Description
The growing youth unemployment and precarious work have been recognised as key features of the global economy and concern for policy makers and experts interested in poverty reduction, job creation and sustainable development. Concerning developing countries, scholarly debate often highlights external influence over domestic policy-making processes which are in turn assumed to (re)shape practices and discourses related to formal/informal or decent/precarious work in local contexts. And in many cases the state is seen as acting as a wilful facilitator of the global capitalist system or being vulnerable to neoliberal reforms due to their reliance on global markets and foreign investments. While acknowledging their contributions, I argue that they risk simplifying the complexities of the ‘actually operating’ political economy of work due to their overemphasis on the role of international actors, states and markets. The questions of how employment policies are designed, calculated, implemented (by whom, with whom and for whom) on the ground as well as where and how the gaps and mismatches between rhetoric and practices of decent jobs take place are still largely missing in the debate. This paper aims to fills these gaps by exploring the day-to-day interactions in the field of Decent Job Creation (DJC) in Tunisia. Drawing on everyday political economy approach and intensive field interviews in Tunisia, the paper examines how international and domestic staffs as well as civil society actors involved in the DJC interact and to what extent their everyday interactions on the ground are shaped by, respond to or contest neoliberal interpretations of work and job creation.
