Across the Global South, cities, and city-regions are growing fast, drawing attention to questions of urban development and its place in contemporary processes of capitalist development. But development for whom? By whom? These are pressing questions amidst growing (urban) inequalities. They are all the more preoccupying given widespread assumptions that urban labouring classes remain weak and, in many instances, ‘surplus’ to the needs of capital. Pushing back against these assumptions, researchers and organisers gathered recently to ask, what would urban development look like if it started with workers? What would it mean to envisionlabour-led urban development (LLUD) —rather than capital- or state-centred development? Their collective reflections follow, as does an invitation: join their conversation via a new listserv.
In Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls, the peasant appears twice dead. First in life, as property; then in death, as inventory lingering in the bureaucratic ledgers of the empire. Pavel Chichikov, Gogol’s wandering con man, traverses provincial Russia purchasing the names of deceased serfs still counted in the census so he can accumulate fictive wealth from human absence. The grotesque brilliance of the novel lies not merely in the absurdity of the scheme, but in Gogol’s revelation that serfdom corrupts everyone. The peasant suffers most brutally, but landlords, bureaucrats, merchants, and respectable society itself become spiritually deformed by a social order that converts human beings into abstraction. Gogol was not a revolutionary prophet. Yet history would eventually sweep away the old landed order through the Russian Revolution of 1917, as if the moral rot he diagnosed had become historically unbearable.
I carried Gogol with me to Negros.
Not literally, of course. One does not bring Russian novels to fact-finding missions in a countryside thick with military checkpoints, grief, and the scorching heat that clings to the sugar fields. But Dead Souls returned to me in Toboso as we listened to the initial accounts surrounding the massacre of the Negros 19. Their names had already begun entering the cold grammar of state security discourse even before families could fully mourn them. “Encounter.” “Armed rebels.” “Recovered firearms.” The dead transformed almost instantly into administrative objects, into a narrative assembled in advance by counterinsurgency.
But the farmers and residents knew the dead otherwise. They knew who laughed most easily, who planted monggo beans, who worried over school expenses, who hummed songs while walking, who sang softly while planting, who fetched water before dawn. They remembered those whom the fact-finding mission confirmed as civilians—Alyssa Alano, Errol Wendel, Maureen Santuyo, RJ Ledesma, Kai Sorem, and Lyle Prijoles—not as names suspended in the cold grammar of casualty reports, but as lives once woven into the ordinary intimacies of community, into fields, unfinished conversations, and futures interrupted. While the state speaks in categories, the masses remember persons.
In September 2025, Adam Tooze sent a shock wave through Development studies circles (in the West) with an essay entitled “The End of Development”. He declared the evident truth that “the West’s aid model was always a mirage” and that “the UN Sustainable Development Goals now look less like a new dawn than the final gasp of a unipolar, end-of-history fantasy”. Yet, so-called ‘development’ speaks to more than aid and Western dominance. This blog post argues that what might be the end of aid could be the beginning of understanding and studying development as an endogenous process within international constraints and opportunities. For this to happen, we, as development scholars, need to resist falling back into narrow conceptions of ‘Development’ as either aid-based or big power rivalry and overcome anxious paralysis and self-pity over the end of uncontested US hegemony. Instead, we need to use the current moment as an opportunity to rethink and finally effectively conceptualise how national politics and global economic structures condition each other.
Industrial policy, once a taboo in mainstream economics, is being mainstreamed by the very institutions that spent four decades stigmatising it. In March 2026, the World Bank published Industrial Policy for Development: Approaches in the 21st Century, co-authored by Ana Margarida Fernandes and Tristan Reed. The IMF, has done a similar volte face, first in its 2019 working paper ‘The Return of the Policy That Shall Not Be Named’ and again in the October 2025 World Economic Outlook, which has a chapter titled ‘Industrial Policy: Managing Trade-Offs to Promote Growth and Resilience’. That the IMF and World Bank have now openly readmitted industrial policy into their vocabulary is no small thing. Does it mean the tide has turned on austerity and market fundamentalism?
The argument of this article is that this rhetorical turn arrives bound by two structural constraints that the new Bretton Woods literature largely refuses to confront: the ongoing rentierisation of Global South economies through IMF-World Bank conditionality, and the imperial retaliation that meets serious attempts at sovereign industrialisation. Industrial policy on the terms set by Washington and Wall Street will not free up the policy space the Global South needs; it risks becoming another financial product or technocratic buzzword layered onto an already extractive architecture.
What actually constitutes the key agenda for workers in Indonesia beyond celebrating May Day as a symbol of struggle? Wages in Indonesia are never truly “negotiated”; they are determined, stabilized, and at the same time separated from the political power that should be able to challenge them. Since the authoritarian New Order regime, the state has built a corporatist framework that not only suppresses independent worker organizations but also fragments the possibility of forming an effective collective force. Reformasi did open space for freedom of association, yet instead of producing consolidation, what emerged was fragmentation—many unions, but weak and divided. Thus, when integrated into global value chains, this configuration finds its function: the state no longer needs to repress workers overtly; it suffices to stabilize wages through mechanisms that appear technocratic, while allowing fragmentation to persist. In this way, low wages in Indonesia are not a failure, but rather the result of a strategy historically shaped and continuously reproduced—a form of partial class accommodation, uneven, and spatially conditioned.
Control over workers today no longer operates primarily through open repression, but through the way wages are calculated and normalized as a technical matter. Wage-setting formulas that link minimum wage increases to inflation and economic growth are presented as rational policies to maintain balance between worker and business. Yet this is precisely where the politics operates: wage conflict is removed from the arena of collective bargaining and locked into calculations that from the outset limit bargaining space. This shift becomes clear when compared to the mechanism based on Decent Living Needs (KHL), which—although not entirely free from depoliticization—still opened space for surveys and the articulation of demands, particularly in industrial areas with high concentrations of workers. Because it was seen as disrupting worker cost stabilization, this space was later closed through formulas that standardize increases while simultaneously dampening conflict. Concessions to workers are not entirely eliminated, but emerge as the result of struggles that under certain conditions succeed in forcing the state and capital to grant space, as in the case of THR and the expansion of social security through BPJS. However, these achievements do not alter the fundamental structure of wages, which remains low and fragmented; rather, they appear as limited and segmented compromises. Thus, what is produced is not merely wage stabilization, but also the management of workers’ power itself: on the one hand, there are forms of protection that are concentrated and appear progressive, while on the other, the underlying structure continues to maintain spatial differentiation and the collective weakness of worker. In this condition, class compromise does not occur comprehensively, but is produced partially, unevenly, and remains locked within a low-wage regime.
Somewhere in the state of Maharashtra, a cotton farmer took his own life after years of compounding debt and crop failure. Across India, this tragedy is not rare. The National Crime Records Bureau recorded 11,290 farmer and farm-labourer suicides in 2022—roughly one death every hour—with debt consistently identified as a leading cause (Down to Earth, 2023). In Sulawesi, Indonesia, villages are being cleared to make way for nickel smelters that supply the batteries of the global electric-vehicle boom. Workers at the Indonesia Morowali Industrial Park earn higher wages than they would in farming, but face fatal furnace explosions and respiratory damage as recurring occupational risks (Campbell & Lee, 2024; Global Witness, 2025). And on the streets of Jakarta, Yogyakarta, and Surabaya, a new population of electric motorcycle drivers pedal their way through twelve-, fourteen-, sixteen-hour days (Novianto, 2025a), servicing loans they never chose and rental fees that can never be fully paid.
These are not three unrelated stories. They are distinct moments in a single global process: the uneven, extractive, and deeply political reorganisation of labour under the banner of the green transition. In this article, I want to argue, drawing on my fieldwork with electric-vehicle (EV) platform drivers in Indonesia, that this reorganisation has produced what I call a regime of green debt bondage—a configuration in which ecological transition, platform governance, and financialised credit converge to bind workers to perpetual labour without delivering the promised climate dividend.
Debt bondage is most often associated with pre-capitalist or early-capitalist forms of coercion: the indentured plantation worker, the brick-kiln labourer, the trafficked domestic servant (Breman, 2007; Brass, 2011; LeBaron, 2014). Its reappearance inside the shiny, algorithmic, climate-friendly infrastructure of platform capitalism should unsettle us. It signals not a rupture from coercive labour regimes, but their transformation into more diffuse and systemically embedded forms. What I call green debt bondage refers to a condition in which workers are not only tied through credit, rental schemes, and platform deductions, but are also structurally compelled to remain within precarious work due to the absence of viable, decent employment alternatives.
In this regime, indebtedness does not operate in isolation; it interacts with broader labour market constraints that limit workers’ capacity to exit. Debt becomes a mechanism that deepens this entrapment—pushing drivers to work longer hours, accept worsening conditions, and absorb greater risks simply to service obligations they cannot easily escape. As such, the “greening” of transport in Southeast Asia does not merely reorganise infrastructure, but reconfigures coercion itself: embedding exploitation within both financial relations and structural labour precarity under the banner of ecological transition.
Private credit markets are showing real signs of stress, with multiple major funds restricting withdrawals as investors struggle to exit illiquid holdings. The fears of investors in these funds, which explain the withdrawals, is driven by the success of AI, which, while driven by enormous capital spending financed in part by private credit, is perceived as disrupting the pre-existing software landscape, many of the creators of which had been financed with credit from these funds. These two dynamics are increasingly tied to military demand, with the US government encouraging private capital to build defence-linked AI infrastructure. The war on Iran is amplifying these trends by squeezing energy costs, tightening liquidity, and accelerating a shift wherein AI investment becomes less market-driven and more concentrated around state-backed priorities.
Around the 22 March 2026, two of the largest players in private credit, Apollo Global Management and Ares Management, dropped redemption gates on flagship retail credit vehicles, temporarily limiting and/or restricting investors from withdrawing their money. While investors had requested withdrawals of 11.2% and 11.6% respectively, both funds capped redemptions at 5%, leaving roughly half of requested capital locked in place.
The gating at Apollo and Ares is just one visible manifestation of broader strains across the roughly $1.8 trillion private credit market. On April 2, it was reported that Blue Owl capital had received redemption requests of upto $5.4 billion over the first quarter of 2026, with those requests amounting to 22% of its private credit fund and a much higher 41% of another of its funds target at software and technology firms. In response, Blue Owl announced a cap on redemptions of 5% of shareholder funds. Earlier BlackRock restricted withdrawals on its HPS Lending Fund, which stands at approximately $26 billion. Blackstone faced roughly $3.8 billion in redemption requests from its flagship private credit fund and stepped in with its own capital to help meet those withdrawals. Morgan Stanley saw around 11% repurchase requests in its North Haven Private Income Fund and Cliffwater honoured only about 7% of roughly 14% redemption requests.
For the better part of two decades, development economics has been held captive by a ‘clinical’ revolution. What began as a niche statistical tool has, through a masterclass in institutional branding, been elevated to the undisputed ‘Gold Standard’ of economic science. We are told a heartwarming tale of ‘Nobel laureates caring about poverty’, a narrative where the ‘bottom billion’ are finally being saved by the rigorous, scientific tinkering of MIT and Harvard.
But as I argue in the newly released second edition of Nobel Laureates Caring About Poverty: Banerjee, Duflo, MIT, and Randomized Controlled Trials(2026), if we strip away the public relations sheen, a far more cynical reality emerges. This is not a story of scientific discovery but an ‘Inside Job’ executed with clinical precision. It is a rebranding exercise designed to cement institutional power and create a circular monopoly over global funding and academic prestige.
Developing Economics 