall slowed or crashed into a global recession, and local tax bases in the US and Europe subsequently dwindled.  In Europe, national governments found themselves with significant budget shortfalls which overextended their current debt obligations.  In Europe, united by the political and economic structures of the European Union (EU), this would reveal another pattern and scale of unevenness.  The “convergence criteria” for the eurozone, the EU’s economic space, dictated the approved debt levels of member states.  In prosperous times, these debt levels were not rigidly enforced and were veiled by dubious accounting and statistics of some member states.  However, with the reality of global economic downturn, these national governments were no longer able to hide their massive national deficits that grossly surpassed EU limits.  The first, and most desperate, of these debt-laden member states was Greece.  Greece’s national debt was seen to overshadow the value of its entire economy.  The deficits in Spain, Portugal and Ireland were next to come under scrutiny.  Fears were then directed at the euro, its threatened credibility and devaluing, and the European Debt Crisis was in full swing.  The New York Times created a series of maps to illustrate the changing geographies of European Debt.  The situation in Europe has also influenced other centers of the world economy: some argued the Europe’s crisis could aid the U.S. recovery, others hinder it; for China, the situation complicated changing currency policy and boosted its share in international aid agencies, like the International Monetary Fund.  The European Debt Crisis shows the same uneven, concentrated economic and financial system at work.  Even more so, it illustrates hierarchical diffusion as troubles erupt at economic epicenters, ripple outward, and trigger new economic aftershocks and financial tremors.

Upcoming:  Part Two will dive into the local and national effects of the European Debt Crisis by investigating the turn to austerity, the reactions of  European citizenry and the social and political implications.

Behind the Millennium Development Goals

Last month the United Nations General Assembly met in New York to discuss the progress of the eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) created in 2000.  The MDGs are an excellent geographic case study as well as an appropriate lens for viewing geographic areas and relationships in world regions.  They can be investigated from the context of the late 1990s.  Global power dynamics can be traced among the structures of international governance and the world economy.  Assumptions and expectations can be unraveled from the focus on social indicators and development, rather than economic development alone.  The interconnections and impacts of local realities can be woven together among the abstract semantics of these aims.

The creation of the MDGs was an outcome of several decades’ worth of United Nations (UN) conferences and summits.  In 2000, the UN Millennium Declaration was signed by all 189 of the member countries, which had the overarching goal of combating global poverty.  At that time, two underlying reasons informed the creation of these eight goals.  First, there had been an overall decrease in the levels of international aid committed by wealthier countries.  Second, the overall increasing pace of globalization was feared to spread global ills, like terrorism, crime, and disease into the developed world.  Moreover, the 2010 Millennium Development Summit has been plagued by similar setbacks: the continuing indolence of developed world donations over the last decade, worsened by the impacts of the recent global recession.  There have also been some echoes of the role of development and poverty in combating global terrorism.

The MDGs, and the UN from which they originate from, can be investigated for their traces of global power.  Studying development often begins with classifying the world into a continuum of more developed vs. less developed or developing.  Ultimately, behind this binary is a division of the world into rich and poor, power-full and power-less.  Global political and economic structures have emerged from the developed, rich, power-full world, and exhibit the assumptions and expectations from those privileged positions.

The 2000 UN Millennium Declaration does exhibit a slightly different perspective on development than previous theories.  First, it may be seen as recognition of the limits of economic development alone as a path to providing greater welfare for all global peoples.  Typically, economic development theories, which rely on economic development indicators like Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and Gross National Income (GNI), undervalue the contributions of subsistence and informal activities, as well as underestimate the impact of accounted economic activities on the environment.  These oversights may have contributed to a view of economic re-structuring and trade policies as ineffective in combating and mitigating social problems in the developing world.  Second, it may also be a rejection of another path to greater welfare – the theory of “teaching” less developed peoples how to generate their own wealth at home.  The complexities of such lessons combined with “culture of poverty” notions perhaps led to the abandoning of that path.  In the end, the paths to greater welfare are not so clear anyway, as shown in lack of progress of Goal Eight to develop a “global partnership for development.”  Whatever the notions behind the formation of the MDGs, they do exhibit two hopeful expectations of the developed world for what development through aid can accomplish: long, healthy, educated, quality lives; and a reduction of global ills.

This connection of scales, the lives of local people to the lives of global societies, exhibits the interconnections and impacts that have led to the creation of each of the MDGs.  Goal One aims to eliminate extreme poverty and hunger, both of which relate to ensuring that basic needs are met for all people.  Once basic needs are met, Goals Two and Three aim to make primary education universal, to promote gender equity and to empower women.  Educating people, especially women, has a clear correlation to economic progress, which adds to the human capital, productivity, and output of a country, or its development.  Goals Four, Five and Six seek to target the populations that are most vulnerable in poverty and to reduce, their often preventable, high mortality and disease rates.  Not combating preventable deaths of women and children would ultimately undermine the first three goals and the economic progress they would bring.  Goal Seven also factors into national progress by instilling ethnics and policies of environmental sustainability to improve the quality of life and to protect national assets.  In theory these goals are sound and reasonable; however, the last 10 years have shown the complexity to their implementation.

To lead class discussions about the MDGs, their complexities, and their progress, students can discuss one or more recent news articles on certain goals.  One focus has been on “energy poverty,” and the idea that access to clean energy will make the eradication of poverty possible.  It is also well known that most of poor people are women.  Accordingly, there has been much said about women’s development, women’s health, maternal mortality, equity and empowerment.  Also, there has been mention of the environmental sustainability, but with a new take on its significance.  Finally, there is an excellent interactive media created by the Guardian that visually presents the progress of three major indictors.

Discussion Questions:

1. What makes a more developed country?  What makes a less developed country?  Consider both economic and social development factors.
2. Why do you think the “eradication of poverty” is an important global goal?  What do you think about the role of developed countries in this cause?
3. Review the Guardian’s Millennium Goals interactive.  Why do you think hunger, primary education and infant mortality are considered “crucial indicators” by the Guardian?  Why do they compare these indicators to GDP?

Concept Caching: Nairobi, Kenya

From our Concept Caching image cache that hopes to promote student spatial awareness by relating specific features on the Earth’s surface with their visual character and GPS coordinates. Through the site photographs and GPS coordinates demonstrate core concepts in geography.  Images are “cached” for viewing by core concept and by region.  Images are certainly useful for introducing visual content to students in all Geography classes.

Africa is one of the last areas on Earth where “wild” and “domesticated” seem to coexist, interact and rely on one another.  The post, Geography Directions: Mhiripiri bombs, guard donkeys, and conservation planning in Sub-Saharan Africa describes the complex interactions between national economies and tourism, with local economies and agriculture/animal domestication.  This image provides an illustration of local animal domestication and the taming of the “wild” in Nairobi, Kenya.

Geography Directions: Mhiripiri Bombs, guard donkeys and Conservation Planning in sub-Saharan Africa

From our Geography Directions site reviewing Wiley-Blackwell’s Geography Compass review journal covering the entire discipline.  Keep up with cutting edge academic geography.  These articles may be useful for introducing students to the discipline or may be appropriate for upper division Geography classes.

In Brian King’s article “Conservation Geographies in Sub-Saharan Africa: The Politics of National Parks, Community Conservation and Peace Parks” in Geography Compass he reviews the history of conservation planning in sub-Saharan Africa. The study provides an insight into National Parks, community conservation, and Peace Parks, and affords an understanding of ‘the development politics and governance challenges of global conservation’.

The establishment of National Parks was largely set up for the purposes of hunting and tourism but at the same time the indigenous populations were forcibly evicted from the area. Since then, concerns about the ethical and economic impacts on the protected areas have generated interest in including the local population in natural resource management. More recently the integration of ecology concepts into the planning process has produced an interest in larger scale initiatives which maximise protected habitat. Central to this are transboundary conservation areas otherwise known as Peace Parks which cross national political borders. Although these approaches are not mutually exclusive, the study stresses that they represent major routes to conservation planning in Sub-Saharan Africa.

As for community conservation, a recent report from the Food and Agriculture Association of the United Nations (FAO) offers advice to people living within (and outside) park boundaries who come into contact with wildlife on a daily basis, on how to live side–by-side with wild animals.  The Human-Wildlife Conflict Toolkit, currently being tested in southern Africa offers colourful advice on how to solve, mitigate and prevent conflict between humans and wild animals. Designed to reduce the threat to peoples’ lives, crops and livestock and to their health from animal-borne diseases, the Conflict Toolkit offers tips to keep cohabitation safer for everyone.  For instance, in order to chase off elephants which are trying to eat villagers’ crops, the FAO suggests using a Mhiripiri Bomber which is a plastic gun that shoots ping-pong balls full of a highly concentrated chilli solution (which elephants hate), that burst over the elephants skin. For hippos that enjoy raiding crops by night they suggest shining a strong light in their eyes. As for warning of the approach of predators the FAO suggest investing in a guard donkey, because they are fearless and can drive away even large carnivores by braying, biting and kicking.

Generally speaking, however, the FAO see that the best way to reduce the human-wildlife problem, is to educate farmers, villagers and  policy makers, to see wild animals as an asset. The FAO feel that villagers will only stop seeing wild animals as a nuisance if rural communities receive some material advantage from living in close contact with animal populations. They suggest that paying villagers a percentage of the revenue derived from tourism, paying for the environmental services they provide and compensation for damage to crops, injury or loss of life should also be considered.

By Paulette Cully

To view the original article please visit the Geography Directions Blog.

Concept Caching: Informal Activities–India

From our Concept Caching image cache that hopes to promote student spatial awareness by relating specific features on the Earth’s surface with their visual character and GPS coordinates. Through the site photographs and GPS coordinates demonstrate core concepts in geography.  Images are “cached” for viewing by core concept and by region.  Images are certainly useful for introducing visual content to students in all Geography classes.

Currently, about 70 percent of India's GDP derives from informal economic activities. Those individuals, who indulge in marginal livlihoods and survival activities outside government regulations, comprise 65-75 percent of workers in urban areas and make up the bulk of the urban poor. Nearly two-thirds of these people are women. Most people who work in the informal sector are low-skilled, rural or small town migrants or those who, for any number of reasons, have fallen out of the formal sector. Barbering and ear cleaning are ancient professions, handed down from father to son through generations. The introduction of cotton buds or Q-tips has hurt the ear cleaning trade. The Federal Government is using barbers to disseminate information about HIV and AIDS because they believe that men are more likely to discuss intimate details of their sex-life with their hair cutter as opposed to family members or colleagues. The barbers keep a supply of governmment-issued condoms on hand. BA Weightman

In thinking about the possible connections that can be made to the post Geography Directions: Haptic Technologies and the Geographies of Touch, this image provides a bit of humor and perspective about haptic scales, technology, and the geographies of touch.  From the American viewpoint, where personal space is prized, the close contact shown in this image is a little astounding.  It exhibits a cultural difference in the way that bodies are managed and interact through touch.  Geographers that study the space of the body are in the vanguard of geographic research.

Geography Directions: Haptic Technologies and the Geographies of Touch

From our Geography Directions site reviewing Wiley-Blackwell’s Geography Compass review journal covering the entire discipline.  Keep up with cutting edge academic geography.  These articles may be useful for introducing students to the discipline or may be appropriate for upper division Geography classes.

Touch-screen mobile phones and other electronic devices are increasingly part of our everyday business and leisure engagements.  However, the BBC recently reported on the commercial race to launch ‘new’ haptic technologies, where “for the first time, people will be actually be able to have a virtual feel of some of the images that are placed before them.”  This article reports on research at the Disney Laboratories in the US where technologies are being developed to let people ‘feel’ objects on screen by stroking them with their fingers.  A senior researcher states: “We do this by applying a high voltage to a transparent electrode on the glass plate – in this case people will feel a texture on the glass. By varying the frequency and amplitude of the signal we can create different sensations.”  Other examples of this type of technology include developments in localised tactile feedback – aimed to enhance haptic phones where “people feel them, stretch them, bend them and have them react to these interactions”.

In a recent issue of Geography Compass, Deborah Dixon and Elizabeth Straughan chart “recent efforts to place touch, touching and being touched within non-essentialist, human geographic analyses”.  They highlight how “Considerable attention within geography has been paid to the physiologies, knowledges and practices that give substance and import to the senses – sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch – and the manner in which these work alone, or in concert, to facilitate particular forms of relations between and amongst people, other life forms and objects.”  Dixon and Straughan draw on examples of work that explores the “inter-play between the ‘interior’ psychologies of intimacy and indifference, acceptance and alienation (i.e. feelings of being in/losing/being out of touch) and the ‘exterior,’ corporeal work of texture and friction, push and feel.” In conclusion, they call for more critical attention to the work of touch.  The advent of haptic technologies reported in this BBC article demonstrates new ways in which various senses – in this case touch - frame our experiences and understandings of the world around us.

By Sarah Mills

To view the original article please visit the Geography Directions Blog.

Geography Directions: Islamic Finance

From our Geography Directions site reviewing Wiley-Blackwell’s Geography Compass review journal covering the entire discipline.  Keep up with cutting edge academic geography.  These articles may be useful for introducing students to the discipline or may be appropriate for upper division Geography classes.

Public confidence in the banking sector has been significantly shaken over recent years.  Given the turmoil caused by the global financial crisis, the depression and the public bail-outs of banks like RBS and Northern Rock; the raising levels of doubt and mistrust are hardly surprising.  Furthermore, such doubts show little sign of abating this week, as seven EU banks fail newly imposed ‘stress tests‘ by the Committee of European Banking Supervisors (CEBS).  As a result increasing numbers are looking for an alternative form of banking in which to invest and Islamic finance could just fit the bill.

Unlike the traditional banking sector, Islamic banking is based upon a strict set of principles; the central of which is that “money itself has no intrinsic value. [Also] as a matter of faith, a Muslim cannot lend money to, or receive money from someone and expect to benefit – interest (known as riba) is not allowed. To make money from money is forbidden – wealth can only be generated through legitimate trade and investment in assets. Money must be used in a productive way” (IBB).  As a result of this central principle Islamic finance is considered more stable (as the temptation to risk in search of profit is reduced) and more ethically appealing to many private savers and investors dismayed by increased profits and bankers bonuses.  Moreover, Pollard (2010) suggests that many organisations like the IBB, are attempting to market themselves as ‘ethical banks’ in areas such as the EU and USA which could otherwise be sceptical of the Islamic name.

In a recent issue of Area geographers Bassens, Derudder and Witlox detail the global spread of the Islamic finance model in recent years, charting how Islamic financial services have moved out of their historical base in the cities of the Middle East and become “anchored in the more conventional world cities” (2010, 44) of London and Paris, challenging our pre-existing geographical imaginations of the global financial sector.

These changes should be of great interest of all Human Geographers, as they offer a potentially fruitful intersection between social and cultural, political and economic geographical research; as we explore how the actions and values of the individual impact upon these globalised networks.

By Alexander Leo Phillips

To view the original article please visit the Geography Directions Blog.

« Previous Page — Next Page »