Community,identity, orientation: sexuality,gender and rights in ASEAN

The Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) escalated its community building project significantly over the last decade, culminating in the launch of a reformed and substantially integrated ASEAN Community at the end of 2015. This article considers what might follow from this newly reformed and rhetorically people-focused version of ASEAN for matters of sexual orientation and gender identity and expression (SOGIE). In claiming to be people-oriented and people-centred, and by developing a regional rights regime, ASEAN opens itself to standards by which it can be measured and held to account. We critically review ASEAN 2025: Forging Ahead Together, and consider civil society's response, focusing on the critique offered by the ASEAN SOGIE Caucus, the peak civil society organisation for ASEAN SOGIE matters. We focus on three themes: identity, visibility politics, and rights. We argue that while ASEAN falls short of its own rhetorical standards, these same standards support a politics which keeps rights in contestation, enabling civil society to push for accountability to international standards, and a more democratic politics.     

Dis-embedding the Sexual/Social Contract: Citizenship and Gender in Nepal

Carole Pateman's work has been central to feminist critiques of the social contract, revealing it to be better understood as the sexual/social contract in which not only is the contracting individual male, but constructed through the active exclusion of women from the pact. These gendered roles are argued to be the result of the restructuring of society in the advent of modernity. The ramifications for the relationship between gender and citizenship in the non-West where modernity has taken a different trajectory are unclear. By mapping out the nature of citizenship as it evolves in its historical form in Nepal, this article argues not only that citizenship comes to be gendered in historically and culturally specific ways, but that the specific manner in which Nepal has been inserted in the late capitalist global economy--via 'development'--has resulted in de-politicized forms of citizenship with local and global constraints on the enlargement of its political potential.     

Policy reform and rural development assistance in Tanzania

Tanzania for a long time refused to reform its economic policies along the lines recommended by the World Bank and IMF. Eventually the foreign exchange crisis forced the government to make the changes advocated by its own pragmatic economists and the Western donor community. The reforms were necessary, but not a panacea for all the problems which had plagued rural development programmes over the past decade. Three big problems still face basic-needs programmes: the government administration has very little capacity to manage or back up programmes; neither the national nor district governments can afford them; and rural residents have not compensated for either of these deficiencies through their own participation and contributions. This article looks at two basic-needs programmes in the rural water supply sector to illustrate how these long-standing problems continue to affect implementation. Both programmes are funded and implemented by donors. The conclusion is that donors have not been sufficiently self-conscious and innovative in grappling with the more intractable problems facing rural programme assistance in Tanzania.     

Role conflict and the limits of state identity: the case of Indonesia in democracy promotion

This paper aims to analyse why Indonesia projects democracy as a state identity by taking on the role of democracy promoter? This paper argues that Indonesia's aspiring role as a democracy promoter is not a manifestation of a firm and coherent democratic political culture, which is more likely to be a permanent feature of states. Thus, rather than seeing it as firmly established state identity, instead, Indonesia's democratic identity should be seen as role conception articulated by foreign policy elites in its quest for international prestige. Its role as a democracy promoter has enabled Indonesia to enhance its other roles conceptions such as a regional leader in Southeast Asia as well as a bridge-builder at the global level. However, this paper further argues that Indonesia's role as a democracy promoter has also been hindered due to the inter-role conflicts arising from its enactment of multiple roles. As a result, Indonesia's enactment of the role as democracy promoter has relatively less impactful towards democratization in the region. To substantiate this argument, the paper examines Indonesia's strategies in promoting democracy and human rights in three case studies, namely Indonesia's role in mainstreaming human rights in ASEAN, Indonesia's democracy promotion through the Bali Democracy Forum, and Indonesia's engagement towards democratization in Myanmar.     

Sex,gender, and promotion in executive office: Cabinet careers in the world of Westminster

This article provides the first analysis of gendered promotion issues for cabinet ministers using most-similar systems design for three “Westminster-style” governments: Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. Using individual-level data and controlling for biographical, institutional, and country effects we find, in common with earlier literature, that women are more likely to be given less prestigious cabinet posts and be assigned to “feminine” portfolio. Using both sequence and event history analysis, we see the careers of men and women starkly diverge. We find that women are less likely to be promoted than men but find no relationship between prestigious portfolio and promotion. However, feminine portfolio assignments decrease the promotion prospects for women yet increase them for men.     

Foreign assistance and development in a small-island economy: The case of Fiji

In many works on comparative public administration and development management the arguments put forward are often presented within the framework of comparing developed and less-developed countries. However, within the latter category there are fairly substantial differences, usually categorized within the context of system of government, or degrees of per capita income. Rarely is the question of scale addressed head on. One dimension of this, for instance, is the nature and operation of public administration where the proliferation of traditional ministries, and the impartiality of the administration, become very problematic in terms of the extremely limited resources and the very personal nature of public life— especially in the microstates. In this paper the question of scale is addressed in the context of the relationship between one island state, Fiji, and its bilateral and multilateral partners. This is considered not just in terms of aid and loans, but in terms of such issues as the ‘critical mass’ of skilled professional people, and the problems of functioning in a system where the rules for such things as overheads seem to have been evolved in the context of the Third-World giants. It is shown that the scale variable is a very powerful one in both the effectiveness and efficiency of governments working in tandem with major external sources of capital assistance.     

Sexual orientation,political trust,and same-sex relationship recognition policies: evidence from Europe

Public Choice - This study uses data from the European Social Survey to analyze the impact of same-sex relationship recognition policies on the political trust of sexual minorities. We exploit...     

Analyzing the dynamic complexity of development interventions: lessons from an irrigation experiment in Nepal

Improving irrigation systems in Asian countries has been a high priority for the allocation of international aid. Substantial funds have been allocated to adopt the “best practices” of hiring external water engineers to construct modern systems to replace those that farmers built. These expensive investments have infrequently led to long-term improvement in the operation of irrigation systems in Asia. In this article, we examine the process and impact of an innovative irrigation assistance project that was initially undertaken in Nepal in the mid-1980s. We analyze data obtained over three time periods related to changes in system structure and performance over time. We trace the unfolding patterns of improved engineering infrastructure across time depending on the way it interacts with other factors to affect long-term irrigation performance. We examine some of the key variables that are likely to affect the diverse and complex patterns of change. We also undertake analysis of the configural impact of core variables using Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA). We find that the initial and later investments in system infrastructure are only one factor that helps to generate short-term improvement. Unless farmers encourage local entrepreneurs and organize themselves, create their own rules or use sanctions, and augment their rules through collective action, infrastructure investment alone is not sufficient to achieve sustainable higher performance.     

Sexual identity,citizenship and medical power of attorney: case illustrations from Northern Ontario,Canada1

Current analyses of sexual identity and citizenship offer complexity to debates about what it means to be a citizen in liberal democratic societies. However, thus far there is limited inclusion of ethnographic, narrative‐based research that addresses how lesbians and gay men experience and negotiate citizenship in their everyday lives. In this paper, I argue that attitudes about medical power of attorney are a lens through which we can examine how lesbians negotiate and experience citizenship in their daily lives and in medical settings. My analysis demonstrates how normative citizenship structures are experienced, reinforced and challenged by four lesbians living in a community in Ontario's Near North region, Canada. In providing case illustrations, I argue that the inclusion of lived experiences strengthens and deepens textual, historical and political analyses of citizenship.     

Alternative patterns of welfare state development: The case of public assistance in the Netherlands

Among the numerous studies of the development of welfare states, less attention has been paid to the smaller European democracies. In an attempt to address this problem, this article investigates the development of public assistance programmes in the Netherlands. The historical record shows that the development of the Dutch public assistance programme has been more contentious than the development of similar programmes in other countries. An explanation for political controversy surrounding Dutch public assistance focuses on the manifestation of corporatism in a policy area that involved private charity organisations, rather than labour and capital interests. The incorporation of private charities permitted them to slow state encroachment on their activities. Implications of the case for the study of corporatism in other countries are discussed.     

Regional development policies and the constructions of gender equality: The Swedish case

Abstract.  This article uses a discursive approach to analyze how gender equality has and is being constructed and given meaning in the context of Swedish regional policy. Drawing on Carole Bacchi's 'What's the Problem? Approach', we explore how arguments concerning the new forms of regional policy are assigning different categories of people different subject positions and, in particular, we focus on the kind of subject positions that are being given to women as a group in this context. The discourse being shaped in national policy is, however, interpreted in specific contexts. Accordingly, we compare the way this new discourse is being (re)interpreted and (re)constructed and the subject positions being ascribed to women in the regional development partnerships and growth strategies in two Swedish regions: Västerbotten and Jönköping. Finally, we draw attention to how both the form and the content of Swedish regional development policies create great difficulties for politicizing gender as a power dimension in society. We suggest that regional politics has become de-politicized and argue for the need for it to be re-politicized with gender included as a conflict dimension.     

Rural development management in Nepal,Part I: Coordination in the Rasuwa-Nuwakot Integrated Rural Development Programme

Rural development management in Nepal has been criticized for more than a decade now on the grounds of the country's weak aid-absorbing capacity, administrative slowness and poor project management. Though several reforms of the rural development planning and management systems have been staged, at present coordination in integrated rural development projects remains weak. The paper reports on the empirical findings of research on mechanisms, procedures, organizational arrangements and problems of coordination. Although the country's environment, and its socioeconomic and cultural constraints, may negatively influence smooth operations in implementing integrated programmes, several policy considerations for improvement may be formulated. Among these, organizational reform with decentralization and reduction of the number of offices involved, strengthening the resource management system, especially budget release and personnel motivation, and a more integrated method of policy, programme and project formulation are the issues considered most important by the government officers themselves. Part II will appear in vol. 7, no. 3 of this journal, and examines the implementation and management of rural development in the Karnali and Bheri districts of the Mid-Western Development Region of Nepal.     

Social analysis,project development and advocacy in U.S. foreign assistance

In 1975 the U.S. Agency for International Development (AID), the principal administrative agent for American bilateral development assistance, mandated a social analysis component to the project preparation and approval process.¹ Although 'social soundness analysis' is now a required dimension of project identification and design its presumed positive effects are not yet apparent on the output side. Post project impact evaluations reveal that there continue to be negative social effects from AID'S development efforts, regardless of project type. In the process by which projects are identified, framed, approved, and ultimately implemented, important signals identified by pre-project social analysis get displaced. This occurs because anticipating social impact is only one of several goals or functions served by pre-project design analysis. This essay interprets the role of social analysis in the dynamics of project preparation, identifying structures and procedures which attenuate its influence.     

BRICS,the southern model,and the evolving landscape of development assistance: Toward a new taxonomy

In recent years, there has been an explosion of categories and labels to account for the expansion of forms of cooperation beyond the membership of the Development Assistance Committee. Such hype has led to the construction of the so‐called southern model as the archetype of development cooperation coming from non‐Development Assistance Committee countries that are somehow committed to the principles of the South–South cooperation. The present article challenges the idea of a southern model by providing an analysis of drivers, tools, and modality of development assistance.     

Reshaping Civil Society through a Truth Commission: Human Rights in Morocco's Process of Political Reform

¹Observers of Moroccan politics have debated extensively thesignificance of the country's ‘top-down’ liberalization.At this point, there is no definitive verdict on palace-guidedreforms, such as the recent Equity and Reconciliation Commission(IER). Rather, these reforms have left an ambiguous legacy.This article uses the IER – a truth commission establishedin 2004 to examine past human rights abuses, compensate victimsand ensure nonrepetition – as an analytical tool to understandhow transitional justice carried out as a strategic measureof top-down liberalization can reshape the relationship betweencivil society and the state. While the monarchy's reform effortsin Morocco have not (as of yet) led to a civil society capableof supporting a stable democratic transition, the article arguesthat these efforts have increased civil society's expectationsof gaining capacity and space to implement ethical goals anddemands. Greater expectations, in turn, have altered how themonarchy must calculate its survival strategy.