No abstract

Global health partnerships (GHPs) are the conceptual cousin of partnerships in the development sphere. Since their emergence in the 1990s, the GHP mode of working and funding has mainly been applied to single-disease, vertical interventions. However, GHPs are increasingly being used to enact Health Systems Strengthening and to address the global health worker shortage. In contrast to other critical explorations of GHPs, we explore in this article how the fact, act, and aspiration of binding different actors together around the ideology and modes of partnership working produces the perpetual state of being in a bind. This is an original analytical framework drawing on research in Sierra Leone and London. We offer new insights into the ways in which GHPs function and are experienced, showing that along with the successes of partnership work, such arrangements are often and unavoidably tense, uncomfortable, and a source of frustration and angst.

African clothing industries have declined since the implementation of economic liberalization policies in the early 1980s whilst used‐clothing imports to Africa have increased. The general effects of economic liberalization on African clothing industries are well documented, although little research has been conducted on the particular impact of increased imports of second‐hand clothes on the local manufacturing sectors. Whether these two processes are causally related is difficult to determine due to limitations in official data sets. In this article, the used‐clothing trade is explored in detail and a broad range of cultural and local economic processes are investigated. Trends such as declining local purchasing power and the opening of African markets to cheap new clothing imports, as well as imports of used‐clothing, are examined, along with the converse boost to African clothing export production resulting from preferential trade agreements in the 2000s. With respect to the differential legal and illegal imports of second‐hand clothing to selected African countries, it is demonstrated that official trade data sets often fail to capture the nuances of contemporary social and economic processes.

The trade in used commodities has received limited geographical attention. The global production network (GPN) approach offers a theoretical frame through which to explore how second‐hand goods, such as used cars, are traded internationally. The structure of a trade network and the tensions within it are researched through an inductive empirical GPN method and the embeddedness of powerful actors is related to context specific discourse. This article contributes to the analysis of the links between production and consumption through investigating informal and corrupt economic networks and exploring how a trade flow is embedded in a patrimonial state. The empirical case study demonstrates how used commodities are re‐produced through political and cultural processes. In Japan a strict inspection regime excludes many used cars from the domestic market, some of which are exported via South Africa for sale in Mozambique. Embedded actors, including Pakistani trading families, play key roles in the governance of this international trade network. Corrupt individuals within the Mozambican customs service exert power at the import node to extract rent from this trade network, but the official neoliberal narrative of ‘development success’ in Mozambique constrains space for critique of their actions. Discussing the example of used car imports demonstrates how there are political structures which enable actors to have agency in trade networks and this shows how studies of international commodity flows have to stretch beyond the immediate manifestation of trade networks and chains to capture the dynamics of power relations.

Urban gentrification debates are essentially anthropocentric, ignoring how the presence of animals at the gentrification frontier can promote or oppose capital accumulation. By way of corrective, this article reviews geographical work on the relations of human and non-human animals in gentrifying neighbourhoods, arguing for a trans-species perspective on urban gentrification that considers the different ways animals are caught up in gentrification struggles. Noting that gentrification sometimes involves the violent and unjust displacement of non-human animals, the article concludes by arguing that anti-gentrification discourse might usefully place more emphasis on the animal ‘right to the city’.