What Price for Privatization?: Cultural Encounter with Development Policy on the Zambian Copperbelt - Hardcover

Parsons, Elizabeth C.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0739140620 ISBN 13: 9780739140628

Publisher: Lexington Books, 2010

Synopsis

This is a case study of the privatization process of Zambia's copper mines, an intervention carried out according to economic, political, and managerial criteria. What Price for Privatization? demonstrates how these ways of thinking were insufficient for grasping the local, lived context and argues that effective development policymaking can only be done when radical differences in cultural and religious worldviews are more fully understood and appreciated.

About this title

Review:

It takes a patient listener to write these stories on how local people experience development beyond its material properties. Beautifully written, Parsons' book will surely help development planners to reflect on the cultural dimensions of their work.--Dorothea Hilhorst, Wageningen University

This book tells a compelling story of an encounter, or rather a missed encounter, between two cosmologies: that of Western views of development and progress and of the Zambians and their understanding and sense of the world in which they live. The author's detailed fieldwork provides overwhelming evidence that 'development' can only start with acknowledging one's own worldviews and that of others. Development is not making the other in one's own image. I hope that the development establishment will listen.--Séverine Deneulin, author of Religion in Development: Rewriting the Secular Script

About the Author:

Elizabeth C. Parsons is lecturer and co-director of contextual education at Boston University School of Theology.

About this edition

• Publisher: Lexington Books
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0739140620
• ISBN 13: 9780739140628
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 250