Gillian Hart, Disabling Globalization: Places of Power in Post-Apartheid South Africa. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.

Extract

Dominant understandings of globalization, according to Gillian Hart, are “disabling.” By measuring the effect of the “global” on the “local,” conventional impact studies rely on a flawed conceptual opposition of time and space: the “global” is temporal and dynamic, the “local” spatial and static (12–13). This drives the lament, heard in post-apartheid government circles, that “there is no alternative” to the pro-globalization policies adopted when the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) was displaced in June 1996 by a plan known as Growth, Employment and Redistribution (GEAR). “The central premise of GEAR was that an orthodox neoliberal package—tight fiscal austerity, monetary discipline, wage restraints, reducing corporate taxes, trade liberalization, and phasing out exchange controls—would lure investment . . . unleash rapid growth, tighten labor markets, and drive up wages” (20). A few years later, poverty had grown among the poorest and unemployment remained high.