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This article traces the trajectory of UK government social policy since World War Two, with particular reference to the shifts in the past 10 to 15 years towards concepts such as multi-level governance, localism, the Third Way and the Big Society. It describes the shifting relationships between institutional religion and the State during that period, tracking the 'return of faith' in government policy and social welfare as it seeks to address a number of intractable social and economic issues related to cohesion and inequality, as well as a perceived absence of moral and ethical norms within public life. The article proposes a set of new analytical concepts (based on recent empirical research from the US and the UK) which seek to describe and evaluate this new 'post-secular' relationship between faith and government. The article concludes that the new 'post-welfare' landscape will continue to play well to the existing strengths and positionalities of religion, faith and spirituality in the UK as the twenty-first century moves into its second decade.

The aim of this article is to reflect theologically on recent research into the changing nature of civil society with a view to exploring the implications of these changes for the way churches & other faith communities might contribute to civil society in the future. The article looks at the mismatch between government rhetoric concerning the role of churches & faith communities in building up civil society, & the actual experience of faith communities becoming engaged in formal civil society activities such as regeneration & social cohesion which has often felt disempowering & awkward. The article then looks at the growth of non-institutional society (i.e. broad-based organizations & direct action campaigns) which tends to lie outside government control & raises the theological & strategic question as to whether more liquid & flexible forms of political participation have something to offer churches seeking to become more appropriately engaged in postmodern flows of society & the increasing marginalization within them. 23 References. Adapted from the source document.

The debate over how to properly foster and maintain affordable housing has remained a longstanding, contentious issue in Massachusetts government. For the past thirty years, this debate has crystallized and regularly centered on Chapter 40B, Massachusetts's affordable housing law. Recent executive, legislative, and private proposals, coupled with extraordinary increases in housing costs, have resulted in growing concerns over the effectiveness of 40B and the correct method, if any, of fixing its deficiencies. This Note examines these proposals as well as affordable housing efforts in other parts of the country and argues that Massachusetts's affordable housing crisis will only be solved if the State legislature replaces 40B's arbitrary housing quotas with new initiatives that create enough housing to meet demand and new incentives that encourage municipalities and the private sector to join in its efforts.

Throughout the colonial period, the government played a substantial role in structuring India's foreign trade and in moulding the economy of the great port cities and their immediate hinterlands. Once Company and government had started to prise themselves apart in the early nineteenth century, however, the colonial rulers adopted a very haughty attitude towards the working of the internal economy. The development of internal production and trade would of course be deeply affected by the imperial connection, but the colonial government refused to admit responsibility and was careful not to be drawn into active intervention. The transition from colonial rule to independence did not mark a sharp break between this era of laissez faire or minimal interference in the internal economy, and an era of 'development' or constructive intervention. Indeed, it is more likely that a reluctant slide into economic management during the latter part of the colonial period helped to speed the colonial rulers along their course of retreat; any attempt to tamper with the mechanisms of the internal economy opened up the colonial government to contradictory pressures and threatened to expose many of the weaker links in the mesh of colonial command.

It was rather bold of Furnivall, less than a decade after the event, to announce that the Depression had brough to an end the history of European overseas expansion over almost half a millennium. Against a background of renewed disorder in the international economy, the current historiography seems to be taking this bold suggestion fairly seriously. The 1930s slump is now the accepted starting point for studies of the relations between the west and the rest in the postcolonial era.

In February 1937, the Congress party in the Madras Presidency won 159 of 215 seats in the provincial Legislative Assembly at the first elections under provincial autonomy. It was the most convincing victory for the Congress in any province of British India, and neither the Madras Government nor the Congress leaders had expected it. In the two and a half years Congress rule that followed, their ministers made adept use of their powers. They cut land revenue and dismantled the procedure for revising the land revenue demand, thus appealing to the pocket of every landholder. They re-instated all the village officers who had been dismissed for aiding the Congress during Civil Disobedience, thus instructing the leaders of rural society where the source of power and influence now lay. They passed two measures to alleviate the burden of agricultural debt, and threatened to legislate in favour of the tenants inside the major landed estates. Meanwhile, for the first time, the Cogress established a network of committees throughout the province, and by 1939 this new machine had placed virtually every local government board under a Congress régime. The number of Congerss members in the Tamil and Andhra areas rose from 115,971 on the eve of the 1937 elections to 594,397 in 1938.