The BRICS and global governance: China’s contradictory role

The impact of rising powers generally and the BRICS - Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa - in particular on the existing global order has become controversial and contested. Donald Trump’s nationalist foreign policy agenda has raised questions about the BRICS willingness and capacity to provide leadership in place on an American administration that is increasingly inward looking. As a result, the rise of BRICS poses potential normative and structural challenges to the existing liberal international order. Given its geoeconomic significance, China also poses a potential problem for the other BRICS, as well as the governance of the existing order more generally. Consequently, we argue that it will be difficult for the BRICS to maintain a unified position amongst themselves, let alone play a constructive role in preserving the foundations of ‘global governance’.     

The global information infrastructure: Empowerment or imperialism?

The hope has arisen that the internet will ultimately evolve into a Global Information Infrastructure (GII). The GII will create a global information marketplace and in the process narrow the poverty gap and eliminate many of the geographic obstacles to prosperity and equality. However commerce-primarily US commerce-is driving the development of the internet. As a result investors will want a return on their money in the form of access to new markets. Many countries will have to accept privatisation and competition wholeheartedly. Also, sooner or later local resources will have to replace external funding and external technical expertise. Many countries lack the regional, social and economic integration found in the USA and in addition have deep political, linguistic and cultural divisions that do not exist in the USA. This article examines issues of connectivity, language and content and concludes that in reality the internet concentrates economic activity and power more narrowly in one group. As a result there is a real risk that we are moving towards a two-tier technology society that perpetuates the old distinctions between North and South.     

The BRICS – a paradigm shift in global health?

To what extent does the Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (BRICS) bloc constitute a paradigm shift in global health and development? This paper interrogates the concept of paradigm shift with the help of a framework familiar to scholars working in the field of International Relations. It distinguishes between the BRICS' material capabilities, institutions and ideas, and assesses the extent to which the BRICS contribution represents ‘a potentially transformative’ source of new resources and innovation for global health and development. It has been argued that the BRICS bloc champions a qualitatively different development discourse from industrialised countries that has made possible a progressive set of development practices. The BRICS discourse and praxis gives weight to the claim that a paradigm shift in global health is underway. However, the extent to which such discourse will be effective in improving global health will depend on the bloc making greater use of institutions and further deploying its material capabilities.     

From the New International Economic Order to the G20: how the ‘global South’ is restructuring world capitalism from within

Abstract

In the early 1970s the G77 and the Non Aligned Movement ( nam ) challenged the material and intellectual pillars of the postwar liberal capitalist system through collective action at the UN to establish a New International Economic Order ( nieo ). The aim was to complete the ‘emancipation’ of the ‘global South’ by creating binding institutional frameworks, legal regimes and redistributive mechanisms correcting historically constructed core–periphery disparities. That ambitious effort failed in the face of ‘Northern’ resistance and national segmentation within the nam . Today re-emerging states of the global South are engaged in a more successful effort to gain voice and alter international hierarchy by claiming a central place in the world capitalist system and restructuring it from within. The vertical late-modern world system centred in the Atlantic and ordered by the ‘West’ is thus gradually giving way to a polycentric international structure in which new regional and transnational ‘South–South’ linkages are being formed. This paper critically reviews the transformation and argues that, while it is creating long sought-for conditions of relative international equality, it has also dampened the emancipatory promise of the anti-colonial struggle.     

The decreasing number of candidates at Danish local elections: Local democracy in crisis?

While the qualitative dimension of local political recruitment is the subject of extensive discussion in the literature, little attention has been paid to the quantitative aspect, i.e., how many candidates run for local elections. Using Danish local politics as a case study, this analysis of election report data demonstrates that the political parties show substantial rational actor behaviour when deciding the number of candidates to be put forward. The number of candidates running at Danish local elections has for the last four decades been continuously decreasing. Applying demand-side hypotheses derived from Rational Choice Institutionalism led to the conclusion that some, but not all, of the decline in the number of candidates can be attributed to changes in the institutional set-up of the Danish local elections.     

Recalcitrant spoiler? Contesting dominant accounts of India’s role in global trade governance

India is frequently cast as a troublemaker and blamed for the breakdown of the Doha Round. This article provides a critical re-reading of India’s trade policy and its position in multilateral trade negotiations. It challenges the widespread characterisation of India as a recalcitrant spoiler, intent on derailing trade liberalisation at the WTO. It shows that with the emergence of its highly-competitive, export-oriented services sector, India became one of the leading advocates of global services trade liberalisation in the Doha Round. Yet, not unlike the traditional powers, India’s offensive trade interests are also combined with significant defensive concerns in agriculture.     

Post-Accra: is there space for country ownership in global health?

Abstract

On 4 September 2008 the Accra Agenda for Action, which emphasised that country ownership over health must be strengthened, was agreed upon. While the Agenda for Action, which builds on the 2005 Paris Declaration, is a major step forward, there are still structural factors that impede developing country ownership in health. This paper outlines the key issues in the governance and resourcing of public health in low- and middle-income countries focusing on three major structural challenges for developing countries: the proliferation of initiatives, donor influence on priority setting and donors' lack of accountability, and the sustainability of current levels and types of external financing. How can these structural obstacles be overcome? Three avenues hold considerable promise: creating new mechanisms to hold donors to account, developing national plans and strengthening national leadership in health, and building South–South collaborative networks through bilateral, multilateral and plurilateral relations.     

How stalled global reform is fueling regionalism: China’s engagement with the G20

In the Chinese view, the architecture of contemporary global governance – especially that of the Bretton Woods institutions – is flawed and in need of reform. Developing nations (like China), the argument runs, need to be given a role proportionate to their global economic influence. Since the Group of Twenty (G20) became a leaders’ summit in 2008, China has used the forum to push for such reform. But today, despite some supposed progress, reform has stalled. Recognising this fact, China is increasingly emphasising regional integration in its strategy for overcoming the middle-income trap. Global reform has not been abandoned, but – given its infeasibility – is no longer a short-term priority.     

Transformational Government? The role of information technology in delivering citizen-centric local public services

Following on from five years of ‘electronic government’, the Labour Government has recently announced a new five year plan for ‘transformational government’. Like its predecessor, t-government emphasises the important role of information technology in enabling the delivery of modernised public services. Modernisation is defined as an increasing emphasis on citizen choice, personalisation of services and understanding and responding to service user needs. This paper explores the appropriateness of the t-government agenda by drawing upon lessons learned from the preceding e-government era. Arguably the most significant citizen-focused technology of the e-government era was customer relationship management. The potential of CRM to support service transformation is explored and co-production, an alternative approach to citizen-centric service design, is examined both as a way of addressing weaknesses in IT-enabled service transformation and as a candidate later stage in the evolution of citizen-centric local public services.     

EU agencies' involvement in transboundary crisis response: Supporting efforts or leading coordination?

EU agencies have emerged as entities offering technical coordination to member states and support to the European Commission in different policy areas. Their expertise may play a role in responding to unexpected crises. Against this backdrop, we examine under which circumstances EU agencies, through their specialized expertise, are involved in transboundary crisis responses, and when they acquire a leading position in coordinating those responses. To do so, we study four agencies which faced crises: the EBA and the 2012 banking crisis; the ECDC and the 2014 Ebola outbreak; EFSA and the 2011 E. coli outbreak; and Frontex and the 2015 refugee crisis. Our findings discuss to what extent agencies' involvement in transboundary crises is related to functional (sector characteristics) and institutional (delegation of authority) variables. We also identify that under certain political conditions EU agencies' coordination capacity is activated, allowing them to emerge as leading institutions in transboundary crisis resolution.     

Peace education research in the twenty-first century: three concepts facing crisis or opportunity?

This article focuses on the concepts of peace, education and research, and the ways in which they combine to form the field of peace education and peace education research. It discusses the ways in which each can be said to be facing a crisis of legitimation, representation and praxis, and the structural and cultural violence that inhibit efforts towards a more inclusive global conception of peace. It will review some ways in which it may be possible to rise to Gur-Ze’ev’s challenge to respond to post-structural critiques of the field. Drawing on participatory, auto ethnographic and arts-based research methodologies, it suggests ways of creating synergies between research and aspirations towards positive (rather than negative) peace.     

The War on Drugs in Mexico: a failed state?

This article focuses on the continued attractiveness of ‘failed state’ strategic thinking that stretches across policy-making and academic circles and links it to the issue of the War on Drugs in Mexico. It does so in order to challenge, if not reject, caricatured representations of ‘failed states’. Moreover, it offers an alternative understanding of the War on Drugs and issues of state crisis in Mexico. Rather than assume that state power is rooted within clear and immobile boundaries, it is more fruitful to rethink transformations in state space that cannot be isolated from underlying historical patterns of development and political economy. A political economy approach to state space is therefore better able to draw attention to the twin geopolitical processes shaping the War on Drugs in Mexico: (1) the geographic restructuring of the trade in cocaine and (2) the coeval onset and consolidation of neoliberalism.     

The Gender Gap in Educational Attainment in India: How Much Can Be Explained?

Differential treatment of sons and daughters by parents is a potential explanation of the gender gap in education in developing countries. This study empirically tests this explanation for India using household survey data collected in urban Uttar Pradesh in 1995. We estimate educational enrolment functions and selectivity-corrected educational attainment functions, conditional on enrolment. The gender difference in educational attainment is decomposed into the part that is explained by men and women's differential characteristics and the part that is not so explained (the conventional 'discrimination' component). The analysis suggests that girls face significantly different treatment in the intra-household allocation of education - there is a large unexplained component in the gender gap in schooling attainment. A detailed decomposition exercise attempts to discover the individual factors most responsible for the differential treatment.