Search

Do regional institutions promote more equitable governance in the global South and, in particular, do they enable more gender-equitable governance? We examine these questions in the light of regional governance actions and policies under COVID-19, drawing on evidence from Latin America and Africa. We argue that weak regional gender equality norms contributed to the downgrading of the rights of women and girls in policymaking during COVID-19, within both member states and regional organizations, which resulted in women and girls paying an unnecessarily high price during and after the pandemic. Using interview and documentary data, we show that the existence of gender equality norms led to an initial recognition of the need for gendered protections in COVID-19 policies but that these were side-lined, and the rights and needs of women and girls deprioritized, as the pandemic deepened. We also discuss the gendered costs of deprioritization in terms of preventable everyday harms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do we account for the ability or otherwise of regional organisations in the global South to enable equitable and inclusive responses to the COVID-19 pandemic? We answer this question with a focus on Africa and in relation to the rights of women and girls. Drawing on theoretical insights from Feminist Global Health Security and from data on the African Union, other regional organisations in Africa and from non-governmental organisations, local activists and medical centres, we show that regional organisations acted quickly to identify the gendered socio-economic and health needs of women and girls and alerted member states to their responsibility to consider gender rights in their policy responses. But weak gender norms led to a disconnect between this early recognition of the importance of policies to protect women and girls and the behaviour of regional organisations, which could not lead a gender sensitive response or engineer one in member state governments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The problem of plastic waste accumulating in the environment has become ubiquitous in recent years. One way in which urban governments are looking to solve this issue is by investing one of several thermodynamic technologies that fall under the umbrella term 'waste-to-energy'. The drawback of such technologies is that the waste stream must be consistent in quality and quantity. By drawing on ethnographic research with environmental activists in Kochi, South India, I demonstrate that particular environmental and material conditions—in this case Kochi's immense wetness—confound the supposed universality of such infrastructures. Querying waste infrastructures in this way also leads to insights that suggest that investing in infrastructures to address issues of plastic waste often deepen attachments to plastic economies of capitalist accumulation. I ultimately argue that addressing environmental and social concerns about plastic waste means broadening what is relevant to infrastructural interventions in urban environmental governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In times of crisis, governments can resort to tax rises and emergency taxation schemes to finance extraordinary needs. These schemes often generate tensions in the fiscal contract between the state and society, as they affect basic definitions regarding who is taxed, for how much, and what for. In the context of developing economies, where available sources of extraordinary rents are limited, dealing with these tensions can be problematic as it involves reconciling questions of fiscal legitimacy with the interests of influential economic sectors. This article analyses these tensions by exploring the case of Argentina in the aftermath of the 2001 debt default crisis, when emergency taxes on agricultural exports were implemented and then expanded under Kirchnerist administrations pursuing a 'post-neoliberal' developmental agenda. However, we argue that the government failed in legitimating this fiscal agreement, resulting in a tax rebellion by the rural sector in 2008 followed by the growing polarisation of the policy in partisan terms. By bringing to the fore the challenges and conflicts involved in legitimating tax collection, the article illuminates an overlooked aspect of the political economy of developmental states, particularly those seeking to enhance state autonomy while pursuing redistributive goals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The (post)colonial logics of speed and convenience are manifest in many of today's infrastructural projects, creating what we consider to be 'fast infrastructures'. These infrastructures create ease for some and harm for others while exacerbating social and environmental crises around the world. Addressing these crises requires, we argue, a slowing down. Enter the role of 'slow infrastructures'. In this paper, we highlight two forms of slow infrastructure that provide possibilities for rearranging our infrastructural orientations: composting and rainwater harvesting. Drawing on fieldwork conducted throughout 2018 and 2019 in Kochi, Kerala, this research asserts that in order to do infrastructure differently, an unworking of convenience and speed is required. This unworking can be achieved through an attunement to multi-species and more-than-human relations, matched with a distributed ethic of maintenance and care. Our ethnographic examples, one from a hospital and another from a hotel, suggest that slow infrastructures can meaningfully offset the threat of disfunction and 'urban failure' that confronts cities increasingly marked by turbulence and uncertainty. While these examples draw from the tropics of urban South India, they offer lessons helpful to unworking the harm caused by fast infrastructures in other parts of the globe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although high-risk sport participants are typically considered a homogenous risk-taking population, attitudes to risk within the high-risk domain can vary considerably. As no validated measure allows researchers to assess risk taking within this domain, we validated the Risk Taking Inventory (RTI) for high-risk sport across four studies. The RTI comprises seven items across two factors: deliberate risk taking and precautionary behaviors. In Study 1 (n = 341), the inventory was refined and tested via a confirmatory factor analysis used in an exploratory fashion. The subsequent three studies confirmed the RTI's good model-data fit via three further separate confirmatory factor analyses. In Study 2 (n = 518) and in Study 3 (n = 290), concurrent validity was also confirmed via associations with other related traits (sensation seeking, behavioral activation, behavioral inhibition, impulsivity, self-esteem, extraversion, and conscientiousness). In Study 4 (n = 365), predictive validity was confirmed via associations with mean accidents and mean close calls in the high-risk domain. Finally, in Study 4, the self-report version of the inventory was significantly associated with an informant version of the inventory. The measure will allow researchers and practitioners to investigate risk taking as a variable that is conceptually distinct from participation in a high-risk sport. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]