What Kind of Geography for What Kind of Public Policy?

Abstract

Before geographers commit themselves to public policy, they need to pose two questions: what kind of geography and what kind of public policy. The evolution of the discipline, in terms both of its aims and its professional organization, must be seen as an adaptation to external conditions, particularly to the development of the corporate state with its emphasis on the 'national interest'. The corporate state forces education to be seen purely as investment in manpower and academic research becomes subservient to the state and is used to preserve and strengthen the status quo. There is here a potential conflict with the academic's sense of moral obligation, but in practice the conflict is resolved by the parochialism and elitism of the humanistic tradition. To help to move away from the corporate state and towards the 'incorporated state' in which men can control the social conditions of their own existence, geographers need to address their efforts towards understanding the tension between the humanistic tradition and the pervasive needs of the corporate state and thereby to learn how to exploit the contradictions within the corporate state itself. CAN geographers contribute successfully, meaningfully and effectively to the formation of public policy ? General Pinochet is a geographer by training, and by all accounts he is successfully putting geography into public policy. As President of the military Junta that overthrew the elected government of Salvador Allende in Chile on I September I973, General Pinochet does not approve of 'subversive' academic disciplines such as sociology, politics and even philosophy. He has asked that 'lessons in patriotism' be taught in all Chilean schools and universities and he is known to look with great favour upon the teaching of geography-such a subject is, he says, ideally suited to instruct the Chilean people in the virtues of patriotism and to convey to the people a sense of their true historic destiny. Since the military have taken full command of the universities and frequently supervise instruction in the schools, it appears that geography will become a very significant discipline in the Chilean educational system. General Pinochet is also actively changing the human geography of Chile. An example is here in order. The health care system of Chile has, for some time, comprised three distinct components: the rich paid for services on a 'free-market' basis; the middle classes made use of hospital-based medicine financed by private insurance schemes; while the lower classes and poor (some 60 per cent of the population) received free medical care in community-based health centres paid for out of a National Health Service.1 Under Allende, resources were switched from the first two sectors into the community health services which had previously been poorly financed and largely ignored. The geography of the health care system began to be transformed from a centralized, provider-controlled, hospital-centred system catering exclusively to the middle and upper classes, to a decentralized, community-controlled, free health care system primarily catering to the needs of the lower classes and the poor. This transformation did not occur without resistance-the providers of hospital-based medicine organized strikes to preserve the old social geography of health care against the emergence of the new. But during the Allende years the community health centres grew and flourished. Also, community control through the creation of Community Health Councils had a profound political impact and many aspects of life began to be organized around the community health centres. The emphasis also shifted from curative medicine (with all of its glamour and expensive paraphernalia) to preventive medicine which sought to treat medical care as something integral to a wide range of environmental issues (water supply, sewage disposal, and the like). The human geography of social contact, political power and distribution changed as hitherto never before, as the lower classes and poor people began to realize the potential for controlling the social conditions of their own existence.