Working with local NGOs: WaterAid's programme in Nepal

This article describes the evolution of WaterAid's programme of work in Nepal, based on the author's experiences while working as WaterAid's Representative Engineer in Nepal from 1987 to 1991. It examines how WaterAid's philosophy of working in partnership with local organisations was actually put into practice. Various problems and constraints are identified and discussed, and certain points are highlighted which may be of general interest to other external support agencies working in similar ways in other countries and sectors. The overall conclusion is that this programme represents a viable methodology for an international NGO to achieve useful results in supporting local NGOs working in development.     

Ludic Negation: Thrasher's The Gang and the Creative Foundations of Gang Sociality

Critical Criminology - In the following essay, I describe how one of the most cited but least analyzed texts in gang studies, Frederic Thrasher's The Gang (1927), has informed my approach to...     

Retrospective and Prospective Performance Assessments during the 2004 Election Campaign: Tests of Mediation and News Media Priming

According to many theoretical accounts of the vote choice, distal determinants (e.g., party identification) influence proximal determinants (e.g., perceptions of candidates), which in turn shape candidate preferences. Yet almost no research on voting has formally tested such mediational hypotheses. Using national survey data collected between February and September of 2004, this paper begins by illustrating how to conduct such investigations. We explored whether public approval of President Bush’s handling of a series of specific national problems (e.g., the Iraq war) influenced overall assessments of his job performance and evaluations of his likely future performance versus John Kerry’s, which in turn shaped vote choices. The results are consistent with the claim of mediation and shed additional light on the impact of various issues on the 2004 election outcome. We also tested what we term the “dosage hypothesis,” derived from news media priming theory, which posits that changes in the amount of media coverage of an issue during the course of a campaign should precipitate changes in the weight citizens place on that issue when evaluating the president’s overall job performance, particularly among citizens most exposed to the news. Surprisingly, this analysis did not yield consistent support for the venerable dosage hypothesis, suggesting that the conditions under which priming occurs should be specified much more precisely in future work.

Bridging the Gap: A Pragmatic Approach to Understanding Critical Criminologies and Policy Influence

The longstanding connection between criminological theory, research and the design and delivery of criminal justice policy has been challenged in the last 3 decades by a variety of constraints such as the rise of neoconservative attitudes, symbolic public discourses about crime, and the proliferation of capture, monitor, and detect strategies brought about by technological innovation. Building on Kevin Haggerty’s (2004. Displaced expertise: three constraints on the policy-relevance of criminological thought. Theoretical Criminology, 8(2), 211–231.) exploration of the external factors that challenge the transition from criminological theory to criminal justice policy and practice, this paper considers internal challenges that may also be relevant. By examining two recent critical criminological orientating strategies, namely left realism and constitutive criminology, the paper concludes by suggesting that an integrated perspective which draws strengths from each of these approaches could assist critical criminologists to better influence policy in the future.

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Regulating the retirement age—Lessons from Nordic pension policy approaches

The likelihood that longevity will continue to increase has generated a search for regulation that make people work longer as they live longer, and thus not just containing pension expenditure but also enlarging labor supply, economic growth, and tax revenue. In public pension policy, Nordic countries have led the world with three types of approaches aimed at making people retire later. The first came when Sweden, followed by Finland and Norway, installed life expectancy coefficients in benefit calculation formulas. The second followed as Finland introduced age-related accrual rates and the third when Denmark indexed the pensionable age to developments in life expectancy. Since economic incentive-based regulations failed to raise exit ages sufficiently, Finland and Sweden subsequently linked pensionable ages to life expectancy like Denmark. While this policy brings out inequalities in health and workability, the fact that countries found it necessary to index the pensionable age to longevity instead of just relying on economic incentives in regulating retirement behavior may hold lessons for other countries.