Constructing a Historiography of Mexican Women and Gender

This article outlines the historiographical importance of the International Colloquium of Women's and Gender History in Mexico, particularly in the context of the author's own scholarship, especially her dissertation. It argues for the need for women's and gender history, and for a dialogue, by means of which these separate but related bodies of scholarship can inform the other. It includes a summary of the author's dissertation and its theoretical influences, a review of historical topics discussed at the first two conferences of the International Colloquium of Women's and Gender History, and a discussion of the historiographical implications of such developments.     

Environmental Policy in India

This article reviews the significant changes India has achieved in environmental policy in the pool 10 years, especially in terms of regulatory procedures and organizational structure. Despite these changes, however, environmental quality has continued to deteriorate, largely because a wide gap persists between the intent of policy and the actual achievement and because major problems have eluded serious attention. The paper analyzes major problems in the implementation of Indian environmental policy, with particular attention to policy design, policy analysis, and standard setting. Political problems are identified that underlie difficulties in policy formulation and implemetation, and strategies to improve implemetation are proposed.     

Unpacking the ‘Joint’ in Joint Forest Management

This article examines the concept of ‘jointness’ in India’s Joint Forest Management (JFM) programme, understood as an engagement between the state (in this case the Forest Department) and people organized into ‘communities’, with NGOs, where available, acting as the interface. By examining the commonalities between older examples of joint or co‐management of resources and current practices of joint forest management, the article challenges the notion that ‘jointness’ is a new feature of forest policy, or that it represents a resurgence of civil society against the state. Further, insofar as the basic agenda of the programme is pre‐determined, it cannot be considered very participatory in nature. None the less, within the limited degree of choice that JFM allows, there is a new and joint construction of needs.     

Fertility Decline and Increasing Gender Imbalance in India,Including a Possible South Indian Turnaround

Birth rates in India have been in a definite decline since about 1985. However, contrary to our assumption that fertility declines in this region hinge on improvements in the status of women, declining fertility seems to be going hand in hand with worsening population sex ratios. This article examines the evidence for a causal connection between fertility decline and increasing gender imbalance by looking at differences in fertility and in gender inequalities between North and South India in the past, and their increasing convergence in gender inequalities in recent years. It pays special attention to the southern state of Tamil Nadu which has been in the forefront of the country's fertility decline but is nevertheless moving towards a North Indian pattern in many aspects of women's status. The Tamil Nadu example is a particularly striking way of studying the country-wide trend because it represents a break from the past, in contrast to North India, where increasing gender differentials may be seen more as an accentuation of long-existing trends. The main problem seems to be that pressures to lower fertility are occurring independently of a change in underlying son preferences and falls in fertility are being aided by technologies which allow one to manipulate not just the sex composition of living children, but also that of children as yet unborn. Some policy implications of this last situation are discussed.     

Policy Gridlock in Waste Management

Current federal hazardous and low-level radioactive waste management policies (under conjoint federalism) fail to balance national concerns for consistency with state concerns for equity, discretion, and adequate resources. Congress should expand conjoint federalism to permit states to charge differential fees on imported hazardous waste as it does for low-level radioactive waste. For low-level radioactive waste, clarification of the "take title" issue makes the present framework for state discretion implementable, given sufficient time.     

Constructing Policy Narratives in 140 Characters or Less: The Case of Gun Policy Organizations

This study examines interest groups’ framing of gun policy issues via an analysis of nearly 10,000 tweets by the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence and the National Rifle Association spanning from 2009 to 2014. Utilizing the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF), I investigate the extent to which interest groups use social media to construct policy narratives. This research shows that much can be conveyed in 140 characters; both gun control and gun rights organizations used Twitter to identify victims, blame “villains,” commend “heroes,” and offer policy solutions. This research sheds light on the politics of gun control by revealing trends over time in groups’ framing and suggests refinements for hypotheses of the NPF. Finally, this work underscores the importance of social media for public policy scholarship.     

Interpreting Gender Mainstreaming by NGOs in India: A comparative ethnographic approach

This article examines the way gender mainstreaming is interpreted by specific non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in India whose development initiatives draw upon particular ideologies of gender equality in their attempts to apply gender analysis. Its purpose is to locate and situate gender mainstreaming in the culturally specific contexts in which it is practiced to capture the complex realities in which gender policies are implemented and women are positioned to effect change. This is an important focus given that gender mainstreaming now pervades transnational governance and yet is informed by feminist analysis. Moreover, NGOs form key sites in which these policies are expected to be implemented. Of the critiques of gender mainstreaming which have emerged in the last 10 years, I examine how potentially conflicting models of gender inequality and equality take local expression and expand on the importance of framing in making gender mainstreaming meaningful by attending to indigenous interpretations of feminism and gender equality. The analysis I offer provides an ethnographic and comparative contribution to an understanding of gender mainstreaming as a contested site whose possibilities and limitations can be revealed by an attention to its feminist origins, namely a focus on context, process and identity formation.     

Ethnographic Understandings of Gender and Economic Transition in Siberia: Implications for Planners and Policy Makers

Economic transition has been defined by neo-liberal restructuring policies and understandings. Using ethnographic data from Omsk, Russia, I examine structural adjustment policy implementation in the context of socially constructed gender norms. These policies have complicated implications for women and men's economic survival. The ethnographic understandings gained from interviews with women provide vital information that would improve planning processes in Omsk. For example, using an economic gardening approach to support women's small business development and workforce development targeting survivors of violence would advance women's economic self-sufficiency. I suggest that if planners use ethnographic understandings they will be able to more effectively respond to planning challenges such as poverty, education and health care issues.     

Culture and Legal Policy Punctuation in the Supreme Court's Gender Discrimination Cases

For the most part, punctuated equilibrium scholarship has ignored the legal policy change generated by the Supreme Court. In this study, I address this gap though an examination of the Court's equal protection and gender cases from the 1970s. My case study here has two aims. First, I offer an adaptation of the jurisprudential regimes framework as a device for framing and identifying legal policy punctuations. After identifying Reed v. Reed (1971) as the cut point of such a regime, I then use Reed and its progeny to illustrate the promise of culture in explaining stasis and change, specifically focusing on the concepts of cultural cognition and cultural surprise.     

Agency,Periodisation and Change in the Gender and Women's History of Colonial India

The paper begins with a critique of the ‘imperialism‐nationalism’ paradigm and its concomitant privileging of the period 1885–1947, which has dominated the writing of modern Indian history. It is argued here that the fixation with the ‘birth‐of‐the‐nation’ theme has led to the neglect of women's agency; that it has resulted in many inconsistencies, dilemmas and unresolved issues regarding a range of topics within Indian gender‐relations; and that this periodisation inhibits the reclamation of terms such as ‘feminist’ and ‘feminism’. The second half of the essay proposes that women's agency can be recovered via a new chronology and a new template for understanding agency within which scholars will be enabled to retrieve the conscious voices of Indian women and record change in gender relations.     

Rural–Urban Migration and Gender Disparities in Child Healthcare in China and India

This article assesses the impact of rural–urban migration on gender disparities in children's access to healthcare in China and India. Much research has shown widespread discrimination against girl children in both countries, including in health investments, contributing to the well‐known problem of Asia's ‘missing’ women. Much less clear is the impact of the massive rural–urban migration now occurring in China and India on discrimination against daughters. Migration is usually thought to have a positive effect on child health, because of improved access to healthcare facilities, but this is not necessarily equally beneficial for both sons and daughters. Based on fourteen months of fieldwork with rural migrant families in Shenzhen (China) and Mumbai (India), this article argues that where migration improves access to healthcare, it may increase rather than decrease the gender gap in treatment of child illness in the short term, as resources are concentrated on the treatment of sons. Furthermore, it is not the case that rural–urban migration necessarily leads to better access to healthcare even for sons: some forms of migration may actually have an overall negative effect on child health outcomes. For these two reasons, development strategies focusing on large‐scale rural–urban migration should not be seen as a short‐term solution to problems of gender inequity in child health.     

Forest Policy Reform and the Organization of Logging in Peruvian Amazonia

Reform in the forest sector in Peru resulted in a new forestry law, developed with substantial input from international conservation and donor organizations. While it incorporates the principles of sustainable forest management, biodiversity conservation and livelihood improvement, inconsistencies remain between the regulatory mechanisms and actual practices and outcomes in the field, leading some to consider the legal framework a failure. This article suggests that problems in the sector persist because the legal and regulatory frameworks do not incorporate existing local institutions, norms and practices — all of which are rooted in complex historical social, political and economic relationships. Based on information from interviews, data on movement of timber and analysis of secondary information, the authors examine the local structure, actors and dynamics of the concession forestry system in the Peruvian Amazon. The article focuses on how financial, social and political relationships in the network of actors, and particularly the patronage system, have helped actors in the sector adapt to the new policy framework. It is proposed that any further reform in the forest sector must be based on a keen understanding and appreciation of the praxis of timber extraction in the region.     

Policy Instrument Choices for Growth Management and Land Use Regulation

What factors account for local government land use practices and their choices among specific growth management policy instruments? We apply the political market framework to examine how land use policy choices in Florida are shaped by institutional features of county governments and the demands of organizations and interests in a community. Local policy decisions reflect a balance of the conflicting interests and responses to economic and political pressures. The results demonstrate that county government structure and election rules play critical roles in the adoption of urban service boundaries, incentive zoning, and transfer of development rights programs. We report evidence consistent with the argument that these “second‐generation” growth management policies are motivated by exclusionary goals.