Demands,responsibility, and influence in Malawi’s participatory agricultural extension services

Participatory governance offers the potential to deliver responsive and accountable services. This article tests this expectation by looking at how members of participatory extension platforms in Malawi understand the meaning of “demand-driven” services, and allocate responsibility and influence in service provision. Results show that most respondents agree on bottom-up extension services that respond to expressed farmers’ needs (86% of respondents), and assign responsibility and influence widely across state and non-state actors. While these findings suggest that these participatory mechanisms can promote responsiveness to farmers’ needs and accountability, they also point toward different governance challenges in extension services.     

Co-Production and Health System Reform – From Re-Imagining To Re-Making

There is growing interest in the application of citizen participation within all areas of public sector service development, where it is increasingly promoted as a significant strand of post-neoliberal policy concerned with re-imagining citizenship and more participatory forms of citizen/consumer engagement. The application of such a perspective within health services, via co-production, has both beneficial, but also problematic implications for the organisation of such services, for professional practice and education. Given the disappointing results in increasing consumer involvement in health services via 'choice' and 'voice' participation strategies, the question of how the more challenging approach of co-production will fare needs to be addressed. The article discusses the possibilities and challenges of system-wide co-production for health. It identifies the discourse and practice contours of co-production, differentiating co-production from other health consumer-led approaches. Finally, it identifies issues critically related to the successful implementation of co-production where additional theorisation and research are required.     

Re-slicing the Big Apple: New Immigrants and African-Americans in the New York Economy

The continuing convergence of immigrants on New York City is a puzzle. On the one hand, the decline of the city's manufacturing sector and the growth of advanced services appear to provide little demand for immigrant labor; on the other hand, the deep penetration of immigrants into the city's economy has been paralleled by a deteriorating employment situation among native blacks. This article, seeks to unravel this puzzk in the light of two conflicting perspectives, the restructuring and the replacement labor hypotheses. The paper assesses each perspective using data from the 1970 and 1980 Censuses of Population and merged sampks of the June 1986 and 1988 Current Population Surveys.