On regional and cultural approaches to Australian Indigenous violence

Based on a national analysis of Indigenous family violence, the 2001 monograph on ‘Violence in Indigenous Communities’ by the author and his colleagues for the Australian Attorney-General's Department called for government agencies to ‘take a regional approach to supporting and co-ordinating local community initiatives’ together with ‘partnerships between Indigenous program personnel and mainstream services …’ (Memmott et al., 2001, p. 4). This current article reports on regional aspects of two subsequent pieces of research by the author, one in the Barkly Region of central-east Northern Territory for Anyinginyi Health Aboriginal Corporation (2007) and the other in the Torres Strait for the Queensland Department of Communities (2008). The research findings from both of these studies develop the case for government policy to accommodate regional approaches to Indigenous family violence due to combinations of geographic and culturally specific causal factors. The importance of nurturing social and cultural capital in Indigenous communities to strengthen social values, leadership and cohesion in addressing Indigenous violence will be emphasised. Some comment will be made on the role of underlying factors (‘deep historical circumstances’) in contributing to violence, in conjunction with precipitating causes and situational factors, the former being somewhat downplayed in policy debate over the period of the Howard government

Production and use of estimates for monitoring progress in the health sector: the case of Bangladesh

Background: In order to support the progress towards the post-2015 development agenda for the health sector, the importance of high-quality and timely estimates has become evident both globally and at the country level. Objective and Methods: Based on desk review, key informant interviews and expert panel discussions, the paper critically reviews health estimates from both the local (i.e. nationally generated information by the government and other agencies) and the global sources (which are mostly modeled or interpolated estimates developed by international organizations based on different sources of information), and assesses the country capacity and monitoring strategies to meet the increasing data demand in the coming years. Primarily, this paper provides a situation analysis of Bangladesh in terms of production and use of health estimates for monitoring progress towards the post-2015 development goals for the health sector. Results: The analysis reveals that Bangladesh is data rich, particularly from household surveys and health facility assessments. Practices of data utilization also exist, with wide acceptability of survey results for informing policy, programme review and course corrections. Despite high data availability from multiple sources, the country capacity for providing regular updates of major global health estimates/indicators remains low. Major challenges also include limited human resources, capacity to generate quality data and multiplicity of data sources, where discrepancy and lack of linkages among different data sources (local sources and between local and global estimates) present emerging challenges for interpretation of the resulting estimates. Conclusion: To fulfill the increased data requirement for the post-2015 era, Bangladesh needs to invest more in electronic data capture and routine health information systems. Streamlining of data sources, integration of parallel information systems into a common platform, and capacity building for data generation and analysis are recommended as priority actions for Bangladesh in the coming years. In addition to automation of routine health information systems, establishing an Indicator Reference Group for Bangladesh to analyze data; building country capacity in data quality assessment and triangulation; and feeding into global, inter-agency estimates for better reporting would address a number of mentioned challenges in the short- and long-run

The internationalisation of Gulf capital and Palestinian class formation

The internationalisation of Gulf capital throughout the economies of the Middle East has been a striking feature of regional capitalist development over the last two decades. This article traces the nature of Palestinian class formation in light of this trend (drawing empirically on 2006-2007 data), arguing that a full understanding of capitalism in the West Bank and Gaza Strip needs to integrate the internationalisation of Gulf capital with the exigencies of Israel’s occupation. The theoretical and political implications of this are discussed in light of the projection of both US and Israeli power in the Middle East