International Sanitation Management and Performance Measurement: Taking Out the Trash

Internationally, sanitation management has been a critical area of contention, especially in recent years with tightening budgets and resource reductions to public services. Our article reviews the management strategies, actions, and developments that have led to sanitation incidents of piling trash and public health concerns. These incidents will be reviewed from a public management perspective underscoring the role of performance measurement and management. The key influences associated with the varying cases are discussed. Both the negative and positive factors of international cases of sanitation management are reviewed.     

The Impact of Drinking Water Quality and Sanitation on Child Health: Evidence from Rural Ethiopia

This paper examines the association between stored drinking water quality and sanitation on diarrhoea incidence among under-five children in Ethiopia. Using primary household survey data and microbiological water quality testing for Escherichia coli, our results show that uncontaminated stored drinking water and safe child stool disposal are associated with decreased child diarrhoea incidences of 18 and 20 percentage points, respectively. In contrast, neighbourhood concentration of pit latrine shows an increased incidence of child diarrhoea of 16 percentage points. To protect rural children from the risk of contracting diarrhoea, improving household drinking water quality and changing people’s behaviour towards safe sanitation practices is needed.     

Urban development falling into the gutter: sanitation planning and ‘anti-politics’ in Myanmar

Urban development, and particularly the improvement of basic services delivery, is still approached in mostly technical terms by international development actors and municipalities of the Global South. Sanitation planning, for instance, remains the realm of engineers despite decades of evidence that conventional approaches focusing on infrastructure upgrading have failed to tackle socio-environmental challenges. Against this background, this paper explores sanitation planning in Mandalay, the second largest city of Myanmar. Here, the Asian Development Bank and a French consulting firm have seized the opportunity created by the country’s recent opening to embark with the municipality on a multi-million dollar scheme: the Mandalay Urban Services Improvement Project (MUSIP). Drawing upon insights from critical development studies, the paper argues that the MUSIP can be interpreted as an ‘anti-politics machine’ that ignored local needs and proposed disputable solutions to local sanitation challenges. The paper further explores how this machine jeopardised urban development in Mandalay more generally, and was eventually challenged by the municipality. The paper concludes that the case is not unique and illustrates how urban development is today being reshaped throughout Myanmar, while it also shows the continued relevance of the ‘anti-politics’ framework to understand contemporary urban development assistance projects.     

MARKETS OR POLITICS? THE DETERMINANTS OF LABOUR RELATIONS IN A NATIONALIZED INDUSTRY

This article examines 'market' and 'political' explanations for the nature of nationalized industry labour relations, using British Rail as a case study. The market perspective suggests that market insulation generated 'cosy' industrial relations since it allowed managers to acquiesce in restrictive practices. More robust labour management recently is the result of greater exposure to market forces. This explanation is rejected because BR was exposed to competitive pressures before the Thatcher era, and because there is no simple relationship between market forces and managerial actions. Instead political uncertainty is the primary determinant of the state of industrial relations. In the 1970s British Rail management and unions formed a 'tacit alliance' to limit the potential damage of government interventions. This alliance has broken down in the 1980s not primarily because of market pressures but because government interventions have become more explicitly concerned with industrial relations.     

Labour in Paradise: Gender,Class and Social Mobility in the Informal Tourism Economy of Urban Bali,Indonesia

Bali’s recent socio-economic transformation is mainly a result of rapid growth in mass-tourism, which, as a capitalist labour-intensive industry, represents a new regime of labour that reorganises, dislocates, and multiplies wage labour opportunities. ‘Localising globalisation’ through labour in tourism alters conditions for gaining a living wage; yet, it also produces new contestations of gender, caste and class. This article argues that the labour regime shift has produced a large informal economy that provides new paths for social mobility for low caste Bali-Hindus, whilst at the same time class, gender and caste inequalities interlock in the shaping of different labour trajectories.     

Vidya,Veda, and Varna: The influence of religion and caste on education in rural India

This paper argues that Vidya (education), Veda (religion) and Varna (caste) are inter-linked in India. It examines whether, and to what extent, the enrolment of children at school in India is influenced by community norms such as those of religion (Hindu or Muslim) or caste (Scheduled or non-Scheduled). The econometric estimates are based on unit record data from a survey of 33,000 rural households, in 1,765 villages, from 16 states of India. The equation for the likelihood of being enrolled at school is estimated separately for boys and for girls and, in each of the equations, all of the slope coefficients are allowed to differ according to whether the children are Hindu, Muslim or Scheduled Caste. The main findings are that the size of the religion or caste effect depends on the non-community circumstances in which the children are placed. Under favourable circumstances (for example, when parents are literate), the size of the community effect is negligible. Under less favourable circumstances, the size of the community effect is considerable.     

Negotiating interference: US democracy promotion,Bolivia and the tale of a failed agreement

Since 2009 the USA and the Bolivian government have been trying to fix their broken diplomatic relations. These negotiations culminated in 2011 in the signing of a bilateral agreement but, ultimately, failed to establish a basis for mutually acceptable development aid relations. This article analyses these negotiations and suggests a partial explanation that accounts for their dynamics and results. Specifically it shows how the negotiations have pitted Bolivian demands for state sovereignty and mutual respect, based on an egalitarian understanding of inter-state relations, against the US emphasis on common obligations and universal rights, informed by a non-egalitarian notion of liberal hegemony.     

Violence on Iraqi bodies: decolonising economic sanctions in security studies

Abstract

United Nations agencies report that by 1998, Iraqi infant mortality had risen from the pre-Gulf War rate of 3.7% to 12%. Insufficient food and medical supplies and deterioration of sewage and sanitation systems and electrical power systems reportedly caused an increase of 40,000 deaths annually of children under the age of 5 and of 50,000 deaths annually of older Iraqis. Why is this violence on Iraqis absent from analyses of sanctions in international relations and security studies? This paper is concerned with, first, situating sanctions against the Global South as violence by challenging the conventional theorisation of violence inflicted by the hegemon as a mechanism of ‘national security’. Second, we offer a decolonial reading of the sanctions imposed on Iraq by shifting the locus of enunciation from the state to Iraqi people’s suffering.     

Earnings and Caste: An Evaluation of Caste Wage Differentials in the Nepalese Labour Market

This paper examines the sources of wage differentials among castes in Nepal, a country which had, until 1963, an age-old caste-based social division of labour. We use an extended Oaxaca decomposition model with occupation and firm size augmenting the conventionally used measures of human capital endowments. Our results indicate that caste wage differentials in Nepal are large and that human capital endowments and lack of access to better paying occupations and larger firms have a significant impact. Furthermore, we find mixed evidence that the government policy of affirmative action has narrowed down the caste wage differential.     

Diaspora Mobilization for Western Military Intervention During the Arab Spring

ABSTRACT

Literature on diaspora interest groups suggests that they exacerbate home-country conflicts by lobbying for hawkish interventions. However, studies fall short of understanding why diasporas support militarized interventions in home-country conflicts. Using original data on Libyan and Syrian pro-revolution activism during the Arab Spring, I demonstrate that extreme escalations in state repression, activists’ transnational ties, and norms supporting the “responsibility to protect” produced perceptions that militarized interventions were necessary countermeasures to mass killings. Overall, analyses of diasporas’ orientations to home-country conflicts should account for annihilative threats to populations at home, diasporas’ relations with those on the ground, and humanitarian intervention norms.     

Caste System and Resistance: The Case of Untouchable Hindu Sweepers in Bangladesh

This paper studies Hindu untouchable sweepers of Bangladesh, using a case study of two sweeper communities in Dhaka city. Due to their untouchability, Hindu sweepers in Bangladesh have historically been subjected to discrimination and marginalisation, and are deprived of choices such as free selection of occupation, access to housing, education and other benefits. Contending with the conventional notion that Hinduism maintains social order by caste hierarchies and divisions of labour, this shows how the sweepers of Dhaka city respond to the notion of untouchability and show resistance to caste discrimination. This paper also argues that it is not only a Hindu religious ideology but also historical, colonial, economic, political and social aspects of caste-based discrimination that can explain construction of the notion of Dalit and the marginalisation and resistance of Bangladeshi sweepers.     

The Ambivalent Relations Between Bureaucracy and Public Innovation: The Case of the Successful Failure of Dial Police

Building on a growing body of literature on public innovation and the rediscovery of bureaucracy, this article explores the relations between innovation and bureaucracy. A framework for studying innovation in a bureaucratic context is developed and its relevance assessed through a case study of the successful implementation but failed diffusion of an innovation project. The case study demonstrates how a bureaucratic context represents not only barriers to innovation but also a number of complex drivers. The outline of these ambivalent relations is used to tease out the Janus face of the new spirit of innovation in public administration.     

Foreign policy, rhetorical action and the idea of otherness: The Czech Republic and Russia

This article employs the concept of rhetorical action in an analysis of the recent developments in Czech-Russian political relations. Through the discourse analysis of key Russian political speeches and official documents related to the Czech Republic, as well as Czech speeches tackling the same issues, we look at two different rhetorical actions employed by Russia to induce changes in Czech policy. The attempts to make Czech policy unacceptable in the wider community of European democracies were only partially successful. While the first rhetorical action aimed against Czech NATO membership failed, the new diplomatic strategy stressing the need for a “normalization” of relations was successful in transforming Czech policy towards Russia.     

Making the Invisible Visible: Disability Inclusive Development in Solomon Islands

International and national level disability inclusive discourse, policy and strategy typically render invisible the institutional structures, political economies and socio-cultural power relations that constitute the lived experience of disability. The lack of robust information on disability extends these theoretical blind spots to the absence of disability in official statistics, political dialogue and social policy. Empirically grounded, inclusive research that recognises disability as embedded in globalised political economies and culturally specific power relations is required to address the theoretical, statistical and programmatic invisibility of disability. Such research will provide a solid knowledge base on which to build effective inclusive interventions.     

The Political Economy of Village Sanitation in South India: Capture or Poor Information?

Despite efforts to mandate and finance local governments' provision of environmental sanitation services, outcomes remain poor in the villages surveyed in the four South Indian states. The analysis indicates some key issues that appear to hinder improvements in sanitation. Local politicians tend to capture sanitary infrastructure and cleaning services for themselves, while also keeping major village roads reasonably well-served. Their decisions suggest, however, that they neither understand the health benefits of sanitation, nor the negative externalities to their own health if surrounding areas are poorly served. Our findings suggest that improving sanitary outcomes requires disseminating information on the public goods nature of their health benefits, as well as on the local government's responsibilities. It also requires putting public health regulations in place, along with measures to enable accountability in service provision.     

Private Water,Public Good: Water Privatization and State Capacity in Chile

In the global policy debate over whether water services in developing countries should remain public or be privatized, advocates for privatization call for reducing the role of the state in water services, while civil society groups argue that privatization violates the human right to water. This article examines water privatization in Chile, a crucial case in the debate over the role of markets and states in water services. Chile is known as a water privatization success story due to its high coverage of drinking water and sanitation under a fully privatized system. The article addresses two questions: How effectively does Chile meet the standard for fulfilling the human right to water within the privatized system? To what extent has privatization in Chile reduced the role of the state in water service provision? I find that the human right to water, narrowly defined, is fulfilled in Chile; however, this outcome is not attributable to the merits of privatization. Chile’s strong state capacity to govern the water sector in the public interest by embedding reforms in state interventions explains the relative success of the Chilean water sector. These findings support the argument that a strong state role is necessary to fulfill the human right to water, even in a privatized water sector.     

For a Public International Relations

The last few years have seen an opening up of what is considered to be the legitimate terrain of international relations (IR). This move is, for the most part, extremely welcome. Yet, the multiple theoretical and empirical openings in IR since the end of the Cold War have failed to elucidate many of the puzzles, questions and problems posed by the contemporary conjuncture. There are a number of reasons for this failure ranging from the stickiness of Cold War problem fields to IR's continued attachment to systemic-level theories. However, this article focuses less on symptoms than on treatment and, in particular, on how generating a more "public" international relations enterprise might help to connect IR with the core theoretical, empirical and normative terrain of "actually existing" world politics. Taking its cue from recent debates in sociology about how to generate a "public sociology," the article lays out three pathologies that a public IR enterprise should avoid and four ground rules—amounting to a manifesto of sorts—which sustain the case for a "public" international relations.     

A Mutiny Against Modernizing Elites Has Erupted In The West

In a conversation with NPQ, the Indian author discusses his book, Age of Anger, and what's propelled a backlash against the cosmopolitan caste.     

Planet of the Australians: Indigenous athletes and Australian Football’s sports diplomacy

This article examines the Australian Football League’s (AFL) diplomatic efforts to bring about recognition and reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous players, and to make a broader contribution to inter-communal relations. The AFL’s primary diplomacy has focused on classical racism, dealing with instances of on-field abuse of players by other players and with spectator education about racism and Indigenous culture in Australia. Despite successes in these areas, the AFL has notably failed to acknowledge structural, institutionalised modes of discrimination and exclusion, with the result that the sport remains deeply influenced by colonial thought and discourse concerning Indigenous Australians.