Grabbing back: essays against the global land grab

ABSTRACT

Extensive research, mainly undertaken by nutrition scientists and economists, indicates that the presence of a home garden is positively associated with improved household nutrition in rural households of the global South. However, this literature is relatively silent on the contexts that influence home garden uptake. This is problematic given rapidly changing social and economic landscapes, which reshape the place and scope for home gardens within households’ livelihood and food provisioning arrangements. Original research from Myanmar reported here reveals that emergent socio-economic contexts for rural households are posing heightened challenges for home gardens to contribute to food and nutrition security.     

Heterogeneous images of (mobile) technologies and services: a feminist contribution

Over the course of the life of the policy of apartheid, the South African State undertook an exercise of classifying the population into different racial categories. These racial classifications were accepted by most but also disputed by many individuals who appealed to be reclassified into other categories or were forcefully reclassified. Interwoven with the processes of racial classification and objections against classification were the laws against inter-racial coupling. The police arrested and the courts prosecuted thousands of individuals for unlawful sex with persons regarded as of other races. This article employs four illustrative cases to show how a certain idea of whiteness was constituted, elaborated, and rooted. The analysis undertaken in this article is grounded on the reports carried in the annual Survey of Race Relations in South Africa about the population of South Africa in the 1960s, a period that has been referred to as the hey-day of apartheid. The article underlines the role of sexuality in the making of whiteness, linking the intention of the immorality laws with the creation of whiteness generally and dominant white masculinity specifically. The State is shown to have been a principal actor in the rendition of sexuality as constitutive of whiteness. The article concludes that over the years the idea of sexuality and sexual immorality as conveyed by the apartheid legal Acts ended up distending the conception of being white, reshaping the development of personal and social relations of whites to each other and to members of groupings.     

INSTITUTIONAL LAYERING IN GOVERNING HEALTHCARE QUALITY

Since the 1980s, regulated markets and New Public Management have been introduced in the public sector across the world. How they have affected existing governance mechanisms such as self‐regulation and state regulation has remained largely unexplored, however. This article examines the origins and consequences of institutional layering in governing healthcare quality. Dutch health care, where a market‐based system has been introduced, is used as a case study. The results show that this market‐based system did not replace but modified existing institutional arrangements. As a result, hospitals have to deal with the fragmentation of quality demands. Using the concept of institutional layering, this study shows how different arrangements interact. As a consequence, the introduction of a certain policy reform will work out differently in different countries and policy sectors. Our ‘archaeological’ study in this layering can be seen as an example of how such incremental change can be studied in detail.     

Political Corruption and Institutional Stability

This article is the first to statistically examine the reciprocal relationship between formal political institutions and political corruption. We argue that political corruption is an informal institution that allows nondemocratic leaders to build political support, act as a substitute for liberalizing concessions in the formal institutions of the state, and thereby extends the longevity of non-democratic regimes. Yet, whereas high corruption level will prevail in nondemocratic regimes, we expect the electoral constituency in democratic regimes to have the formal power to curb political corruption. We demonstrate that these expectations hold by estimating a dynamic multinomial regression model on data for 133 countries for the 1985–2008 period. Our model shows that high-corruption autocracies and hybrid regimes are more stable than their low-corruption counterparts, but that low-corruption democracies are more stable than high-corruption ones. For autocratic and hybrid regimes, the stability is due both to corruption making the formal institutions more resistant to democratization and that the formal institutions prevent reductions in corruption. Consistent democracies, on the other hand, are able to reduce corruption and become more stable as a result.