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In her important essay 'Praxis in the time of empire', Ananya Roy (2006) calls for planning theory to confront imperialism and colonialism as the constitutive 'present history' of planning and to substitute a liberal 'responsibility for' others with a postcolonial 'accountability to' them. This article takes up Roy's appeal with reference to the disciplines of anthropology, critical development studies and feminist studies. It argues that in order to move beyond the limits of 'liberal benevolence', planners need an ethics of accountability that recognizes the conditions of postcoloniality, to be sure, but that can also foreground the relational subjectivities of planners and beneficiaries more generally with an eye to broaching the normative terrain of 'what is to be done?'. Through a review of literature at the juncture of planning and critical development studies, and reflections on my own cross-disciplinary travels, the article identifies four theoretical concepts that planning needs to recognize and engage in order to strengthen both its critical and normative orientations: the structures of imperialism, agency and resistance among the 'beneficiaries' of planning action, the subjectivity of planers and the conditions of collective action. The article argues that, cumulatively, these concepts can inform an ethics of accountability that encompasses both postcolonial critique and a 'reflexive relationality'.

Feminist theory has expanded the sphere within which politics is assumed to occur and thus can make significant contributions to research on state transition. This paper traces the development of a research project wherein we combined our expertise and feminist commitments to explore the current political transition in Nepal. The project conceptualized market formation and resource governance to be important sites of political contestation and the formation of citizen subjectivities. Within these sites, we sought to understand what 'democracy' looks like at different scales, especially where, when and how people make claims and build critical accounts of established social systems in its name. Here, we reflect how on our feminist political and intellectual commitments helped develop a collaborative methodology and approach to state transition that integrates 'politics' across scales. The insights include the role played by spaces of social reproduction in everyday processes of state and political transformation, and the analytical opportunities opened up when research collaborations take the form of a community of inquiry within the field itself. We found ourselves turning back to the long tradition of feminist scholarship to show how the household is the origin of inequalities and how such relations transmit into wider contestations over 'democracy'.

How does 'civil society' serve the Washington Consensus while also attracting the aspirations of left political activists and progressive planners? We address this troubling question by interrogating the concept of civil society, with due respect to the actual role played by civil society in the development of capitalism. Based on close readings of Hegel, Marx and planning theory dealing with it, we also argue that the discourse of civil society now serves neoliberalism quite well, but provides dubious support for 'radical' or 'insurgent' planning. As an ideal for the latter, we propose instead the radical democratization of both the economy and the state.

This paper tracks the transition of "creative city" planning from the gentrified downtown to the disinvested inner-suburbs. It attends particularly to contradictory notions of community mobilized by proponents of inner-suburban revitalization and by residents and business owners who daily inhabit inner-suburban commercial streets where cultural planning interventions are typically targeted. It further argues that those contradictory notions indicate immanent displacement pressure. The argument builds around data gleaned from an action research project in Toronto's Mount Dennis neighbourhood, a former manufacturing neighbourhood that is now home to a large number of precariously employed new immigrants. We contend that community engaged research not only allows for an analysis of the race and class dimensions of creative city planning, it consolidates marginalized perspectives and opens up alternative possibilities for planning and development. We also claim that the relational, exploratory and sometimes fraught process of sharing knowledge with community-based researchers enriches critical research on the exclusionary politics of redevelopment planning.

AbstractQuestions of state formation and public authority have been at the top of the development and political agenda in Nepal since 2006. The post-2006 so-called 'political transition' has been characterized by rising ethnic tensions, violence, strikes, and a bewildering kaleidoscope of leaders gaining political leverage, only to be marginalized again. In 2015, the Constitution was finally adopted following the earthquakes and amid violent protests from groups who felt their needs were marginalized in the final version. In this article we are concerned to probe how struggles over different technologies of government help throw into relief the various terrains within which public authority is claimed and contested, and, as a result, help to expose the limits of the state. Using the forestry sector as an ethnographic lens, we argue that there is both a profound failure by the state to provide services and stable governanceas well asan ability to reproduce itself and to function in some contexts. It is therefore important to understand public authority during this period as both stable and unstable—and at times, instability is what helps to perpetuate particular imaginaries of the Nepali state.

ABSTRACTThe political economy literature on post‐disaster reconstruction tends to contrast 'disaster capitalism' narratives denouncing the predatory character of neoliberal rebuilding, and 'building back better' policies supporting market‐driven reconstruction. This article seeks to provide a more nuanced account, developing the concept of 'disaster financialization' through a case study of household‐level changes experienced through processes of post‐earthquake reconstruction in Nepal. The concept of disaster financialization describes not only the integration of disaster‐affected households into the cash‐based logic of reconstruction instituted by donors and government authorities, but also the financialization of their lives, social relations and subjectivities. It is a transitive process involving a shift into financialized mechanisms of disaster prevention, adaptation and recovery. Analysing contrasting experiences across three earthquake‐affected districts in Nepal, this study proposes disaster financialization as an integrative term through which to understand the simultaneous acceleration of monetization, the leveraging of cash incentives by donors and government to 'build back better', and the flurry of financial transactions associated with reconstruction processes. While some aspects of disaster financialization have had negative social impacts, such as debt‐related anxieties and a breakdown of voluntary labour exchanges hurting the most vulnerable, the process has taken on variegated forms, with equally variegated effects, reflecting household characteristics and interactions with financial institutions.