Redefining Sustainable Development

Middleton, Neil; O'Keefe, Philip

doi:10.2307/j.ctt18fs7zv

Cited by 11 publications

(6 citation statements)

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“…Such elitism imbues power effects which are masked up by an array of rules, rituals, systems and bureaucratic procedures that then project truth as taken-for-granted or commonplace. As argued by Middleton & O'Keefe (2001) in their chapter Polite Meaningless Words, the findings in this study have revealed how linguistic strategies and political capital have reinforced existing power relations, arguing that elites in positions of authority "tinker with our consciousness in order to conceal their real agendas" and that words [such as regional balance] are "often used to conceal a disagreeable reality" (p. 32). Thus in the context of this study, it can be inferred that the term regional balance is a polite meaningless word, indeed a mere political rhetoric that is intended to mask the real intentions of policy architects as regards awarding of students loans to access HE in Uganda.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 65%

A Foucauldian Discourse Analysis of Regional Balance in the Financing of Higher Education in Uganda: The Uganda Students’ Higher Education Financing Policy Perspective

Kibuuka

2022

East Afr. j. educ. stud.

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In Uganda, there have been historically glaring disparities in access to higher education, where the majority of the students that join universities come from good secondary schools, which are mostly afforded by rich individuals. This has created a situation of ‘inherited merit’, where students from particular backgrounds and regions dominate access to HE. Because children of the poor who cannot afford to go to good schools hardly access higher education, whilst many of the students who join higher education institutions (HEIs) fail to complete their study programmes due to the failure to meet the costs involved. The Ministry of Education and Sports 2012 introduced the Uganda Students’ Higher Education Financing Policy to address the problem of inequitable access to higher education. Thus, the third objective of the policy aims to ensure ‘regional balance’ in the provision of HE through awarding of student loans. Because there are strong intra-connections between policy and language, the language used in discourse plays a critical role in the way the term Regional balance was constructed in the policy. This paper performs a Foucauldian discourse analysis perspective of the policy with the overall aim of showing signs of power imbalance through the use of language and revealing the discourses used by elite actors to retain power and sustain existing regional imbalance in access to HE in Uganda. By approaching such regional balance as political discourse rather than a pure act of equity and social justice, the paper shows how power is implicated within the guise of regional balance. As such the paper contributes to a discursive understanding of regional balance in the provision of HE in Uganda, to an appreciation of the role of power relations embedded in policy rhetoric as a form of exemplary theatrical government, and to the politics of regional balance. The findings revealed that the term ‘regional balance’ is used as a sugar-coated camouflage to sustain and perpetuate the hegemony of the Western part of the country. The paper concludes by exposing the power relations embedded within the policy and highlights gaps between the rhetoric and practice of the policy in which people from the Western part of Uganda have benefited more from this financing policy at the expense of other students from other regions of the country

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 65%

A Foucauldian Discourse Analysis of Regional Balance in the Financing of Higher Education in Uganda: The Uganda Students’ Higher Education Financing Policy Perspective

Kibuuka

2022

East Afr. j. educ. stud.

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“…Time and again, his research uncovered tricks and traps that stifled human potential. The series of vicious cycles discussed in his early work on soil erosion proved to have been the workshop in which O'Keefe hardened the steel of his analytical tools that he would use for nearly 40 years more in defence of that human potential, in works such as Disaster and Development (Middleton and O'Keefe, 1998), Redefining Sustainable Development (Middleton and O'Keefe, 2001) and Managing Adaptation to Climate Risk (O'Brien and O'Keefe, 2013). We will all miss his professional voice.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Land use and development: The early work of Phil O’Keefe

Wisner

2022

Human Geography

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“…Poetry of space is therefore, a dangerous saga of capital's centralization of development through accumulation, and hence, the production of unevenness through the deprivation of capital in other spaces. Development therefore, becomes a fashion, a fetish, an ephemerality, a bourgeois epic replete with "polite meaningless words" (Middleton and O' Keefe, 2001) like "sustainability," "resilience," and "growth with equity." Development in its spatial unevenness and in its inbuilt bourgeois motive of sustaining nature for accumulating profit, and fixing nature to keep profit accumulation unhindered becomes a poetic injustice, a disjunctured space, an analytical elegance of cost-benefit analysis, a nature produced, and humans alienated (through spatial displacement and wage relations).…”

Section: Commodification Not With Nature's Forgivenessmentioning

confidence: 99%

Roll on that day: A dialectical poetry

Chatterjee

2022

Human Geography

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Phil O’ Keefe’s Roll on that day is not just poetry, but a dialectical materialist rendition of reality. In this tribute, I refer to his poetry as “rendition,” rather than, interpretation. O’ Keefe renders nature, time, and space not as separate and discrete, but as a complete assemblage of hope and fear; second, he renders resources, labor, and landscape as simultaneously “nature(al)” and produced. “Rendering” as opposed to “interpreting” is O’Keefe’s Marxist poetic justice because “rendition” is reality communicated, expressed, viewed, and revealed in the richness of its relationality. Rendition is poetic and dialectical. Interpretation, on the other hand, involves the treatment of data collected through externalization and segmentation, a prosaic analysis that externalizes nature as an environment to be prodded, tabulated, experimented, and fixed. Inspired by O’ Keefe’s poetry, I trace Marxist concepts of alienation and commodification of nature, arguing that O’Keefe’s poetry provides a dialectical ebb and flow which disrupts teleology and provides a conceptual lens to understand modes of production not as discrete or ahistorical, but instead, as containing seeds of the previous modes of production. This tribute concludes by emphasizing O’Keefe’s contention that development has to be decolonized, that uneven development is the death of dialectical poetry and the victory of analytical prose, that theorists must begin with an honest acceptance that development theory is simultaneously a response to the effects of capital and are conditioned by it.

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Redefining Sustainable Development

Cited by 11 publications

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A Foucauldian Discourse Analysis of Regional Balance in the Financing of Higher Education in Uganda: The Uganda Students’ Higher Education Financing Policy Perspective

A Foucauldian Discourse Analysis of Regional Balance in the Financing of Higher Education in Uganda: The Uganda Students’ Higher Education Financing Policy Perspective

Land use and development: The early work of Phil O’Keefe

Roll on that day: A dialectical poetry

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