Anti-development or identity crisis? Misreading civil society in Meghalaya,India

This paper discusses the complex relationship between civil society and development in Asia by examining the role of ethnic identity in anti-development movements. Local and transnational movements by civil society actors against dams, mines, and deforestation have gained increased attention in academia and activist circles in the last decade, often used as evidence in arguments that development as part of neo-liberalism and/or state-led socialism is faltering. Furthermore, tribal, indigenous, and minority communities are often portrayed as having a closer relationship to the environment, which is seen as instrumental in their opposition to development projects. While agreeing with these arguments to some extent, this paper examines the local context of anti-development movements using research from fieldwork in the Indian state of Meghalaya and argues that struggles over development projects are also struggles over ethnic identity. In Meghalaya, civil society actors from the Khasi ethnic group have opposed several large development projects on the +grounds that these projects will attract labourers from Bangladesh and other parts of India, threatening the survival of the Khasi ethnic group. Damage to the environment, livelihoods, and loss of land are rarely a concern. The failure to recognize the influence of ethnic identity politics in critiques of development raises the risk of misreading both the extent of anti-development sentiments in civil society and the potential for development projects to be reframed by proponents into an acceptable ethnic guise. Furthermore, the actors contesting development through identity politics are overwhelmingly from urban areas, leaving rural people with limited access to civil society. This paper attempts to add a critical perspective to current literature on development and civil society using empirical examples from one of the least researched regions in Asia.     

Methodological Approaches to Assessing Risk Perceptions Associated with Food-Related Hazards

The psychometric approach developed by Slovic and his co-workers has been effectively used to assess risk perceptions associated with different food-related hazards. However, further examination (using questionnaire data and partial correlation techniques) has indicated that technological hazards are highly differentiated from lifestyle hazards, in terms of both hazard control and knowledge about the hazard. Optimistic bias was also seen to vary between hazards. Further research has focused on a particular hazard, genetic engineering. Risk perceptions associated with genetic engineering are underpinned by ethical concern and questions relating to perceived need for the technology, as well as perceptions of risk or harm. However, increasing the specificity of hazard stimuli was found to alter the factor structure of underlying risk perceptions. The utility of preference mapping procedures in determining individual differences in trust in risk regulators is also discussed.     

Accountability to Welfare Service Users: Challenges and Responses of Service Providers

Influenced by the consumerist sentiment in New Public Management,the last decades have witnessed a revival of the call for accountabilityto service users in the public service sector. As an act ofaccountability, social care and health care professionals areincreasingly obliged to involve their service users in the serviceplanning and monitoring process. Despite the popularity of thisaccountability and user involvement rhetoric, critics have,however, been skeptical of the prevailing user involvement initiativesas an effective measure of accountability to service users (Barnes and Wistow, 1994a,1994b; Bowl, 1996; Peck et al., 2002; Rea, 2004). Based on astudy of user involvement in the welfare sector of Hong Kong,this paper argues that the discourse of accountability to theservice users can be a source of unrest for welfare professionals,in the manifestation of accountability as a power relationship.Their ensuing response is to accommodate the ensuing challengearising from the demand for accountability to service usersby manoeuvring the accountability discourse. It is the contentionof this paper that the institutional inclusion of welfare serviceusers into a discursive space is a necessary but not sufficientcondition for the realization of a mandate of accountabilityto welfare service users.     

The Cohort Size‐Wage Relationship in Europe

This paper estimates the impact of cohort size on wages using data on young males in European regions covering 2004–10. The effect of cohort size on wages is identified through an instrumental variables strategy which, in contrast to previous analyses of European data, addresses self‐selection into geographical areas as well as into educational groups. The results suggest that cohort size has a significant negative effect on male wages for individuals with secondary education — the largest group — but not for individuals with less than secondary education or tertiary education. This effect is underestimated if self‐selection into geographical areas is not addressed.     

Psychological and cultural factors in the process of occupational achievement

An eight-equation model embodies the hypothesis that cultural differences among ethnic-religious groups give rise to differences in psychological dispositions, which, though not directly observable, influence occupational achievement, directly or via educational attainment, while being subject to feedback from one or the other of these endogenous variables. Dispositions are reflected in three fallible indicators, constructed from items in a survey interview of native white men in the Detroit area; the survey also secured socioeconomic measures and an estimate of intelligence. The model is block recursive and over-identified. Parameter estimates are secured by a sequence of ordinary least squares and two-stage least squares procedures, after solving out the structural equations to eliminate the unobservable variables. Numerical results do not strongly support the “Protestant Ethic” theory of achievement, but do suggest that the influence of education on occupation is mediated by motivational as well as cognitive and institutional factors.     

A note on deriving rank-dependent utility using additive joint receipts

Luce and Fishburn (1991) derived a general rank-dependent utility model using an operation ⊕ of joint receipt. Their argument rested on an empirically supported property (now) calledsegregation and on the assumption that utility is additive over ⊕. This note generalizes that conclusion to the case where utility need not be additive over ⊕, but rather is of a more general form, which they derived but did not use in their article. Tversky and Kahneman (1992), conjecturing that the joint receipt of two sums of money is simply their sum, criticized that original model because ⊕=+ together with additive utility implies the unacceptable conclusion that the utility of money is proportional to money. In the present generalized theory, if ⊕=+, utility is a negative exponential function of money rather than proportional. Similar results hold for losses. The case of mixed gains and losses is less well understood.     

Institutional Diversity and Performance in African Cotton Sectors

This article analyses the performance of cotton sectors across East, Southern, and West Africa, paying particular attention to the wide diversity of institutional arrangements that they now exhibit. It finds strong support for earlier contentions regarding trade‐offs between competition and coordination, and between the roles of public and private sectors. New insights provide concrete and context‐specific guidance to policy‐makers and stakeholders regarding the key challenges they will face and the risks they will need to manage as they work to improve productivity and ensure an equitable division of benefits within cotton sectors.     

Global standards for social work education and training

This paper explores the ways in which social workers can be helped to acquire the wider understanding of relevant legal frameworks which is currently necessary for child-centred practice, given the influence of an ecological perspective on such practice. It arises from the development of a module on child care social work and the community for the Post Qualifying Child Care Award by members of the Law and Social Work Departments at Brunel University. The authors believe that to reach beyond a tokenistic acknowledgement of the ecological perspective requires an understanding and experience of the complex layers which make up the widening and complex social worlds of the child. The paper explains how social workers were encouraged to appreciate both the ever-widening circles of potentially relevant law and the different roles through which law operates. It concludes that a deeper engagement with the legal implications of an ecological dimension to practice would make such practice more effective and would also help combat social exclusion and discrimination.