Creating Spaces of Resistance: Development NGOs and their Clients in Ghana, India and Mexico

Development NGOs have been accused by some of being new instruments of control, domesticated by the neoliberal project. For others, they elaborate and pursue alternative dreams. In this paper, we argue that, although the majority of NGOs have been co‐opted to serve hegemonic development agendas, they nevertheless present a fluid, contradictory web of relations, within which a significant minority seeks to make spaces of resistance, and where even the most neoliberal NGOs are used by some clients to create new associational spaces. Drawing on work with NGOs in Ghana, India, Mexico and Europe, we explore various strategies deployed by this minority of "independent thinking NGOs". We argue that there is an important production of Melucci's submerged networks or latent social movements, however limited their political impact to date.     

FANY (First Aid Nursing Yeomanry) ‘Other Spaces’: toward an application of Foucault's heterotopias as alternate spaces of social ordering

This article applies the principles of Foucault's (1986) concept of heterotopia to the spatial imaginaries and material realities of the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (FANY), an elite organisation of British women volunteers who served on the Western Front during World War I. First, the FANY created crisis heterotopia shaped by the history and politics of the period and linked to gendered cultural anxieties at this slice in time; second, FANY space was ordered and made accessible through the interplay of class privilege and patriotic national identity; third, it involved possibilities for transgression through the heterotopic juxtaposition of material practices of domesticity within and against sites of combat; and finally, FANY space both involved an utopian element that contrasted with other real spaces available to women and helped reveal the gendered politics of those traditional sites.     

Torres Strait elections, 2000 and 2004: Changes in political leadership and style?

Torres Strait has 18 local governments, elections for which were held in March of both 2000 and 2004 in conjunction with other local government elections in Queensland. Elections were also held at these times for additional positions on two regional representative bodies for Torres Strait, the Island Co-ordinating Council and the Torres Strait Regional Authority. This paper examines all these elections, focusing on changes in political leadership and also a possible emerging change in political style in Torres Strait.     

Political Resources for Policy Terminators

Scholars of policy termination have long understood that there are tremendous difficulties associated with closing down public programs and facilities. This examination of one closure begins with that understanding and then, using Deborah Stone's conceptualization of politics in the policy arena, moves to categorize and analyze those difficulties.
The case involves the U.S. government's policy of providing lifelong, residential care to victims of Hansen's Disease (leprosy). The investigation documents the government's decision in the 1950s to end the policy and follows the ensuing battle. The government terminators, despite the rationality of their position, were held at bay for nearly fifty years by politically savvy opponents including patients, staff, and the community that housed the leprosarium. Only when government officials reached into their own bag of political resources and skillfully employed those resources, was it possible to end the policy.     

EMPIRICAL POLYCENTRICITY: THE COMPLEX RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN EMPLOYMENT CENTERS

Our paper empirically demonstrates that employment subcenters in large urban areas have important economic relationships with each other, and not solely with the central business district (CBD). Using data from Houston, Texas, we estimate polycentric density functions and show that “total” gradients differ from gradients using only own‐center coefficients. We model asymmetry by showing density is very different for centers with overlapping areas of influence. We conclude that subcenters have important yet heterogeneous linkages to each other in addition to the CBD, and that therefore the polycentric city is more complex than simply having additional centers mimicking the CBD.