In the early 1960s, three pilot agricultural and settlement schemes were set up along the shores of Lake Victoria in the north-western region of Tanzania with the involvement of Israeli development agency Agridev. One of these sites was Mbarika, where the experimental project ran for three years and had mixed results before being discontinued by the young Tanzanian government. This article explores the story of that scheme and its long-term legacies some 50 years on. Unpacking the representational and material ruinations that outlived the project's official timeline, we examine the memories and rumours that continue to haunt the site to this day and their entanglement with successive development experiences and shifting political ideologies. Through interviews, ethnographic observations and archival research, we shed light on the complex, deeply ambiguous legacies and ‘afterlives’ of a development intervention set between expectations of modernity and a sense of exclusion.

This essay supplies brief historical context on the Candlelight Protest movement in South Korea (2016–17) and provides the thematic and theoretical framing for the forum “The South Korean Candlelight Protest Movement and Its Discontents.” It lays the groundwork for approaching the study of the protests and assessing their historical and contemporary value for the push for political change, challenging economic norms and social renewal in Korea. In particular, this essay helps frame the forum as a platform for interrogating the connections between revolution, democracy, and capitalism and the limits of and potential for political change within the political economy of Korea and elsewhere.

This paper introduces and defines the concept of collective entrepreneurship. A review of the defensive single-level rent-seeking objective of traditional agricultural cooperatives is introduced followed by an analysis of recent studies documenting a shift in the objective functions of producers jointly integrating toward more multiple-level rent-seeking entities. This process of shifting from market failure-ameliorating collective action mechanisms toward rent-seeking group action organizations is labeled collective entrepreneurship. The justification for introducing this concept is based on the Olsonian premise that rational, self-interested individuals will not act to achieve their common or group interests without coercion or selective incentives.

What explains the electoral staying power of many Japanese interest groups in the wake of electoral reform? Electoral explanations provide part of the answer; candidates in elections to both houses of the Diet continue to face incentives—many of them unintended—to court the organized vote. But missing from such accounts is an explanation of why economically noncompetitive groups provide the bulk of such support. The primary reason for this, I argue, is organization. As a result of their historical linkages to the bureaucracy, many interests developed hierarchical, national organizational structures that enabled them to carry out a variety of vote-gathering functions that the parties had trouble performing themselves. Although electoral reform and long-term demographic trends have weakened the electoral influence of interest groups, these organizational complementarities between groups and the parties continue to matter in Japanese elections—including under conditions of two-party competition. To illustrate these points, I trace the evolution of interest group politics from the era of LDP dominance through the rise of two-party competition and the LDP's recent return to power, using postmasters associations and agricultural cooperatives as case studies.

Agricultural sales cooperative unions (ASCUs) in Turkey are heavily influenced by both domestic and international government policies. Both export taxes and import tariffs are used as policy tools to regulate cotton markets. Domestic price support programs, water subsidies, fertilizer subsidies, and credit subsidies have also been used as domestic policy tools. These types of subsidies are not uncommon among developing countries. This paper provides empirical estimates of the degree of economic inefficiency associated with government intervention in Turkish cotton markets. A two-region partial equilibrium model of cotton exports and imports is developed under the “small country assumption” to obtain empirical estimates of the deadweight welfare loss associated with these government subsidies. Although government intervention results in significant income distribution among the various cotton sectors within Turkey, the overall economic inefficiency of the redistribution is very low.