Global Financialisation and Disability: Can Disability Budgeting be an Effective Response in the South?

This chapter explores a southern disabled standpoint as a theoretical and strategic approach to examine disability with the intensification of global financialisation. The 2008 financial crisis was a significant illustration of the fragility of deregulate

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Global Financialisation and Disability: Can Disability Budgeting be an Effective Response in the South? S. Janaka Biyanwila and Karen Soldatic

The global inequality crisis is reaching new extremes. The richest 1 % now have more wealth than the rest of the world combined. Power and privilege is being used to skew the economic system to increase the gap between the richest and the rest. A global network of tax havens further enables the richest individuals to hide $7.6 trillion. The fight against poverty will not be won until the inequality crisis is tackled. Oxfam 2016: 1

Introduction This chapter explores a southern disabled standpoint as a theoretical and strategic approach to examine disability with the intensification of global financialisation. The 2008 financial crisis was a significant illustration of the fragility of deregulated financial markets which directly impacted on advances in addressing issues of poverty, particularly for people with disabilities in the global South. By locating the 2008 crisis within neo-liberal strategies of financial deregulation launched in the mid-1990s, this chapter examines how the normalisation of financialisation mechanisms, processes and practices reproduces the marginalisation and exploitation of

S.J. Biyanwila Independent Researcher, Sydney and Colombo, Australia and Sri Lanka K. Soldatic ( ) Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University, NSW, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016 S. Grech, K. Soldatic (eds.), Disability in the Global South, International Perspectives on Social Policy, Administration, and Practice, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-42488-0_26

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people with disabilities in the global South1. In particular, we illuminate new forms of colonialism by highlighting how global finance capital located in the global North increasingly influences the development landscape. To conclude, we explore the increasing role of identity budgeting, as first articulated in Sao Paolo through local feminist leftist movements as ‘gender budgeting’, as a counteracting southern tool of social justice. Since the ratification of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in 2006, the enduring mainstream development discourse has increasingly engaged with the global governance of disability. Global development and governance institutions such as the World Bank and the United Nations have invested heavily in situating disability within these new practices of development as an active strategy to secure disability rights (see Soldatic 2013). Among the clearest examples is the 2011 World Report on Disability (WHO and WB 2011). These global initiatives are clearly significant for local disability movements to place downward pressure on nation-states to advance the realisation of rights (Soldatic 2015). Our concern here is to examine whether rights realisation is possible with intensified global financialisation, and the types of southern intervention that are emer