We must demonstrate that the medium to long-term benefits of change to all are worth the short-term costs to some, and assemble coalitions of actors with sufficient power to sustain those short-term costs. To understand how to design such interventions, we need a framework for analyzing modern slavery systems.
We call this the ‘Developing Freedom’ framework. It explains modern slavery as an extractive system that arises where 1) institutional environments intersect with 2) people’s vulnerabilities in ways that allow 3) profitable exploiter strategies to emerge.
The Developing Freedom analytic framework
Exploiters use the institutional resources in the environment – including laws, social norms and business practices – to turn people’s vulnerability into stable control of their economic agency, allowing rent capture. These practices may further contribute to people’s vulnerability (e.g. ‘adverse incorporation’), creating a reinforcing feedback mechanism that helps sustain the system.
Rentiers also maintain these systems by actively undertaking ‘domain maintenance’ (Andrew Crane’s term) to protect their autonomy from anti-slavery norms. That often includes alliances with political power and corruption, but can also include alignment of interests with global buyers, consumers and investors.
Interventions can seek to 1) transform the institutional environment, 2) empower people to make them more resistant to exploitation, or 3) disrupt exploiter strategies by changing their strategic calculus. Transformation requires more than just legal reforms, since slavery often operates beyond the reach of the law, and is sustained more by social norms. Empowerment works to increase people’s resistance to exploitation, including by enhancing their agency and capabilities, including their financial capabilities. Disruption aims to make slavery too costly, or alternative strategies more profitable.
Where development actors intervene, rent-takers can be expected to resist, pre-empting, counter-mobilizing or coopting interventions (Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick’s typology). To be effective, development interventions must be strategic, anticipating such resistance.
