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Adjustment or Transformation? Are existing economic principles sufficient to deal with current problems, or do we need others? In Africa and elsewhere?
The self critique of The African Alternative Framework to Structural Adjustment, endorsed by African governments and released by the UN Economic Commission for Africa in July, 1989, sets out how certain existing policies of the World Bank and Western nations undermine African economic and social structures, and proposes additional and alternative approaches. The debates these proposals have engendered may benefit Western economic systems as well.
The largely unpublicized but growing African movements for popular participation, local accountability, and the recognition of the value of the informal economy, will be explored for their potential value in Africa and their affinity to comparable movements elsewhere.
The rights and wrongs of past policies will not dominate this discussion. While many believe that current approaches to development by the World Bank, Western nations, and up to now, African governments have often limited and skewed development, increasingly we see that the fundamental fault lies in the limitations of underlying economic theory. We will explore these limitations of thought and the nascent efforts to move past them to deal with present realities - in Africa and beyond.
We expect not only to discuss the subject but to move the agenda.
Workshop organizer and chair
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