Non-state Institutions Research Articles

Letters to the Editor

4 October 2006 Dear Editor, PREVALENCE OF OVERWEIGHT AND OBESITY IN A REGIONAL QUEENSLAND PRESCHOOL POPULATION The reported trend of increasing overweight and obesity among Australian school children1 has resulted in studies of younger children being undertaken in recent years in an attempt to determine the age at which this trend begins. Identifying age of onset may be an important factor in understanding the ‘obesogenic’ factors that lead to this condition. The rebound or increase in body mass index (BMI) that occurs after it reaches its lowest point in early childhood is referred to as ‘adiposity rebound’ (AR). The age at which children enter the phase of AR (usually 5–6 years) generally coincides with entry into the preschool system. An early AR has been shown to be associated with an increased risk of obesity in adulthood.2 The detection of an increased prevalence of overweight or obesity in preschool children may offer opportunities for research to determine the environmental factors associated with an early AR. Results of studies determining the BMI of preschool children from South Australia and Victoria have previously been reported.3, 4 These studies encouraged us to explore the incidence of overweight and obesity in our regionally based preschool population. Our research called the ‘Toowoomba Healthy Weight Study’ surveyed a cohort of preschool children attending State primary schools with collocated preschool in our regional Queensland district. We obtained ethics approval for this study from the Toowoomba Health Service ethics committee and from Education Queensland. Weight and height of 339 children was measured with informed parental consent by a single observer in Term 4 of 2005. Age ranged from 4.0 to 6.5 (mean 5.2 ± 0.3) years. BMI and the age of the child on the day of measurement were calculated and the age and gender-specific International Obesity Task Force cut-off points5 were used to classify overweight and obesity. Of the 182 boys and 157 girls measured, 89% were aged between 5.0 and 5.5 years. Overall, 18.3% of all children were overweight or obese. This figure is similar to the overall prevalence of 19.3% and 19.8% found in the South Australian and Victorian studies respectively. Table 1 shows the percentages of overweight, obese and combined overweight/obese children in the South Australian, Victorian studies and the Toowoomba Healthy Weight Study (permission was obtained from the author and publisher to amend and add our data to their previously published table4). Despite differences in sample size and sampling frames between the three studies, the results confirm a trend which affects preschool children in regional and metropolitan areas across these three states. A limitation to our study is that the results reflect the prevalence of overweight and obesity in children attending State schools with collocated preschool in our district and do not include children from non-State institutions. In addition, the number of children consented by their parents to participate in the study was 37% of the total cohort of children at these preschools. Despite these limitations, our findings that approximately one in five preschoolers in our district is already overweight or obese add to the alarming evidence of excessive weight gain in Australian preschool children affecting girls more so than boys. These data support the need to develop national awareness, educational, supportive and preventative programmes targeting families with young children to prevent these children from becoming overweight and/or obese. This research was funded by the Toowoomba Hospital Foundation and the Pure Land Learning College, Toowoomba.

Paradoxes of Decentralization: Water Reform and Social Implications in Mexico

Summary Decentralized governance of water resources is a centerpiece of Mexico’s neoliberal reform strategy. We analyze decentralization based on urban/rural case studies in distinct geographical regions to ascertain whether it is linked to more efficient water management or sustainable use of water resources, and to examine its development implications. We assess whether or not private sector management is related to a more efficient, sustainable, and accountable management of water variety of municipal and private management arrangement in four urban areas. We find that it has not resulted in efficiency or sustainability gains. For agricultural water management, irrigation districts in two case studies benefited from the more democratic participatory management by water users under Mexico’s “transference” strategy, but did not result in greater equity, efficiency or sustainability of water use. We argue that decentralization in the Mexican water sector is context specific, and marked by limited benefits. Privatization is less an instrument aimed at improving efficiency than a channel for preferred treatment for capital accumulation by private entities as well as a legitimized way for the state to transfer the burden of water management to non-state institutions. The creation of new forms of water institutions requires not the retrenchment of the state but rather its involvement to ensure accountability, transparency, equity, and sustainability.

Decentralization, the State and Conflicts over Local Boundaries in Northern Ghana

Decentralization projects, such as that initiated by the Rawlings government in Ghana at the end of the 1980s, create a political space in which the relations between local political communities and the state are re-negotiated. In many cases, the devolution of power intensifies special-interest politics and political mobilization aiming at securing a ‘larger share of the national cake’, that is, more state funds, infrastructure and posts for the locality. To legitimate their claims vis-a-vis the state, civic associations (‘hometown’ unions), traditional rulers and other non-state institutions often invoke some form of ‘natural’ solidarity, and decentralization projects thus become arenas of debate over the boundaries of community and the relationship between ‘local’ and national citizenship. This article analyses one such debate, in the former Lawra District of Ghana's Upper West Region, where the creation of new districts provoked protracted discussions, among the local political elite as well as the peasants and labour migrants, about the connections between land ownership and political authority, the relations between the local ethnic groups (Dagara and Sisala), and the relevance of ethnic versus territorial criteria in defining local citizenship.

Decentralization, Local Taxation and Citizenship in Senegal

This article deals with the politics of revenue collection in a framework of decentralization, democratization and multiparty politics as experienced in the small village of Barkedji in the pastoral region of Senegal. In Senegal, revenue collection has recently been transferred from state administrators to locally elected councillors. Contrary to the assumption of the ‘good governance’ doctrine, this transfer of responsibility has not resulted in a strengthening of democratic structures where taxpayers demand (and gain) public services and more political representation in exchange for increasing taxes. In Barkedji, as elsewhere in Senegal, tax-compliance hit rock-bottom after tax collection became the responsibility of local councillors. Meanwhile other types of local institutions, with less clear state relations, are able to mobilize large amounts of revenue outside the normal tax channels for the provision of goods and service. These non-state institutions seem to have taken over as providers of political representation as well as suppliers of public goods and of access or rights to crucial local resources. The article explores the motivation among first-comers and newcomer populations to adopt or reject tax requirements to different types of organizations, and discusses the implications of this parallel tax collection for the exercise of public authority and the crafting of state and citizenry.

Welfare Law, Welfare Fraud, and the Moral Regulation of the ‘Never Deserving’ Poor

The dismantling and restructuring of Keynesian social security programmes have impacted disproportionately on women, especially lone parent mothers, and shifted public discourse and social images from welfare fraud to welfare as fraud, thereby linking poverty, welfare and crime. This article analyzes the current, inordinate focus on ‘welfare cheats’. The criminalization of poverty raises theoretical and empirical questions related to regulation, control, and the relationship between them at particular historical moments. Moral regulation scholars working within post-structuralist and post-modern frameworks have developed an influential approach to these issues; however, we situate ourselves in a different stream of critical socio-legal studies that takes as its point of departure the efficacy, contradictions and inherently social nature of law in a given social formation. With reference to the historical treatment of poor women on welfare, we develop three themes in our critical review of the moral regulation concept: the conceptualization of welfare and welfare law, as illustrated by welfare fraud; the relationship between social and moral with respect to the role of law; and changing forms of the relationship between state and non-state institutions and agencies. We conclude with comments on the utility of a ‘materialist’ concept of moral regulation for feminist theorizing.

The Governance of Security in Weak and Failing States

This article seeks to identify means of strengthening social control and conflict resolution in weak and failing states. It begins by discussing the governance of public security in stronger states, and identifies three basic forms of engagement between state and non-state institutions that may contribute to the co-production of public security: coercion, sale and gift. The article then seeks to identify institutional arrangements that might be transplanted to those settings where conventional state institutions of security may be in decline, or non-existent. It also suggests how new institutions might be invented in settings where states may be dysfunctional or otherwise lacking in capacity. It develops a typology of security provision, including auspices that are public; public under private arrangements; collective or voluntary; private/national; private/international; and criminal. By identifying new mechanisms for the governance of security, it may be possible to arrest the deterioration of states, or at least provide for a modicum of internal security. The article concludes with a discussion of the Zwelethemba model of peacemaking and peacebuilding that is being developed in South Africa.

La redefinición del espacio público: el caso de las escuelas autogestionadas en Argentina

El Proyecto de las Escuelas Experimentales o Autogestionadas de la Provincia de San Luis adquiere sentido en el marco de la denominada Transformación Educativa y de las políticas desarrolladas en las últimas décadas en Argentina, que, al igual que en gran parte de los países latinoamericanos, han estado orientadas por discursos y prácticas tendientes a legitimar un nuevo modelo económico, social, político, cultural y educativo. La reforma educativa argentina de la década del '90 puede analizarse como una respuesta frente a la crisis de la matriz estado-céntrica que caracterizó la institucionalización y expansión del sistema educativo. El Proyecto de las Escuelas Experimentales en la Provincia de San Luis, inspirado en el modelo de las charter schools de Estados Unidos, es presentado por el Gobierno de la Provincia como un caso precursor en nivel regional en el marco de lo que caracterizan como la "necesaria e imperante reforma de los sistemas educativos". En este sentido, el objetivo de este trabajo es analizar la lógica que orienta el modelo de estas escuelas así como presentar algunas problemáticas centrales vinculadas con el proceso de implementación de la propuesta.

Institutions and Industrial Governance in India: Learning to Cooperate the Japanese Way

Development theorists and practitioners recognize the importance of durable and adaptable institutions for economic and social transformation. The decline of the Euro-centric modernization models and the collapse of the centrally planned ‘socialist’ bloc draws our attention to Japan, a nation that has successfully combined the market system with indicative planning. This study examines Japanese social institutions underlying economic governance and their applicability to developing countries, such as India. The discussion centers around the social basis of cooperation between the state, capital, and labor and the challenges encountered in industrial governance in India. I provide evidence of Japanese-induced cooperation in a Japanese auto joint-venture in India. Cooperation fosters group participation in a structured environment, creating job satisfaction and social solidarity. It also provides the basis for self-regulating capitalism and pre-empting India's inegalitarian consequences of high growth. This advances, even if modestly, institutional ‘solutions’ to some of India's endemic industrial governance problems. The study also re-affirms the importance of non-market institutions such as the state and non-state institutions such as social networks at a time when they are being hastily marginalized by economistic neo-liberal policies. Reinventing institutions of cooperation and constructing social networks for industrial governance remains the most promising avenue for Indian development.

Особливості співпраці державних та недержавних установ в напрямку дистанційного зондування Землі в Україні

Особливості співпраці державних та недержавних установ в напрямку дистанційного зондування Землі в Україні

Bilingual and Multilingual Universities in the Republic of Belarus

The Republic of Belarus is a bilingual country, its two principal languages being Belarussian and Russian. Knowledge of other languages is encouraged; indeed, a specialized higher education institution, the Minsk State Linguistic University, has been created to prepare multilingual specialists in various fields. In addition, several non-state higher education institutions have developed bi- and multilingual partnerships with Western higher education institutions.

Decentralisation, participation and accountability in Sahelian forestry: legal instruments of political-administrative control

Colonial relations of political administration are being reproduced in the current era of participation and decentralisation. In natural resource management, participation and decentralisation are promoted on the basis that they can increase equity, yield greater efficiency, benefit the environment and contribute to rural development. Reaping these benefits is predicated on (1) the devolution of some real powers over natural resources to local populations, and (2) the existence of locally accountable authorities to whom those powers can be devolved. However, a limited set of highly circumscribed powers are being devolved to locally accountable authorities, and most local authorities to whom powers are being devolved are systematically structured to be upwardly accountable to the central state, rather than downwardly accountable to local populations. Many of the new laws being passed in the name of participation and decentralisation administer rather than enfranchise. The article examines the historical legal underpinnings of the powers and accountability of state-backed rural authorities (chiefs and rural councils), the authorities through which current natural resource management projects in Burkina Faso and in Mali represent local populations, and the decisions being devolved to local bodies in new natural resource management efforts. Without reform local interventions risk reproducing the inequities of their centralised political-administrative context. Rather than pitting the state against society by depicting the state as a negative force and society and non-state institutions as positive—as is done in many decentralisation and participatory efforts—this article suggests that representation through local government can be the basis of general and enduring participation by society in public affairs.

Growing security: land rights and agricultural development in northern Senegal

Are “traditional” or “indigenous” land rights an obstacle to development? The question seems simple enough. And the liberal economic perspective currently being advanced by free market advocates such as the Bretton Woods institutions answers: yes, to the extent that those traditional relations hinder the free exchange of land, they do slow development. But of course the question is more complex and requires answers to a number of subsidiary and ancillary questions. Some are definitional and empirical: what are these “traditional land rights”? To what extent do they, rather than codified law or administrative practices, define the relationships of social actors and groups to land and to each other through land? Other questions are more hypothetical: what are the alternatives to the current regime, what costs would installing them incur, and what would be their costs and benefits, once in place? Finally, there are ancillary, but still central questions: what other factors, such as ecological conditions, state policies and non-state institutions, may account for development or the lack thereof, apart from land tenure regimes?

Community in German Criminal Justice: a Significant Absence ?

The article is prompted by an apparent paradox. In Germany, working relations between state criminal justice agencies and non-state institutions within a locality are often extremely close, relying upon networks of communication and a degree of mutual reliance, which in Britain would undoubtedly invoke reference to the idea of 'community'. In Germany, however, criminal justice professionals rarely describe this in terms of community. Though the emergence of locally based criminal justice ini tiatives has been later and less extensive in Germany than in Britain, there have been significant institutional developments in this direction over the last decade, particu larly in the fields of crime prevention and victim-offender mediation. Yet even those organizations working closely with local people or reliant upon the efforts of indi vidual volunteers or charitable bodies do not appear to perceive their work as com munity-orientated. This is the 'significant absence' of our title. By reflecting on why it is that in Germany the vocabularies in which local or informal criminal justice ini tiatives have been framed rarely make reference to the idea of 'community', we may hope to gain some insight also about the conditions under which the appeal to com munity becomes powerful in societies such as Britain.

Globalization makes states: perspectives of local governance in the age of the world city

This article discusses perspectives of local agency in the age of the world city. It presents a brief critique of the debate on globalization and posits that globalization makes states. This includes a discussion of the local state as a complex creature of state and civil society, of the regulatory power of the urban and of the world city as a site of the emergence of the post-national state. While it can be argued that globalization hollows out the state and helps facilitate the replacement of state by non-state institutions in the market or civil society, it also creates new forms of states. The state does not wither away but is rather reincarnated in a plethora of forms on many socio-spatial scales. Globalization makes states but these differ from the ones we used to know. This article concentrates on those new forms of governance that occur on the urban level, particularly in so-called world or global cities. It makes the case for the recognition of the urban as a relevant site of the political in the era of globalization. Politics in world cities is concerned with the governance of complexity which can be understood best through a combination of regime theory, regulation theory and discourse theory.

Bringing transnational relations back in: non-state actors, domestic structures and international institutions

Bringing transnational relations back in: non-state actors, domestic structures and international institutions

Between state and market: Hegemony and institutions of collective action under conditions of international capital mobility

This article rejects the atomistic conception of international capital mobility as individual, uncoordinated decision-making. It argues that non-state institutions exist in the global political economy which condition the thoughts and actions that comprise the investment process. Because these structure investment, such institutions can be understood as private makers of global public policy. Credit rating agencies are used as an example of these mechanisms. The article examines transformations in the organization of capital markets which underpin the greater influence of these agencies. Functional accounts of rating institutions are evaluated, and their scope for transcending a strict agency role with regard to investors is assessed, based on their possession of specialized forms of knowledge from which they derive control. Some description of the agencies, their international growth and the ratings process is provided. Three arguments about the pressures on the economic and financial structures identified by Zysman (1983) generated by rating agencies are considered. Rating institutions create pressures for fundamental analyss of investment, for a particular view of appropriate management forms and policy lines along new constitutionalist lines, and contribute to a more abstract investment process which is likely to have the effect of transforming social relationships within the dominant alliances of social forces. The article concludes with some consideration of the implications of these hybrid forms of authority and policy for world order.

Principles and pragmatism in private higher education: examples from Britain and Germany

The origins, ethos, academic organisation and funding basis of the first private universities in Germany and Britain are described and compared. The role of these universities within their respective national systems is discussed, and the paper concludes with general comments about the value of nonstate institutions of higher education.

Associação de educação católica: uma proposta de educação pública não-estatal

O presente estudo objetiva analisar a relação público-privado na educação brasileira contemporânea, a partir da posição da igreja, que durante a Assembléia Nacional Constituinte (1987/1988) apresentou sua proposta educacional na qual considerava as escolas confessionais como instituições públicas não-estatais. O grupo católico procurou desvincular as duas noções: público e estatal. Essa questão situa-se numa discussão mais ampla sobre o público e o privado que ganha novos contornos principalmente a partir do momento em que se questiona o papel do Estado, não somente em relação ao setor social, mas também quanto a sua participação na vida econômica. A partir dessa constatação, a pesquisa procurou entender como a concepção de público não-estatal foi abordada e discutida pela Associação de Educação Católica (AEC) criada em 1945, com a finalidade de congregar as instituições educacionais católicas. A reconstituição histórica da AEC evidenciou que sua trajetória foi marcada por urna postura conservadora e elitista, posicionando-se, contrariamente, em relação à escola pública. Após a Conferência de Puebla, a AEC iniciou uma reflexão a respeito da educação católica formal voltada para as camadas populares, ou seja, na perspectiva da opção preferencial pelos pobres. A partir desse posicionamento a igreja desejava que se estabelecesse uma distinção entre escola pública estatal e escola pública não-estatal e que a legislação garantisse recursos para ambas, uma vez que a escola pública não- estatal distanciava-se do lucro para manter-se coerente com a opção preferencial pelos pobres, sendo a escola-serviço à comunidade, serviço aos pobres.