Corporate Bonds: Corporatized Development, Racial Capitalism, and Dispossession

• In Event: Political Economy of EdTech: Analyses of the Racialized, Gendered, and Classed Dimensions of EdTech in the Global Economy

Abstract

In May 2020, just weeks into a statewide lockdown in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo announced a new partnership with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to “reimagine” the K-12 school system going forward. The partnership is just the latest attempt by government leaders, CEOs, and development directors to “disrupt” educational spaces following crisis, often through the implementation of new technology and the outsourcing of decision-making, management, and governance to for-profit corporate actors and institutions. Such partnerships, operating under a new “humanized capitalism” with the “twin mission” of growing profits and “improving the lives of those who don’t fully benefit from market forces” (Gates 2008), have given rise to a global education industry (GEI) (Verger et al 2016) and the corporatization of development (Moeller 2018). This “corporatized development” often uses “crisis” as an opportunity to undemocratically impose generally unpopular emergency measures (Klein 2007), and results in new technologies of governance like the social impact bond, a social development process that sees investors receive returns based on individuals, communities, or policies enacting the correct social, economic, and political outcomes. These new bonds effectively “rewrite the social contract between civil society and the government through the intermediation of the private sector” (Preston 2012) and are promoted as a means of aligning social development with market incentives considered useful in “at risk” populations (Kish and Leroy 2015). This paper, through the case study of the Liberian Educational Advancement Program (LEAP), examines how corporatized development (Moeller 2018) embeds corporate power structures and relationships into social development through new kinds of social investment, philanthropy, technologies, surveillance, partnerships, and service provision, resulting in the (re)production of colonial and racialized labor regimes, governance, and forms of extraction. The paper particularly highlights how Big-Tech and financial capital have become especially influential in disrupting and capturing social/educational development reform, often under cover of safeguarding a population’s health, security, and productivity following crisis. Through interviews of teachers, administrators, CSOs, and Ministry officials in Liberia, the paper argues that this process ultimately dispossess local stakeholders of public land/spaces, democratic decision-making, individual privacy, and labor security. The paper thus examines how corporatized development has merged with elements of “disaster capitalism” (Klein 2007), accumulation by dispossession (Harvey 2003), and “surveillance capitalism” (Zuboff 2019) to control and socially engineer bodies and subjectivities for the extraction of profit (Kish and Leroy 2015; Murphy 2017; Lazzarato 2012; 2015). It reveals the tools, technologies, and logics of these corporate actors, along with the experiences of individuals, as corporatized development is implemented during and following “crisis” (Roitman 2016; Larkin 2016), ultimately leading to new forms of precarity, bondage, and social death (Mbembe 2019).

Author

• Tyler Hook, University of Wisconsin - Madison