Assessing Local Government Capacity for Implementing Sustainable Transportation: The Role of Political Culture

Transportation development increasingly relies on local governments to implement sustainable strategies, yet implementation success varies widely. This begs an important question, why are some cities successful and others not? In response, this study focuses on the political culture characteristics of city leadership and staff pertaining to sustainable transportation. Employing semi-structured interviews with officials in two case study cities—Pomona and Pasadena, California—the study identifies and traces the impact of cultural characteristics on network interactions and the resulting transportation innovation. Finally, this research suggests key political and department characteristics that contribute to political cultures that facilitate sustainable transportation development.     

“Most MPs are Not All that Sharp.” Political Employees and Representative Democracy

The article analyses the orientations of political employees in Sweden. It finds that their roles are diffuse: there is no agreement among political employees about whether they are politicians or not, and their mandate is fleeting and unclear. They hold the average politician’s intellectual abilities in low regard, and sometimes take on clearly paternalistic views toward elected representatives. They see little attraction in pursuing a career as elected politicians, because of intrusive media scrutiny and since they hold a view of elected politics as slow, boring, and shallow. The professional route to politics is seen as more fast and fun.     

ASEAN At 50: the global political economy’s contribution to durability

Why has the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) proved so durable as a regional organisation given the many challenges it has faced since its inception in 1967? This analysis makes use of an historical institutionalist approach. It shows how the global political economy, through the injection of aid and investment and the development of production networks and increased trade, generated a generally positive regional economic environment that encouraged cooperation. It also provided the resources for the gradual institutionalisation of ASEAN and the expansion of its reach through the establishment of associated regional organisations. The result was that these factors, in combination, contributed to ASEAN’s staying power.     

Qatar’s humanitarian aid to Palestine

The purpose of this paper is to document Qatar’s recent contribution of humanitarian aid to the Palestinians. We consider Qatar as an example of a mini state that relies on its wealth and soft power to further its interests in the Middle East and support a beleaguered Arab-Muslim state. The paper carries out analysis of Arabic newspapers and other documentary evidence to contextualise and estimate Qatar’s financial contribution 2010–2016. Contextualising Qatar’s aid necessitates considering Israel’s military control of the Palestinian Territories, and its ability through hard power to regulate the inflow of aid to Palestine. The paper concludes by calling for adopting the political economy perspective in dealing with humanitarian aid.     

Why do South-east Asian states choose to suppress opium? A cross-case comparison

Abstract

This paper compares the reasons given by three South-east Asian states (Laos, Thailand and Vietnam) for choosing to suppress opium production. While external pressure, often from the US or United Nations (UN)/League of Nations, is the most commonly identified reason in the literature, and was experienced in each case, it was not by itself sufficient to motivate states into action. All three cases were motivated by religious or ideological opposition to drug consumption or trade, rural development, state extension and concern for increasing domestic drug consumption. Apprehension about rising drug consumption often possessed racial or chauvinistic elements. The development of export commodities, environmental protection and national security were also identified in one or two cases. The paper concludes by hypothesising that economic and/or security considerations underlie all choices to suppress illicit drug crops.     

Mobilising volunteer activists in political parties: the view from central office

The role of volunteer activists in the success of election campaigning has undergone somewhat of a renaissance in the last decade or so. It is now becoming increasingly evident that having a strong volunteer activist base is central to winning elections, especially when the campaign is a close run affair. This then raises the important question of how to raise the volunteer armies necessary for such work. Indeed, there is a reasonably long standing literature on what might incentivise people to become active in political parties. However, there is relatively little work done on what party managers are able and willing to offer members as incentives for activism. Using new data from extensive interviews with professional party managers working in the central offices of political parties, this article explores the ways in which such party managers have worked to incentivise volunteer activists. From this data, it offers a new framework for encouraging volunteer activism through inclusive party organisations.     

A political ecology of socio-economic differentiation: debt,inputs and liberalization reforms in southwestern Burkina Faso

This paper builds on work from the agrarian change and political ecology literatures to analyze the process of agrarian change among smallholder cotton farmers in southwestern Burkina Faso. Specifically, we use a rural survey of 72 heads of household in three villages to examine whether and how (1) access to agricultural inputs, (2) debt and (3) liberalization reforms combine to produce rural socio-economic differentiation based on wealth. We find that wealthier farmers use more mineral fertilizer and manure inputs than their poorer counterparts. Wealthier farmers are also better able to remain debt-free as cotton prices drop and input prices rise. Moreover, they are able to take advantage of the neo-liberal restructuring of cotton cooperatives to change polices on debt repayment and input provisioning to their favor. This growing divide has large implications for rural food security, particularly as land becomes scarcer, fallows disappear and the need to intensify production grows. This research addresses two gaps in the agrarian change literature in relating how liberalization reforms and biophysical elements drive rural socio-economic differentiation. This work also shows that merging the concerns of political ecology with the agrarian change literature allows for a deeper examination of rural socio-economic differentiation.     

Soft budgets and elastic debt: farm liabilities in the agrarian political economy of post-Soviet Tajikistan

ABSTRACT

Since Tajikistan’s independence, market reforms and pressure from international donors have brought changes to the state’s role in the economy. The official narrative holds that the post-socialist state reduced its control over agriculture, but there are still various mechanisms through which it exerts control over farming. In this paper, I examine Tajikistan’s post-socialist agrarian change through the prism of farm debt. Farm debt used to be an accounting nuisance in Soviet agriculture as a result of so-called soft-budget constraints. In the political economy of post-socialist transformation, farm cotton debt has been transformed into indebted land. I classify this debt ‘elastic’ for its ambiguous nature. It ties farmers to land and makes farmers’ independence illusory. With an in-depth analysis based on original ethnographic insights, I aim to provide a theoretical contribution to the way in which debt is conceptualised and politicised in post-Soviet Tajikistan.     

The land of no taboo: agrarian politics of neglect and care in Madagascar

ABSTRACT

In considering the complex relationships between taboo, culture and landscapes, it is productive to examine not only how people bestow taboos onto places, but also how they take them away. In this contribution, I use as a case study a 35-hectare parcel of agricultural land in Madagascar, where members of an extended family are debating whether or not to continue to follow their ancestral taboos while farming. Analyzing the debate, alternative historical, cultural and political narratives of land relationships emerge, including a fraught colonial history, ongoing battles over land tenure, shifting community demographics, and intergenerational conflicts. Overall, this stretch of land illustrates that agricultural landscapes may be rendered without taboo not because they lack meaning, but because they contain an excess of overlapping – and highly contentious – meanings.     

Plantation rubber,land grabbing and social-property transformation in southern Laos

This paper critically examines theories of accumulation, dispossession and exclusion for analyzing the agrarian transformations that result from contemporary large-scale land acquisitions across the Global South. Building upon Marx's primitive accumulation, Harvey's accumulation by dispossession and Hall et al.'s Powers of Exclusion, conceptual lenses are developed through which to examine how land grabs transform property and social relationships of resource-based production. I examine the concession of 10,000 hectares by the central government of Laos to a Vietnamese corporation for extracting timber and planting rubber in the southern province of Attapeu. This acquisition has excluded farmers from land and resources that constituted their primary sources of (re)production, reconfigured rural property relations, altered the peasant relationship to land and produced new exploitative forms of wage labor.