Contested paradigms of ‘viability’ in redistributive land reform: perspectives from southern Africa

This article reviews some of the salient aspects of the controversy over capitalism and the fate of Russian peasantry, among the Russian Marxists and the narodniks immediately prior to and after the Bolshevik revolution. At issue was the characterization of peasant economies. The narodniks believed that neither marginalism nor Marxism fully captured the nuances of peasant agriculture and the economic system/systems that evolved out of it; neither the market model nor class analysis adequately described the allocative and distributive processes in such economies. While nineteenth-century narodniks stressed the role of institutions based in the village community, Chayanov's twentieth-century populism stressed the organizational dynamic of peasant households within an institutional framework. Accordingly, the economics of the Chayanovian interpretation are examined from an institutional and organizational perspective. Such an exercise, it is argued, lends more credibility not only to the narodnik agenda, but also to the peasantist model of development.     

Labour flexibility in export horticulture: a case study of northeast Brazilian grape production

This article analyses the nature and extent of labour flexibility, defined as lack of permanent and secure employment contracts, within an emerging export horticulture sector in northeast Brazil. Whilst much has been written about flexible employment systems in agriculture, it is important to show exactly why, how, and to what extent these systems are flexible, and conversely, what kinds of strategies and practices are available to workers to ameliorate their conditions within such systems. This article illustrates how a combination of processes – farms' ability to produce two harvests per annum, northern retailers' increasing demands for product quality, employers' requirements for relatively skilled labour, and workers' ability to organise and extract concessions from employers – contribute, within the conditions of the São Francisco valley, to specific labour regimes and forms of labour flexibility.     

The political economy of sugarcane flexing: initial insights from Brazil,Southern Africa and Cambodia

In the context of rising resource demand, agricultural crops such as sugarcane are being promoted for their multiple uses in different commodity markets and as alternatives to fossil fuel equivalents (i.e. as a source of biofuel, bioelectricity and bioplastic). These commodities are also produced on an increasingly flexible basis, as sugarcane mills respond to price signals and switch between different crop uses. This paper offers a preliminary exploration into the politics of this latest development in the capitalist industrialization of agriculture. It does so by focusing primarily on flexing in Brazil and highlighting the role of the state in both creating markets for non-food products that sugarcane mills can now switch between and managing the tensions that arise from this. These tensions have concerned consumer prices for fuel, control of distribution infrastructure and conditions of land conversion, each prompting political interventions by the state. The paper then suggests how this same process is taking place, albeit shaped by different contexts, in Southern Africa and Cambodia. It concludes with some key questions for further research: is flexing eroding the distinction between crop regimes? How do primary processors decide what their product mix will be? And on what basis do state actors support flexing between agricultural products and investments in so-called bio-refineries?     

The geopolitical economy of social policy in the Philippines: securitisation,emerging powers and multilateral policies

Recent geopolitical and economic changes have altered global social policy formation. The Bretton Woods multilateral development agencies (MDAs) have selectively incorporated ideas emerging from developing country states and decision makers, with a recent increased acceptance of social transfers as part of renewed efforts at poverty alleviation based on social risk management. There has been an instance in the use and promotion of conditional cash transfer (CCT) policies by MDAs. CCTs were a product of the emergence of a neo-structuralist welfare regime (understood as an ideal type) in Latin America – an attempt to reconcile neoliberal strategies of development with aspirations for guaranteed minimum incomes. The Bretton Woods and regional development bank MDAs have facilitated the adoption of CCTs in other developing countries, including the Phillipines. Here, a combination of actions by national political actors and MDAs has resulted in the implementation of a securitised and compliance-focused version of CCTs derived from the Colombian security state. Although poor Philippine households welcome income assistance, CCTs have acted to enforce further state monitoring without altering the national-based political and economic processes that replicate poverty.     

Fact Checking and Information in the Age of Covid

The Covid-19 pandemic has revealed and accelerated an information crisis as well as a health one. What we discover about Covid 19, how it spreads, to whom and why and how best to mitigate it—all depend on information. The essays in this special section, which this article introduces, explore the importance of information and the fundamental role of fact checkers in understanding how information flows, why mistakes are made, and how to counteract them. Fact checking as an idea and a practice emerged in the early twenty-first century, developed as a positive beacon to counteract a growing sense that information could no longer be trusted. Now, more than a decade after its creation, fact checking sits within a far more complex and chaotic media context, and its expertise and understanding has never been so important. We need to understand what fact checkers do because they are grappling with how to tether us to reality.     

Pragmatist and Neo‐Classical Policy Paradigms in Public Services: Which is the Better Template for Program Design?

Principal-agent theory alerts principals to their problematic relationship with agents. The former are encouraged to take deliberate action to counter asymmetries in knowledge, moral hazard etc. To avoid this, principals should determine outcomes and contracts and incentives should be designed to achieve them. This approach has influenced the form of purchaser-provider arrangements, including the Job Network. This article reviews impacts, which include incentives for gaming and increased transaction costs. Another survey highlighted the extent to which innovation in the disability employment sector had depended on collaboration, which competition would end. The article then sketches an alternative pragmatic or experimental approach, which assumes that the centre can never establish outcomes that are other than provisional and corrigible. Program design needs to be built around this fundamental fact. Learning not 'carrots and sticks' is the appropriate form of relationship. The article explores the feasibility of this approach in a Job Network context .     

The relative importance of identity status interview components

Eighty college males were given an expanded identity status interview which included two new interpersonal-sexual areas, “attitudes towards sexual expression” and “sex-role beliefs.” The relative contribution of the new content areas as well as of the standard three areas (occupation, religion, and politics) to overall identity status was assessed by noting the extent of correspondence. Identity status in each content area was also compared with performance on the dependent variable of cognitive complexity. Ideology contributed more than occupation both to overall status rating, as well as to discrimination on the dependent variable. Results on the two new areas supported the view that interpersonal-sexual concerns are important for men's identity development as well as for women's. The finding that all interview areas corresponded well with overall identity status and discriminated significantly on the dependent measure leads to the suggestion that the process variables of crisis and commitment may so overshadow a particular content area that any content of personal relevance for the late adolescent might be used in investigating ego identity development.