Transnational activities of immigrant organizations in the Netherlands: Do Ghanaian, Moroccan and Surinamese diaspora organizations enhance development?

Globalization is commonly assumed to have important implications for development processes, including opportunities for poverty alleviation. Globalization connects people and places that are distant in space but linked in such ways that what happens in one place has direct bearing on the other (Giddens 1990, 64; also Harvey 1989). According to Appadurai (1996, 192), globalization creates landscapes of translocalities: Such localities create complex conditions for the production and reproduction of locality in which ties of marriage, work, business and leisure weave together various circulating populations, with kinds of locals to create neighbourhoods that belong in one sense to particular nation-states, but are from another point of view what might be called translocalities. In a globalizing world, local development is increasingly played out in a matrix of links that connect people and places with people and places elsewhere.