Bringing the Revolution to the Countryside: Rural Health Programmes as State‐Building in Post‐1952 Bolivia

Bolivia's Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario (Revolutionary Nationalist Movement, MNR) took power in April 1952 via a popular social revolution. After 1952, the party implemented state‐sponsored modernisation projects, including extending rural public health programmes. The MNR used health programmes to change rural practices, cultivate political loyalty, and expand the state's political power. Yet rural indigenous communities were hardly passive recipients of these programmes. These communities often requested government services, and they borrowed the MNR's own political rhetoric to position themselves as worthy of state attention. Public health programmes increased access to rural health care, but they also allowed state officials and rural communities to negotiate the MNR's authority.     

‘A Sick,Weak, and Ignorant People’: Public Health Education and Prevention in Rural Colombia, 1930–1940

This article analyses Salud y Sanidad (Health and Sanitation), a government journal edited in 1930s Colombia. It examines the state's model of public health, which proposed education and prevention as strategies to guarantee the success of its programmes. It argues that despite the journal's more progressive approaches, editors and contributors reproduced stereotypes about Colombia's rural inhabitants that contradicted state rhetoric and showed the limits of public health models that do not address the underlying social inequities that drive the propagation of poverty and disease in rural areas, and that ultimately continued to blame victims for their illness and misfortune     

An Honourable Profession: Public Employees and Identity Construction in Chile, 1880–1920

This paper analyses how public employees at two Chilean government offices constructed their occupational identities. In contrast to the vast majority of previous work, which took the 1920s as its starting point, this study focuses on the period between 1880 and 1920. Additionally, the construction of identity is analysed in direct relation to performance in the workplace. The paper asserts that public criticism of their performance prompted public employees to develop an image of themselves based on the concept of their honourability as competent and honest workers.     

From ‘Green Laggard’ to Regional Leader: Explaining the Recent Development of Environmental Policy in Chile

Environmental policy in Chile has developed rapidly in recent years, and the country has become a regional leader in renewable energy, climate change policy, recycling, and nature conservation. This contrasts with the previous neglect of environmental issues in the country and its depiction as a ‘green laggard’ (Orihuela, 2014: 251) within Latin America. In this article the recent development of environmental policy in Chile is reviewed and five factors affecting this development are analysed: international influences, institutional legacies, a window of opportunity opened by environmental movements, policy entrepreneurship, and business power.     

The dilemmas of pursuing ‘throughput legitimacy’ through participatory mechanisms

Under pressure to open up the ‘black box’ of governance, technocratic bodies are increasingly seeking to include civil society participation in the policy process. This article draws on empirical cases from the European Commission and NHS England to assess the extent to which the participatory mechanisms pursued by these institutions have been successful in eliciting ‘throughput legitimacy’. It is shown that though these mechanisms have taken very different forms – the former a classic instance of ‘window dressing’ participation, the latter closer to ‘best practice’ in this field – they nevertheless share a number of ongoing vulnerabilities. The article outlines the shared organisational, operational and existential dilemmas that technocratic bodies face when eliciting civil society participation, and highlight their reliance on backstage negotiation to sustain stakeholder buy-in. It concludes by highlighting the prospect that the pursuit of throughput legitimacy for technocratic bodies entails inherent limitations and contradictions.     

The corporate shaping of GM crops as a technology for the poor

The status of international agricultural research as a global public good (GPG) has been widely accepted since the Green Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s. While the term was not used at the time of its creation, the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) system that evolved at that time has been described as a ‘prime example of the promise, performance and perils of an international approach to providing GPGs’. Contemporary literature on international agricultural research as a GPG tends to support this view and focuses on how to operationalize the concept. This paper adopts a different starting point and questions this conceptualization of the CGIAR and its outputs. It questions the appropriateness of such a ‘neutral’ concept to a system born of the imperatives of Cold War geopolitics, and shaped by a history of attempts to secure its relevance in a changing world. This paper draws on a multi-sited, ethnographic study of a research effort highlighted by the CGIAR as an exemplar of GPG-oriented research. Behind the ubiquitous language of GPGs, ‘partnership’ and ‘consensus’, however, new forms of exclusion and restriction are emerging within everyday practice, reproducing North–South inequalities and undermining the ability of these programmes to respond to the needs of projected beneficiaries.     

Books received

Since the early 2000s, the governments in ASEAN (the Association of South East Asian Nations) countries have developed ‘good agricultural practices’ (GAP) as public approaches to field-level quality assurance. Besides the primary goals of consumer food safety and quality assurance, these public GAP programs aim to support small-scale farmer inclusion in mainstream markets. This goal represents the antithesis of the prevailing trend that private GAP approaches have tightened integration with resourceful, large-scale producers in global value chains. This paper examines the compatibility of the goals of safety assurance and social justice in a public GAP approach through comparative analysis of Thailand's Q-GAP between two local contexts of fruit production and marketing. The research findings suggest that while the public GAP scheme could draw the participation of a broad cohort of local small-scale producers and serve to certify their production, its impact on changing producers' on-field practices and catalyzing their access to the global market through food safety assurance is limited. The binding factors include the lack of producers' understanding of the principles of the programme, limited additional economic merits for them, and the influence of extra-local market forces that stress economies of size and food quality rather than food safety.     

2000年政治经济学和社会主义经济理论热点问题研究综述

2000年政治经济学和社会主义经济理论热点问题集中在关于深化对劳动和劳动价值论的认识;公有制在社会主义制度中的地位;社会主义经济和有中国特色的社会主义经济的关系;政治经济学基本理论和方法的坚持与发展等几个方面.在研究和探讨中,见仁见智,推动了对相关问题的深入认识和理解.     

中国宏观经济现状与发展态势分析

当前中国宏观经济随着产业结构调整和国有企业经济效益明显好转而出现稳步回升的势头,经济质量也出现新的转机。但我国城乡经济发展极不平衡,制约经济增长的结构性、制度性问题仍未得到根本解决,经济回升的基础还不够稳固。要将转机变为战略性转折,一方面,必须继续坚持扩大内需的扩张性政策,保持较高的经济增长速度;另一方面,必须探索和推动政治体制的改革和法律制度建设,以激发经济增长的内在动力,加快经济结构调整以促进制度创新,切实提高国民经济的整体质量和效益。     

私利·公利·正义·仁义--义利关系的传统反思与现代诠释

本文首先在剖析中西义利观区别的基础上,把义和利的内涵分别分解为私利、公利和正义、仁义等不同层次.然后通过对社会主义市场经济内在本质的考察,提出理解义利关系的三大理论原则第一,以私利为动力,以公利为目标;第二,以正义为约束,以仁义为引导;第三,以利释义,以义制利,义利统一.最后根据以上原则提出社会主义市场经济条件下坚持义利统一的三个层次合理谋利即是义;增进公利即是义;自觉让利即是义.