1. Responding to Global Crises:
From ‘Development’ to Global
Justice
A/P James Goodman, UTS
For ‘Development Futures’, ACFID

2. Development / Justice
• Does ‘development’ produce justice? ‘Development’ as
ideology: for whom?
• Today’s developmentalism, under market globalism
• Alternative ideologies: justice globalism rejecting
development order
• Justice globalism generating new political agendas

3. Why Justice Globalism?
• Crises of global development: finance, food, climate
• Neoliberal world, seen as the source of global crisis
• Global justice movements, acting together, against
market globalism.
• Rejection of developmentalist hierarchies.
• Rejection of donor-driven aid; instead arguing for
structural change that addresses the causes of global
crises

4. Producing Global Justice?
• In a 3 year study of 40 organisations active in the World
Social Forum since 2001 we found:
• (i) A model of reflexive development, centred on
reciprocity and solidarity, a ‘joint struggle model’
• (ii) A political nexus between mobilisation and global
crisis, where the failures of market globalism become
opportunities for justice globalism
• (iii) A process of generating alternatives through the
refusal of policies, reframing crises, in dialogues over
options, and North-South reflexivity

5. Global Crisis #1: Finance, 2008…
• Southern and now Northern Debts: ‘Planet Finance’ vs
‘Ordinary Planet’ (WCC); 2008 crisis seen as a lost
opportunity: austerity producing ‘Occupy’ (TNI). Three
main options:
• (i) Global regulation: Southern debt cancellation;
closing tax havens; transparency; global tax on
speculation
• (ii) Financial localisation: opt-out, delinking to relink to
locality/region (ALBA)
• (iii) Democratisation of finance: crisis showing the
public effects of private finance; wealth as a public
asset; public control of financial decisions.

6. Global Crisis #2: Food, 2000• Food prices doubling 2000-08; collapsing with financial
crisis; post-crisis new highs. Hunger +180m; 25 states
halt exports of food staples. Three main options:
• (i) Food equality: market access; fair trade; enforceable
food rights
• (ii) Food security: state delinking, to re-link consumers
and producers, vs. import surges and food speculation
• (iii) Food Sovereignty: delinking from WTO +
corporates; land to producers, local production for
local needs

7. Global Crisis #3: Climate
• A crisis of global developmentalism; identifying dual
problem Third-worldism / and neoliberalism in climate
policy. Three main options:
• (i) Climate action: green growth; carbon markets; trust
funds; ‘just transitions’
• (ii) Climate autonomy: mobilisations against elite
policy, for local and national action/knowledge
• (iii) Climate justice: targeting elites North and South,
and carbon markets; for ‘living well’ and ‘biocivilisation’, against productivism

8. Responding to Crises: x3
• We found three tendencies:
• (i) Reform by regulation – debate between reformist
and non-reformist regulation (reforms that close or
open possibilities)
• (ii) Localisation and translocalism – delinking to relink –
stressing autonomy and solidarity in an alternative
globality
• (iii) Transformation – projects to supersede market
globalism and create a new political model

9. Development Futures?
• Justice globalism inverts Northern assumptions
about ‘development’: the development crisis is
global, not simply in the South.
• The question of ‘development futures’ for ‘them’ is
now a question of all of our development futures.
• As the UNDP stated in relation to climate, the key
question we face is of ‘Human Solidarity in a
Divided World’ (2008)

10. Concluding: a place for ‘aid’?
Development assistance is often understood as a gift, to
‘help people overcome poverty’, as AusAID put it.
Solidarity funding for global justice is not a gift, but:
(i) a form of mutual assistance, founded on common
purpose, for a shared goal;
(ii) a responsibility or obligation, rather than a donation, a
means of discharging a social or ecological debt.
How may this funding model develop, to express global
justice imperatives beyond developmentalism?

11. Contact
• James Goodman: james.goodman@uts.edu.au
• Manfred Steger, James Goodman, Erin Wilson, (2013)
Justice Globalism: Ideology, Crises, Policy, Sage,
London, March, pp 184.
• Thanks to UTS and the Australian Research Council for
supporting this research.