Reconfiguring African Studies, reconfiguring economics: centring intersectionality and social stratification

Abstract

African and African diaspora scholars have made key contributions to contemporary understandings of inequality, intersectionality, institutions and ‘development'. A recent major contribution to this debate is offered by Franklin Obeng-Odoom’s Property, Institutions and Social Stratification in Africa (Cambridge University Press, 2020). Drawing on a wide range of literatures, but especially from traditions of Black radical economic thought that span the United States, the Caribbean and Africa, the book calls for intersectional perspectives to be brought to bear on classical institutionalist and stratification economics traditions, in order to rethink ‘development economics’ as we know it. Obeng-Odoom utilises these traditions to make sense of persistent and increasing intra- and inter-group inequalities in Africa and between Africa and the world, showing how classed, raced and gendered identities shape diverse political and economic experiences, including the access to property or employment opportunities. At the same time, Black wo*men economists and wo*men economists of Colour have made notable contributions to the themes addressed by Obeng-Odoom's book – an archive that deserves deep attention. Gathering a collective of feminist economists from and beyond Africa (Abena D. Oduro, Tanita J. Lewis, Lebohang Liepollo Pheko, Sara Stevano, Ingrid Kvangraven), this symposium paper develops a conversation around the themes of intersectionality and social stratification in Africa.

Les chercheurs africains et de la diaspora africaine ont contribué de manière significative à la compréhension contemporaine de l'inégalité, de l'intersectionnalité, des institutions et du « développement ». Une récente publication de Franklin Obeng-Odoom's Property, Institutions and Social Stratification in Africa (Cambridge University Press, 2020), apporte une contribution majeure à ce débat. Ce livre, s'appuie sur un large éventail de littératures, notamment sur les courants de la pensée économique radicale noire qui s'étendent aux États-Unis, aux Caraïbes et à l'Afrique. Il préconise qu'une approche intersectionnelle soi apportée aux courants institutionnels classiques et aux études de de stratification économique afin de reconsidérer l'“économie du développement” telle que nous la connaissons. Obeng-Odoom se fonde sur ces courants pour expliquer les inégalités persistantes et croissantes entre les groupes en Afrique et entre l'Afrique et le reste du monde. Il montre comment les identités de classe, de race et de sexe façonnent les expériences politiques et économiques, y compris l'accès à la propriété ou aux opportunités d'emploi. En parallèle, les Black wo*men economists and wo*men economists of Colour ont apporté des contributions notables aux thèmes abordés dans l'ouvrage d'Obeng-Odoom - des archives qui méritent une attention particulière. Regroupant un collectif d'économistes féministes d'Afrique et d'ailleurs (Abena D. Oduro, Tanita J. Lewis, Lebohang Liepollo Pheko, Sara Stevano, Ingrid Kvangraven), cet ouvrage de symposium développe une conversation autour des thèmes de l'intersectionnalité et de la stratification sociale en Afrique.

Keywords:

• Feminist economics
• property
• inequality
• institutions
• decolonising economics
• African Studies

Mots clés:

• Économie féministe
• propriété
• inégalité
• Institutions
• décolonisation de l'économie
• études africaines

African and African diaspora scholars have made key contributions to contemporary understandings of inequality, intersectionality, institutions and ‘development’. A recent major contribution to this debate is offered by Franklin Obeng-Odoom’s Property, Institutions and Social Stratification in Africa (Obeng-Odoom 2020).

Drawing on a wide range of literatures, but especially from traditions of Black radical economic thought that span the United States, the Caribbean and Africa, the book calls for intersectional perspectives to be brought to bear on classical institutionalist and stratification economics traditions, in order to rethink ‘development economics’ as we know it. Obeng-Odoom utilises these traditions to make sense of persistent and increasing intra- and inter-group inequalities in Africa and between Africa and the world, showing how classed, raced and gendered identities shape diverse political and economic experiences, including access to property or employment opportunities. The book avoids epistemic compartmentalisation and brings African debates into conversations with other arenas of Black experience and thought.

These engagements with intersectionality debates, as is evident in the key categories of the book – intersectionality, stratification, property, institutions – provide opportunities for a larger conversation about not only the reconfiguration of development economics, but also of African Studies at large. At the same time, Black wo*men¹ economists and wo*men economists of Colour have made notable contributions to the themes addressed by Obeng-Odoom’s book – this knowledge archive deserves due credit and attention, as several of the commentaries to follow show.

Two of the co-authors (Ouma/Vogt-William) of this paper sought to nurture this debate by organising a round table debate between Franklin Obeng-Odoom and several wo*men economists in December 2021, most of whom are from Africa and its diasporas. We did this from our institutional locus, the ‘Africa Multiple’ Cluster of Excellence,² in which the Bayreuth, Lagos, Rhodes, Joseph Ki-Zerbo and Moi Universities seek to work towards the reconfiguration of African Studies, at both conceptual and structural levels. The Cluster is conceived as a transformative space within which to systematically advance the study of African and African diasporic ways of life and world-making, via the pursuit of cutting-edge research and theory-building based on new inter- and transdisciplinary formats of research cooperation. The key concepts of multiplicity, relationality and reflexivity anchor this project.

The Cluster's Gender and Diversity Office, where one of the co-authors (Vogt-William) is the Director, is a key structural interface between the arenas of research and institutional administration where the Reconfiguring African Studies agenda is negotiated, navigated and implemented. We are invested in generating spaces and opportunities for such scholarly exchanges along the conceptual trajectories of intersectional, critical diversity and decolonial scholarship.

Why did we (Ouma/Vogt-William) single out ‘Economics’ for our round table? First, we think that reconfiguring African Studies entails rethinking disciplinary cultures and practices, whereby revisiting disciplinary parameters is a necessary step towards such rethinking with a view to optimising knowledge production practices for a viable 21st century African Studies. In that sense, economics is not special; all disciplines should stand scrutiny from a ‘reconfiguring perspective’, as regards knowledge production positionalities, the prioritisation of certain knowledge archives imbued with definitional authority at the expense and exclusion of others, the distribution of research resources, the (lack of) representation of certain bodies in knowledge production spaces, levels of reflexivity in research practices, to name just a few aspects. However, economics is special in terms of its social power and policy impact, its partial self-insulation from other disciplines in the social sciences, the normative and socio-demographic homogeneity of power centres in economics (White / Heteronormative / Male / Masculine / Middle-Upper Class / Global North), and the lack of representation of African and Afrodiasporan ideas and scholars in the global economics landscape, which led Zambian economist Grieve Chelwa to argue that ‘Economics has an Africa problem’ (Chelwa 2021). Publications such as those by Franklin Obeng-Odoom are welcome opportunities to address the complex web of the coloniality of economic knowledge and to bring into greater attention the rich archives of economic thought produced by heterodox African continental and diaspora thinkers as counter-narratives. Notably these critical marginalised perspectives are all but visible in mainstream economics (i.e., varieties of neoclassical economics), which by now has attained a firm grip on most economics departments in Africa (Stein 2021).³

Hence, the goal of the round table was to gather dissenting African continental and diasporic voices in the study of the economy and develop the conversation around the themes of intersectionality, property, institutions and social stratification via the book of Obeng-Odoom. The intellectual practice offered in his work – that of a scholar venturing beyond conventional territories of economic thought and reading widely across spatial and disciplinary boundaries, including Black feminist thought – is something to be emulated in other research settings, including our very own research cluster. We must acknowledge that feminist economists or those utilising feminist ideas to study ‘the economy’ (without necessarily calling themselves ‘economists’) have long been working with the key concepts addressed in the book (see Bastia 2014; Imam, Sow, and Mama 1997; O'Laughlin 1996; Oduro and van Staveren 2015; Okome 2005; Rodriguez, Tsikata, and Adomako Ampofo 2015; Tsikata 2016; Zein-Elabdin 1997; Zein-Elabdin 2009).⁴ Thus, constructive and respectful engagements between differently positioned interlocutors were envisioned in order to move the debate forward while at the same time doing justice to the rich archive produced by feminist scholars in and beyond Africa. We maintain that this is not a closed-off archive, but rather a tree of radical thought that extends its epistemic reach and strength of argument. This is well-demonstrated by initiatives such as the African Feminist Macroeconomic Academy,⁵ the vibrant activities of the International Association of Feminist Economics, recent exchanges by African feminist political economists (Moudouthe, Dieng, and Ossome 2019; Salla Dieng and Ossome, 2022; for a general overview, see Jacobsen 2020), or the more general contributions of the Association for the Advancement of African Women Economists (AAAWE).

For the following exchange, we were fortunate to have a position statement from Franklin Obeng-Odoom on his book, followed by interventions from the following wo*men economists⁶: Abena D. Oduro, Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Ghana, appreciates Obeng-Odoom’s intervention and calls out fellow economists particularly for their neglect of care work and intra-household dynamics and their failure to rigorously unpack the underlying, deeper structural forces that shape various social inequalities. However, she also finds the book neglects a significant proportion of the existing (African) feminist economic archive. Tanita J. Lewis, a graduate student of development economics at SOAS and co-author of a powerful overview of the field of stratification economics (Lewis, Asare, and Fields 2021), lauds the book for its global-relational and intersectionality-theory inspired materialist take on the production of development and underdevelopment. In their view, the theoretical perspectives mobilised in the book also help in scrutinising the role that economics as a discipline plays in producing and reproducing inter- and intra-group inequalities. Lewis finally highlights that the book represents a powerful call for reparations, which have both an economic and ecological dimension. Lebohang Liepollo Pheko, a Senior Research Fellow at the Trade Collective Think Tank, flags economics for its white hegemony (Pailey 2019) and its voracious appetite to reproduce Black and Brown victimhood. She believes that Obeng-Odoom’s book and the theoretical perspective of stratification economics can, perhaps, help to decolonise the field and debunk ‘flat world’ narratives. She also points out various feminist African scholars whose work would be highly beneficial to such an endeavour, but are currently not visible in the book. Sara Stevano, an economist at SOAS, finds the strong rejection of ‘culture-based explanations of economic phenomena’ in Obeng-Odoom’s book refreshing, reaffirming the need for an analysis that has a material basis, such as land, property, and the means of production. She also finds ‘there is a need to bridge micro–macro divides to analyse inequality’, as well as develop the conceptual and methodological tools that help advance this. Finally, she calls upon Obeng-Odoom and others to centre the dynamics of social reproduction more firmly in stratification economics and to do more justice to those African and non-African feminist scholars who have been doing this for many years.

The exchanges will be concluded with a final commentary by Ingrid Kvangraven, an economist at King’s College London. Kvangraven has made a number of contributions to the current critical debate on the state of economics, along with fellow colleagues from Diversifying and Decolonising Economics (D-Econ) and the Association for Heterodox Economics (AHE),⁷ and she was present during the original round table (online). We had also invited a mainstream development economist to the original round table event in the hope of deeper engagements with the arguments and the archive on which Property, Institutions and Social Stratification in Africa (Obeng-Odoom, 2020) builds. While economics frequently ‘cancels’ approaches not aligned with the mainstream, we still decided to build a bridge to facilitate these necessary conversations. Despite our efforts, we witnessed a repetition of the type of disengaged scholarship at the event that Bigsten (2020) practised in his shallow review of Obeng-Odoom’s book. While we point out the problematic aspect of this mainstream stance here, this is clearly a structural problem embedded in the discipline of economics and its inability to respond adequately to fundamental critique. Such disengagement is particularly concerning because mainstream economics’ own numerous flawed assumptions and policy advice have actively contributed to the reproduction of inequalities in the global economy (Komlos 2019; 2021). However, though not reproduced here in its entirety, such mainstream positions inevitably shape and have shaped the frequently toxic landscape that many Black wo*men economists and wo*men economists of Colour are navigating in their daily struggles to transform the discipline of economics (Dupas et al. 2021; Dutt 2020). Against this canvas, one might ruminate on Joan Tronto’s pithy observation:

Why has the language of economics seemingly come to replace all other forms of political language? […] What has gone wrong […] is that we have lost sight of the other side of human existence besides the world of the ‘economy’. In addition to our economic roles as workers and consumers, citizens live in two other realms as well: the world of intimate caring in our households, families and circles of friends, and in the political world. (Tronto 2013, xi)

Tronto points out how the language of (mainstream) economics currently erases, and has erased questions of structural inequality, citizenship, distribution of resources and the shaping of geopolitical spaces and relationalities. Noting Tronto’s advocacy of a shift in the focus of economics in public (gendered, raced, classed) realms of the workplace, entertainment, leisure and consumption, to include more private gendered, classed (and raced) spaces like the household, we might consider political dimensions as regards intersectional complexities of citizenship and power relations, which shape economic frames in spaces other than those commonly aligned with the ‘economic’. In doing so, Tronto squarely locates the onus of care politics both in private familial spaces as well as public spaces, where ‘business’ is said to occur. This resonates with an earlier observation by the late Zambian development economist Guy Mhone – that unequal interdependencies circumscribed by household spaces would require an evolution of a microeconomic theory that addresses the inequality dimensions of utility considerations: joint but unequal consumption or joint but unequal decision-making as regards production factors, savings and investments (Mhone 1997, 131).

From the vantage point of care politics too, it bears thinking then that Obeng-Odoom’s work and the contributions of the feminist economists here demonstrate care for the discipline of economics by recursively addressing the coloniality of mainstream economics (Kellecioglu 2020), as regards the situated perspectives of marginalised economist knowledge archives, through their critiques and their visions of how economics itself might be decolonised as an academic discipline and as a socio-cultural and political practice. Such critique as that proffered here can, thus, be read as a mode of care aligned with Martin et al.’s observations on scholars’ entanglements with their subject matter as generative of affective economies:

To disavow care would leave intact binaries that circumscribe realms of legitimate and illegitimate knowledge and the pervasive bifurcations that prioritize the rational over the sensory and affective dimensions of knowledge. […] Care and its politics will continue to contour and propel research, and the partialities and limits of care must be made evident, be examined and be taken into account. Foregrounding care and its fraught politics is then one way to ‘stay with the trouble’ and take situated knowledges seriously […]. (Martin, Myers, and Viseu 2015, 631)

While rendering visible the fraught bifurcations in the discipline of economics, these engagements also mobilise understandings of intersectionality as a mode of care ethics in knowledge production which appreciates how social locations are produced by discursive aggregates accumulating around gender, race, class, geographical and geopolitical locations, among other categories. Contingent on care politics, the contributions here work with an intersectional care ethics evidently invested in ‘a more expansive and accurate portrayal of the interlocking and mutually enforcing axes of power that affect the operationalization of care on a global level’ by considering ‘how such relationships and concomitant distributions of advantage and disadvantage have developed historically and exist contemporarily’ (Hankivsky 2014, 255). Within these parameters of care politics and care ethics then, we see this conversation as addressing the call by the late Black feminist scholar bell hooks to ‘face reality even as we collectively imagine ways to move beyond boundaries’ (hooks 1994, 207) – a call that Franklin Obeng-Odoom cites in his contribution here and undertakes in his book.

Our invited interlocutors have based their statements on a reading of the introduction and the first chapter of the book. Our last commentator, Ingrid Kvangraven, has already published a review of the book (Kvangraven 2022), thus situating her contribution within a broader frame that captures what our guest feminist scholars have to say alongside what the book as a whole achieves. Our offering here is thus an exploration of marginalised yet powerful economic archives, via lucid engagements with Obeng-Odoom’s innovative engagement with, and advancement of, stratification economics.

Franklin Obeng-Odoom

In my book, Property, Institutions, and Social Stratification in Africa (Obeng-Odoom 2020), I seek fresh answers to questions about the nature of, and solutions to, social stratification. This social problem persists in Africa but also between Africa and the rest of the world. These multiple inequalities are not only multiscale, they are also intertwined, locally, regionally, and globally.

‘The personal is political’

Feminists have taught us that the ‘the personal is political’ (Hanisch [1969] 2006). Political economy is also very personal. Therefore, I revisit the preface of the book, which outlines my personal rationale for writing it. Re-engaging that personal preface helps to show that my professional interests in land, space, intersectionality, property, institutions, and stratification, which are key themes in the book under discussion (Obeng-Odoom 2020), are also profoundly personal.

In the preface to the book, I describe my experience with the disconnect between the lay and the learned, within and outside Africa. A Black taxi driver in South Africa analyses inequality and stratification as a function of the land question, a reflection of the unequal racialised, gendered, propertied and power relations across space and time. This is in stark contrast to how white South Africans in general and professional economists broadly analyse the so-called South African, indeed African, condition.

But that is not just personal, it is also just political economy. Tembeka Ngcukaitobi’s recent book, Land Matters (Ngcukaitobi 2021), makes the point. Although they constitute only 8% of the total population, white people in South Africa hold 72% of the agricultural land in South Africa. The majority Black people, constituting 81% of the population, hold only 4% of land (Ngcukaitobi 2021, 110). The disproportionate ownership of land value is, perhaps, even more stark. But this is simply not a case of Black and white stratification. It is also highly gendered.

As shown in Land Matters, white men have been more willing to give land to Black men, than to Black women. Intersectionality, as an analytical framework, is often taken as a formula: Race plus Class, plus Gender equals Black feminism. But Kimberlé Crenshaw, the leading Black feminist who pioneered and popularised the use of this approach, would consider this formulaic interpretation essentialist (Crenshaw 1992, 402–440). Indeed, if we look at the Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas hearing, a key context of Crenshaw’s theorising, and the jurisprudence of Justice Clarence Thomas (the conservative Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States) (Hill 1977; Thomas 2008), we must conclude that intersectionality is a particular approach to explaining and resolving inter-group inequality and stratification within what C.J. Robinson called the ‘Black Radical Tradition’ (Robinson 1983), a collage of analytical and activist approaches for Black emancipation, liberation of the Global South.

Central to this tradition is the land question. While white South Africans recurrently focus on capital and corruption (Sackur 2012), Black South Africans typically emphasise land and liberty in their explanation of stratification. Land really matters for inequality in the whole world, but as Henry George comprehensively demonstrated, most scholarship on land is ‘perplexed philosophy’ (George [1892] 1988). It neither consistently explains nor comprehensively resolves social stratification. Stratification economics, developed by Black economists (Darity Jr et al. 2017, 35–51), provides a much firmer pathway to doing so.

The book

In trying to contribute to this subfield, Property, Institutions, and Social Stratification in Africa reflects my long-standing interests in the political economy of development, urban and regional economics, natural resources and the environment.

In the social sciences, Henry George developed ‘a way of seeing’ that could combine these elements (George 1898). George had an integrated framework in which he dealt with ethical, economic, and ecological questions. However, modern Georgists have fractured and fragmented this approach. Some choose ethical over economic questions; others prefer his economics to his ethics (see Obeng-Odoom 2022). Ecological questions could be taken even more seriously.⁸

To address these problems, I seek a holistic hybridisation of Georgist, institutional, and stratification economics. This approach framed the needed data, collected from a variety of sources, and analysed in multiple ways. Overall, I argue, with respect to the questions I ask and existing scholarship on inequality and stratification, as follows:

First, not only is Africa underdeveloped historically, as Walter Rodney ([1972] 2011) demonstrated so convincingly, but also African societies currently develop the Global North.

Second, the rules of development reproduce this stratification by transferring rents from producers – and reproducers – to absentee landlords both within and outside Africa. Following the Georgist tradition, ‘rent, in its economic sense – that is, when used, as I am using it, to distinguish that part of the produce which accrues to the owners of land or other natural capabilities by virtue of their ownership – differs in meaning from the word rent as commonly used’ (see George [1897] 1935, 165).⁹ The key point here is that rent may be enhanced by location, social change, and, some combination of the two and others. But rent, in general, is the unearned privilege extracted by landlords.

And third, those seeking to interpret and address this stratification not only fail in exposition, they also succeed in obfuscation.

To date, I have seen three sets of responses to these arguments: Dismissal, encouragement, and total support.¹⁰ Mainstream economists lead the way with denunciation.¹¹ In his book, Is There a Future for Heterodox Economics? Geoffrey Hodgson (2019) argues that this response by mainstream economists is typical. Some political economists, including Hodgson himself, aspire to convince mainstream economists (see also Hodgson 2019, 164–165, 167; Markusen 2005). Without changing the minds of economists, such economists contend, political economy has failed. Others argue that convincing economists is not the goal; winning others over to political economy is the aspiration (Dow 2021, 153–157; Stilwell, Butler, and Jones 2009).

My own view is that whether economists change their minds is immaterial. An obsession with what mainstream economists think of political economy reproduces the problem of economic colonialism and the imperialism of economics (Mäki and Marchionni 2011, 645–665), against which there is a growing global consensus (Ambler, Earl, and Scott 2022; Ouma 2021). Where only a few people monopolise not only knowledge production in economics, but also control the terms and instruments of knowledge production and dissemination, social science is hindered (Obeng-Odoom 2019, 211–224). Decolonising economics must, therefore, include opening up the discipline to all.

Implications

Democratising the world economy, indeed (development) economics is one clear implication of the arguments in Property, Institutions, and Social Stratification in Africa. Decolonising sustainability is another. Reconstructing institutions, particularly landed property rights, is central to both. Shifting the priorities from economics to political economy would entail contradictions and challenge, but change is possible (Stilwell 2019, 35–62). As our research becomes decolonised, so must our teaching and activism: shifting from pedagogical monism to pedagogical pluralism is a first step.

Going further to pedagogical citizenship is firmer still. This ‘teaching to transgress’, to use the phrase of bell hooks, the eminent Black feminist, is congruent with research and activism to transgress, which create what she calls ‘an openness of mind and heart that allows us to face reality even as we collectively imagine ways to move beyond boundaries, to transgress. This is ‘education as the practice of freedom’ (hooks 1994, 207), our challenge to ‘African studies in distress’ (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Seesemann, and Vogt-William 2022, 83–100), a collective attempt to ‘reconfigure African studies and economics by centring intersectionality and social stratification’.

Abena D. Oduro

Franklin Obeng-Odoom’s book is a welcome addition to the literature on inequality in Africa. The objective of the book is to interrogate the development-inequality nexus in Africa by answering five important questions. What are the patterns and dimensions of inequality? What are the causes of inequality? Why does inequality persist? Why is inequality an important focus for political economy analysis? What can and is being done about inequality and by whom? (10). On page 37, Obeng-Odoom proposes stratification economics as a route to achieving the change he states Africa requires, thus suggesting that investigating the answers to the questions he has raised will be analysed using stratification economics.

Stratification economics is based on a number of worldviews. These include the intergenerational transmission effects of resource transfer, the motivation of privileged groups to hold onto privilege, and the role of conscious policy to abort the persistence of privilege (Darity 2005). These aspects of stratification economics bring added value to analysis in development economics. This is because it requires that the development economist unpacks the dummy variable that is usually included in regression models to capture dimensions of inequality and privilege based on attributes such as gender, race and ethnicity. The development economist must foray into the other disciplines in the social sciences and employ methods that they usually avoid and therefore do not know much about in order to gain insight into the phenomena being investigated. Too often, economists tend to be satisfied with identifying significant explanatory variables, using what is considered to be rigorous quantitative techniques, without rigorously unpacking what is behind the statistically significant relationships. For example, many poverty regressions find that as the level of educational attainment increases the likelihood of having a level of consumption expenditure below the poverty line reduces. A common reason provided to explain why such a relationship exists is that the returns to education are higher as one moves up the education ladder. Stratification analysis requires the analyst to delve deeper to find out why a group of individuals have low levels of educational attainment in the first place. Inclusion of stratification economics in the analytical framework of development economics will not only broaden the scope of investigation into possible explanatory variables from the tendency to focus on characteristics of the individual to include national and international contexts, but also create an opening to actively and purposely include these dimensions in the analysis.

Intersectional analysis does not analyse the effect of gender, class, ethnicity, race on inequality separately. Including interaction terms in regression models may not be enough to fully explain the effect of intersecting oppressions. As does stratification economics, centring intersectionality in development economics will require that the analyst delves into other disciplines to understand the intersections they observe and how these intersections explain inequality and other development outcomes.

My reading of the first question that Franklin Obeng-Odoom sets out to answer is that this book will not focus only on the distribution of income but also consider issues such as gender inequality. Indeed, feminist economics has asked and continues to explore answers to the five questions that Obeng-Odoom poses, albeit with a focus on gender inequality. Unfortunately, Obeng-Odoom does not adequately recognise the contribution of feminist economists. An example of this is the discussion on the shortcomings of the measurement of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) on pages 8–9. He states that the GDP does not incorporate ‘ … the nurturing and useful roles of caring for the home, the elderly and the weak … ’ (emphasis added). The caring roles are invariably provided by women and girls and are not only useful, but integral and critical to the functioning of economies. Feminists have used the metaphor of the home as the factory that produces and maintains the farm, factory, office and other workers upon whom the economy depends; and indeed, the owners of capital. The workers in the home factory are women and girls whose services are unpaid, undervalued, devalued and made invisible by the way in which GDP is measured. Unfortunately, Franklin Obeng-Odoom does not use his commentary on the GDP to make visible the contributions of women and girls as workers in the home and the informal economy and to recognise the contribution of feminist economists such as Amporfu et al. (2018), Beneria (1981), Budlender (2008) and Waring (1988) to this discussion, with only the latter being cited at a relatively late stage in the book (201).¹²

In situating the discussion on why development economics fails Africa, Franklin Obeng-Odoom begins his analysis by critically examining two books that were published 29 years apart. The two books were probably chosen for scrutiny because their explanations of why development economics has failed Africa are aligned to what Franklin Obeng-Odoom identifies is the common narrative. He begins with a discussion on Polly Hill’s Development Economics on Trial (Hill 1986). He states that she bemoans the conceptual mistakes that are made and the unquestioning reliance on official statistics. In particular, Obeng-Odoom presents Hill’s concerns about the neglect of development economics of some issues. These are (1) the heterogenous complexities within households (2) the study of inheritance and transmission of wealth and (3) the peculiarities and complexities of women’s experiences, including with land, men and other women (26). Nine years after Hill’s observations, there is evidence that feminist economics has begun to address these issues. Obeng-Odoom’s decision to flag them could be considered as evidence of the failure of mainstream and Marxist development economics to pay adequate attention to developments within feminist economics. Researchers are exploring the complexities within households. See, for example, Elizabeth Gummerson and Daniel Schneider (2013) on bargaining within non-nuclear households that uses South African data. The Routledge Handbook of Feminist Economics published in 2021 has chapters that contain reviews of work that has been done on some of these issues. I refer the reader to the chapter written by Dzodzi Tsikata and Gertrude Dzifa Torvikey (Tsikata and Torvikey 2021) on rural women’s livelihoods and food security in Africa and the references therein. The Palgrave Handbook of African Women’s Studies, edited by Olajumoke Yacob-Haliso and Toyin Falola published in 2019 has a chapter by Peace Mungo Sone (Sone 2019) on Women, Land and Law in Africa. I also refer the reader to Lyn Ossome’s publication on the law and women’s land rights (Ossome 2014). There are studies on the mode of asset acquisition that explore issues of inheritance such as Deere et al. (2013).

Despite my critical remarks on the omissions of several key accounts of African women feminist economists, I am certain that Franklin Obeng-Odoom’s book will generate a lot of debate and will provoke development economists who are so inclined to be more expansive in the tools they use and how they approach the questions they ask and how they formulate the questions they ask.

Tanita J. Lewis

To begin, Obeng-Odoom’s immediate use of Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth in his introduction is especially striking (Fanon 1983). Starting with the dialectical material relationship between the Global South and the Global North, he immediately sets the scene so that we are discussing colonialism, global inequality, neocolonialism, and imperialism (Obeng-Odoom 2020, 1). These systems are essential to frame our understanding of development economics and why Africa is underdeveloped. Underdeveloped is a state of suppression and oppression, a deliberate construction rather than a benign accident; this notion is best exemplified in Walter Rodney’s seminal work How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (Rodney [1972] 2011). It is essential to understand that the global systems within which African development must operate are fundamentally genocidal and ecocidal.

This perspective shifts how we look at the solutions provided in development economics. It directly challenges mainstream economics, which often obfuscates imperialism and colonialism by trying to hide the socio-political and historical forces of extraction and exploitation. Thus, mainstream economics does not present the economic underdevelopment of Africa as a dialectical relationship with the capitalist development of the Global North. This omission profoundly affects the way we understand the situation; if we do not recognise that people are underdeveloped by someone or some nation, it absolves the latter of any responsibility.

This is one of the fundamental reasons why stratification economics is crucial; because it deals with the structural and intentional processes that generate and maintain hierarchy and inequality (Lewis, Asare, and Fields 2021). We must understand that this is a structural and intentional process of underdevelopment that we see in African countries. When we approach the issue from this point of view, we realise that the same systems of exploitation and domination that cause the challenges we are discussing are the same ones that legitimise much of the knowledge production in mainstream economics. So, it is a two-fold problem, and it reinforces the logics we see around white saviourism and paternalism; the infantilisation of Africa and African peoples is a big issue.

The rejection of cultural determinism is also essential when addressing underdevelopment in Africa. Stratification economics rejects collective dysfunction, personal responsibility, or cultural determinism as a cause of inter-group inequality (Darity 2005). Obeng-Odoom’s unpacking of culture and focus on the material aspects is much needed (2020, 11–15); that is most important: people’s lived material realities. Moving away from an exclusive focus on ideational aspects is necessary for us to appropriately address the institutional material reality of development challenges. Furthermore, centring land and property is crucial to understanding wealth inequality, which is a key aspect of stratification economics. Additionally, Obeng-Odoom’s employment of a global perspective of stratification economics is exciting because much of the current literature focuses largely on African American populations (Lewis, Asare, and Fields 2021).

There is certainly more to be explored in the debate around feminist economics and intersectionality. However, to read a book about economics and see the works of bell hooks and Kimberlé Crenshaw referenced is deeply refreshing (Obeng-Odoom 2020, 9). It is valuable to have their work involved when discussing economics. Often people think of race, class, and gender as purely personal or cultural identities rather than sociological categories that affect one’s material socioeconomic reality. It is imperative to recognise this in discussions of intersectionality and economics. When it comes to engaging the work of African and African-diaspora women economists, although we have some amazing ones assembled in this joint paper, unfortunately, there are not that many and there are fewer still who have a Black radical critical feminist perspective. Existing Black wo*men economists are not sufficiently recognised, either. For example, when we look at the UK, there are no Black women who are economics professors in our universities. There are limits to representation when wider systems remain unchanged and if their perspectives align with orthodoxy; but, nevertheless, the representation of marginalised groups is necessary when a certain demographic is dominating the field. In stratification economics, we understand that if the privileged group dominates the political system, then inequality will persist (Lewis, Asare, and Fields 2021); thus, if they dominate the academic sphere, then the kinds of knowledge production we see, will continue to reinforce the same inequalities we are trying to address.

Obeng-Odoom’s conception of ‘alternative commoning’ and multi-scalar reparative justice, especially righting past, present and future or potential expropriations, has many parallels with reparative justice movements (Obeng-Odoom 2020, 54). Notably, his focus on land rents, the value of land and nature is vital in the context of the climate crisis. There is much knowledge production outside of academia, in organising and movement-building, especially in African and global-majority grassroots movements organising for Planet Repairs. There is a wealth of knowledge to learn from these spaces that economics, development economics especially, can take on to inform analysis and create solutions. Thus, Obeng-Odoom’s attention to reparative justice is the kind of insight we need when addressing economic development in Africa (2020, 56–58). Furthermore, he writes about the need to restructure global economic relations; this is crucial when examining the international financial institutions, where although the Global North predominantly holds the voting power, the decisions made determine the realities of so many countries and so many people’s lives in the Global South (Lukka 2020). It is critical to incorporate all these additional insights and consider how injustice manifests on a global scale.

Liepollo Lebohang Pheko

Many aspects of African and Black feminisms and feminist economics resonate with Franklin Obeng-Odoom’s implicit understanding that human lives cannot be reduced to single characteristics and universalised. These find some alignment with stratification economics in recognising social categories such as race, gender, class, ability and how they are socially constructed and require centring in policy and development planning. These traditions stand in opposition to the ‘rational man’ of orthodox economics. They recognise that causes of poverty and inequality are embedded in the intersection of different inequalities in social relations. Obeng-Odoom (2020) strongly recommends that economic and development policy should be constructed within a broader, feminist framework of human well-being and justice. Economic policy that has been solely concerned with the achievement of output-based metrics such as GDP growth have largely been inadequate in addressing how patriarchy, classism and structural racism determine economic outcomes around the world, including in Africa.

Gurminder Bhambra is very helpful in framing the possibilities of deconstructing the logic of white privilege using ‘methodological whiteness’ as an anchor. The methodologically white development economics (and development practice):

fails to acknowledge the role played by race in the very structuring of that world, and of the ways in which knowledge is constructed and legitimated within it. It fails to recognise the dominance of ‘whiteness’ as anything other than the standard state of affairs and treats a limited perspective – that deriving from white experience – as a universal perspective. At the same time, it treats other perspectives as forms of identity politics explicable within its own universal (but parochial and lesser than its own supposedly universal) understandings (Bhambra 2017, n.p.)

While it is also true feminism that reminds us that the personal is political, as Obeng-Odoom cites, feminism can nurture a potentially humanising development ethic. This requires shifting from white analyses to develop a nuanced and multi-dimensional understanding of Black and Brown women. It is crucial to counter the racist characterisation of passive and voiceless victimhood that Western development imposes, voraciously consumes and toxically reproduces. Accordingly, it would be appropriate for African feminists to be named, to be better cited and centred in this work. Transdiscplinary feminist scholars and activists such as Dzodzi Tsikata, Mojubaolu Okome, Amina Mama, Fatimah Kelleher, Masego Madzwamuse, Nancy Kachingwe, Yoliswa Clarke, Patricia McFadden, Aurea Mouzinho, Puleng Lenka-Bula, and Cheryl Hendricks require greater recognition for their respective works on macro-economics, climate and environmental health, ethics and political science, gendered land and agrarian reform, peace, security and state formation, migration and globalisation, among other issues.

There has been a great resurgence of theorising in feminist political economy. This is probably due to the scepticism of capitalism's capacity to provide solutions for the problems noted by feminist scholars, including gendered socio-political power relations. So feminist political economy has greatly renewed analytical and political relevance that is independent of a colonised patriarchal worldview.

Western development scholars are largely too deeply enmeshed in their own white normative gaze, to step aside from colonial privilege, in order to understand that they are speaking from positions of privilege. Equally inimical to a decolonised development project for the African continent are the claims of convergence theory. It presents a false narrative that the world is converging into this moment, from the same parameters and historical axes. This anti-historical approach erases the trafficking of millions of African people to forced labour across the world. It is deeply dishonest and violently pretends that the buttress of what is known as modern-day economics in the United States, and the industrial revolutions in the United Kingdom and across Europe were not built on the basis of enslaved African labour and child labour. These are premises and utilities that would be completely and correctly abhorrent in any other society today and were, in fact, abhorrent at every moment of human existence. Thus, according to Western logic that African countries need to ‘catch up’ with Western economies, this would require plane loads of British people being deployed to work in African agricultural fields and industrial plants for about three hundred years, with no pay in order to replicate the imperial model of economic and state development. This vision should act as a robust repudiation of mainstream Euro-US American patriarchal orthodox economists.

Finally, Obeng-Odoom has succinctly articulated and criticised the flat world narrative, which rests on the assumption of a ‘triple convergence’. Thomas Friedman (2005) suggests that the flat world makes it possible for billions of people in the middle classes to communicate and cooperate with each other and thus participate in a global social and economic transformation powered by the engine of new information technology. Beyond other toxically orthodox and punitive economic models, Friedman suggests increased (but acutally exploitative) global value chains and most preposterously, the ‘McDonaldization’ of the world as a deterrent against war. By the time his work was published eighteen years ago, the failings of globalisation on the African continent and beyond were already well documented.

The world is, however, not flat and Obeng-Odoom’s work calls attention to the reality that the Global South is also situated in and manifests in the Global North including among African American communities, Afro-Latina communities, Afro-European and Caribbean communities. This requires more thoughtful and nuanced pan-African architecture and internationalist positioning drawing from traditions like the Bandung project where it is understood that, theoretically, we as Africans have our own genealogies from which to draw on and self-sufficient economic lineages from which to grow. This further offers African scholarship the opportunity to reclaim other lineages, other histories, ‘herstories’ and philosophies. I think by invoking Frantz Fanon, Obeng-Odoom positions this book in traditions that are fundamental in reimagining Africa away from Western imperial hegemony.

This reimagining includes the emergence of other social hegemonies that create the possibility for a revival of development conceived as it should be, the indivisible combination of social progress, movement led democratic advancement, and the affirmation of national sovereignty within a negotiated multipolar political economy.

One of the major strengths of Franklin Obeng-Odoom’s work is in foregrounding these blind spots in development economics and problematising them through stratification and institutional economics in the book. Decentring the construction of decolonised development and reframed political economics on the African continent are germane in the light of increasing concerns that neoliberal models of development, including the harsh reforms that prioritised private sector economic growth while retracting social expenditure and safety nets have been inimical and unconscionable failures (Gatwiri, Amboko, and Okolla 2020).

Sara Stevano

I have really enjoyed reading Franklin Obeng-Odoom’s book (Obeng-Odoom 2020). The book raises several important questions and offers hundreds of insights. Most importantly, it lays the foundations for an intellectual project that is of critical significance. In my reading, this project is about articulating an understanding of inequality that is embedded in the processes that produce uneven development, from the perspective of the most marginalised continent in the world. It is an ambitious but necessary agenda that entails re-charting the history of inequality, re-centring the development-inequality nexus as structural (as put in the book), and – also – expanding the meaning of inequality. As a starting point, the book foregrounds African lenses, which are essential to expand the analysis of global inequality through an intersectional lens. In fact, the book recognises that inequality should not only be understood in terms of income or wealth – which is where economics’ limited engagement with inequality has been focused at – but also in terms of race, gender and class. It is on this dimension that a closer engagement with feminist perspectives could be most helpful.

I will structure my comments around three points.

First, I found the strong rejection of culture-based explanations of economic phenomena incredibly refreshing. As noted in the book, a fixation with culture as a determinant of economic failure is pervasive in economics and beyond. I have always found it quite interesting how culture seems to be an attribute that only people from the Global South have. In fact, culture appears to be an all-encompassing, never-changing and loosely defined category that, eventually, does not have much of a meaning once we stop for a second and reflect on it. On this, I want to share with you an example based on my research on labour in Mozambique (see Stevano 2021). In Mozambique, it is very common to encounter culture-based explanations of workers’ engagement with wage work – employers complain about the unsuitability of Mozambican workers to wage employment and often these arguments are reproduced by government officials, too. There is no space to detail everything that is wrong with these takes but these narratives most often serve to justify poor and exploitative working conditions and dismiss workers’ complaints. So, these narratives are not only racist qualifications of an economic model based on the attraction of foreign investment as a key driver of capital accumulation, but they are core to the perpetuation of this model and are key to ensure capital’s access to cheap and disposable labour. In this sense, it is imperative to reject culture-based arguments while recognising that socio-cultural relations have a materialist basis and, in turn, contribute to the reproduction of socio-economic inequalities. If you are interested in a more detailed explanation of this argument, I have written about how the workplace at the bottom of global commodity chains is a site of reproduction of colonial relations, based on the study of the cashew industry in Mozambique (see Stevano 2021).

The second point I want to make is on the level of analysis that is appropriate to take an intersectional approach to inequality. In asserting that inequality is reproduced through global-local relations, the book appears to be more geared towards the macro processes that produce ‘underdevelopment’, based on situating the African continent in relation to the global economy. I think this is very important but, at the same time, inequalities of gender, race/ethnicity and class reflect dynamics that are context-specific and better observed through a focus on everyday practices at the local level. In other words, there is a need to recognise how intersecting inequalities are reproduced at different levels, where the global and the local interact at multiple scales and in different ways. To put it in economic terms, we could say that there is a need to bridge micro–macro divides to analyse inequality. Therefore, more work could go into how – both conceptually and methodologically – relations that are best captured at the micro-level (e.g. organisation of everyday life in households, lineages and communities) can be connected with macro-systemic relations (e.g. the creation of underdevelopment through the continent’s external relations).

One way to do so, and this is my third and final point, is to anchor intersectional analysis to feminist approaches centred on social reproduction. The reason is that, through social reproduction lenses, the division of labour that creates class, race and gender patterns of inclusion, marginalisation and exclusion can be seen more clearly. This is salient because certain forms of work have been under- or devalued in the context of capitalist development, leaving gendered forms of unpaid labour as the backbone of social reproduction among the marginalised and excluded. The means of social reproduction have become increasingly fragmented. Access to land remains a necessary, but insufficient, condition for reproduction and engagement in a multiplicity of precarious occupations have become the norm for survival. From my viewpoint, there is a need to foreground the dynamics of social reproduction – in the everyday and inter-generationally – as a core component of the development-inequality nexus. I would like to conclude by pointing to the work by Bridget O’Laughlin, Ben Cousins, Alex Dubb, Donna Hornby, Farai Mtero, Lyn Ossome and Sirisha Naidu, which I found very instructive on social reproduction in Africa and in the Global South more broadly (see, for example, Cousins et al. 2018; O'Laughlin 1996; Ossome and Naidu 2021).

Ingrid Kvangraven

While many disciplines started to reckon with the colonial legacies of many of their key theoretical and methodological frames in the 1970s, the economics field has lagged severely behind (Kayatekin 2009). Economists’ work on Africa has been particularly problematic (Chelwa 2021) and most studies of economic issues on the continent have since the 1980s largely been devoid of systemic or anti-colonial analysis (Arrighi 2002; Ouma 2017).

Furthermore, in the wake of the escalation of the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, the economics field has increasingly been forced to face its problems with race and racism, but it has tended to do so in a partial and inadequate manner (Kvangraven and Kesar 2020; Ouma 2021). In this context, Franklin Obeng-Odoom’s book, Property, Institutions and Social Stratification in Africa (Obeng-Odoom, 2020), offers an excellent opportunity to radically push forward a much-needed systematic reckoning with the colonial and racist ways in which economics has developed and the way economists have approached questions of economic development in Africa. When I first reviewed Obeng-Odoom’s book, I wrote that it opens the door for a discussion of what decolonising economics could entail and for more radical imaginations of what alternatives exist, but it does not fully fling it open (Kvangraven 2022). The round table organised at Bayreuth and this current symposium in Critical African Studies are, therefore, excellent opportunities for us to collectively explore what flinging open the door could mean and the implications it could have.

This is incredibly important given that much of the dominant scholarship on Africa is thoroughly Eurocentric, even when trying to grapple with questions of colonialism and the trade in enslaved people from Africa. Eurocentrism entails an understanding that capitalism emerged endogenously in Europe, abstracted from associated processes such as the transatlantic enslavement and colonialism, and a universalisation of such a partial understanding in attempts to explain socioeconomic phenomena across the world (Amin 1989/2009; Blaut 1993; Hobson 2013). Eurocentric theorisation stands in contrast to the insights of radical anti-colonial scholars that saw imperialism and structural racism as intricately connected to the development of capitalism in Europe (Amin 1974; Robinson 1983; Williams 1944). With such an understanding of Eurocentrism, it is important to keep in mind that one can study issues such as colonialism, imperialism, the trade in enslaved Africans, and race, from both Eurocentric and non-Eurocentric starting points.

Eurocentric frameworks often explain deviations from what is considered the benchmark or norm as aberrations or imperfections. If we think of the project to decolonise economics as one that challenges dominant economic categories, that present themselves as neutral, and see ‘others’ as aberrations (for example through gender, race or caste differentiations, or dichotomies between core/periphery, traditional/modern, capitalist/non-capitalist, developed/underdeveloped), then insights from feminist economics become essential for the project (Alves et al. 2024). For example, feminist economists have long pointed to how masculine biases prevail in economic theory, as economic behaviour is analysed though the lens of a rational utility-maximising agent (homo economicus), where ‘feminist’ attributes such as empathy, altruism, or subjectivity are considered aberrations to this norm (Nelson 1995). From a feminist perspective, the neglect of social and emotional dimensions of human behaviour are a limitation in economics, not a sign of rigour, just as the neglect of imperialist processes is a limitation from a decolonisation perspective. More generally, critical political economy analysis in Africa and beyond generally demands a holistic understanding of the social reproduction of labour (Ouma 2017). From theoretical, empirical, and policy-oriented perspectives, leaving aside feminist or anti-colonial accounts of economic processes risks producing a distorted understanding of economic questions (Kvangraven and Kesar 2021; Oduro and van Staveren 2015).

The discussion that Obeng-Odoom’s book has generated at the University of Bayreuth’s Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence is, thus, central for both advancing the agenda of decolonising thinking about economic issues in Africa and for advancing critical political economy more broadly. Indeed, the roundtable panellists all noted ways in which analysis of African political economy would need to be expanded beyond Obeng-Odoom’s book, with heavy emphasis on feminist political economy. Abena D. Oduro calls for a deeper engagement with radical African feminists and with radical feminism, given the integral role of care, that is provided primarily by women and girls, for the functioning of economies. Notably, both Oduro and Liepollo Lebohang Pheko note omissions of key accounts of African women feminist economists in Obeng-Odoom’s book and suggest scholars to engage for rectification. What is more, both Tanita J. Lewis and Pheko made connections to how the problems of the field can be understood in context of the vast inequalities and injustices within the field itself, such as the privilege of Global North authors that contribute to reproducing the ‘white gaze’ in scholarship on Africa (Bhambra 2017; Pailey 2019). This is important because it reminds us that decolonising economics is not only about challenging Eurocentrism in theory and methods but also deeply intertwined with structural racism, sexism and privilege of location that impacts the individual scholars themselves, both in terms of allowing the white normative gaze to go unchecked and in terms of excluding scholars and scholarship that comes from a place of disadvantage. Lewis makes this point with respect to the United Kingdom, showing how economics in the UK is not only Eurocentric but also deeply institutionally racist. A glaring symptom of this institutional racism is the raw fact that, in the UK, there is not a single Black woman economics professor.

Finally, Sara Stevano also made crucial points about the importance of considering the global-local relations in which intersecting inequalities are reproduced at different levels. The challenge, then, as Lewis and Pheko also alluded to, is to analyse concrete political economy phenomena within the context of a highly unequal imperialist economic system. This also has an impact on how we think about solutions, a point made in Obeng-Odoom's position statement in this paper. Moving towards a structural understanding of oppression and various scales, ranging from local to global, also reveals the limits of many of the efforts being made to reduce inequality both in the world and in academia, and pushes us to imagine alternative strategies that can help to address such structural inequalities, such as reparations.

The emerging efforts to tackle problems of racism in economics would benefit from taking these broader insights into account. The recent symposium on Race and Economic Literature (Logan and Myers Jr 2022) is a pertinent example of the efforts within the economics field to tackle racism in a serious manner. However, without drawing on lessons from African and other feminist economists, critiques of Eurocentrism, or concerted calls for the discipline of economics to decolonise within the mainstream, risks incorporating issues of colonialism and race, while leaving Eurocentric foundations intact.

Finally, it is important to commend the work being done here by Obeng-Odoom, the organisers and participants of this symposium, and the broader group of scholars working to make more space for radical and anti-colonial or anti-imperialist approaches in the social sciences, given that each person involved will no doubt meet resistance in various forms and fora. At the roundtable itself, we experienced a classic example of this, where an invited mainstream development economist essentially dismissed all the work and critiques by Obeng-Odoom by claiming that the economics field is already explaining inequalities well and arguing that if Obeng-Odoom’s critiques and alternative approach were actually relevant and rigorous, they would have already won recognition in the mainstream, assuming that there is a free market of ideas (Ingber 1984). However, heterodox scholars know well that the political economy of knowledge production is not an open and democratic playing field at all, but rather heavily tilted in favour of the established mainstream (Colander 2015; Lee 2009). Even more striking was the lack of engagement by the mainstream development economist with the critiques levelled by the African feminist economists. Unfortunately, this was an apt illustration of how certain scholars and ideas are structurally ignored in the economics field.

With multiple crises unfolding that challenge the existing hegemony, raising awareness about the inadequacies of dominant analyses and solutions, as well as reimagining alternatives, is more critical than ever. Indeed, many students and members of the public are thirsty for alternative explanations of inequalities and injustices. Franklin Obeng-Odoom's book, Property, Institutions, and Social Stratification in Africa, and the debates that have emerged in its wake are, thus, of utmost importance and it is hopefully only the beginning.

Statement of Ethics

At the time this study was conducted, the authors' institutions did not require ethical approval to be sought for this type of research.

Acknowledgements

We thank Ange-Dorine Irakoze for her help with French translations, as well as Joël Glasman.

Disclosure statement

This article issue is the outcome of research conducted within the Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence at the University of Bayreuth, funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) under Germany ś Excellence Strategy – EXC 2052/1 – 390713894.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft.

Notes

1 This spelling includes those of non-binary, queer identifications.

2 https://www.africamultiple.uni-bayreuth.de/en/index.html (accessed 01/05/2022).

3 For some good characterisations of neoclassical economics/ the ‘economic mainstream’, see Wooley (1993), Stein (2021) and Komlos (2019). The tricky thing is that even dissenting economists or purported innovations in economics (such as the ‘new institutional economics’ or ‘behavioural economics’) often still hold on to certain key assumptions of neoclassical economics. This includes methodological individualism, the disregard for power (except for an occasional concern with ‘monopoly power'), the assumption that individuals enter ‘transactions’ on equal terms (equipped with the same social qualities), and the neglect of space and the environment. This is also evident in Wooley’s feminist critique of the standard neoclassical framework, which seeks to improve that framework rather than undoing it.

4 This is a list far from complete, as the interventions of Oduro, Pheko and Stevano show. For an excellent overview of feminist economic thought going back as far as to the late 19th and early twentieth century, see the review of the economist Nina Banks (Banks 2021). The overview, however, is tilted towards a US context. For a critical discussion of a uniform transfer of race-gender-class as a system of interlocking oppressions to an African context, see Oyêwùmí (2002).

5 See https://femnet.org/afma/ (accessed 01/07/2022).

6 Dr. Nyamekye Asare (Ottawa) also contributed to the round table, but unfortunately could not contribute to this paper.

7 Diversifying and Decolonising Economics (D-Econ): https://d-econ.org/ (accessed 01/07/2022).

8 The ecological questions in Georgist political economy are taken up much more in Obeng-Odoom (2021).

9 For a more extensive analysis of ‘rent’ in the Georgist methodology, see Obeng-Odoom (2022).

10 See reviews in, among others, Land and Liberty, Economic Geography, Journal of Australian Political Economy, Contribution to Political Economy, and Evolutionary and Institutional Economics Review.

11 See reviews in the Journal of Economic Inequality and African and Asian Studies.

12 Another useful paper appearing after Obeng-Odoom’s book was published is Zacharias et al. (2021).