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Seeing Like A State – Prescribing Society
Thought provoking quotes from Scott’s (1998) Seeing Like A State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition have Failed. The rationale: “The publicly stated rationale for planned settlement schemes was almost always couched in the discourse of orderly development and social services (such as the provision of health clinics, sanitation, adequate housing, education, clean […]
Tags: #Development #International development #James C. Scott #Prescribing Society #Seeing Like a State
Seeing Like A State – Describing Society
Thought provoking quotes from Scott’s (1998) Seeing Like A State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition have Failed. On simplification: “… state simplifications, the basic givens of modern statecraft, were, I began to realize, rather like abridged maps. They did not successfully represent the actual activity of the society they depicted, nor were […]
Tags: #Describing Society #James C. Scott #Legibility #Seeing Like a State #Simplification
Awarded: Robert M. Netting Graduate Paper Prize
The Robert M. Netting award is given out by the Culture and Agriculture section of the American Anthropological Association. I was awarded this prize for my paper “Worldviews Apart: Agriculture Extension and Ethiopian Smallholder Farmers.” As a part of the award, I will now work with the editors of the journal Culture, Agriculture, Food and Environment for its […]
Tags: #American Anthropological Association #Culture Agriculture Food and Environment #Robert M. Netting
Creating Capabilities (Nussbaum, 2011)
The following quotes are taken from Nussbaum’s Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach, 2011. Largely building on Sen, and forging new paths for the capabilities approach, in this book Nussbaum attempts to summarize the approach for broader audiences, as it is often bogged down in weighty philosophical texts. On the Capabilities Approach: “The Capabilities Approach […]
Tags: #Capabilities Approach #Creating Capabilities #Human Development Approach #Nussbaum #Sen
U.S. Development as Foreign Policy in Ethiopia (McVety, 2012)
On US foreign aid: “In its most optimistic moments, the U.S. government truly believed that by doing good it could indeed do well. The problem is that foreign aid seems to have done more harm than it has good, which means that the United States has not done nearly as well as it hoped.” (p. […]
Tags: #Ethiopia #Expectations of Development #Foreign Aid #Foreign Policy #politics of famine
New Publication in Global Humanities
Cochrane, L. and Chellan, W. (2015) “We Were Extremely Poor But We Were Pious”: Exploring the Interrelationships between Religious Adherence and Economic Status in the Muslim World. Global Humanities 2: 112-128. Abstract: This paper analyzes theological, quantitative and qualitative data regarding the relationships between economic status and religious adherence, with specific reference to Islam and […]
Tags: #Economic Status #Household Income #Poverty #Religiosity #Religious Adherence
About me
Logan Cochrane
Logan is a Professor at HBKU in the College of Public Policy. He is an Associate Fellow of the Ethiopian Academy of Sciences and an Adjunct Professor at Hawassa University (Institute for Policy and Development Research). Over the last twenty years, he has worked in Afghanistan, Benin, Burundi, Canada, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Egypt, Ethiopia, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, South Sudan, Tanzania and Uganda. Logan acts as a consultant for governmental agencies and non-governmental organizations, seeking to create bridges between research and practice.
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