Building capacity in indigenous governance: Comparing the Australian and American experiences

This paper compares key aspects of governance structures for Indigenous populations in the United States and Australia. The paper focuses on policy coordination and administration, in particular the nodes of decision-making in the two countries in relation to government contracting and accountability. The U.S. approach to funding Indigenous organizations stems from the 1975 Indian Self-Determination and Education Act and its subsequent expansions. Through the development of contracting into permanent compacting via block grants, this approach builds established nodes of Indigenous government and facilitates whole-of-government coherence at the level of the American Indian tribe. The U.S. approach seems correlated with better performance and may lighten bureaucratic loads over the long term. The Australian model, on the other hand, seeks to create whole-of-government coherence through top-down financial accountability in a way that hampers the development of Indigenous political capacity. The paper traces the development of these practices through time and illustrates how they contribute to the fragmentation rather than growth of Indigenous political capacities. It suggests ways the Australian model could be improved even in the absence of fundamental reform by drawing on the contracting-to-compacting framework of longstanding U.S. practices.     

Beyond Militant Particularisms: Collaboration and Hybridization in the “Contact Zones” of Environmentalism

ABSTRACT

This paper seeks to build on scholarship that historicises the commodification of water in Africa. It foregrounds this phenomenon as part of broader processes of colonial remaking of society–nature relations. An empirical analysis is developed that illustrates how the British colonists’ condescending attitudes to indigenous social-ecologies, as well as the attendant exclusionary practises relating to colonisers versus colonised body-space interactions, not only formed the moral and material justification for subjugating the “inferior other” but also provided legitimating narratives for entrenching a racially differentiated urbanism, imposing western sanitation attitudes and introducing modernist ways of capturing and domesticating water at Blantyre. These marked a watershed moment in reconfiguring water–society interactions from being quotidian activities performed by the indigenes to produce water as a use-value/basic need, to that mediated by the circulation of money, modernist public health concerns and water technologies primarily intended to serve the interests of the minority white settlers; thus setting in stone the production of Blantyre town in Malawi as an alienated and commodified waterscape.     

Book note

James William Morley (ed.) The Final Confrontation: Japan's Negotiations with the United States, 1941 New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. 437 pp. ISBN 0–231–08024–7.     

An examination of stress hardiness, dysphoria, and anger among police recruits exposed to stressful police academy training

This study examined whether stress hardiness moderates the relationship between stress and anger during stressful police academy training. It was hypothesized that stress hardiness alters the strength of the relationship between stressful circumstances and anger. The study of stress resistance is an important area of study as stress has been linked to behavioral problems (e.g., absenteeism from work), emotional problems (e.g., depression), and physical problems (e.g., coronary heart disease). This research was conducted as part of the doctoral dissertation requirements of Billy J. James at Walden University, Minneapolis, MN     

Bystander reaction to women fighting: developing a theory of intervention

This article explores accounts of bystanders to female-on-female public violence. Group interviews with participants in the night-time economy are carried out. Whereas men tend to respond to the discussion topic of female-on-female violence with laughter, this laughter reveals ambivalence and discomfort as much as amusement. Men seem to negotiate the tension between the expectation that they should intervene in emergencies and a catalogue of costs that attend intervention. Female bystanders appear to have a different set of concerns. They talk about feelings of shame at the interpersonal and the group level. Women cite the public spectacle, and the opportunity for men to demean or sexualize women, as reasons for intervention. The article concludes with some recommendations about the importance of exploring female violence in its own terms, beginning with a series of identified moral and social dilemmas incurred within possible third-party intervention.