Reflections on relationships: the nature of partnership according to five NGOs in southern Mexico

This article is based on interviews with several staff members of NGOs located in San Cristóbal de Las Casas, Chiapas, Mexico, regarding partnerships between them and their funding sources, such as foundations or agencies of the North that do or support development work in the South. The motive behind the interviews was an interest in the word ‘partnerships’, in particular strategic ones. Do partnerships exist now and, if they do, what does it mean for the NGOs to have a partnership with a funding source? The general conclusion was that strategic partnerships have indeed existed in the past, and may again emerge in the future, but that currently they exist only sporadically, given the distinct ways of viewing and carrying out development work within NGOs on the one hand, and foundations or agencies on the other.     

Antipoverty Transfers and Labour Market Outcomes: Regression Discontinuity Design Findings

The article estimates the impact of Familias en Acción, a human development conditional cash transfer programme, on adult labour market outcomes in urban areas in Colombia. Relying on a regression discontinuity design and a large panel dataset, the article finds significant, largely positive, but heterogeneous programme effects on labour market outcomes. The findings suggest that antipoverty transfers enable a re-allocation of household productive resources among participant households.     

Introduction: citizenship as inhabitance? Migrant housing squats versus institutional accommodation

ABSTRACT

This special issue focuses on migrants’ self-organised strategies in relation to housing in Europe, namely the collective squatting of vacant buildings and land. In particular, the contributions to this special issue differentiate between shelter provided in state-run or humanitarian camps and squatted homes. Migrants squats are an essential part of the ‘corridors of solidarity’ that are being created throughout Europe, where grassroots social movements engaged in anti-racist, anarchist and anti-authoritarian politics coalesce with migrants in devising non-institutional responses to the violence of border regimes. In these spaces contentious politics and everyday social reproduction uproot racist and xenophobic regimes. The struggles emerging in these spaces disrupt host-guest relations, which often perpetuate state-imposed hierarchies and humanitarian disciplining technologies. Moreover, the solidarities and collaborations between undocumented and documented activists challenge hitherto prevailing notions of citizenship and social movements, as well as current articulations of the common. These radical spaces enable possibilities for inhabitance beyond, against and within citizenship, which do not only reverse forms of exclusion and repression, but produce ungovernable resources, alliances and subjectivities that prefigure more livable spaces for all. Therefore, these struggles are interpreted here as forms of commoning, as they constitute autonomous socio-political infrastructures and networks of solidarity beyond and against the state and humanitarian provision     

Near Infrared Spectroscopy Detection and Quantification of Herbal Medicines Adulterated with Sibutramine

There is an increasing demand for herbal medicines in weight loss treatment. Some synthetic chemicals, such as sibutramine (SB), have been detected as adulterants in herbal formulations. In this study, two strategies using near infrared (NIR) spectroscopy have been developed to evaluate potential adulteration of herbal medicines with SB: a qualitative screening approach and a quantitative methodology based on multivariate calibration. Samples were composed by products commercialized as herbal medicines, as well as by laboratory adulterated samples. Spectra were obtained in the range of 14,000–4000 per cm. Using PLS‐DA, a correct classification of 100% was achieved for the external validation set. In the quantitative approach, the root mean squares error of prediction (RMSEP), for both PLS and MLR models, was 0.2%w/w. The results prove the potential of NIR spectroscopy and multivariate calibration in quantifying sibutramine in adulterated herbal medicines samples.     

A Critical Comment on Niskanen's Model

Niskanen's model has been largely criticized, but it still remains a standard explanation of bureaucracy's behaviour. In this paper we criticize the monopoly power that Niskanen assigns to the bureaucracy. A bilateral monopoly between bureaucrats and politicians might be a much more adequate framework for explaining the bureaucracy's behaviour than Niskanen's original formulation of a perfect discriminating bureaucracy. In a bilateral monopoly model, in no case the type of relationship which holds between the sponsor and the bureau leads to an oversupply of output. Should an excess output occur, it would be a consequence of the political decision-making mechanisms. This result stands in sharp contrast to the Niskanen's model, but, at the same time, it is coherent with the fact that, when the sponsor introduces control and monitoring mechanisms, the sponsor does not pretend to decrease the output but rather to supervise and to reduce the costs of producing the output.     

The strategic use of dismissal legislation: an empirical analysis using Spanish data

In this paper, we analyse empirically how the legal framework affects the relationship between labour market conditions and dismissals. We use a pseudo-panel of Spanish data from 1987 to 2001. We find that Labour Law reforms have effects on the use of individual and collective dismissals although such effects are much lower than those related to the business cycle. The results also show a strategic use of the different types of dismissals, distorting the work of those institutions involved in dismissals.      

Genetic analysis of the populations from Northern and Mesopotamian provinces of Argentina by means of 15 autosomal STRs

The allele frequencies for the 15 short tandem repeats included in the Power Plex-16 kit (Promega Corp., Madison, WI, USA) were determined in a sample of 429 unrelated individuals from five provinces of the Northern and Northeastern regions of Argentina. Three Northern provinces including Salta, Formosa and Chaco and two within the region surrounded by the Paraná and Uruguay Rivers commonly known as the Argentine Mesopotamia, including Misiones and Corrientes. Since in this region Entre Ríos Province is also present, previously published results were used for comparison. The calculated parameters: polymorphism information content (PIC); discrimination power (DP); matching probability (MP); typical paternity index (TPI) and power of exclusion (PE) showed Penta E to be the most valuable marker from the studied sample set. All loci met Hardy–Weinberg expectations using the Bonferroni correction for the number of loci analyzed, except D3S1358 in Salta and THO1 in Formosa provinces. Population differentiation test revealed that the Salta population sample data denoted significant differences for various loci when compared with the other province information presented here in, as well as with other published data sets.