Social policy from the bottom up: Abandoning FGC in sub-Saharan Africa

The authors analyse the experience of Tostan, a Senegalese NGO, with the abandonment of female genital cutting (FGC) in Senegal, the Sudan, and Mali. Tostan uses non-formal, participatory methodologies to support village-based social change, especially in the areas of human rights and women's health. Following Tostan's educational programme, some communities have declared a moratorium on the practice of FGC and have mobilised their families and villages to discontinue its use. This article describes the process used, considers issues that have arisen as the concept is marketed and disseminated beyond Senegal, and reviews implications for grassroots policy initiatives.     

The Impact of Earnings Disregards on the Behavior of Low‐Income Families

This paper investigates the impact of changes in earnings disregards for welfare assistance received by single mothers following welfare reform in 1996. Some states adopted much higher earnings disregards (women could work full‐time and still receive substantial welfare benefits), while other states did not. We explore the effect of these changes on women's labor supply and income using several data sources and multiple estimation strategies. Our results indicate these changes had little effect on labor supply or income. We show this is because surprisingly few women used the earnings disregards. We discuss several explanations for why this might occur.     

Confronting penal excess

Each year, in the United Kingdom more than two million of our fellow citizens are subject to some form of penal sanction, including imprisonment, house arrest, community punishment, fines, cautions and penalty notices. This will strike many as excessive.     

The Trouble with Newcomers: Women,Localism and the Politics of Surfing

ABSTRACT

In Australian surfing, localism is a practice through which surfers claim authority to protect their surf breaks and access to waves from newcomers and outsiders. While localism has been shown to be a central component of the cultural identities of men who surf, the relationships to and experiences of localism of women who surf have rarely been the subject of critical analysis. In this discussion, I build on Krista Comer’s use of “girl localism” to understand how effects of globalisation are experienced as place-specific by surfers. In this case, thinking about localism helps shift an analysis of how women surf from a sole focus on sex and gender, and away from cisgendered white women, to adopt a more intersectional approach that considers multiple aspects of women’s surfing subjectivities, and the ways these impact their surfing lives. Examining the politicised nature of localism in surfing reveals how women are affected by and complicit in surfing hierarchies, highlights how surfing is enmeshed in the settler politics of place in Australia and, suggests means by which surfers might make more ethical approaches to entering surfing places as newcomers.     

Squaring the circle? Collective and distributive effects of United Nations Security Council reform

Changing the composition and voting system of the Security Council, in an effort to increase the institution’s global legitimacy, is proving to be one of the most difficult hurdles to overcome for the global community of states represented in the United Nations (UN). This paper demonstrates that due to institutional hurdles, it is considerably more difficult today than it was in the early years of the UN to reach a winning coalition in the General Assembly to secure Security Council reform. In addition, the paper analyzes the effects that adapted patterns of voting, as prescribed by recent reform proposals, would have on the distribution of power among UN member states in the Security Council and on the probability that this institution can form a winning coalition, i.e., reach decisions. Our power and decision capacity computations are based on (modified) Penrose-Banzhaf-Coleman measures.