Suchergebnisse

Experiments in deepening democracy through decentralized governance : an overview / Joseph Tharamangalam and Jos Chathukulam -- Embedded democracy / Patrick Heller -- Socialist construction and commoning / Cliff DuRand -- Thinking beyond capitalism / Errol Sharpe -- COVID-19 context in India and working towards alternative paradigms / M.A. Oommen -- Citizenship and social suffering in the context of COVID-19 / P. Sanal Mohan -- Democracy and capitalism in the time of COVID-19 / Henry Veltmeyer -- The roles of NGOs, state and for-profit agencies in improving the maternal and child sector in Bangladesh : towards a division of labour / Ahmed Tareq Rashid -- Governance, welfare-based development and COVID-19 : Sweden and Kerala in comparative perspective / Olle Tornquist -- The cure remains a symptom : sub-national government, democracy and development in South Africa / Steven Friedman -- Reorienting people's planning in Kerala / K.N. Harilal -- The capacity conundrum in decentralization and local governance : how Kerala tackles it / Joy Elamon and Sukanya K.U. -- Employment creation at a decentralized level through the construction of niche structures and promotion of self-organization / Sunil Ray -- From agricultural co-operatives to farmer producing companies : analysing the transition of co-operativism in India / K. Gireesan -- Co-operativism to manage COVID-19 / Abhilash Babu and Sabu Thomas -- Cuba's experiments with cooperativsm and solidarity economies : a move towards 21st century socialism / Joseph Tharamangalam -- Lessons and non -lessons / Joseph Tharamangalam and Jos Chathukulam.

Intervention projects aimed at preventing STD and HIV generally tend to target women sex workers and through them their clients. This approach sees women sex workers as agents of change, with the attendant burden, but has failed to recognise gender issues surrounding sexual health, particularly power relations existing in society. While gender justice is a recognised legitimate concern, the discourse has excluded sex workers from its purview making them the moral 'other'. Sexual health projects implemented currently in different parts of Kerala are not sensitive to gender issues because they mistakenly assume that sex workers are autonomous subjects. In the sexual health project for female sex workers implemented in the Kottayam municipal area some gender issues were tackled with modest success. This paper makes a strong plea for more gender sensitivity in sexual health projects and for men to take their fair share of responsibility for HIV transmission.

The de-operationalisation of Article 370 has given a new lease of life to grassroots democracy in the erstwhile State of Jammu and Kashmir. The Union government has made it clear that the main priority is to strengthen grassroots democracy there. At present, the erstwhile State which was once battered by militancy, insurgency as well economic and political instability has embarked on the path of democracy. Though there have been criticisms that the eagerness and interest taken by the Union government to foster local democracy in Kashmir is an attempt to whitewash the absence of democratically elected State government, the recent developments in the erstwhile State including the completion of delimitation exercise at a quick pace to form democratically elected governments in the union territories of Jammu and Kashmir implies that there is some hope at end of the tunnel.

AbstractAttempts at measuring decentralisation are still in an underdeveloped stage. The reason for this lies in the failure to devise common standards against which measurement is possible and the lack of consensus about the very meaning of decentralisation. An attempt to measure decentralisation was made by Vengroff and Ben Salem in the context of Tunisia nearly a decade ago. An expanded and adapted version of this model is used to measure decentralisation in Kerala using the same judgmental criteria that they used after involving a panel of nine experts. These experts had a fairly good understanding of the practice of decentralisation to score on the basis of the adapted criteria. An ideal form of decentralisation envisaged in this measurement exercise is devolution. It has been found that on a scale ranging between 0 and 5, the state of Kerala obtained a score of 2.00 in spite of the fact that the investment that the state had made in decentralisation has no parallels anywhere in the developing countries. Such a low score, despite the much publicised campaign for decentralisation, was due to the focus on planning rather than on decentralisation issues. Attempts to measure decentralisation will not only enable us to develop more contextually valid measures of decentralisation, but also contribute to the clarification of the concept of decentralisation, particularly by identifying aspects neglected hitherto. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.