Peddlers of Information: Unintended Consequences of Information-Centred Development for North Indian Non-Government Organizations

Information and knowledge have re-emerged as essential resources in the fight against poverty, with new opportunities for their dissemination seen to empower the poor and the agencies that work with them. While optimism is high, little empirical evidence exists as to the actual effect of these changes within localized development contexts. This article contributes to overcoming this lacuna by exploring the role of local non-government organizations (NGOs) in Uttarakhand, North India. It examines how the promotion of information and knowledge as development goods have changed the way NGOs understand poverty and their own roles within the sector. I propose the metaphor of NGOs as ??peddlers of information?? to draw attention to the current emphasis on awareness, sensitisation and assemblage of information about the grassroots as the primary??and in many cases only??development work NGOs undertake. This metaphor provides an analytical device through which to assess the roles of NGOs in immanent and intentional development.     

A systematic review of education for the prevention of HIV/AIDS among older adults

Through a comprehensive literature search, the authors of this systematic review identified 21 articles focused on primary prevention of HIV/AIDS for adults aged 50 and over. Three major challenges to providing HIV/AIDS education for older adults include health professionals' ageism, older adults' reluctance to discuss sexuality, and their misconception of their HIV risk. Clinical guidelines for social workers, nurses, and physicians identified the importance of sharing information and assessing risk, considering cultural diversity, and devising creative delivery strategies. Three models of HIV/AIDS education include group education programs delivered by social workers or other health professionals, peer education models, and one-on-one early intervention models including HIV/AIDS testing. Additional outreach and research on HIV/AIDS prevention among older adults is needed.     

The Immigration Industrial Complex: Why We Enforce Immigration Policies Destined to Fail

This article provides a genealogy of the idea of an immigration industrial complex. The immigration industrial complex is the confluence of public and private sector interests in the criminalization of undocumented migration, immigration law enforcement, and the promotion of ‘anti‐illegal’ rhetoric. This concept is based on ideas developed with regard to the prison and military industrial complexes. These three complexes share three major features: (a) a rhetoric of fear; (b) the convergence of powerful interests; and (c) a discourse of other‐ization. This article explores why Congress has not passed viable legislation to deal with undocumented migration, and instead has passed laws destined to fail, and has appropriated billions of dollars to the Department of Homeland Security to implement these laws. This has been exacerbated in the context of the War on Terror, now that national security has been conflated with immigration law enforcement. This is the first in a two‐part series on the immigration industrial complex.     

A Polynomial Optimization Approach to Principal–Agent Problems

This paper presents a new method for the analysis of moral hazard principal–agent problems. The new approach avoids the stringent assumptions on the distribution of outcomes made by the classical first‐order approach and instead only requires the agent's expected utility to be a rational function of the action. This assumption allows for a reformulation of the agent's utility maximization problem as an equivalent system of equations and inequalities. This reformulation in turn transforms the principal's utility maximization problem into a nonlinear program. Under the additional assumptions that the principal's expected utility is a polynomial and the agent's expected utility is rational in the wage, the final nonlinear program can be solved to global optimality. The paper also shows how to first approximate expected utility functions that are not rational by polynomials, so that the polynomial optimization approach can be applied to compute an approximate solution to nonpolynomial problems. Finally, the paper demonstrates that the polynomial optimization approach extends to principal–agent models with multidimensional action sets.     

The More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same: The Elusive Search for Racial Equity in Higher Education

In 1965, when affirmative action officially became part of the national consensus to achieve racial social justice, it was based on the compelling justification of establishing equality and remedying the effects of past discrimination. Since then, there has been a slow but steady shift from "equity" to "diversity" as its rationale. The shift has had a negative effect on achieving the original goal of racial equality. The diversity rationale has permitted parallel procedures to evolve that provided majority students with an even larger differential advantage than that conferred on minority students by affirmative action. In addition, we continue to have massive segregation. Minorities are concentrated in second level schools in urban areas, while whites are concentrated in higher quality institutions in the educational suburbs. It is without factual or legal foundation that whites can argue that they (relative to minorities) are the victims of discrimination through unfair and unequal educational policies and practices that determine access to higher education.     

He Came, He Saw, He Stayed. Guest Worker Programmes and the Issue of Non-Return

Critics of guest worker programmes have pointed out that many temporary workers do not return home when their contracts expire and thus end up swelling the ranks of undocumented workers in a host country. This article argues that this outcome is not inevitable. Whether or not guest workers return home or stay behind depends to a large extent on how the guest worker programme is administered. By comparing the US Bracero Program with the Canadian Mexican Agricultural Seasonal Workers' Program, it is shown that three aspects of programme administration account for why so many Braceros stayed in the US illegally, while almost all temporary workers employed in Canada return to Mexico at the end of the season. The three aspects are recruitment policies and procedures, enforcement of employment and housing-related minimum standards, and the size of the programme. It is suggested that the administration of the programme, in turn, reflects various interests that shape the State's position on foreign labour. Whereas in the US the Bracero Program was tailored to meet the needs of agribusinesses, the Canadian state responds to a wider variety of interests, including its own concern with the definition of ideal citizenship, as well as the need to protect domestic workers and the Mexican Government's interest in assisting those who are most needy. Additionally, unlike the US, where braceros were employed mainly in agribusinesses, in Canada Mexicans are brought to work on family farms. While desertion was a frequent phenomenon in the US, the paternalistic relationships that Canada-bound workers develop with their employers make desertion unlikely.