Melbourne Law School - Theses
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ItemPublic-private partnerships and the transformation of the third world state: the case of Indonesia( 2017)This thesis aims to answer the question of how we should understand the transformation of infrastructure finance, and with it the Third World state, through the adoption of public-private partnerships (PPPs), with a focus on the case of Indonesia. It also seeks to understand the role of international law and institutions in that transformation. In this thesis, ‘PPPs’ refer to a range of contractual mechanisms used in the infrastructure sector. This thesis mainly focuses on PPPs as long-term contracts between Third World states and foreign private investors for the provision of ‘economic’ infrastructure that is vital for daily economic activity. PPPs have been widely promoted by international financial institutions (IFIs) as offering an innovative, technical and apolitical means to deliver better infrastructure and development for Third World states. This thesis offers a different way of understanding the role of PPPs in the Third World, presenting them as instruments of development and state transformation that must be studied within broader historical and geopolitical perspectives. It situates the promotion of PPPs within the project of Third World development championed by international institutions and law. The thesis argues that the translation of concessions into an instrument of development, and their incorporation into global development policy in the form of PPPs, has revived an older colonial project of remaking the Third World through concessions. Through promoting PPPs, IFIs have transformed domestic economic governance, the state and market relationship and the way the state understands infrastructure provision. In conjunction with their establishment, PPPs provided ‘efficiency’ as the new single reference for the state. Further, PPPs have transformed the economic role of the state beyond merely supporting the market, to a level where the state is also accountable to the market, thus putting democracy at risk. The thesis takes Indonesia as its focus, and uses a historical method to understand the ideological and legal-technical basis of PPPs, the role played by international law and actors in their promotion, their relation to earlier colonial concessions, and their role in the displacement of a collectivist post-independence economic model and interventionist establishment of market-friendly institutions. It reveals that Third World PPPs are a distinct project, shaped by the interventions of the international actors involved, and aimed at the transformation of the state. By these interventions and conceptualizations, the promotion of PPPs by IFIs has transformed Third World concessions and expanded the role of international law from a regulatory system governing concessions to one that creates market-friendly institutions in the domestic sphere.
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ItemLocal space, global life: the everyday operation of international law and development( 2012)This thesis engages with the expansive and ground-level operation of international law and the development project by discussing the current international attention to local jurisdictions. In the last three decades, local jurisdictions have become the preferred spaces to promote global ideals of human, economic and environmental development. Through an ethnographic study of Bogotá’s recent development experience, in particular the city’s changing relation to its illegal neighbourhoods, this thesis interrogates the rationale and exposes some of the contradictions involved in the emergence of localities in development discussions and the international normative scene. The thesis pays particular attention to how the current attention to local jurisdictions – a process that has been largely articulated through the idea of decentralization – has involved a global re-accommodation of the exercise of authority over territory and population once assigned primarily to national administrations. However, the process of decentralization has not involved the abandonment of the nation-state but instead a multiplication of levels of governance upon local jurisdictions, a move that has made local administrations more concerned about calibrating their territories and populations in terms of their development aspirations, their fiscal capacities and their internal and external frontiers. This situation has particularly affected the relation between local administrations and their most peripheral subjects. In its evaluation of the multiple ways in which international law and development are shaping local realities, the thesis argues for closer critical attention to how these intimately related projects are constantly operationalized through the actions of national and local administrations, and through a multiplicity of laws, administrative technologies and artefacts of governance, that are rarely considered part of the economy of international law or the development project.
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ItemBorderwork: ‘Illegality’, un-bounded labour and the lives of Basotho migrant domestic workers( 2010)This thesis provides an in-depth, ethnographic case study of women who have migrated from Lesotho to work as domestic workers in South Africa. It explores and analyses these women’s experiences of migration and employment, while examining the impacts of the Lesotho-South Africa border on their lives. The border is conceptualised in this thesis not merely as a territorial frontier but as an apparatus operating throughout a constellation of social and geographical sites. This apparatus is seen to produce migrant subjectivities. In the case of Basotho migrant domestic workers, it produces and disciplines them as ‘illegal’ migrant workers. These women’s ‘illegality’ is continually reproduced not only legally, but socially and discursively as well. It also arises from the repeated ostensible failure of migration and labour law to restrict women’s access to territory or the labour market. Through their ‘illegality’, Basotho domestics are produced as a form of un-bounded labour. The hyphenated term ‘un-bounded’ captures both boundedness and unboundedness. Basotho domestics and their labour migration appear unbounded, as in unrestricted or unregulated. However, women’s subjective experiences reveal their bounding and confinement – geographically, socially, spatially, economically, in the employment relationship, and in terms of their invisibility. Basotho women’s un-bounding and their subjectivity as ‘illegal’ migrant workers create a division between South Africa as the site of ‘work’ and Lesotho as the site of ‘family’ or ‘life’. Women’s social lives and identities, together with their family members, become bounded within Lesotho; within South Africa, their identity and subjectivity is reduced to that of ‘worker’. In order to maintain employment, family and life, women must manage a range of perpetual cross-border circulations, with regular remittances and visits home. As ‘illegal’ migrants, their experience of employment is also unique, as they are produced as dismissible, exploitable, dependent, submissive and ultimately dehumanised workers. Borderwork therefore carries three meanings in this thesis: the ‘work’ of many individuals and institutions in continually constructing the border as a social and legal reality; the impacts of the border on Basotho migrant domestic workers’ experience of employment; and women’s everyday strategies for negotiating and ‘working’ this border. Basotho migrant domestic workers and their difficult circumstances have to date been largely ignored by scholars and policy-makers alike. Drawing on these women’s own accounts, this rich analysis also challenges and extends scholarly understandings of borders, labour migration, ‘illegality’ and development. The significance and implications of this thesis therefore extend beyond the specific case study.