Social Policy in Development: Coherence and Cooperation in the Real World

Ideas about social policy and its role in development have shifted over time, signaling the difficulty of finding clarity in approaches to social investment, poverty alleviation, and equity. In consequence, research and practice related to social policy and poverty alleviation have left a legacy of a very broad agenda of "things that need to be done," along with important unanswered questions about how to integrate social and economic development. While these legacies contribute to the difficulty of developing overarching solutions to problems of social development and poverty alleviation, they also suggest the fruitfulness of focusing more on the distinctions among countries in terms of their capacities, generating ideas about priorities and sequences, and working to reduce what is often an overwhelming social policy agenda. The development community needs to get much better at matching ideas to realities, at considering how policy priorities could be assessed in terms of contextually specific feasibility, and at generating contextually grounded processes for taking the next step. While these are less ambitious questions than are often asked, they hold some promise of bringing ideas into better touch with the real world.

Sanctions, Benefits, and Rights: Three Faces of Accountability

As countries throughout the world democratize and decentralize, citizen participation in public life should increase. In this paper, I suggest that democratic participation in local government is enhanced when citizens can reply affirmatively to at least three questions about their ability to hold local officials accountable for their actions: Can citizens use the vote effectively to reward and punish the general or specific performance of local public officials and/or the parties they represent? Can citizens generate response to their collective needs from local governments? Can citizens be ensured of fair and equitable treatment from public agencies at local levels? The findings of a study of 30 randomly selected municipalities in Mexico indicate that, over the course of a decade and a half, voters were able to enforce alternation in power and the circulation of elites, but not necessarily to transmit unambiguous messages to public officials or parties about performance concerns. More definitively, citizens were able to build successfully on prior political experiences to extract benefits from local governments. At the same time, the ability to demand good performance of local government as a right of citizenship lagged behind other forms of accountability.

Constructing, Deconstructing, and Reconstructing Career Civil Service Systems in Latin America

Patronage--the discretionary allocation of public sector jobs--continues to be a dominant way government is staffed in most Latin American countries and it is proving resistant to the imprecations of public sector reformers. Despite the ubiquity of patronage systems, however, all major countries in Latin America have legislation establishing a formal civil service system. In fact, such reform initiatives are swept aside or significantly altered after they have been legislated. In this paper, public sector reform initiatives in Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, and Chile confirm that implementation is fraught with opportunities for distorting the intent of law and indicate a series of similar strategies used by the opponents of reform to offset the impact of new legislation. Taken together, such strategies have been remarkably successful in blocking the systematic implementation of civil service laws. Nevertheless, there is evidence that public sectors in each of the case study countries have made advances in the degree of stability, professionalism, and expertise in public offices, even in the absence of a Weberian civil service.

Good Governance: The Inflation of an Idea

Good governance has grown rapidly to become a major ingredient in analyses of what's missing in countries struggling for economic and political development. Intuitively and in research, good governance is a seductive idea--who, after all, can reasonably defend bad governance? Nevertheless, the popularity of the idea has far outpaced its capacity to deliver. In its brief life, it has also muddied the waters of thinking about the development process, and has become conflated with the capacity to generate growth, alleviate poverty, and bring effective democracy to peoples in poor countries. Scholars and practitioners need to develop a reasonable understanding of what good governance can deliver--and what it cannot. They must also assume more realistic expectations about how much good governance can be expected in poor countries struggling with a plethora of demands on their capacities to pursue change. In this paper, I explore how and why the concept of good governance emerged and grew, and then suggest ways that academics and practitioners can become more sensitive to the limitations of fads and to curb the tendency toward idea inflation.

In Quest of the Political: The Political Economy of Development Policy Making

This paper explores some of the central debates in the application of political economy to development policy making. It is particularly concerned with the connection between theory, empirical observation, and the practice of policy decision making. It explores distinct traditions of political economy, some drawn from economics, others based in sociological theory, that generate distinct insights about why and when change is likely to occur in policies and institutions. The paper then raises the question of whether such traditions provide effective guidance about the politics of decision making and the process of policy reform and whether they generate helpful insights for reformers interested in encouraging such processes. It suggests that current approaches to political economy present a stark tradeoff between parsimony and elegance on the one hand and insight into conflict and process on the other. Both both traditions of political economy borrow assumptions about political interactions from contexts that may not be fully relevant to developing and transitional countries. In addition, when theory is compared to the extensive empirical literature that now exists about experiences for policy and institutional change, it fails to provide convincing explanations for some of the most important characteristics of real world politics--leadership, ideas, and success. Further, much theoretical and empirical work in political economy has fallen far behind in exploring the policy agendas that now confront developing and transitional countries.political economy of development, policy making in developing countries, policy reform, development policy choice

Social Policy in Development: Coherence and Cooperation in the Real World

Research and practice related to social policy and poverty alleviation have left a legacy of a very broad agenda of “things that need to be done”, along with important unanswered questions about how to integrate social and economic development. These suggest the fruitfulness of focusing more on the distinctions among countries, in terms of their capacities, generating ideas about priorities and sequences, and working to reduce the agenda. Instead of new big ideas and new paradigms, the development community needs to get better at matching ideas to realities, and at generating contextually grounded processes for taking the next step.social policy, economic development history; poverty policy; development agenda; development cooperation

Execrable human traffic: Charles Dibdin, George Morland and the waterman

Scenes from Charles Dibdin's ballad My Poll and my Partner Joe were painted and etched by famous artists such as James Gillray and Thomas Rowlandson but by far the most striking pictures were the pair of scenes painted in 1790 by George Morland (1763-1804). The other representations illustrated the closing lines ('For, seeing I was finely trick'd, / Plump to the devil I fairly kick'd / My Poll and my partner Joe') but Morland's pictures contrasted two scenes from earlier in the song: the domestic bliss of the waterman, Poll and Joe, and the waterman's violent capture by the press gang. The pictures recall Morland's astoundingly successful painting The Slave Trade (1788) which showed families being separated and sold off on the African coast. Dibdin and Morland were London contemporaries and their careers have some striking parallels. Between 1789 and 1804 both enjoyed success as independent performers who worked outside the established systems of salaried performance and private patronage. Both men found success with brief, light and sometimes pointed treatments of familiar subjects: family life, military figures, fashionable scenes, and a wide cast of people on the move such as pedlars and labourers. Both were famous for their representations of black Africans, both were twice imprisoned for debt, and both had lengthy accounts of their lives published within a couple of years of each other (1804 and 1809 for Dibdin; 1806 and 1807 for Morland). Dibdin's world was a world of people on the move, and in this paper I explore and explain My Poll and my Partner Joe and Morland's paintings after it in relation to the traffic of people and goods in late eighteenth century Britain. The waterman who is captured and forced to serve in the navy is a prime example of a trafficked person. I take this point a step further by suggesting that Dibdin and Morland are also a part of this traffic, since they were both artists who pioneered working for an open market and took on a commodity value. I argue that the paradigm of 'traffic' gives us a better understanding of the structures of both men's later careers and the subjects that formed the basis for their work in the years 1789-1804

Challenges for Art Historians teaching outside the HE classroom

Teaching 'outside the classroom' is one of the biggest challenges facing art historians. Students are often shy of paintings, sculptures, and buildings because they don't know how to make sense of objects and what to say about them. This paper describes an assessment initiative in a first-year undergraduate gallery-based History of Art module which was designed to help students engage more closely with objects and to practice genres of writing that are appropriate to the study of painting, drawing, sculpture and architecture. In the assessment students were asked to devise a proposal for a gallery display, offer feedback on their peers' proposals, and then each write a piece of work for a catalogue accompanying the display, using the winning proposal as the working brief

An Assessment of Community Attitudes and Behavior to Inclusion of Youth with Disabilities in Youth Sports and Recreational Activities

Attitudes toward inclusion in recreation and leisure activities for youth outside of the school setting are not well studied. Through a survey the author sought to discover more about the attitudes and behaviors of community service providers, businesses and recreational organizations, within the study area to participation of older youth and young adults in leisure and recreational activities provided by the businesses and organizations surveyed. The research was intended to inform curriculum planning for Transition Program teachers within the study area. How participation is affected by stigma associated with disability and its effect on quality of life is discussed. With a response rate of 27.3% of those asked to participate, the researcher found attitudes of acceptance to the inclusion of people with disabilities in the activities being offered by the respondents. Groups engaging in leisure activities of a non-competitive nature were more accepting of the participation of people with disabilities than those engaging in competitive activities. More research is required to determine if the attitudes expressed by the respondents are matched by their behaviors

'The gipsey-race my pity rarely move?' Representing the Gypsy in George Morland's Morning, or the Benevolent Sportsman

This chapter explores theories of race in relation to a famous eighteenth-century painting of gypsies and explores the relationship between ideas about race and vagrancy in the context of debates about picturesque beauty and the landscape