The Breadwinner, his Wife and their Welfare: Identity, Expertise and Economic Security in Australian Post-War Reconstruction

The architects of Australian post-war reconstruction had learned from the experience of the Depression that subordinating the social order to economic objectives could have disastrous results. In Australia as elsewhere, interwar political and civic institutions were not sufficiently robust to protect society from the instability of a system based on the economically rational choices of individual entrepreneurs. High unemployment, which had characterised the interwar years and reached catastrophic levels in the Depression, convinced the architects of post-war reconstruction that new political institutions were necessary. The civil and political institutions they attempted to create were expressed in a particular anthropology constituted around their own identity as experts and the identities of the entrepreneur, the breadwinner and his wife.     

One and All: Labor and the Radical Tradition in South Australia

One and All: Labor and the Radical Tradition in South Australia. By Philip Payton (Mile End, SA: Wakefield Press, 2016), pp.xiv + 359. AU$39.95 (pb).     

Reforming Local Government in Germany: Institutional Changes and Performance Impacts

The article analyses trajectories and impacts of local government reforms in Germany. It scrutinises four major approaches of reform that have affected the local authorities since the beginning of the 1990s: decentralisation, privatisation, administrative reforms (‘New Steering Model’) and the direct election of mayors. The objective of the article is to encompass the multifaceted elements and effects of local government reform in Germany. Firstly, the author examines the institutional changes that have occurred in the local councils. Secondly, the broader effects and impacts of the institutional transformations are dealt with, analysing how the latter has enhanced performance, steering capacity and political accountability. Finally, the author evaluates the extent to which the reforms have put their mark on the inherited and historic tradition of the German local government system.     

Voices from Pattani: Fears,suspicion, and confusion

Abstract

By December 2005, violence in the South of Thailand had taken the lives of more than one thousand people. In this article, the voices of southerners are presented as they were recorded during the author's two-year stay in Pattani Province and various Malay-Muslim villages in southern Thailand. Verbatim excerpts from tok imams (religious teachers), overseas scholars, academics, fisherfolk, and locals of various ethnicity and religious groups illustrate perspectives and frustrations about the violence. Fears, suspicions, and confusion are the most prominent emotions embedded in these conversations. These excerpts illustrate the foremost concerns of the common people in the South, among them, impertinent threats to livelihood security and peaceful ethnic coexistence in the region.     

Exclusion Despite Nominal Inclusion: A Critical Analysis of Participatory Development Programmes in Post-War Colombia

Citizen participation takes centre stage in Colombia's 2016 peace agreement. Its practical implementation, however, has proven difficult. This case study examines targets and tactics of exclusion in participatory development programmes established under the peace accords. Drawing on qualitative data generated between 2021 and 2022 in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, this article argues that exclusion affects societal (sub-)groups, organisations and communities as a whole and involves a large array of implicit-elusive, direct-explicit and coercive mechanisms. This matters for implementing inclusive peacebuilding more generally.     

Local Government in Japan: New Directions in Governance toward Citizens' Autonomy

Local autonomy is a fundamental base for making democracy work, and is often referred to as a “school in democracy.” However, in Japan to date, local autonomy has suffered from a substantial gap between what it should be in an ideal form and what it has been in reality. This article explores a desirable and effective reform of local governance with the advent of the “local era,” which is prompting unprecedented levels of citizens' attention to local authorities.     

Economic or Political Development: The Evolution of "Native" Local Government Policy in the Territory of Papua and New Guinea, 1945–1963

In 1969, Speaker of the House Assembly of Papua and New Guinea John Guise, spoke of a "quiet decision" to limit the activities of "Native" Local Government Councils in the Territory, so that "they seem to be much more like those of Australian Shire Councils" . The present essay suggests that this "quiet decision", contrary to conventional wisdom, was not simply part of a colonial policy designed to serve "assimilationist purposes". Rather, the restricted role finally accorded to local councils was a corollary of the enhanced, post-war capacity of the metropolitan state. Early local government policy never envisaged councils as a first step toward self-government. Rather, councils were to be vehicles for securing the "systematic development of native agricultural potential". The decision to limit the scope of local government policy reflected not a rejection of this initial intent, but rather agrarian reform after 1956 was re-constituted as an object of direct government control. The legacy of local government in Papua New Guinea is not so much one of 'white' colonialism, but of 'development' entrapped in trusteeship.     

Local Value Chain Development in Vietnam: Motorcycles,Technical Learning and Rents Management

This article analyses how foreign direct investment drives technological upgrading in the motorcycle industry in Vietnam. Using the analytical framework of rent management, the article evaluates the rent management mechanisms that provided the incentives and pressures for domestic firms to develop a local value chain by participating in the foreign supply network. This article offers a case study analysis of two periods: 1995–2000 and 2000–05. Two case studies examine the exchanges between lead firms and their suppliers; between multinational corporations and local firms; and among the state, private and foreign firms in the context of the value chain for motorcycle production. The analyses suggest that industrial upgrading has been predominantly driven by foreign direct investment starting in the early 2000s. In addition, market competition among Japanese and Chinese lead firms led to significant technical learning for domestic firms through collaboration with foreign firms despite the government’s failure to effectively monitor rents or implement industrial policies.     

Funding Local Government: Use (and Abuse) of Peru's Canon System

While decentralisation, properly understood, implies that sub‐national government involves devolution of authority over revenues, recent experience from Peru suggests that the canon system tends to create perverse incentives in encouraging open and democratic government at the local level. This is particularly the case in regions such as Cusco, which benefit disproportionately from this system. Examination of experiences in four provinces of Cusco shows how – in the absence of a robust civil society – excessive funding tends to encourage clientelism and corruption rather than accountable and transparent administration.     

Between Interculturalism and Ethnocentrism: Local Government and the Indigenous Movement in Otavalo‐Ecuador

To what extent might an indigenous mayor govern beyond ethnically defined grievances, without being labelled traitor by the indigenous organisation? This article deals with the challenges faced by the Ecuadorian indigenous movement when it attains power in local government. The issue will be explored through the case of Mario Conejo, who in 2000 became the first indigenous mayor of Otavalo representing the indigenous political movement Pachakutik. Although ethnically based tensions in the local indigenous movement were evident throughout the period, 2006 saw Conejo leave Pachakutik and create a new political movement. This rupture can be traced, I argue, to an intercultural dilemma and the difficulties of ethnically defined political movements.     

Precarity and Vulnerability: Rubber Plantations in Northern Laos and Northern Shan State,Myanmar

ABSTRACT

In northern Laos and Northern Shan State in Myanmar, there has occurred a rapid expansion of rubber plantations, both by large economic concessions and by smallholder farmers. The impact of the introduction of rubber differs by place. This article analyses the impact of the introduction of rubber in two villages in Northern Shan State and two in Luang Namtha Province, Lao PDR. We differentiate vulnerability and precarity while assessing the changes that women and men have experienced, which allows us to problematise the long-term vulnerability of seemingly well-adapted farming households. We argue that the strategies that farmers have chosen to improve their situation today will lead to unsustainable livelihoods in the long term. We also link the analysis of vulnerability and precarity to changes in household gender relations. Notwithstanding increased precarity, rising household cash incomes and external support have improved women’s position in some places while hardly affecting gender relations in others.     

Governance from Below in Bolivia: A Theory of Local Government with Two Empirical Tests

This article examines decentralization through the lens of the local dynamics it unleashed in the much‐noted case of Bolivia. It argues that the national effects of decentralization are largely the sum of its local‐level effects. To understand decentralization, therefore, we must first understand how local government works. The article explores the deep economic and institutional determinants of government quality in two extremes of municipal performance. From this it derives a model of local government responsiveness as the product of political openness and substantive competition. The quality of local politics, in turn, emerges endogenously as the joint product of the lobbying and political engagement of local firms and interests and the organizational density and ability of civil society. The analysis tests the theory's predictions on a database containing all Bolivian municipalities. The theory proves robust. The combined methodology provides a higher‐order empirical rigor than either approach can alone.