The creation and preservation of capable states is a lengthy, laborious, and multifaceted process, fraught with opportunities for failure and misspent resources. It requires time, commitment, innovative ideas, consensus building, new rules of the game, efficient design and resource allocation in technical assistance, and considerable good luck. By the mid-1990s, the imperative to improve government performance had been added to the development agenda precisely because of greater awareness that neither markets nor democracies could function well--or perhaps function at all--unless governments' efficiency, effectiveness, and responsiveness are improved.
This publication seeks to help understand how governments can be encouraged to perform better and how state capabilities can be developed in ways that allow markets and democracies to flourish. The contributors draw comparative lessons from specific efforts designed to enhance human resource development in the public sector, to strengthen organizations that contribute to the public purpose of government, and to reform the institutions that set the rules for economic and political interaction.
Getting Good Government will be of interest not only to public officials and public management and policy analysts, but also to political scientists and international development specialists.
A necessary volume of essays working to decolonize the digital humanities
Often conceived of as an all-inclusive “big tent,” digital humanities has in fact been troubled by a lack of perspectives beyond Westernized and Anglophone contexts and assumptions. This latest collection in the Debates in the Digital Humanities series seeks to address this deficit in the field. Focused on thought and work that has been underappreciated for linguistic, cultural, or geopolitical reasons, contributors showcase alternative histories and perspectives that detail the rise of the digital humanities in the Global South and other “invisible” contexts and explore the implications of a globally diverse digital humanities.
Advancing a vision of the digital humanities as a space where we can reimagine basic questions about our cultural and historical development, this volume challenges the field to undertake innovation and reform.
Contributors: Maria José Afanador-Llach, U de los Andes, Bogotá; Maira E. Álvarez, U of Houston; Purbasha Auddy, Jadavpur U; Diana Barreto Ávila, U of British Columbia; Deepti Bharthur, IT for Change; Sayan Bhattacharyya, Singapore U of Technology and Design; Anastasia Bonch-Osmolovskaya, National Research U Higher School of Economics; Jing Chen, Nanjing U; Carlton Clark, Kazimieras Simonavičius U, Vilnius; Carolina Dalla Chiesa, Erasmus U, Rotterdam; Gimena del Rio Riande, Institute of Bibliographic Research and Textual Criticism; Leonardo Foletto, U of São Paulo; Rahul K. Gairola, Murdoch U; Sofia Gavrilova, Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography; Andre Goodrich, North-West U; Anita Gurumurthy, IT for Change; Aliz Horvath, Eötvös Loránd U; Igor Kim, Russian Academy of Sciences; Inna Kizhner, Siberian Federal U; Cédric Leterme, Tricontinental Center; Andres Lombana-Bermudez, Pontificia, U Javeriana, Bogotá; Lev Manovich, City U of New York; Itay Marienberg-Milikowsky, Ben-Gurion U of the Negev; Maciej Maryl, Polish Academy of Sciences; Nirmala Menon, Indian Institute of Technology, Indore; Boris Orekhov, National Research U Higher School of Economics; Ernesto Priego, U of London; Sylvia Fernández Quintanilla, U of Kansas; Nuria Rodríguez-Ortega, U of Málaga; Steffen Roth, U of Turku; Dibyadyuti Roy, Indian Institute of Technology, Jodhpur; Maxim Rumyantsev, Siberian Federal U; Puthiya Purayil Sneha, Centre for Internet and Society, Bengaluru; Juan Steyn, South African Centre for Digital Language Resources; Melissa Terras, U of Edinburgh; Ernesto Miranda Trigueros, U of the Cloister of Sor Juana; Lik Hang Tsui, City U of Hong Kong; Tim Unwin, U of London; Lei Zhang, U of Wisconsin–La Crosse.
Millions across the world face the daily challenge to find enough food to survive. Hunger is on the rise globally, with more than 1.2 billion people suffering from food insecurity. Rising prices are further restricting food access.
In this deeply informative study, Majda Bne Saad identifies the causes for global hunger embedded in the current global political and economic system and highlights the key challenges facing food deficit countries. She shows how Western countries share the blame for global hunger through their support for subsidies to agricultural production and biofuels, which have created new challenges to food security worldwide.
Bne Saad argues that, as world population rises from 7 billion to 9.2 billion by 2050, there needs to be a ‘second green revolution’ to grow more food. She looks at the factors constraining low-income nations from achieving food security and considers policies which could generate income and enhance individuals' entitlement to food.
Nominee, 2023 Wallace Award, Agricultural History Society
In The Globalization of Wheat, Marci R. Baranski explores Norman Borlaug’s complicated legacy as godfather of the Green Revolution. Winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 for his role in fighting global hunger, Borlaug, an American agricultural scientist and plant breeder who worked for the Rockefeller Foundation, left a legacy that divides opinions even today. His high-yielding dwarf wheat varieties, known as miracle seeds, effectively doubled and tripled crop yields across the globe, from Kenya to India and Argentina to Mexico due to their wide adaptation. But these modern seeds also required expensive chemical fertilizers and irrigation, both of which were only available to wealthier farmers. Baranski argues that Borlaug’s new technologies ultimately privileged wealthier farmers, despite assurances to politicians that these new crops would thrive in diverse geographies and benefit all farmers. As large-scale monocultures replaced traditional farming practices, these changes were codified into the Indian wheat research system, thus limiting attention to traditional practices and marginal environments. In the shadow of this legacy, and in the face of accelerating climate change, Baranski brings new light to Borlaug’s role in a controversial concept in agricultural science.
"[A] fascinating study of how people―and their capital―seek to move around a world that is at once hugely interconnected and driven by inequities…definitive, detailed, and unusually nuanced.”
―Atossa Araxia Abrahamian, Foreign Affairs
The first comprehensive on-the-ground investigation of the global market for citizenship, examining the wealthy elites who buy passports, the states and brokers who sell them, and the normalization of a once shadowy practice.
Our lives are in countless ways defined by our citizenship. The country we belong to affects our rights, our travel possibilities, and ultimately our chances in life. Obtaining a new citizenship is rarely easy. But for those with the means—billionaires like Peter Thiel and Jho Low, but also countless unknown multimillionaires—it’s just a question of price.
More than a dozen countries, many of them small islands in the Mediterranean, Caribbean, and South Pacific, sell citizenship to 50,000 people annually. Through six years of fieldwork on four continents, Kristin Surak discovered how the initially dubious sale of passports has transformed into a full-blown citizenship industry that thrives on global inequalities. Some “investor citizens” hope to parlay their new passport into visa-free travel—or use it as a stepping stone to residence in countries like the United States. Other buyers take out a new citizenship as an insurance policy or to escape state control at home. Almost none, though, intend to move to their selected country and live among their new compatriots, whose relationship with these global elites is complex.
A groundbreaking study of a contentious practice that has become popular among the nouveaux riches, The Golden Passport takes readers from the details of the application process to the geopolitical hydraulics of the citizenship industry. It’s a business that thrives on uncertainty and imbalances of power between big, globalized economies and tiny states desperate for investment. In between are the fascinating stories of buyers, brokers, and sellers, all ready to profit from the citizenship trade.
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