ABSTRACTThis article uses Mercado Libre, the leading digital platform company in Latin America, as an illustrative case to analyse the effect of regional platforms on development, by considering their interplay with both global leaders and local actors. Building on dependency theory, the article identifies the company's structural dependence on algorithms and computing power provided by the largest information technology (Big Tech) companies in the United States. Nonetheless, it also finds that Mercado Libre is at the frontier in applied data analysis solutions tailored for its businesses. Together with a privileged access to personalized and cross‐fertilized market and financial datasets, the company's internal and purchassed technologies are the source of asymmetric relationships with its platforms’ users. The article conceptualizes Mercado Libre's place in digital capitalism as extractivist with local actors and, just like local elites when dependency theory was first formulated, it is complicit with global powers. But, unlike those elite firms, it is not technologically laggard, and its value capture is underpinned by its technological advantage. Thus, this article conceptualizes (digital) dependency as multiple layers of economic power in which leading firms from the peripheries occupy intermediate and interconnecting positions. It shows that, while these regional leaders operate at the technological frontier, economic power relations based on technological asymmetries remain crucial for studying underdevelopment.

ABSTRACTIn 2014, Nigeria adopted a new law for its healthcare system, which mandated the establishment of a novel health‐financing mechanism, the Basic Health Care Provision Fund (BHCPF). The BHCPF was created to provide sustainable funding with a view to fast‐tracking Universal Health Coverage (UHC) and improving health outcomes in Nigeria. This article places Nigeria's UHC reform process in the broader context of social policy implementation in Africa to illustrate the extent to which interactions between different agents, contextual factors such as Nigeria's federal character, as well as changing conceptualizations of social policy at a global level, shape views on how best to implement UHC. The article is based on the careful examination of three different versions of implementation guidelines for the BHCPF combined with qualitative data collected during fieldwork. It argues that there is a discrepancy between the Nigerian government rhetoric of putting into place a system that improves access to healthcare and the actual practice of implementing UHC via the BHCPF. In reality, a range of controversies surround the ongoing operationalization of the BHCPF, contributing to the perpetuation of a social policy environment that allows poor health outcomes and significant health inequities in Nigeria to persist.

ABSTRACTRecent accounts of the re‐emergence of debt distress in Africa, while offering significant insights, fail to provide the historical political‐economic context within which African indebtedness is set. On the surface, spending induced by the COVID‐19 pandemic, economic fallout from the Russia–Ukraine war, and repeated examples of fiscal indiscipline by African governments appear to be the causes of the current wave of debt crises. Beyond these factors, however, this article argues that the present indebtedness, like previous episodes, is rooted in the economic and financial subordination of African economies. Specifically, the article places Ghana's extensive debt within the country's post‐independence political‐economic context, and thus traces the structural factors and external constraints that underlie its economic vulnerability and financial dependence. These include the collapse of developmentalism in the 1970s, the Structural Adjustment Programmes of the 1980s, and an exploitative transnational lending system dominated by Western commercial creditors. Internally, recent fiscal mistakes by the government, within its limited policy space, have exacerbated Ghana's indebtedness. The Ghanaian experience shows that unconditional debt cancellation, widely called for, is a necessary but insufficient measure to address the recurring cycles of indebtedness. Debt cancellation should be followed by broader economic and financial reforms, globally and domestically.

ABSTRACTThis article examines the development and implications of local currency bond markets (LCBMs) in African countries in the context of international financial subordination (IFS). Despite the promotion of LCBMs as a solution to debt vulnerability, there is a dearth of research that offers a systematic empirical examination of their actual benefits along with conceptual explanations as to when and why such benefits may or may not materialize. This is especially true for countries at the bottom of the global economic hierarchy. To explore how the subordination in global production and financial systems shapes LCBM development, the article offers an empirical analysis of selected African countries that combines interviews with policy makers, officials and experts with statistical data. The findings suggest that while LCBMs offer some benefits, such as mitigating risks associated with foreign currency debt, their potential is limited by the structural processes created by IFS, such as their dependence on the global financial cycle, the relatively higher costs of this debt and the sustained constraint on macroeconomic policy making. However, there are also domestic factors which shape how these structural constraints are mediated in the context of LCBM development — in particular, historically developed financial structures of developing countries, the political economy of the state and the structure of production. This study thus contributes to the debate about the developmental benefits of domestic debt market development and the emerging research agenda on IFS.

ABSTRACTWhile much attention has been paid to the ways in which the private sector is now embedded within the field of development, one group of actors — for‐profit development consultancies and contractors, or service providers — has received relatively little attention. This article analyses the growing role of for‐profit consultancies and contractors in British aid delivery, which has been driven by two key trends: first, the outsourcing of managerial, audit and knowledge‐management functions as part of efforts to bring private sector approaches and skills into public spending on aid; and second, the reconfiguration of aid spending towards markets and the private sector, and away from locally embedded, state‐focused aid programming. The authors argue that both trends were launched under New Labour in the early 2000s, and super‐charged under successive Conservative governments. The resulting entanglement means that the policies and practices of the UK government's aid agencies, and the interests and forms of for‐profit service providers, are increasingly mutually constitutive. Amongst other implications, this shift acts to displace traditional forms of contestation and accountability of aid delivery.

ABSTRACTForest frontiers are important areas for sustainable development as they combine the need to halt deforestation with the challenges of rural poverty. In the region of San Martín, Peru, the ‘Production, Protection and Inclusion’ model combines narratives of conservation, economic development and social inclusion in what can be defined as a ‘sustainable development frontier’. This article asks how such sustainable development frontiers change social, economic and ecological outcomes in the localities where they are found. The authors examine the reality of sustainable cocoa production linked to conservation and development goals, as promoted by government bodies, international agencies, cooperatives and chocolate brands in Peru, and show how, paradoxically, sustainability goals intensify production and attract smallholders into forest frontier areas. In doing so, the boom in demand for sustainable commodities has inadvertently created conditions encouraging further colonization of forested areas leading to a continuing rise in deforestation, ecological degradation and economic instability. Narratives of sustainable development can thus reinforce commodity intensification, as they obscure alternative approaches and reproduce traditional frontier dynamics.