Website: http://www.smu.ca

Coming to Canada from

Institute of Social Studies
The Hague, Netherlands

Research involves

Examining interactions between actors and institutions in rural-urban, South-North, state-non-state and other settings, and their implications for development.

Research relevance

Developing a framework to understand how the dynamic interactions of actors and institutions, especially those involving property rights in natural resources, affect development.

How we Work Together (or not) for Development

World poverty is complex and multifaceted. Rural poverty is linked to urban poverty, agriculture to industry, the political economy in the South to that inthe North, politics to economics, global to local, and so on. How do we explain how people, institutions and processes with different resources and found in different places interact to shape and reshape one another over time?

These ongoing interactions involve competition and co-operation, subjugation and liberation, all at the same time. Everyone with a stake in the process has a view on the meaning, pace, extent and direction of development. They construct and deconstruct such categories as class, gender and ethnicity; rural, urban and suburban; and South and North. These interactions can lead to unintended and unexpected outcomes and impacts.

As Canada Research Chair in International Development Studies, Dr. Saturnino Borras untangles what happens when people fight over property rights, especially land, and when they develop natural resource regimes. This research helps us understand how development eradicates poverty, inequality, social exclusion and political disempowerment. The research can also be used to build on Borras’s previous work on state-society relations, social movements and agrarian reform.