Questioning pathways out of poverty: Indonesia as an illustrative case for the World Bank's transforming countries

The World Development Report 2008 uses Indonesia as an illustrative case for what it calls ‘transforming countries’. The main argument of this paper is that the three pathways out of poverty (commercially-oriented entrepreneurial smallholder farming; rural non-farm enterprise development, and out-migration) prescribed by the Report should be theoretically and empirically questioned because of the possibility of a reverse consequence: the perpetuation of poverty in Indonesia.     

Power to make land dispossession acceptable: a policy discourse analysis of the Merauke Integrated Food and Energy Estate (MIFEE), Papua,Indonesia

The Merauke Integrated Food and Energy Estate (MIFEE) in Papua, Indonesia, is a state-led mega-project to transform local agriculture through large-scale corporate investment in food crops and biofuels for foreign markets. The project has led to extensive land dispossession, accompanied by devastating social and ecological impacts. This contribution analyzes how discourse regarding food and energy crises has been employed to release land from customary tenure to a coalition of state, corporate and local elite actors. The interests of these actors have converged on the state-led mega-project to transform local agriculture through large-scale corporate investment in food crops and biofuels in the name of national food security.     

FAMILY SUPPORT AND MAINTENANCE: EMERGING ISSUES IN SOME DEVELOPING COUNTRIES WITH MIXED JURISDICTIONS

Family support and maintenance laws in several developing countries with mixed legal traditions derived from colonial and local laws are based on a litigation model. This model often fails to give adequate legal relief in the socioeconomic context of poverty. The situation is made worse by inequitable and gender‐biased inheritance laws. This article will use examples mainly from countries in South Asia and Commonwealth Africa to demonstrate how reformist legislation and constitutional jurisprudence in the area of public law and judicial activism highlight the issues that must be addressed if the legal system is to provide an effective system of family support and maintenance.     

Using the principle of non-discrimination to reconcile the national contract with the global compact

The argument of this article is that the best way to reconcile the national social contract with the global compact is to ensure that the terms of the national social contract are compatible with the principle of non-discrimination. It suggests that if national societies were seriously guided by the principle of non-discrimination, the response to the rights claims of non-citizens would be a lot different from the present situation, without, in fact, requiring more of any of us than we, as ordinarily self-centred human beings, are capable of delivering.