Resilience and Community in the Age of World-System Collapse

In this essay we explore how humans might face systemic collapse and/or entry into a dark age through forms of community resilience. We also note that nature, types of communities, and degrees of resilience differ in core, peripheral, and semiperipheral areas of the contemporary world-system. Core or global north or first world communities have all but disintegrated due to neoliberal policies. However, communities in peripheral and semiperipheral areas are more emergent, and more resilient. These areas are most likely to have or to creatively develop strategies to overcome global collapse. We further argue that social scientists need to develop new definitions of community that go beyond contemporary conceptualizations

Public Health, Yellow Fever, and the Making of Modern Tampico

This essay uses the Mexican port city of Tampico as a case study of the relationship between nation-state formation, urban transformation, and public health policy during the late nineteenth century. It examines a virulent yellow fever epidemic in 1898 to illustrate how Tampico's urban transformation generated conditions for the epidemic, and how public health officials addressed the challenge of combating the epidemic. Special emphasis is placed on how officials used quarantines in a failed attempt to contain the problem. As a result of its limitations, national authorities came to perceive quarantines as antithetical to the project of the modern nation-state, leading them to adopt urban sanitation projects as substitute. Local and state authorities, however, retained their faith in the quarantine, often out of a desperate need to protect their populations and commerce. The battle against yellow fever constituted part of an important shift in public health authority from the control of local officials to national authorities, which further consolidated the power of the nation-state. The essay concludes with consideration of the implications of Tampico's 1898 epidemic for a history of circum-Caribbean port cities.Cet essai étudie le cas de la ville portuaire de Tampico, au Mexique, pour mettre en lumière les liens qui existent entre la création de l’État-nation, l’urbanisation et la politique en matière de santé publique à la fin du XIXe siècle. On y établit un rapport entre l’expansion de Tampico et la progression, en 1898, d’une virulente épidémie de fièvre jaune, tout en analysant les stratégies adoptées par les responsables de la santé publique pour la combattre. L’essai s’intéresse plus particulièrement au fait que les autorités aient eu recours aux quarantaines dans l’espoir de freiner l’épidémie. Ces dernières s’étant avérées inefficaces, les autorités nationales en sont venues à les considérer comme étant contradictoires par rapport au projet d’État-nation moderne, ce qui les a amenées à remplacer ces mesures par la mise sur pied de programmes d’hygiène urbaine. Toutefois, les autorités de la région et de l’État sont demeurées convaincues de la pertinence des quarantaines. Il faut dire qu’elles faisaient face à un besoin urgent de protéger leur population et le commerce. La lutte contre la fièvre jaune s’est inscrite dans un important virage en matière de gestion de la santé publique. En effet, ce domaine est passé sous la responsabilité des autorités nationales après avoir été administré jusque-là par les pouvoirs locaux. En conclusion, l’auteur examine les incidences de l’épidémie de Tampico en 1898 sur l’histoire des villes portuaires des Caraïbes

Disrupted Governance: Towards a New Policy Science

This Element explores the uncertain future of public policy practice and scholarship in an age of radical disruption. Building on foundational ideas in policy sciences, we argue that an anachronistic instrumental rationalism underlies contemporary policy logic and limits efforts to understand new policy challenges. We consider whether the policy sciences framework can be reframed to facilitate deeper understandings of this anachronistic epistemic, in anticipation of a research agenda about epistemic destabilization and contestation. The Element applies this theoretical provocation to environmental policy and sustainability, issues about which policymaking proceeds amid unpredictable contexts and rising sociopolitical turbulence that portend a liminal state in the transition from one way of thinking to another. The Element concludes by contemplating the fate of policy\u27s epistemic instability, anticipating what policy understandings will emerge in a new system, and questioning the degree to which either presages a seismic shift in the relationship between policy and society