Economic Citizenship

With the spread of neoliberal projects, responsibility for the welfare of minority and poor citizens has shifted from states to local communities. Businesses, municipalities, grassroots activists, and state functionaries share in projects meant to help vulnerable populations become self-supportive. Ironically, such projects produce odd discursive blends of justice, solidarity, and wellbeing, and place the languages of feminist and minority rights side by side with the language of apolitical consumerism. Using theoretical concepts of economic citizenship and emotional capitalism, Economic Citizenship exposes the paradoxes that are deep within neoliberal interpretations of citizenship and analyzes the unexpected consequences of applying globally circulating notions to concrete local contexts.

“South America is not the poorest continent in the world, but it may very well be the most unjust.” This statement by Ricardo Lagos, then president of Chile, at the Summit of the Americas in January 2004 captures nicely the dilemma that faces Latin American countries in the wake of the transition to democracy that swept across the continent in the last two decades of the twentieth century. While political rights are now available to citizens at unprecedented levels, social and economic rights lag far behind, and the fledgling democracies struggle with long legacies of poverty, inequality, and corruption. Key to understanding what is happening in Latin America today is the relationship between the state and civil society. In this ambitious book, Philip Oxhorn sets forth a theory of civil society adequate for explaining current developments in a way that such controversial neoconservative theories as Francis Fukuyama’s liberal triumphalism or Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” cannot. Inspired by the rich political sociology of an earlier era and the classic work of T. H. Marshall on citizenship, Oxhorn studies the process by which social groups are incorporated, or not, into national socioeconomic and political development through an approach that focuses on the “social construction of citizenship.”

Based on rich oral histories, this is an engaging study of citizenship construction and practice in Liberia, Africa's first black republic.

Drawing on contemporary global events, this book highlights how global citizenship education can be used to critically educate about the complexity and repressive nature of global events and our collective role in creating a just world.

In 2001 the northern Ontario town of Cobalt won a competition to be named the province’s “Most Historic Town.” This honour came as Cobalters were also applying for and winning federal and provincial development grants to remake this once important silver mining centre. This book, based on extended ethnographic and multi-method research, examines the multiple ways that development proposal writing is intertwined with neoliberal citizenship. The authors argue that the citizens of Cobalt have become entrenched in a “proposal economy,” a system that empowers them to imagine, engage, and propose but not to count on the state to provide certain services.

Drawing on case studies in areas of social and economic concern, this interdisciplinary collection explores how foundational experiments can foster collective consumption and promote social justice.

Economic Citizenship Programs (ECPs) have recently been proliferating, with large and potentially volatile inflows of investment and fiscal revenues generating significant benefits for small economies, but also posing substantial challenges. This paper discusses recent developments and implications of such programs for fiscal discipline and the real economy, including risks to macroeconomic and financial stability, with a focus on small state economies. It discusses the prudent management of these programs, overviews strategies to minimize risks to various sectors, and addresses potential governance and integrity challenges. The paper proposes a framework for managing inflows and savings from ECPs to contain macroeconomic risks, and it recommends the establishment of a sovereign wealth fund (SWF) where such revenues are large and persistent.

This text reconsiders the principles of economic citizenship appropriate to a democratic society, and explores the radical implications of these principles for public policy. According to White, justice demands that economic co-operation satisfy a standard of fair reciprocity.