A sociological economy of HIV/AIDS vaccine partnerships: case studies from Africa and India

Public–private partnerships (PPPs) are perhaps the key emergent theme in the delivery of what the socio-economic literature terms global public goods. In light of the problems relating to the distribution of health services and products in developing countries, partnerships between public and private institutions are often proposed as an innovative mechanism to reconnect and reorient supply and demand. In this area, the International Aids Vaccine Initiative (IAVI), which is driving the development of candidate HIV/AIDS vaccines through injections of capital into the research process, represents a significant case study. IAVI seeks to form partnerships between key public and private interests committing them to sharing the risks, costs and benefits of research into an effective and affordable vaccine against HIV. Our empirical work covers partnerships based in several countries including Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda and India. Our early findings highlight IAVI's ability as a learning institution as it adapts its institutional arrangements to various local contexts. An offshoot of this appears to be the building of real local capacity.     

Disentangling Gut Feeling: Assessing the Integrity of Social Entrepreneurs

This paper analyzes how social venture capitalists evaluate the integrity of social entrepreneurs. Based on an experiment with 40 social venture capitalists and 40 students, we investigate how five attributes of the entrepreneur contribute to the assessment of integrity. These attributes are the entrepreneur’s personal experience, professional background, voluntary accountability efforts, reputation and awards/fellowships granted to the entrepreneur. Results indicate that social venture capitalists focus largely on voluntary accountability efforts of the entrepreneur and the entrepreneur’s reputation when judging integrity. For an overall positive judgment of integrity, it seems to be sufficient if either voluntary accountability efforts or reputation of the entrepreneur are high. By comparing social venture capitalists with students, we show that experience leads to a simpler decision model focusing on key attributes.     

Leadership in Collaborative Community Health Partnerships

This article examines key leadership issues in community health partnerships. We assert that leadership in a partnership is differentiated from that in a traditional, hierarchical organization in that participation is voluntary and egalitarian and often entails cooperation by organizations with different cultures and agendas. Partnership leaders, accordingly, often lack formal control over members and their actions. Using qualitative analysis of 115 site‐visit interviews of participants in four partnerships in the Community Care Networks demonstration program, we identify and discuss five themes of collaborative leadership: systems thinking, vision‐based leadership, collateral leadership, power sharing, and process‐based leadership. We then discuss the multiple challenges that collaborative leadership faces in a community health partnership.     

Passing a Mental Health Levy

ABSTRACT

The “devolution revolution” has decreased federal and state roles in the funding of social services and increased the burden on local sources, both public and private. This article describes how a community passed an initially unpopular property tax levy earmarked to support local drug, alcohol and mental health services. The article illustrates how social workers employing specific community practice knowledge provided leadership to the successful campaign. This example of community practice leadership includes building and maintaining coalitions, managing group tension and conflict and demonstrating fundamental social work values.     

The conservation challenge in sustaining rural environments

The focus of this paper is on obstacles to conservation and specific conservation initiatives. While policy makers are influenced by the social constructions of rural and while there is unlikely to be common agreement on what is rural, convergences can occur on the most efficacious approaches towards conservation through widening communities of knowledge achieved by greater efforts to evaluate strategies and to share experiences from different localities. The paper begins with a brief conceptualization of the trade-offs involved between commodity and non-commodity uses of rural lands. A more elaborate discussion follows of the dominant factors which undermine conservation of rural environments. In the face of these obstacles the paper examines a wide variety of strategies and actions from OECD countries to provide a better balance between commodity and non-commodity functions. Although governments are expected to continue to play an important leadership, policy setting and regulatory role, it is clear from the examples presented in this paper that many important initiatives are coming from non-governmental organizations and that partnerships between public and private sectors and between private and non-governmental sectors have significant potential to clarify issues, to establish common ground and galvanize constructive action.     

LAWYERS IN VENTURE CAPITAL CONTRACTING: THEORY AND EVIDENCE

Real‐world financial contracts are sometimes so complex that it can be difficult to understand their exact payoff consequences. We develop and test a theoretical model of a venture capitalist (VC) negotiating with an entrepreneur who may overweigh or underweigh the payoff consequences of contractual downside protection (DP). A lawyer with expertise in venture capital can inform the entrepreneur about these consequences, but less expert (but otherwise high quality) lawyers cannot. We determine how a VC's decision to include DP is affected by the expected quality of the entrepreneur's project, the entrepreneur's experience, and the VC expertise of his/her legal counsel. We show that the VC's incentive to include unnecessary DP declines in expected project quality. Indeed, for inexperienced entrepreneurs involved with high‐quality projects, VCs prefer that the entrepreneur's counsel has VC expertise. This implies that, when negotiating with inexperienced entrepreneurs, VCs who invest in high‐quality companies should be more likely to negotiate with entrepreneurs who employ lawyers with VC expertise. We document broad empirical support for the model, and provide evidence against competing explanations. (JEL L24, G24, K12, L14, L24)     

Standards for Development: Food Safety and Sustainability in Wal‐Mart's Honduran Produce Supply Chains

Public‐private partnerships between supermarket retailers and development agencies help small‐scale producers reach growing domestic markets in developing countries. Drawing on qualitative data that focuses on relationships between producers, development agencies, and Wal‐Mart‐owned supermarkets in Honduras, the research presented here demonstrates how, by introducing food safety standards to development agencies' outreach efforts, but without necessarily certifying producers or offering a price premium, Wal‐Mart uses these standards to simultaneously differentiate production practices by promoting quality, while maintaining a standardized market. As a result, the responsibility and costs for incentivizing growers to change their practices is shifted to nongovernmental organizations. Therefore, although an extensive body of literature describes standards and third‐party certification systems as the means for corporations to control production practices, this research indicates that public‐private partnerships are a new vehicle by which corporations can influence agricultural production practices. In addition, this article argues that the inclusion of food safety standards in development projects leads to the conflation of food safety and sustainability, without adequately interrogating which agroecological processes food safety standards include and exclude. Therefore, retailers' private food safety standards dominate how sustainability is perceived and practiced in the development context.     

PUBLIC–PRIVATE PARTNERSHIPS FOR MATERNAL HEALTH IN AFRICA: CHALLENGES AND PROSPECTS

ABSTRACT

The concept of public and private partnerships raises growing interest and hope from international development agencies, governments, and communities as an alternative strategy in social welfare delivery. Conceptualized as a strategy to build and capitalize on the tangible and intangible assets and resources endogenous to social organizations and communities, individually and collectively, this article embraces an asset-based approach to analyze the potency of such a framework in enhancing maternal health care delivery in developing countries such as Senegal and Mali. These countries face growing retrenchment of the state from social service delivery and scarcity of human and financial resources, which call for innovative approaches and sustainable solutions in addressing pervasive deficits in health service delivery. Drawing from empirical field research conducted in Senegal and Mali, this article examines the trend toward public–private partnerships and its gender impacts and critically analyzes the challenges and opportunities it offers conceptually and practically to address and improve equity in health care delivery, particularly safe motherhood and maternal health care delivery in developing countries.     

Natural implementation in public goods economies

In this paper, we identify necessary and sufficient conditions for social choice correspondences to be Nash implemented by “natural” mechanisms in economies with arbitrary numbers of private and public goods. We find that when there exist only one public good and an arbitrary number of private goods, the Lindahl correspondence is implementable by a natural quantity mechanism in which each agent announces his own consumption bundle of private goods and input vectors for public goods. However, regardless of the numbers of private and public goods, the Pareto correspondence is not implementable even by any natural price ⁿ -quantity mechanism in which each agent reports a price vector of private goods and all agents’ personalized price vectors of public goods, in addition to his own consumption bundle of private goods and input vectors for public goods.     

The average child: Lewis Hine,statistics, and ‘social photography’

This project looks at the statistical turn in American sociology in the early twentieth century and its impact on Lewis Hine’s ‘social photography.’ Photographic studies of today are digital and often participatory, yet, their roots can be traced back to Hine’s work. The rise of statistical methods in the social sciences coincides with Hine’s development as a documentary photographer. Hine is often discussed alongside just one or two of his iconic images. This approach overstates the importance of the single, select print, subverting the essence of Hine’s statistical method. The conventional monographic approach is far too limiting for a photographer who produced thousands of images. In 1907, Hine enrolled in Columbia University to study sociology with Professor Franklin Giddings, who was responsible for establishing their leadership position in statistical methods. Hine’s longstanding affiliation with Columbia played an important role in shaping his sociological perspective. Hine never thought of his work in terms of individual photographs. What was central to his picture making was a belief in the veracity of a statistical norm. My project examines how the Columbia School provided Hine with the elements upon which his term ‘social photography’ found meaning and informed how a sociological philosophy might be manifest in photography.     

Partnerships and the Good-Governance Agenda: Improving Service Delivery Through State–NGO Collaborations

First under the Millennium Development Goals and now under the Sustainable Development Goals, partnerships for development, especially between state and NGOs, remain a valued goal. Partnerships are argued to improve provision of basic social services to the poor: the state is viewed as providing scale, with NGOs ensuring good governance. Close study of three leading partnership arrangements in Pakistan (privatization of basic health units, an ‘adopt a school’ program, and low-cost sanitation) shows how state–NGO collaborations can indeed improve service delivery; however, few of these collaborations are capable of evolving into embedded partnerships that can bring about positive changes in government working practices on a sustainable basis. In most cases, public servants tolerate, rather than welcome, NGO interventions, due to political or donor pressure. Embedded partnerships require ideal-type commitment on the part of the NGO leadership, which most donor-funded NGOs fail to demonstrate. For effective planning, it is important to differentiate the benefits and limitations of routine co-production arrangements from those of embedded partnerships.

     

Public or Private Management? A Comparative Analysis of Social Policies in Europe

Across the world, political leaders and policy experts frequently use the labels ‘public’ and ‘private’ to organize social policies. A line seemingly separates public from private efforts, with social policies publicly organized in some countries and privately organized in others. According to this perspective, a public social policy is undertaken by government or deals with a public matter. When a social policy is private, non‐public actors and institutions, like employers, undertake it or it deals with a private matter, like body control. This article examines whether public or private approaches to managing social policies are currently emphasized in European countries. I begin by defining social policy and then provide an overview of the public–private dichotomy in managing social policy. I review predominant typological frameworks of public–private organization of social policies and examine three welfare social policies and three social policies dealing with body control by comparing public–private organization of these six policy areas across 21 European countries. I conclude by discussing the limited diversity of public–private organizations of social policies in Europe.     

Writing dictatorship and misrule in Uganda: Susan N. Kiguli’s The African Saga

This article explores the portrayal of one aspect of the theme of dictatorship and misrule in Susan Nalugwa Kiguli’s first collection of poems, The African Saga, that is, the cruel leadership that is blind to the humanity of the ruled. I argue that Kiguli’s writing of post-independence leadership in Uganda is unique in its use of vivid images that help the reader to visualise how rulers like Idi Amin and Milton Apollo Obote brutalised their compatriots, turning the country into what Henry Kyemba calls, in his memoir of the same title, “a state of blood” and Moses Isegawa, in his novel of the same title, a “snakepit.” Closely reading some of her poems of protest, I demonstrate that Kiguli’s poetry is deeply political in its exploration of both the private domain of the family and the public area of political office.     

Partners in Power: a Radically Pluralistic Form of Participative Democracy for Children and Young People

The central concern of this article is to advocate an inclusive and pluralistic notion of a public sphere similar to those advocated by feminist writers such as Iris Marion Young and Nancy Fraser. These ideas complement the plethora of initiatives from statutory and voluntary agencies to take on board the participation and voices of children and young people. This reflects a movement away from simplistic top–down governance through the State towards a co‐production of governance through partnerships and community involvement. However, children's participation in this public sphere is constrained through the inhibition of children's voices. These inhibitions, it is argued, pervade the private and intermediary as well as public spheres of children's lives. Thus it is unrealistic to expect children to adjust to an undifferentiated and often hostile public arena. © 2007 The Author(s). Journal compilation © 2007 National Children's Bureau     

Ready,Set, Go … Again: Renewing an Academy–Agency Child Welfare Partnership

This article presents a case study of the renewed partnership between a midwestern public child welfare agency and a midwestern university school of social work. The partnership, which includes educating BSW and MSW students, preparing frontline child welfare case managers, and providing leadership training for supervisors and managers, demonstrates relational capital, relational embeddedness, and transparency, all of which are criteria for trust and strong partnerships. We discuss the unique development of collaborative relationships through the history of the partnership. This study provides an exemplar of how the academy and the agency communities can inform each other to enhance the well-being of children and families.     

Promising Innovations in Child Welfare Education: Findings From a National Initiative

For many years, schools of social work have engaged in partnerships, especially with public child welfare agencies, to prepare a competent and professional child welfare workforce through the mechanism of Title IV-E training. In 2008 the National Child Welfare Workforce Institute (NCWWI) established an additional resource for preparing students in social work schools for child welfare practice. Twelve NCWWI traineeship programs supported a diverse group of BSW and MSW students from 2008 to 2013 and prepared them for client-centered practice informed by child welfare and leadership competencies. This article highlights a curriculum innovation in an MSW program and a field innovation in a BSW program that were designed to increase the readiness of BSW and MSW students for child welfare practice.     

All it takes is leadership

The authors, as leaders in a public child welfare system, have teamed together and reached out to their private sector partners in a large, rural county in western Colorado. This effort was part of a comprehensive, communitywide effort to redesign and fundamentally improve the entire child welfare service delivery system. Across the country in many areas where collaboration and integration have been the focus, we often hear voices in the private and public sector declaring the importance of integration. Why, then, does it not happen as a general course of action? The authors believe the answer lies in leadership, both public and private. They hold the Mesa County model up as witness to that fact.     

Challenges of Safe Motherhood: Program and Policy Recommendations

ABSTRACT

This article synthesizes the major findings from research and case studies on safe motherhood and focuses on best practices and changes in public policy. Many factors that negatively influence safe motherhood can be ameliorated—and have been in numerous societies through education, access to resources, public–private partnerships, and grassroots efforts. A model identifying the interrelationship of variable is provided. Policy recommendations are discussed.     

Leadership in Social Work Education and the Social Change Model of Leadership

Leadership is a topic of international debate in both social work education and practice. Questions remain, however, regarding what specific models of leadership should be emphasized and how leadership content should be infused within the social work curriculum. This paper seeks to contribute to the ongoing discussion about the infusion of leadership within social work education. Specifically, this paper shares the design and development of a graduate-level social work course in program evaluation that infused education around the social change model of leadership (SCM) and then explores qualitatively how 39 graduate students interpreted and applied this model of leadership through an experiential community-based evaluation project. Findings of this study suggest that students utilized the values identified in the SCM in a range of ways to understand and interpret their leadership experience both in their collaborative groups and in their partnerships with community-based organizations. Community organizations also reported benefiting from the experience in partnership with the students. Implications are discussed in relation to the potential value and impact of this model for social work education.     

试析高职院校《公益创业管理》教学中学生的创业意识培养

《公益创业管理》是公共事务管理专业的重要课程之一,是对学生进行公益创业所需要的意识、精神、知识、能力及其相应公益创业实践活动的教学。其中,首要的是培养学生的公益创业意识和公益企业家精神。文章分析了当前创业教学中的种种不足,剖析了创业意识的内涵,旨在寻找一种以培养创业意识为导向的教学方式。