Global Neoliberal Policies Research Articles

The Rise of Developmental Statism in India: Focusing on the Resurgence of State-owned Enterprises in the Modi Government's Infrastructure Development Strategy

This paper explores how the Narendra Modi administration has used state-owned enterprises (SOEs) to achieve its infrastructure development goals. After implementing global neoliberal policies in 1991, India had reduced the state's role and promoted private sector activities. However, these reforms failed to attract private sector investment, which led to a decline in growth. This decline in economic growth and slow progress in infrastructure became major political issues after the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. India witnessed a significant political shift in 2014 with the election of BJP-led Narendra Modi government, marking the first single-party majority government in three decades. The Modi administration identified infrastructure development as a critical factor in reviving India's growth story. It embraced what I term 'Developmental Statism' by extensively utilizing SOEs as 'developmental means' to implement crucial infrastructure developmental projects. India’s this developmental strategy led to the creation of new SOEs and an expansion of the existing ones. The paper also highlights that the resurgence of SOEs in the Indian economy doesn't oppose the market economy. Instead, it facilitates the market economy by promoting public-private partnerships.

ANALYSIS OF THE FACTORS AFFECTING THE SELECTION OF THE SITE-LOCATION FOR HEALTH FREE ZONE IN TURKIYE

Purpose- The purpose of this study is to investigate and analyze the factors affecting the location selection for Health Free Zone in Turkey if established. Since 1980’s various transformations are experienced in health sector worldwide with the effects of global neo-liberal policies. New products, new methods, and new markets are emerged. Health tourism and Health Free Zones (SASEB) are at the forefront of these developments. First, the health tourism entered the world agenda in 1990s, and since the 2000s, Health Free Zones have followed this trend. The Health Free Zone project attracts the attention of many countries that want to get a big share from the global health tourism market, to attract foreign direct investments (FDI), to benefit from technology transfer, to increase health quality and standards, to exchange information and experience, and to attract specialist physicians and health personnel. United Arab Emirates was the first country in the world to realize this project in 2002, and in the following years, China, South Korea, Indonesia and Nigeria started the implementation steps, and countries such as Turkey and India could not continue despite their rapid start. Although the Health Free Zone project, which came to the fore in Turkey in 2010, aroused great excitement in the whole country, the project could not be realized. With the change of the minister and senior bureaucrats of the period, the interest of the government in SASEB project decreased. Although attempts have been made by the private sector in various provinces, no results have been achieved until today. Methodology- In this study, an answer has been sought to the question of what are the factors that affect the selection of the location for SASEB. The study was conducted with a sample group consisting of those working in the health sector or related fields in Turkey. A total of 518 persons have participated in the study, in which a 5-point Likert scale and quantitative method was used. Parametric analyses were carried out with the data obtained from the remaining 491 individuals, after subtracting 27 units from the data, which hindered the normal distribution of the data. Frequency charts of demographic data belonging to the sample group were drawn by using SPSS v.23, and the obtained data were also subjected to t-test and ANOVA analysis. Findings- The analysis reveals that the majority of the sample group confirmed that Istanbul (89,6%), Izmir (88,4%), Antalya (87,3%) and Ankara (83,9%) were the most appropriate provinces for the SASEB project. The strategic situation of the location has a significant impact on the decision processes (92,3%), followed by other factors such as the availability of transportation facilities (91,7%) and the availability of airport facilty in the region (90,1%). Conclusion- Based upon the analyisis, it has been revealed that Istanbul is the most appropriate city for SASEB project, due to its sea, airport, road accessibility and other infrastructure possibilities, followed by İzmir. Keywords: Health free zone, sağlık serbest bölgesi, medical tourism, SASEB, health tourism JEL Codes: I11, N22, M21

Higher Education funding, Justice and Equity - Critical Perspectives

How governments choose to fund students in higher education (HE) is inextricably linked to the sector’s sustainability and efforts to achieve a just and equitable HE experience and outcomes for all students. The way funding mechanisms are structured and subsequently enacted within the university, has far-reaching consequences, with the implications reaching far beyond the walls of the institution (Shermer, 2021). In the context of austerity, marketisation, credentialisation and related neoliberal conceptions of education and society, student funding models have greatly transformed the sector and its role in enabling or hindering efforts to achieve a more just and equitable society (Quinlan, 2014). However, despite well-intentioned global and national-level policy commitments to achieving justice and equity in and through HE, the persistent effects of geography, race, wealth, gender, and class-based disparities in patterns of access, participation and attainment rates have undermined the idea of HE as a vehicle for just and equitable futures and transformation (Boliver, 2017). Higher education institutions globally find themselves at a crossroads of trying to maintain their core purpose as a public good on the one hand and compliance with global neoliberal policies, which are foundational to the modern university on the other. The tension between these contested and seemingly contradicting paradigms is made visible in how universities respond to issues of inclusion, equity and in how and what they choose to fund.

The Limits to Growth: Ecosocialism or Barbarism

A major deficiency of the growth-obsessed model driving global neoliberal economic policy is its lack of understanding on the Earth System on which it—and indeed, all life on Earth—relies.

Professional Learning Groups: is it possible to reimagine appraisal culture?

This article draws on a case study of how one school changed its annual appraisal process through the use of Teaching as Inquiry (TAI). Appraisal lies at the nexus of accountability and support for teachers, amidst a backdrop of global neo-liberal reforms and education policy initiatives that has ultimately eroded trust in teachers. This case study will employ the use of Michel Foucault’s “governmentality” (2000a, p. 201) to look at the annual examination of teacher work through appraisal. The contestability of this space, as teachers become sites of both resistance and drivers for change, is highlighted and the successes and challenges of recent innovations will be discussed. While TAI provides opportunity to do ‘ethical work’ to transform teaching pedagogy, it raises the key question of how to reimagine appraisal to adequately provide accountability and promote excellence. A collaborative approach using PLGs (Professional Learning Groups) and critical friends is proposed as one innovative method of transforming teaching pedagogy in this space.

К ВОПРОСУ ОБ ОТСУТСТВИИ В РОССИИ ГОСУДАРСТВЕННОЙ ИДЕОЛОГИИ

Introduction: the article deals with the constitutional formula officially denying the presence of state ideology in Russia. Purpose: to investigate the issue of the absence of state ideology in Russia de jure and de facto; to identify the typology of modern Russian society, state, and law, the reasons for the absence of their essential characteristics in the Constitution of the Russian Federation. Methodology: the research is based on the fundamental principles of scientific philosophy – the principle of objectivity, the principle of development (historicism), the principle of universal interconnection, the principle of determinism, the principle of inconsistency, as well as general scientific methods of analysis and synthesis, induction and deduction. Results: the Constitution of the Russian Federation was adopted in the context of a deep socio-economic and political crisis and a split of the Russian political elite into irreconcilable groups that offered different ways of getting the country out of the crisis and different historical prospects for Russia. The new liberal elite, having defeated its political opponents in political and armed conflict, organized drafting and adoption of the Constitution of the Russian Federation in a short time in order to give legitimacy to the reforms planned. The liberal elite avoided ideologically and politically loaded vocabulary in their public speeches not to scare off the population when adopting the Constitution and carrying out reforms which were to result in the radical change of the type of society, state, and law. The same approach was used when developing the Constitution. The basic law of the country was created and adopted after the Cold War, when Russia found itself on the periphery of the world history and turned into an object of global neoliberal capital policy. The above factors determined the character, the design, and the contents of the Constitution of the Russian Federation. Conclusions: the Constitution was adopted in specific socio-economic and political conditions. It helped to avoid a disastrous civil war and to carry out economic and social reforms corresponding to the interests of the new elite of Russia and their western curators. As a result of the reforms, Russia was introduced into the economic, political, and cultural space of the global neoliberal capitalism managed from Washington. The country has actually lost its sovereignty and subjectivity. Modern Russia, unlike the Russia of the 90s, has ceased to be exclusively an object of global neoliberal capital. As a great power, Russia is bound to have its own state ideology that would express its national interests, fundamental needs, meaningful values, and a geopolitical strategy that would determine its historical prospects.

The England degree apprenticeship: a lens to consider the national and international context of social work education

ABSTRACT This paper discusses the new English degree level social work apprenticeship scheme. Examining how it links and contrasts with modern and historical international apprenticeship models, it identifies how this route may offer new opportunities to open the profession to social care staff, while allowing employers to improve strategic workforce planning. In arguing that successful implementation of the new qualification pathway requires careful preparation and adequate resourcing, the paper highlights the importance of drawing on the extensive body of knowledge developed internationally in relation to social work education. The author discusses how this could prove challenging given the impact of government funding reductions to social care providers and other public sector bodies, and considers how long-standing debates about social work education reflect the context of global neoliberal socio-economic policies. Many of these can be seen to coalesce around the new training route.

FAMILY, SCHOOL AND THE MASS PRODUCTION OF PARENTING ADVICE

ABSTRACTThe underlying thesis of much popular parenting discourse in circulation in western Anglophone countries is that parenting labour has intensified historically, notably in regard to schooling, and that we are witnessing new kinds of parental attitudes and strategies. A related argument holds that parents, especially middle-class parents, have become entrepreneurial agents in their children’s education, and that this activity is a consequence of global neoliberal policy reform. This paper examines the intensification thesis through a study of popular parenting advice in the late pre-neoliberal era, the 1960s and 1970s. It proposes that the rise of intensive school parenting must be understood not only through policy histories of competition, choice and marketisation but also through histories of domestic life, of the material and affective activities of ‘home-making’. The focus is on a collection of parenting advice (including advertisements) published in one mass-market women’s magazine, the Australian Women’s Weekly. Such publications were, the paper argues, significant and exemplary in disseminating forms of advice that encouraged parents, especially mothers, to discover and develop new repertoires of educational child-rearing competencies and to consider themselves as competitors in the educational arena, on behalf of their own children.

Postgrowth Imaginaries: New Ecologies and Counterhegemonic Culture in Post-2008 Spain - Part 3, Chapter 4

This chapter focuses on catastrophe fiction that explores the disturbing ecological consequences of sudden disruptions caused by extreme environmental events set in motion or exacerbated by growth-oriented activity. In this scenario, rapid anthropogenic changes in the earth’s ecological systems unleash a massive catastrophe at a regional or global level. This kind of fiction has commonly been assumed to have pedagogical implications because it highlights the destructive practices that humanity should abandon and promotes an activist lifestyle. By studying some of the most popular contemporary catastrophe audiovisual narratives in Spain (TV show El Barco and the movie The Impossible), I demonstrate that the pedagogical interpretation of catastrophe should be revisited for several reasons. Catastrophe-oriented fiction tends to ignore or, in the worse cases, conceal the pervasive structural violence against humans and nonhumans resulting from global neoliberal policies and growth economic dynamics. In order to encourage an effective political ecology, I argue that other kinds of narratives are much more effective and resistant to co-optation by the dominant imaginary: stories and projects that envision and perform desirable postgrowth imaginaries

Understanding Educational Leadership and Curriculum Reform

On a state level both curriculum policy work and educational leadership are increasingly challenged by new transnational phenomena in Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas alike: expanding cultural neo-national-ism, more populist politics, economic protectionism, new forms of self-centered identity formation, reli-gious fundamentalism, mistrust in democratic political participation, and decreasing respect for knowledge institutions and established media. These developments have many roots but appear partly as consequences of neoliberally driven policy initiatives and globalization. Consequently, there is increasing mistrust as to whether curriculum, leadership, and evaluation initiatives driven by a global neoliberal policy may provide sustainable solutions for guiding reforms in the public sector, including education. Not surprisingly, also the existing curriculum and educational leadership theory are under scrutiny. This article provides openings pointing to a hermeneutic and systems-oriented, multilevel and professional approach for reorienting na-tional systems with respect to collaborative work on curriculum, leadership, and evaluation. Such a Bild-ung-centered view on human identity, growth, and citizenship is congruent with a non-affirmative educa-tion theory (NAT). It provides a conceptualization that is able to deal with curriculum and leadership gen-uinely based on an idea of education. Such a position grounds educational leadership, curriculum, and pol-icy work, as well as evaluation and school reform, in education theory. As a general education theory the non-affirmative position is able to bring together an analysis of educational aims, contents, and methods of schooling, teacher professionalism, and leadership. In addition, NAT frames an understanding of how cur-riculum work at different levels is initiated, implemented, and enacted. In bridging these perspectives, it is argued that critical and hermeneutic NAT provides a theoretically productive approach to present-day local, national, and global education problems. As a foundational frame of reference, NAT allows us to perceive curriculum discourses as different forms of mediating, hermeneutic invitations, and summoning to self-activity and self-formation (Bildung), within and for a democratic polity.

Higher Education Policy in Independent Lithuania (1990–2018): Between Local and Global Public Policy Factors

The article analyses the development of Higher Education Policy in independent Lithuania (1990-2018). The analysis is dwelling on the results of qualitative research conducted in 2018 with a focus on local national and global neoliberal public policy factors that have impact on higher education policy development, as well as Lithuanian education policy issues and it’s funding system. The empirical evidence revealed that higher education policy in Lithuania is highly influenced by global neoliberal public policy, however, the biggest higher education development problems are related to the local political factors: financial resources, political parties, the lack of sustainable higher education strategy.DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5755/j01.ppaa.17.3.21957

‘The battlefield is in Brussels’: Islamophobia in the Visegrád Four in its global context

ABSTRACTA common popular and scholarly opinion of Islamophobia in the so-called ‘Visegrád Four’ or ‘V4’ (Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary) sees it as caused by circumstances unique to Eastern Europe. Specifically to blame, it is alleged, is a distinctive local history of intolerance, especially antisemitism, and the fact that under socialism these countries were exempt from the post-war soul-searching that took place in Western Europe. Kalmar’s paper, instead, decentres Islamophobia in the V4 by considering it less as a limited regional phenomenon, and more in terms of how it is linked to Islamophobia in other European Union member states and the United States. As elsewhere, foremost among the conditions that encourage Islamophobia in the V4 is the alienation of certain publics on the periphery, which is an effect of global neoliberal policies. These have generated, along with Islamism and Islamophobia, a reinvented, essentializing discourse of difference between Eastern and Western Europe. In spite of that alleged difference, however, Islamophobic populism in the V4 is not just a regional threat to liberal democracy, but targets all of the European Union and the world.

Contesting early childhood professional identities: A cross-national discussion

In this collective article, the authors explore constructions of early childhood practitioners and how they disconnect and reconnect in a global neo-liberal education policy context. The contributions to the conversation provide windows into shifting professional identities across five national contexts: New Zealand, the USA, Ireland, Australia and Denmark. The authors ask who benefits from the notion of distinct professional identities, linked to early childhood education as locally and culturally embedded practice. They conceptualize teachers’ shifting subjectivities, drawing on Kristeva’s philosophical conception of identity as constantly in construction, open and evolving. Arguments for the urgency to counter the global uniformity machine, streamlined curricula, standardized assessment and deprofessionalization are not new. However, the authors wonder whether these arguments are missing something. Does our localized and highly contextualized identity construction enable ‘divide and rule’ politics by global agents such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, World Bank and international corporations? The authors’ (preliminary) answer is to build individual and collective professional identities that are grounded in diverse local contexts and in a broader transnational professional (political) consciousness and collective voice.

Food Banks and Food Insecurity: Cases of Brazil and Turkey

The ascendency of global neoliberal economic policies seriously challenged universalist and right-based welfare policies and promoted the idea of targeted and selective allocations to the poor with private provision for the better of in both high-income and developing countries since the mid-1980s. This article focuses on food banking as an example of targeted social provisioning and provides contrasting observations from food bank programs in Brazil and Turkey. The article traces some different approaches and practices of food banks, and argues that food banks could be part of the progressive social policies that address the root causes of hunger among developing countries within neoliberal economic restructuring.

Reheating the Cold War: us, Russia, and the Revival of Rollback

Abstract A neoconservative coalition of oppositional forces, comprised of the Clinton wing of the Democratic Party and their allies in the Republican Party, the liberal mainstream media, and the deep state have promoted a new Cold War against Russia. This is intended as a mobilizing strategy to overturn the Trump presidency, weaken the Russian state, and reconstruct state legitimacy following years of decline in the quality of life and democracy in America. The coalition reconstructed the Cold War as an ideological tool in the interest of continuing to pursue domestic and global neoliberal policies and dealing with a fractious public disenchanted with government, its elected officials, the mainstream media, and a failing democracy.

BRICS: An Anti-Capitalist Critique, by Patrick Bond and Ana Garcia, eds.

Reviewed by : Giselle Thompson, York UniversityThere is no irony fact that BRICS: An Anti-Capitalist Critique is largely written by a cadre of interdisciplinary scholars who are associated with academic institutions Global South. This observation evokes sentiments of Antiguan-American author Jamaica Kincaid, who posits that the bureaucracy and the Gross National Product are inventions of Rostowian Western modernity that were forcefully imposed on Rest.[1] In this compilation of essays, editors Patrick Bond and Ana Garcia, along with notable authors Leo Panitch, Canada Research Chair Comparative Political Economy, and Immanuel Wallerstein, progenitor of world-systems analysis, present a critical response to emerging regional bloc known as (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and most recently, South Africa).In introduction, Garcia and Bond suggest that demanding a seat at international table, nations engage antagonistic cooperation, which means in practice, that [in] areas ranging from world finance to climate change to super-exploitative relations with periphery and even to soccer, bloc aims not to overturn tables at proverbial temple, but to collaborate holding them up (1) - despite China's and Russia's occasional inter-imperial stances against West. According to editors, project is not antithetical to existing state of affairs West with regard to economic stabilization, generating capacity of a lender of last resort, and steadying multilateral governance, especially with its ongoing demand for US dollar.Garcia and Bond's central problematic, which sets thematic tone for succeeding chapters, is BRICS' extractive, high-carbon economic (3). They argue that this model positions bloc for mimicry of Western social, political, and economic failings, thereby threatening to amplify destructive qualities of advanced capitalism our time.In his chapter BRICS, G20 and American Empire, Panitch calls for a more sober assessment (65) of brochure presentation of regional bloc as reflection of a fundamental change global economic and political power[2] and promoter of cooperation and solidarity with peoples... achievement of sustainable development, and eradication of poverty,[3] sentiments of former chief economist of World Bank, Joseph Stiglitz, and of former Cuban leader Fidel Castro, respectively. Panitch is concerned with counter narrative: readiness of World Bank to welcome New Development Bank because of its resource depleting and export-oriented (65) strategies that are consistent with its own.Admittedly, aforementioned are prodigious and inflammatory indictments, but are nonetheless necessary for scholars and students to consider - which is why BRICS: An Anti-Capitalist Critique occupies a unique space expanding literature about bloc.Reviving Ruy Marini's (1965) application of sub-imperialism to Brazilian dictatorships, BRICS and sub-imperial location Bond suggests that appear to be sub-imperialist since they maintain global neoliberal policies and practices that benefit imperial powers as well as themselves. In other words, much like Wallerstein's semi-periphery, sub-imperialist power helps to broaden West's accumulation of capital by brokering extraction and exploitation of resources. …

‘I do not like what I am becoming but…’: transforming the identity of head teachers in Catalonia

The aim of this article is to elucidate how a new system of school and teacher assessment in Catalonia is transforming the conceptions, practices and identity of head teachers, especially younger ones. It begins by considering the impact of global neoliberal policies on educational practices, highlighting their Foucauldian productive nature. It then examines the educational context of Catalonia during the last 30 years, emphasising the changing role of head teachers and the impact of neoliberal governance. This is followed by an account and analysis of in-depth interviews with four head teachers, focusing especially on how the head teacher’s objectives, practices and identities are being transformed, or produced, as a result of the new neoliberal ‘assessment regime’. It ends with a discussion on the importance of refusal and resistance to this process and the need to reconsider basic educational and social questions.

Auto-, duo- and collaborative-ethnographies: “caring” in an audit culture climate

Purpose– The purpose of this paper is to make a case for the strength of qualitative work, but more specifically for various kinds of ethnographies.Design/methodology/approach– The authors argue that global neoliberal and audit culture policies have crept into academic research, tertiary education practice, and research culture.Findings– The authors then discuss major tenets of and make the case for the use of auto-, duo-, and collaborative-ethnographies as caring practices and research method(ologies) that may in fact push back against such hegemonic neoliberal practices in the academy. Finally, the authors link these caring types of ethnographies to the papers within this special issue.Originality/value– This is an original look at the concepts of auto-, duo-, and collaborative-ethnographies with relation to caring practices.

Qualifications Frameworks Between Global and European Pressures and Local Responses

The article considers the Europeanization of education, a process that is taking place in the European Union (EU) as a result of the establishment of a common education policy and that is playing a part in determining the development of education policies in EU member states and candidate countries. The concept of Europeanization serves as a methodological tool with which to analyze one of the fundamental political instruments of European education policy, namely, the European Qualifications Framework (EQF), and also the national qualifications frameworks (NQFs) that are emerging under its influence. In the case of our analysis of the NQF that has been prepared by Slovenia, we demonstrate that the formulation of the EQF and NQFs in the EU is influenced by two factors: by the Anglo-Saxon countries, which were the first to establish a qualifications framework of the modern type, and by global neoliberal policy, with its tendency toward the deregulation, marketization, and commodification of education. At the same time, we tried to show that NQFs in continental Europe have resulted, by virtue of their local specificities, in frameworks that differ considerably from qualifications in the Anglo-Saxon countries. It appears that the effects of globalization and Europeanization on education are unpredictable, because policies are never simply copied into national systems.

Blogging as public pedagogy: creating alternative educational futures

In this study, I explore ‘blogging’, the use of a regularly updated website or web page, authored and curated by an individual or small group, written in a conversational style, as a form of public pedagogy. I analyse blogs as pre-figurative spaces where people go to learn with/in a public sphere, through collaboration with interested others. However, my intention is not to conceptualize blogging spaces as such, but rather—having framed them in a particular way—to explore the extent to which they globalise dissent. My argument is that the blogs I explore, understood as public pedagogic spaces, cultivate voices of educational dissent. Positioning itself within the global research imagination, the study draws extensively on data generated by two blogging communities with a combined international readership in excess of 40,000 people; one of the blogs is based in the UK, written by a group of adult educators. The other is based in Canada written by a group of adult literacy practitioners. Whilst both blogs are authored, curated and carried by a named individual, as public pedagogic spaces, they are implicated in the creation of a dialogic self: a self which is developed collaboratively with/in the interests of and through a public that coalesces around them. The pedagogies associated with these spaces are argued as explicit and intentioned. The public that coalesces around them learns how to survive a global neoliberal policy nexus that is unsympathetic towards the ideals they pre-figuratively embody. In so doing, they call into being the creation of alternative educational understandings of themselves and each other in relation to policy, pedagogy and the purposes of education.