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In this article, the author responds to the paper by Tom Shakespeare and Nicholas Watson defending the social model in its wider context. Disability study critiques have emphasised the way in which medical sociologists' work on the experience of illness have often underplayed the influence of structures; and simultaneously how, in their desire to move away from the individualised "tragedy" model of disability, much of their own work has concentrated on structures, and rather less on the subtleties and complexities of lived experience. The Leeds Conference "Exploring the Divide" in March 1996 was organised precisely to address these issues and to see if a more sensitive rapprochement might be found between the two. Shakespeare has argued elsewhere that one of the achievements of the Disability Movement has been to separate impairment from disability. Whilst author appreciate the force of these arguments, and their grounding in disabled people's experience of marginalisation and exclusion from mainstream society, his two papers argue that attempts to treat the two as discrete entities glosses over the complexity of individual lives.

This research uses the development of the disability rights movement in Taiwan as a case study to analyze the impact of state transformation, in particular marketization of social welfare policy, on the disability rights movement. First, the institutionalization of the disability rights movement enabled it to expand its organizational structure and become involved in shaping policy. Secondly, when disability rights organizations started to undertake state-funded projects, their focus shifted from advocacy to service provision. Thirdly, competition for limited state-funding gave the organizations led by urban-middle class advocates a significant advantage over small, community-based NPOs and gathered significantly greater resources. Finally, this paper suggests that, in a context in which the state did not provide basic social services for its citizens with disabilities, the institutionalization of SMOs turned advocacy groups into service providers. Although the number of disability civic organizations increased, the voices of advocacy groups were weakened. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper addresses the challenges of building capacity for collaborative participatory research with disabled people's organisations in European countries. The paper presents initial findings from the project 'European Research Agendas for Disability Equality' (EuRADE), which seeks to build the capacity of civil society organisations to participate in future research collaborations in partnership with academic institutions. The findings draw on survey data identifying the research capacity, needs and priorities of 68 organisations in 25 countries and focuses, in particular, on responses from national or European level representative organisations of disabled people. The findings demonstrate a high degree of motivation and readiness for collaboration in academic research but raise concerns about the readiness of academic institutions to engage disabled people as equal partners within social model and rights-based approaches. Respondent organisations identified a wide range of research needs that raise challenges for collaborative responses from the academic community. In this way, the findings provide a basis for developing user-led agendas for European funded research within the emancipatory paradigm, and indentify important opportunities for new international research collaborations between activists and academics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper summarises the findings of my doctoral thesis on the development of Jamaica's first rights-based disability policy: The National Policy for Persons with Disabilities 2000. The research had two main aims. First through conducting a retrospective case study, was to construct a history of the national policy's development, which was made possible by a series of events. Second, was to explore through using Easton's thesis, that policy is developed within an extra- and intra- societal environment in order to investigate how macro, meso and micro factors have influenced the policy-making process. The thesis synthesises Easton's systems approach to policy-making with Lasswell's classic stagist approach as a tool for discussing the policy-making process in Jamaica. I argue that a combination of macro, meso and micro factors created an 'opportunity' for the national policy's development, which represents a paradigm shift in Jamaican disability policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]