Global Policy Studies Research Articles

Observing silent, smooth and striated space: The case of Indian national curriculum policy 2009

The paper employs the assemblage approach to unfold India’s 2009 education policy, the National Curriculum Framework, in order to uncover its multiple international, national or other links. In doing so, a deconstruction approach (as strategy, not as rationale) is applied, in order to uncover the policy text and what is identified as a construction and reconstruction of meaning. The contested notion of student-centred learning and its perspective is proposed as a solution to deal with the professionalism problem of Indian teachers and the criteria to develop teachers’ professional skills are closely analysed. As a result, it is not only student-centred learning that is apprised to be part of the National Curriculum Framework, but also its multiple versions, linked to local and global policy studies. In turn, this highlights the complicated nature of the policy. The multifaceted and manifold versions of student-centred learning are further unfolded through the assemblage rationale. Silent spaces (e.g. teachers’ voices, teaching evaluation methods, etc.) are observed in the policy text to accommodate the emergence of student-centred learning.

Ontological journeys: The lifeworld of opium across the Afghan-Iranian border in/out of the pharmacy

How can we conceive alternative policy models that embrace the empirical potentialities emerging from the lifeworld of drugs? The article reflects on this question, concluding that to reassess and to reinvent current policies on drugs, we need to think with a political ontology. Incidentally, the article also responds to the critique dismissing ontological inquiries as obstructing – or, at best, not informing – alternative drug policies. In an archaeological approach inspired by the work of Giorgio Agamben, the article unearths the case study of opium maintenance programme in Iran (1969–79), a forgotten policy experiment in an understudied and yet crucial geo-cultural environment for the global study of drugs. Mobilising the conceptual framework of ontological journeys, the article recomposes the lifeworld of opium within the horizons of transformative cultural practices, international borders, policy regimes and public ethics. Here, the materiality of drug consumption under the maintenance policy links with the changes in opium's transnational political economy and with shifting regimes of health and bioethical orthodoxy. Ontological journeys, hence, develop in a fluid space and time, making it possible to illuminate the lifeworld of drugs in places and times hitherto deserted by global policy studies. In building theoretical reflections upon a non-Western case, the article also incites the possibility of theory beyond Eurocentric knowledge and Euromerican cases. In this way, the article's purpose is to analyse the be-coming of opium beyond ‘good’ or ‘evil’, as a ‘medicine’ or a ‘drug’ and its real or perceived classification as ‘licit’ or ‘illicit’ across the Afghan-Iranian border. In conclusion, the article reflects upon the significance of this forgotten policy experiment, understood as an ontological journey, for contemporary drug policy and drug studies, but also for reinventing notions of care, welfare and health.

Understanding the Global Dimensions of Policy

AbstractBeyond wide agreement that many areas of contemporary policy making are unintelligible if processes that transcend the boundaries of individual states are not taken into account, analysts often disagree on how various ‘global’ and ‘local’ factors interact to produce policies and policy outcomes. The disagreement stems in part from the use of different analytic lenses, and specifically from the choice between ‘state‐centric’ and ‘polycentric’ lenses. This article examines the fundamental assumptions of these general perspectives with regard to the polity, politics and policy dimensions of global policy making, and surveys some of the research questions and findings that resulted from their use. It concludes that scholars and policy makers should treat the two analytical lenses as complementary, as each of them stimulates the analyst to ask questions and look for entities and causal connections that the other lens may miss.Policy Implications Analysts and policy makers need to be aware of the sometimes implicit assumptions underlying global policy studies. ‘State‐centric’ and ‘polycentric’ lenses provide complementary and valuable perspectives on the global dimensions of policy making. Systematic data collection and analysis of nonstate mechanisms of policy making should be encouraged and supported.

Infections and Inequalities: The Modern Plagues by Paul Farmer (review)

Infections and Inequalities: The Modem Plagues Paul Farmer University of California Press Reviewed by T e rry Simmons Center for Global Policy Studies F o rtun ately, in the United States and Canada medical care is af­ fordable for the insured, and is generally accessible for everyone. Readers of this journal probably can afford to be seriously ill or in­ jured, if their employer provides adequate medical insurance or if they can pay the premiums themselves. Moreover, they probably have sufficient social skills and education to interact successfully with medical personnel and institutions. Still, after a minor accident in any town or city within the territory of the Association of Pacific Coast Geographers, an ambulance ride to the hospital costs more than the annual per-capita income of Haiti. The subsequent hospital emergency-room visit might cost more than the annual per-capita income of Peru. Notwithstanding many well-known public policy and practical issues, North Americans live well and long and are protected competently by sophisticated modern medicine, sanita­ tion, and public health infrastructures. Nevertheless, North Americans still are vulnerable to and play host to tuberculosis, HIV/ AIDS, and other well-known chronic dis­ eases. The specter of bubonic plague—the infamous villain of the Black Death—is as close as infected chipmunks in the Sierra Ne­ vada. Certainly, nineteenth-century diseases such as malaria, typhus, and cholera await their returns to North America when modem sani­ tation and public health infrastructures falter. Meanwhile, new, drug-resistant strains of tuberculosis as well as more exotic tropical diseases such as ebola can threaten North America whenever the next infected passenger disembarks from a Boeing 747 from Asia, Africa, or Latin America. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse wait impatiently always. 155 156 APCG YEARBOOK •Volume 62 • 2000 Infections and Inequalities is a challenging, scholarly protest of the social inequalities reflected in the global realities of HIV/AIDS, tu­ berculosis, malaria, typhoid, and other infectious diseases. Infections and Inequalities is a physician's professional biography, and an anthropologist's critical and self-critical analysis of social, economic, and institutional responses of poor Haitian farmers to medical care for tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS. "The book examines the inequali­ ties in the distribution and outcome of infectious diseases. It asks why people...are likely to die of infections such as tuberculosis and AIDS and malaria while others are spared this risk. It explores the creation and maintenance of such disparities, which are biological in their expression but are largely socially determined. This book also explores social responses to infectious diseases, responses rang­ ing from quarantine to accusations of sorcery" (p. 4). Infections and Inequalities provides a theoretical basis for coping with the stark, devastating realities of epidemic diseases and for understanding a global setting where medical knowledge exists but available re­ sources are scarce. Paul Farmer, a physician, medical anthropologist, and director of Harvard Medical School's Program in Infectious Disease and So­ cial Change, examines his personal clinical experience and anthropological fieldwork on the Central Plateau of Haiti since 1983, for which he is well known for AIDS research. He evaluates and reports on clinical experiences in the poor suburbs of Lima, Peru, and in the poor districts of New York City and Boston. Paul Farmer the clinician challenges the reader in practical and ethical terms. At the same time, Farmer the medical anthropologist challenges the reader to reach better theoretical understandings of poor Haitian and Peruvian patients, who suffer and die from infectious diseases. The global HIV/AIDS pandemic, the tuberculosis pandemic, and the threatened pandemic of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDRTB) are quite real. As transnational microbial traffic and in­ ternational capital and commerce travel together, "we discern the pernicious effects of the two-worlds myth" (p. 34). Beyond the frus­ Sim m o n s : Review o f Infections and Inequalities 157 trations of individual medical care, issues of poverty, inequality, and access to care in the developing world may metamorphose into medical emergencies in the developed world anytime an airplane lands or a ship docks. Farmer's medical anthropology shares much with medical ge­ ography. Among geographers, only the late Peter Gould is cited for his The Slow Plague...

Thinking Globally in Post-Mao China

For the first time in modern history, China has become an active, if somewhat still elusive, member of the global system. With this momentous transformation comes myriads of new linkages, new contexts, new demands, new opportunities and new costs and consequences for China/global interaction. Proceeding from the premise that what China does or does not do becomes part of the global problem or part of the global solution, the article seeks to situate post-Mao China in the global/local problematique. The article advances the concept of global learning as a way of exploring diachronic changes and shifts in Chinese global thinking. Global learning is conceptualized as a two-way interactive linkage process in which domestic actors' restructuring of their cognitive maps and the changing global reality mediated by positive participatory experience in the global system become reciprocal in terms of cause and effect, constituting mutually essential parts of the same global/local process. Global learning is applied as a guide to examining Chinese global policy in three issue areas - global peace; global development; and global human rights. Global learning is also suggested as a possible bridge linking Chinese global policy and global policy studies. The paper concludes that some changes and shifts in Chinese global thinking have occurred and explains them as interest-driven adaptive readjustments to the dual logic of modernization imperative and of the world situation. From a post-Tiananmen perspective, the paper also critically evaluates the nature and scope of Chinese global learning as well as its new possibilities and old limitations.

Global Policy Studies and Peace Research

This introductory article notes several parallels in the mission and historical evolution of the fields of contemporary policy studies and peace research, as well as some of the basic differences in the two fields. The field of policy studies, which analyzes the potential contributions of governmental action to collective well-being, encompasses a variety of approaches, including positivism, social engineering, incrementalism, and rationalism. A case is made for development of an international and global dimension of the field of policy studies in view of the increasing seriousness and complexity of transnational problems and the scope of international problem-solving activities. Much of peace research has, in effect, the basic characteristics of the differing approaches to policy studies. Global policy studies can make several contributions to peace research, including a comprehensive theoretical orientation for guiding initiatives for achieving desired outcomes, insights into the dynamics of international conflict resolution, a greater understanding of the potential role of international law and institutions in world politics, and a recognition of the wide range of global policies that have a bearing on peace. Peace research has much to offer global policy studies, but this is a subject to be elaborated elsewhere.