Suchergebnisse

The history of Surinam's economy & class development is analyzed, providing the basis for explanation of how privileged & nonprivileged classes were determined. Racial characteristics & class position are closely related. An attempt is made to demonstrate in which ways class & race have affected the development of political parties after WWII. The creation of political parties can be considered the reaction of different racial elites to the necessity of democratically legitimizing their power. Until now elites have been able to preserve an advantageous position in influencing basic policy decisions within their parties. Elites govern by means of informal compromises & coalitions, which constitutes a threat to the stability of the system. Surinam, on the verge of independence, awaits a long period of political instability & faces the possibility of external interference. 1 Table. Modified HA.

Background: Significant research attention has been given to understanding the processes of drug policy reform. However, there has been surprisingly little analysis of the persistence of policy in the face ofopposition and evidence of ineffectiveness. In this article we analysed just such a case – police drug detection dog policy in NSW, Australia. We sought to identify factors which may account for the continuation of this policy, in spite of counter-evidence and concerted advocacy.Methods: The analysis was conducted using the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF). We collated documents relating to NSW drug detection dog policy from 1995 to 2016, including parliamentaryrecords (NSW Parliament Hansard), government and institutional reports, legislation, police procedures, books, media, and academic publications. Texts were then read, coded and classified against the core dimensions of the ACF, including subsystem actors and coalitions, their belief systems and resources and venues employed for policy debate.Results: Three coalitions were identified as competing in the policy subsystem: security/law and order, civil liberties and harm reduction. Factors that aided policy stability were the continued dominance of thesecurity/law and order coalition since they introduced the drug dog policy; a power imbalance enabling the ruling coalition to limit when and where the policy was discussed; and a highly adversarial policysubsystem. In this context even technical knowledge that dogs infringed civil liberties and increased risks of overdose were readily downplayed, leading to only incremental changes in implementation ratherthan policy cessation or wholesale revision.Conclusion: The analysis provides new insights into why the accumulation of new evidence and advocacy efforts can be insufficient to drive significant policy change. It poses a challenge for the evidence-based paradigm suggesting that in highly adversarial policy subsystems new evidence is unlikely to generate policy change without broader subsystem change, such as reducing the adversarial nature and/or providing new avenues for cross-coalition learning.

A specific focus on the rural poor and public policy is warranted for several reasons: (1) poverty has been and continues to be more severe in rural or nonmetropolitan areas, despite the perception of poverty as an urban problem; (2) the rural poor have more limited access to services and programmes than the urban poor; (3) some analysts argue that antipoverty policy has tended to be tailored toward the urban poor rather than the rural poor, giving the former more political power and hence resulting in more programmes and policies than for the latter. (AM)