On the politics of production: A comment on ‘peasants and politics’ by Eric Hobsbawn

This article examines how poor rural families in India cope with the food insecurity associated with seasonal troughs in the agricultural production cycle, and with calamities such as drought and famine; the effectiveness of the coping mechanisms they adopt; the intra‐household sharing of the burden of coping; and the appropriate state and non‐state interventions that would strengthen the survival mechanisms adopted by the families themselves. The family is seen here as a bargaining unit, the ability of different members to command food (among other resources) depending on their relative bargaining strengths, determined in turn by their ownership endowments (of land, labour, etc.), exchange entitlements, and external social and communal support systems. Gender and age both form the basis of intra‐family inequality in this respect. While seasonality reveals a face of the family which is one of co‐operation, famine mirrors one of disintegration. In both contexts, the burden of coping falls disproportionately on female members within poor households, traceable to women's already weak and further weakened (during calamity) bargaining position within the family. A re‐interpretation of existing facts about the 1943 Bengal famine illustrates the process of family disintegration and the abandonment of wives and children during a severe calamity. State efforts complemented by non‐state interventions therefore need to be directed to programmes that ‘empower’ poor families and the more vulnerable members within them.     

Commentary: Food regime for thought

This essay engages with Henry Bernstein's critical survey of food regime analysis, focusing on the claim that my interpretation of the food regime takes a misguided ‘peasant turn’. I argue Henry's representation loses sight of my reformulation of the ‘agrarian question’, as more than analysis of the uneven process by which capital subordinates landed property, and therefore of the class fate of the peasantry, as such. Rather it is about social and ecological fate on a global scale, involving questions of ecosystem survival, precarious labor circuits, urban slum proliferation, privatization of states, financialization, intellectual (property) rights, climate change mitigation and so on. Significantly, global recognition of these connections to processes of agro-industrialization and enclosure was informed by a ‘peasant’ mobilization that would be unthinkable within the terms of the classical agrarian question. Peasant organizations catalyzed challenge to the neoliberal food order institutionalized in the World Trade Organization (WTO) regime, in a time of massive dispossession. Politicizing neoliberal ‘food security’ as an agribusiness project, the ‘food sovereignty’ counter-movement used a politics of strategic essentialism to unmask the undemocratic and impoverishing architecture of the ‘free trade’ regime privileging corporate rights over state and citizen rights. In effect, this counter-movement performed a food regime analysis from within, importantly reaching beyond a peasant project. This essay revisits the comparative-historical method by which the food regime trajectory can be understood, as a contradictory set of interacting forces and relations that complicate and shape and reshape its politics, and yet allow identification of emergent possibilities.     

Playground or Church? Implications for Public Administration from Trinity Lutheran v. Comer

The roots of public administration are in the fields of management, political science, and the law. The law is underrepresented in the literature and is not as well understood by nonlawyer practitioners, yet it increasingly enables, constrains, and prescribes government action. In 2017, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on a case involving whether a government grant awarded on secular criteria must be provided to a qualified church. This article contributes to the field's understanding of the interplay of law and administration by examining the constitutional issues in the case and their implications for public administration. By considering how this dispute was framed and the ways in which the court approached its resolution, public officials can better understand the issues in similar cases; anticipate potential disputes; and (re)design policies that will serve their communities, remain within constitutional limits, and reduce the likelihood of litigation.     

The cyclicality of government foreign-aid expenditure: voter awareness in “good” times and in “bad”

Public Choice - While it has been argued that the cyclicality of government spending likely depends on the intensities of political pressure to increase expenditure, in economic upturns and...