Blockchain Papers

T. Masmoudi

This paper examines agricultural credit as a strategic instrument for agricultural development in Morocco. It argues that credit can contribute to investment, modernization, income growth, and social promotion, but only if it is embedded in a coherent economic and social policy framework. The author reviews the main obstacles that limited the effectiveness of agricultural credit, including inappropriate institutional choices, weak agrarian structures, insufficient organization, limited outreach, and intervention rules poorly adapted to small farmers. The article concludes that a more flexible, decentralized, and development-oriented credit system is necessary if rural finance is to serve the needs of traditional as well as modern agriculture.

Essossinam Pali, Coffi Cyprien Aholou, François Paul Yatta

Since 2019, Togo has resolutely engaged in the decentralization process marked by communalization and elections of municipal councilors. Financial autonomy constitutes an essential lever for the free administration of municipalities, allowing them to ensure decision-making and the implementation of development projects. However, despite a legal and regulatory framework defining taxation specific to local authorities, Togolese municipalities are often perceived as needing more financial resources. This study aims to map the financing mechanisms for decentralization in Togo and analyze their contribution to municipal budgets. By adopting a quantitative approach combining documentary analysis and interviews with 188 experts and practitioners of local finance from various Togolese structures, four main financing mechanisms were identified: local, national, Community, and international. Among these mechanisms, own resources (in particular from the sale of products and services, fiscal and non-fiscal taxes) and state transfers via the Support Fund for Local Authorities emerge as the primary sources of financing for municipalities. However, the study reveals that several instruments of local mechanisms, although institutionally defined, still need to be updated in many municipalities, thus limiting their effectiveness in resource mobilization. These results highlight the importance of optimizing the management of local mechanisms to strengthen municipalities’ financial autonomy and support territories’ sustainable development.

Lakhdar Ziane, Moussa Boukrif

This article examines the interaction between small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and territorial development in Akbou, Algeria, within the context of economic decentralization. Through a mixed-method approach, combining questionnaires, interviews, document analysis, and field observations, the study explores the role of SMEs in the local economy, as well as the challenges they face, such as access to financing and administrative complexity. Although rooted in local dynamics, Akbou's SMEs actively contribute to job creation, innovation, and strengthening social bonds. Cooperation between SMEs, local authorities, and support institutions is essential for overcoming obstacles and improving competitiveness. Recommendations include facilitating access to financing, promoting training, and modernizing infrastructure. These strategies could optimize the contribution of SMEs to territorial development, creating a resilient and inclusive economic ecosystem for the region.

Mohamed Ait Mohammed

No abstract is available for this record.

James Christopher Mizes

This dissertation is an ethnographic investigation into how democratic municipalities in Dakar, Senegal are formed and reformed. The municipal scale of government has long been both a modern norm and a central object of governmental reform throughout the Francophone world. Established in the late 19th century as a colony of France, Dakar is one of the oldest local democracies in Africa and remains today a model of democratic reform for municipal governments across the continent. In 2013, the Senegalese legislature passed what is known colloquially as Act III of decentralization. This national reform legally delegated political and fiscal authority to Senegal’s lowest level of territorial administration—the commune—inaugurating what the law itself referred to as the “complete communalization of the national territory”. Yet far from resolving the problem of communal form, the Act III incited a novel set of experiments in communal authority. This dissertation reveals a broader terrain of democratic politics and reform that is beyond the more familiar domains of law and public debate. I examine the novel set of experimental techniques that have emerged out of critical reflections on the problem of communal form in Dakar. Posing the communal form as contested problem-space, I follow a range of experiments through which diverse actors make sense of how public authority should be distributed across Dakar’s urban terrain. To analyze the politics of this distribution, I develop the concept of municipal state formation: the set of techniques through which sub-national governments take on functions of the sovereign nation and exercise legitimate authority over citizens, populations, publics, and territory. Yet this dissertation does not demonstrate how communes have arrived, once and for all, fully formed—or, as the Senegalese laws describe it, “fully empowered”. Municipal state formation is never complete; it is an ongoing process of experimentation, disagreement, and piecemeal reform. In the wake of Act III, most communal officials articulated a commonly held critique: the laws had devolved new responsibilities, but without the necessary revenues to match. There was, in other words, a persistent mismatch between political and fiscal decentralization. For this reason, I examine fiscal administration as a particularly consequential political terrain in which the problem of communal form took shape in Dakar.This dissertation is organized into five substantive chapters and a conclusion. After introducing the concept of municipal state formation, the second chapter reveals how a French colonial policy of assimilation provided the political conditions for the legal constitution communes in Senegal. But these laws were also formed in relation to a longstanding dispute over the fiscal administration of the communes. The third chapter turns to one such dispute over Dakar’s municipal bond program. Although the program was ultimately sabotaged by the central state, it introduced a novel political terrain into this long-standing dispute over fiscal administration: public financial evaluation. I argue that such evaluations made an appeal to an audience beyond the courts—what I term, a financial public—to assert the City’s claim to municipal authority. The fourth chapter examines a similarly unsuccessful experiment to re-distribute public authority in Dakar. In partnership with a private firm, municipal authorities constructed a commercial center in which to relocate thousands of Dakar’s walking street vendors. The program introduced a familiar form of a neoliberal fiscal contract: the user-fee. However, vendors disagreed with the poor location and high cost of the building, and unequivocally refused to relocate. In this chapter, I argue that this failed neoliberal program provided the conditions under which vendors’ refusal became a possible and effective political act, successfully delimiting when and where municipal authority was legitimately exercised in Dakar.The final chapter returns to a more traditional aspect of public authority: the right to tax. Although Act III supposedly delegated several new local taxes, bureaucrats and officials nevertheless had to experiment with novel techniques of rule to exercise communal authority on the ground. One local commune pushed the limits of communal rights to enforce tax collection by drawing on the mayor’s public reputation for violence. The Mayor’s reputation as an armed murderer with a “flare for the aggressive” shaped how and where street-level bureaucrats collected taxes. Tax collection thus became more than an accounting of the physical landscape: it was a technique of territorial control grounded in a reputation for unlawful violence.This dissertation concludes with a reflection on how the concept of municipal state formation may be extended to cities far from Dakar. To make this comparative case, I briefly analyze the problem of metropolitan fragmentation in St. Louis, Missouri.

Karl Lauschke

Although academic and practical interest in non-fungible tokens (NFTs) has continuously increased over the last few years, there is still a need to better understand their social acceptability. The aim of the study was to explore the double edge of NFT legitimacy for NFTs by unveiling the role of sustainability and by adopting technology legitimacy and the field of sustainability transition studies as a theoretical lens. Specifically, this research investigates the role of sustainability in securing and maintaining technology legitimacy within NFT projects. We interviewed 12 experts through exploratory qualitative research. The findings highlight three main ways in which sustainability participates in the legitimation of NFT projects. While sustainability can be inherent in the NFT project itself, this legitimation can also be derived from the perceived sustainability of the NFT technology or be part of innovative business models. Theoretical contributions and managerial implications are then discussed. JEL CODES: O33, O35, O50

DANIELA COIMBRA SWIATEK AND ANDREAS NOVY

Neither East nor West East-West cleavages in Europe are a key determinant to understanding Vienna as a rich, but nevertheless semi-peripheral city between Eastern and Western Europe. The Habsburg Empire (1282-1918), of which Vienna was the capital city, covered large parts of the region between Western Europe, the Ottoman Empire and Russia. It was characterized by multiple nationalities and was internally structured with multiple and changing centre-periphery relations – North-South, as well as East-West, and dominant German/Hungarian nationalities versus the other, mainly Slavic nations. Vienna is thus a privileged site for the study of the spatial imaginaries and strategies accompanying the transformations of this broad region, and their socio-economic, political and cultural implications. East and West have been crucially antagonistic mind maps in Western thought, like ‘we’ and ‘the others’, Orient and Occident, and the West and ‘the rest’ (Hall 1994). In the ninth century, Charlemagne separated the Franco-Germanic part of Europe from the Slavic East with an East-West divide very similar to the one later erected by the Iron Curtain (Szücs 1990: 13). In the West, a Christian feudal order evolved out of a symbiosis of the Roman slaveholder latifundium and the German communitarian social organization. Its relatively decentralized power structure permitted a plurality of languages and autonomous cities evolved from the power vacuum (Anderson 1978: 148), constituting a fertile ground for later modernization. From the end of the Middle Ages onwards, the territorial expansionism of the West resulted in the crusades, reconquista and colonization (Komlosy 1994; Hobsbawm 1990). The East experienced a different trajectory. Russia, the sentinel of Europe on the eastern front, had to bear the brunt of repeated invasion waves by Mongols, Tartars and other Asian nomadic people (Anderson 1980), a crucial determinant to an understanding of the centralist and authoritarian structure of its state and society. These different historical-geographical trajectories have significantly contributed to shaping the ‘morphological contrast between the state in the East and West’ (Gramsci 1971) and the different forms of political praxis: ‘In the East the State was everything, civil society was primordial and gelatinous; in the West, there was a proper relation between State and civil society’ (Gramsci 1971: 238). The Habsburg Empire was part of eastern Central Europe, which was surrounded by the West and Russia. This ‘in-between region’ (Szücs 1990), consisting of Poland, Prussia and the Habsburg Empire, for centuries oriented itself towards the West, but had difficulties in building truly Western institutions, especially a strong civil society. The countryside was sparsely populated (Anderson 1980), the cities were smaller and less independent, the nobility was larger and more influential (Szücs 1990), and the Counter-Reformation was strong. The Habsburg Empire was thus a hybrid, combining elements of the East and the West under one dynasty for more than 600 years.

Rob Young

The profitability of foreign affairs starts with setting priorities amidst diminishing financial resources. This policy goes hand in hand with investment in the means of communication, delegating services to the private sector, decentralization, usage of local personnel and the quest for self-financing of consular activities. This effort towards improving profitability has already produced results.

Walid Raad

“Beyrouth, á la Folie” 1 Walid Ra’ad H ORS LA VIE by Maroun Baghdadi, the French official selection to the 1991 Cannes film festival, is about a Frenchman’s ordeal in Beirut as a “ Western hostage.” Inspired by the real-life account written by Roger Auque, Hors la Vie proposes a complex and original treatment of the episode in Franco-Lebanese relations referred to as “ PAffaire des Otages.” 2 This treatment clarifies some aspects of the complex nature of France’s historical relations with Lebanon, and chal­ lenges the hitherto narrowly geopolitical analyses of the Western hostage crisis.3In this essay, I will concentrate on the following questions: How does the film’s treatment of a French photojournalist’s “ ordeal” as a Western hostage contest France’s historical ties to Lebanon? And what is at stake in Baghdadi’s emphasis on reading the Western hostage crisis through specific representations of the Lebanese capital? Paris o f the Middle East—Hors la Vie’s opening sequence, praised by critics as presenting “the truth of this city [Beirut] and of this war [the Lebanese civil war],” offers two very familiar images.4The first is that of the photojournalist hero in the figure of Patrick Perrault, and the second is that of the Lebanon of the past 17 years, the Lebanon that has become synonymous with anarchy and destruction. I propose first that Hors la Vie relies on a popular conception of photojournalism in order to present Perrault as a politically and ideo­ logically neutral witness to the civil war, and subsequently to offer his account as the uncontested proof of the inability of the Lebanese and the Arabs to govern themselves. Both instances, I will argue, function, on the one hand, to displace French complicity in the abduction of French nationals in Beirut and the socio-political turmoil in Lebanon and, on the other, to justify France’s colonial intervention in Lebanon. Having qualified as “ the hot spot” in the world from the mid-seven­ ties on, Lebanon witnessed a deluge of Western correspondents seeking to provide news agencies and institutions with a bank of images and analyses that, it would seem, could just as easily have been borrowed from previous Third World “ hot spot” civil wars—Biafra, Benin, Chad, Bangladesh, or Katanga. However, Lebanon and the Lebanese civil war came to represent not just another Third World “ hot spot.” The naming Vol. XXXIV, No. 2 31 L ’E spr it C réa te u r and visualizing of the Lebanon of the past two decades betrayed an ambivalence that fluctuated between “ nostalgia and regret” and “’fear and loathing.” I can but marvel and be baffled by the avalanche of terms and images that have come to dominate the bank of descriptions and characterizations of Lebanese subjects and spaces, both in and outside of Lebanon.5Indeed, Beirut for some Western reporters was not only “ the most important story for quite a while,” 6but it was also “ exciting, it was intoxicating, it was journalistic paradise” (Gersh 9), “ the Casablanca, the center for the Middle East correspondents” (10). Steve Hagey of United Press International comments, “ The dirty little secret about Beirut is what fun it was. It was often scary and creepy, but it was absolutely hilarious fun. I can’t remember anything that was as much fun or as exhilarating” (Gersh 11). That correspondents should unabash­ edly extol the joys of working in war-torn terrain should not come as much of a surprise. One only needs to be reminded of the statements of such heralded war photojournalists as Don McCullin boasting that he “ used to be a war a year man, but now it is not enough. I need two a year.” 7 Such statements highlight a seldom publicly acknowledged aspect of photojournalism and photojournalists’ interests in war, an aspect that challenges the popular conception which holds that: (1) war photojournalists are neutral observers, faithful and uncorrupted wit­ nesses to the situations and events of the world; (2) that they are commit­ ted, humanly and morally, to the stories they cover and are willing to put themselves in situations of extreme danger in order to record and report on the oppression...

Pierre Mouterde

Decentralized Communication at the Ministry of Finance With a view to decentralization, the regional information centers have formed an original regional communication tool whose objective has been to make contact with citizens in the field. How have these developed from 1977 to 1988 ? With what problems and difficulties have they been confronted ? An assessment of 11 years of decentralized communication at the Ministry of Finance.

John Nellis

Abstract The Tunisian government has long admitted that its excessively centralized administrative and political systems have generated heavy costs in terms of inefficiency and citizen alienation. A major decentralizing reform effort was launched in the mid‐1970s, the most important parts of which dealt with changes in local taxation powers, and in the sources and size of grants and loans which Tunisian communes receive from national sources. The result to date has been a modest increase in communal revenues from the new or increased taxes, and a more significant increase in central government grants to local governments. Smaller and more rural communes are heavily dependent on grants to undertake development actions, their tax base being negligible. The revised systefn generates more revenue, and distributes resources more equitably, than the previous arrangements. In theory, it gives a greatly increased latitude to elected communal councils. Nonetheless, the local governments‐and the communes in particular‐remain severely constrained by central government authorities. The conclusion is that the decentralization reform has been partial and halting, and will in all probability continue in the same manner.

B. Balamurugan, T. Poongodi, M. R. Manu, S. Karthikeyan · 5 authors

The moving image archive of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) includes a copy of the film The Double Day (1975), cataloged in the series Moving Images Relating to International Development Programs and Activities, 1979–1991, a collection of more than eight hundred titles “created to provide information on assistance programs supported by the Agency for International Development (AID).”1 Yet, The Double Day does not, in fact, directly depict or engage with any specific development or aid initiative. Instead, the film—directed by US-based Brazilian filmmaker Helena Solberg as part of the International Women’s Film Project collective and described as “the first Latin American feminist documentary”—examines the gendered dynamics of paid and unpaid labor through the testimonies of women from Argentina, Bolivia, Venezuela, and Mexico.2 Its presence in the USAID archive is likely a consequence of its funding history, having received support from the Inter-American Foundation, a USAID-affiliated entity; the development agencies of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden; the United Nations Development Program; and US philanthropist Calvin Cafritz.3These transnational funding structures not only enabled the film’s production but also determined its archival destination, which renders legible its place within the history of international development.4 The Double Day’s institutional trajectory reflects the shifting configurations of aid, gender, and media during a historic moment when women were being repositioned at the center of what Arturo Escobar has described as development’s “regimes of visuality.”5 Especially relevant to The Double Day’s production and exhibition was the international institutional framework of Women in Development (WID). Emerging in the early 1970s and culminating in United Nations’ proclamation of 1975 as International Women’s Year, WID emphasized women’s participation in the global economy as both an index and mechanism of development. Indeed, The Double Day premiered at the World Conference of the International Women’s Year, held in Mexico City.6 Within this context, the film forms part of a broader trajectory of media use by international organizations that intensified during the 1970s—as best exemplified by Media Habitat, a collection of 236 documentary films commissioned by the United Nations to represent urban and rural development initiatives for the 1976 Habitat Conference on Human Settlements in Vancouver. As a policy-shaping initiative, Media Habitat primarily featured films from the Global South intended not only to illustrate but also to help codify standardized audiovisual markers of “underdevelopment” that determined access to the emerging global economic order and to international aid.7Framed in relation to these international institutions and their operations, The Double Day could similarly be considered “development media”—exemplifying the type of nonfiction media produced and distributed outside of the commercial film circuits whose aspects and subcategories have been variously described in scholarship as nontheatrical, useful, sponsored, institutional, industrial, educational, or nonprofessional/amateur.8 Scholars working in this area have emphasized the institutional contexts of such media’s production and exhibition infrastructures as shaping its instrumentalized effects. From a feminist perspective, such an approach is crucial to grappling with the broader question of how “gender impacts [these works’] shape, content, and trajectories.”9 Yet we also argue that, taken in isolation, the institutional and infrastructural contexts are insufficient to account for the complex relationship between media and development, potentially not only limiting our understanding of the reach and impact of development but also distorting our interpretive conclusions. For example, to categorize The Double Day as “development media” is to overlook the film’s place within Solberg’s directorial oeuvre, as well as within the histories of both transnational women’s filmmaking and radical Latin American documentary cinema to which it simultaneously belongs. Such exclusive framing is especially limiting given that women globally were disproportionately engaged in nonfiction production throughout the twentieth century—sometimes by political choice but more often due to structural exclusions from fiction filmmaking. Even in nonfiction historiography, however, institutional media has remained particularly marginal, reinforcing hierarchies that separate such works from the aesthetic and authorial frameworks through which film history has been constructed.10 This marginalization not only tends to erase women’s contributions but also presumes a “weak” or derivative authorship, rendering these films unworthy of the interpretive attention needed to apprehend their aesthetic and political complexity.11 The same dynamic is likely to structure assumptions about “development media” as well.Categorizing The Double Day exclusively within this category would further prompt us to assume top-down institutional analyses that have been characteristic of both institutional media methodologies and the scholarship on development at large. This, in turn, would risk obscuring this film’s radical Marxist approach to women’s labor as well as its concrete contribution to activism and its attendant grassroot structures. In Mexico City, The Double Day became a catalyst for feminist solidarity in practice when one of the film’s protagonists, Bolivian activist and trade unionist Domitila Barrios de Chungara, was invited to participate in the Tribune of Non-Governmental Organizations held alongside the official UN conference.12 There, Barrios de Chungara challenged Western feminist priorities by reframing the debate around labor, class, and imperialism, helping to articulate a shared Third World feminist agenda that significantly departed from the developmentalist vision of the United Nations and USAID.13 Seen through the lens of activist media, The Double Day helped forge transnational solidarity networks by enabling information exchange across the diverse voices that shaped its making—from the women featured in the film to the activists who circulated it—revealing a considerably more dynamic interplay between institutional and grassroots or contingent media practices.Moreover, the film’s Latin American context—reflected in Solberg’s formation in Brazil as the only woman in Cinema Novo, its focus on women from across the region, and its premiere and key reception in Mexico City—requires grappling with the regional specificities of the very notion of development in its multiple iterations.14 Far from being an epistemological and political framework imposed solely by the Global North, both the practices of development and the theoretical foundations of developmentalism (understood as a broad and polysemic set of discourses) were shaped through the active participation of Latin American economists.15 Within this iteration, underdevelopment, as a constitutive notion of developmentalism, became central to a distinctly critical strand, which by the late 1960s became known as the dependency theory.16 This same approach is reflected in some of the best-known Latin American radical film manifestos of the time, arising precisely from the same milieus to which Solberg belonged.17These various considerations of the film’s history illustrate the methodological challenges confronting feminist scholars seeking to assess the impact of development on media projects, theories, and practices. To disregard the developmentalist context of such works by emphasizing their political aesthetics and affects risks reproducing a romanticized narrative of heroic resistance (albeit from a feminist perspective). Yet to engage exclusively with their institutional and material infrastructures risks naturalizing developmentalism’s political and epistemological foundations at the expense of the goals and beliefs of the many women who participated in these projects. The contradictions and ambivalences that animate such histories call for feminist frameworks capable of holding both institutional complicity and radical possibility in view.This challenge resonates with ongoing debates about the politics of the archive and what Allyson Field has termed “the practice of informed speculation.”18 As she reminds us, feminist, queer, and decolonial methodologies have long taught us to “press at the limits” of the archive to “inoculate our scholarship against our evidence’s afflictions.”19 The concern that the evidence we draw on in our analysis reproduces the very structures and blind spots of the dominant ideology and therefore shapes and delimits our interpretation becomes particularly urgent when engaging the developmentalist media corpus. Informed speculation offers an alternative by inviting the experimental, creative, and speculative rewriting of history, mobilizing the archive “in a project that runs counter to the original purpose, or the imperative to preserve, or the conditions that led to erasure.”20 Yet, as Field cautions, such speculative gestures must remain grounded in a deep and “intimate familiarity with the archive” that we are working with and against. Building on this imperative, we suggest that the developmentalist archive, in particular, demands expansion and critical reconsideration in ways that unsettle the very disciplinary frameworks through which it has been studied as well as the larger institutional contexts for such knowledge production.Our focus on The Double Day in the opening of this introduction thus foregrounds the entanglements of institutional and grassroots forces, local and international contexts, structural and interpersonal relations, and creative and economic factors that have shaped not only this film but the broader ecosystem of development media projects—and their preservation—over time. Addressing such a constellation involves transgressing methodologically entrenched divisions between political economy and aesthetics, between material infrastructures and affective regimes; reckoning with divergent periodizations across film history and world economics; and situating these within the local specificities of women’s movements and international institutional programs. It also demands attentiveness to the coexistence of multiple, and sometimes competing, understandings of development—each historically, geographically, and ideologically situated.We imagine this special issue as an opening toward a critical dialogue, not only about how such an approach might be enacted in practice but also about the far-reaching ways development paradigms have shaped both our objects of study and the contours of the field itself. The decision to center institutionally sponsored films across all the essays in this issue is deliberate and enables us to highlight institutional critique as a vital methodological imperative within our analytical framework. Created within the frameworks of international organizations, state agencies, or NGOs, these films’ histories make legible the institutional logics that underwrite their production. Yet our critique does not stop at these specific entities. Rather, we argue for a broader interrogation of the political conditions and institutional infrastructures that shape media and knowledge production more generally. This includes contemporary corporations embedded in the digital platform economy, from streaming services to the rapid expansion of AI. Equally critical is a reflexive examination of academia itself, where departments of economics, political science, and centers for development have played a formative role in producing and legitimizing developmentalist theories and policy frameworks. While the humanities and arts have at times offered critical alternatives, they have also frequently mirrored and reinforced many of the same developmentalist assumptions. A feminist analysis of the nexus between development and media must therefore unsettle not only dominant archives but also the institutional and disciplinary foundations of our own scholarly practices.As scholars, we share the complex position of navigating the same tensions between institutional complicity and emancipatory aspiration as many of the media-makers whose work we study. Mirroring our subjects is also the transnational, collective mode of this special issue’s own production as it emerges from an ongoing informal working group we have sustained over several years. While relying on institutional and disciplinary affordances—such as university funding for conferences or access to academic publishing platforms—we have been working toward creating a community that exceeds, and often resists, the prevailing logics of our academic institutions. Our aim has been to create a space for shared inquiry and mutual support that pushes back against disciplinary siloing and technocratic neoliberal assessment modes of both labor and knowledge production—and this certainly extends to our experience collaborating with the journal editors throughout the publication process. Our goal has been to examine both the persistence and variability of developmentalism, understood as what Gustavo Esteva calls a “powerful but fragile semantic constellation,” as a conceptual formation that has historically inspired, legitimized, and mobilized media projects across Asia, Africa, and Latin America.21 And gendered biopolitics, from population control to gender mainstreaming, have remained integral to development policies and media practices, recurring across formats from institutional newsreels to film festivals.We share the conviction that, far beyond the history of nonfiction institutional media, development (as both a broad ideological project and a network of material and institutional practices) and developmentalism (as a set of discourses and theoretical models associated with development) have exerted a far-reaching influence on film and media cultures at large. As such, they must be treated as a major force in shaping global film and media systems and also the many ongoing assumptions behind their critical discourses. The discipline of communication studies was founded on modernization theory governed by Cold War goals of dissemination of Western liberal democracy around the world, while “an area studies framework allowed compartmentalizing Western and non-Western outcomes of technologies that were always claimed to be universal.”22 Despite critique from postcolonial and critical race studies, many of these frameworks have remained foundational for media theory.23 In historical scholarship, as we increasingly move beyond “modernity” as a dominant conceptual anchor, engaging with practices and discourses of development opens more precise analytical pathways. These film and media’s entanglements with the logics of and economic and the associated with as well as their conceptual underdevelopment, and impact in as diverse as and of media aesthetic and paradigms in film and film and funding are developmentalist assumptions to the they to underwrite the narrative and logics of and global media from the structure of the film to the cultures of argue that a examination of the historical entanglements between film and developmentalist aesthetics, modes of as well as infrastructures and critical the and that our contemporary media is a of the historical contours of development as a field of inquiry embedded within a of some of the methodologies by the featured in this special a of this complex history, to the larger at in media, development, and gender all its development a it as an of be with practices as divergent as and in In as we work on this the of the of the USAID the ideological that have the history of international the and of this on the global its a from development as a global practice and as an institutional and which over the has as a with its own media Yet or does not erase the historical impact of these the contradictions they have reflected and over the as the of development several crucial to the economic theories of development initiatives to and through the of the development an international policy framework at from the Global to the of the Global the by the political role of and the of the International the on was challenged by dependency theory and at development as global structural the neoliberal of the the Programs by the and World imposed and as conditions for and forms of assistance became known as the major markers for international development development has moving beyond economic to such as the Human Development and the Development and from international organizations such as the United Nations to a broader network of These frameworks increasingly of and liberal of and with what in many ways to various while the of the to development’s epistemological more scholarship has toward a of its and material the field has to a of and critical by and scholars, which development as a dynamic of conceptual and political to these the studies in this special issue call for sustained analysis in place of In we draw from a of and that in of of gender and to this special issue engage that and from Mexico to contemporary specific local historical of global distinctly feminist methodologies as well as attention to studies that this issue a in the global history of development on and documentary work in Mexico how early women infrastructures as of while US films an early of state and transnational on a outside the Global as the of developmentalist both the and markers of development media, its to the and Latin central grounded in archival also women’s in transnational and the methodological of archives on study of the series to a a digital media not by but by women not as but as subjects and within circuits of neoliberal and the aesthetics and of how development’s has models of to contemporary neoliberal paradigms of and analysis how digital and gender and practices, discourses on and their of these essays the of some of the historical of developmentalist as the question of the role of the state within such on a notion of economic as a and the dominant of development that the state as the for and through infrastructural projects. This understanding of development was shared across both of the as well as in the Third The United and the increasingly mobilized international in the of the modes of international at the postcolonial of policy and ideological These programs were at the expansion of their and of while with the and decolonial of The conceptual between modernization and development that the Cold in of and hierarchies of that long and As an of postcolonial their role as of international aid concern about the of Western development projects. In alternative across the Global South that to structural between and through policies of and In many they were further the global structures. In Latin for example, this approach was through organizations such as the United Nations for Latin and the both developmentalist projects and their have taken many forms historically, and they have and they have been to a of projects, and postcolonial and development has been and in ways and with frequently political While many of these alternative frameworks the embedded in dominant Western they often technocratic and assumptions. gender and gender as for the of to be shaped by This becomes particularly in the media that of development where women frequently a crucial associated with and women were as both the subjects and of their participation in the and labor often as the index of In this study of from the 1970s how women were as of this as these about women’s urban and recurring and of a within the own of and critique that official examination of archives and enables a feminist interrogation of their mobilizing a of the in the of contribution to this issue similarly the of a dynamic within as well as across ideological the of women’s and the media of the and as active in labor and as integral to the technocratic women became of as their labor remained a of and analysis and archival with attention to the specific of and It also transnational that as a and affective a nexus of and practices through which gender, media, and developmentalism one film not as a but as part of the of alongside and work a broader concern of this special media as a of developmentalist projects. The debates the World and which international such as the United Nations and a critical historical for such primarily by postcolonial and of the for the of media and communication infrastructures in as to counter Western The a between and economic how systems of media and reinforced global hierarchies of and in an agenda that supported and alternative media infrastructures across postcolonial contexts, the framework gender as an analytical This “gender in the 1970s by of the Women in Development in relation to The Double its political critique of with its broader to center women in development policy through and This was also in of media, which was shaped by its international reach and audiovisual production and and and Yet, as WID institutional it also to the and of the women’s development programs often by in These were by a of studies, and on and the to of women’s presence and through the of their economic and In this on the filmmaker this history directly by the and of for women by the WID framework during the with and agencies the of and against Women in at the of the neoliberal turn, when institutional media often the only to access and support to projects. The an by this dynamic as of the from the Global South are to engage with the developmentalist assumptions funding models that their similarly the as a in developmentalist media history by the of and centers on the Film a between of and the attention toward the and labor by and work was foundational the of and the of audiovisual aid, as both a of development projects and a critical for their the in this issue argue for a with media, gender, and developmentalism as an field of that is and shaped by feminist and methodologies and that challenge the entanglements between academic knowledge production and and technocratic development And while methodological these dynamics at the structural the of feminist in media and cinema by this the very a