ABSTRACT
De-globalisation re-emerged in the scholarly literature at the beginning of the twenty-first century, popularised by Bello, and is experiencing a renaissance as attested by, for example, the populist agenda demonstrated by the election of Donald Trump and the Brexit vote in 2016. The concept in its current form denotes a strategy to restructure globalisation-based economic and political systems with the aim of bolstering, rather than weakening, national economies. The rise of right-wing populism brought to the fore a strong movement against globalisation and cosmopolitanism. In the context of foreign aid, the main populist criticism levelled at neoliberal globalisation is trade liberalisation, causing a significant loss of jobs in developed countries experiencing an exodus of capital. The problems with the relocation of capital were further exacerbated by the advancement of the World Bank’s ‘one-size-fits-all’ export-focused conditionalities and the IMF’s structural adjustments programmes (SAPs). Despite the shortcomings of the de-globalisation analysis generally, from a PEA perspective, de-globalisation has the potential to extend the epistemic and practical horizons beyond the existing neoliberal globalisation paradigm, to a socio-political and socio-economic construct. This has the potential to provide PEA practitioners with a tool that not only investigates and analyses power-relationships at the macro, meso and micro-levels, but provides an understanding of the impact of foreign aid on the cultural, social, political and economic value systems of the donor and the recipient alike.
