Industrial cluster literature has traditionally focused on work-place upgrading, clusters' ability to promote firm productivity, economic growth, and benefits that firm owners can or will give to workers. However, even in growing, productive clusters, such a work-place focus leaves out questions about how to situate the contribution of the firm and cluster in improving living standards in the wider socio-economic and spatial context of the region. By providing a systematic examination of the relationship between industrial clusters and poverty analyzed within a multidimensional frame, this dissertation attempts to close this bridge. It asks under what conditions firms in productive clusters pass on benefits to workers in ways that improve their living standards, even when they are not required by law to do so. Three hypotheses are put forward. First, firms in their own interest boost worker productivity by providing certain kinds of work-place benefits such as overall capability, proxied by various types of internal technological knowledge and skills. Second, firms choose not to give other place-based and work-based benefits like health or housing because social policies do not demand it and it has no direct benefit to the firm. Third, firms pass on these benefits because it costs little, and tend to deepen employee loyalty. The study analyses the case of the Otigba Information and Communications Technology cluster in Lagos, Nigeria and uses survey questionnaires, interviews, and archival research. Results confirm that clustering promotes not just firm-level productivity as literature on agglomeration economy highlights, but also raises workers' living standards compared to non-clustered firms in the same sector. Older employees, and those with prior experience in other firms report improvements in their living standards since working in their firms. Furthermore, firms in the cluster give a diverse number of non-income benefits such as housing, health insurance, feeding and transportation allowance, training, child care, funding for further education, pension and company products, based on the length of service in the firm, age of employee, and size of the firm. Additionally, while formal state-supported social protection institutions are largely absent, monetary and non-monetary benefits such as employment, provision of skills through apprenticeships, housing, transportation, and feeding allowance are channeled to employees through firms and informal institutions based on social and kinship ties. A high level of horizontal and collective cooperation based on professional lines has also emerged within the cluster in the absence of formal state institutions. The dissertation makes a theoretical contribution by bridging studies on industrial clusters with those on social protection policy instruments. The study gives greater evidence to the diversity of social protection available, as well as the opportunity for economic development planners to explore ways in which firm-driven social protection can be integrated into social policy.

Food access has become a popular area of concern in both urban planning and public health as both fields are directing increasing attention to the role that uneven neighbourhood food environments play in diet practices and health outcomes. This research investigates two food access expansion projects underway in New York City by looking at how they are implemented in the neighbourhood of Brownsville in the borough of Brooklyn. One, the Brownsville Youthmarket, run by the city-wide nonprofit GrowNYC, is a farmers' market intervention that increases access to fresh fruit and vegetables by hiring neighbourhood youth to sell regional produce. The second, Shop Healthy, is an initiative run by the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (and its District Public Health Offices). It encourages bodega owners to stock healthier items in their stores, including fruits and vegetables. By drawing on concepts of environmental justice and biopower, this research shows how these programs are characterized by competing motivations and strategies. While the stated rationale for these food access programs is to improve food environments by bringing more healthy items into underserved neighbourhoods, they rely upon nutrition education and cooking skills programs that indicate that the underlying problem is a lack of knowledge about what food is healthy and how to prepare it. This gap between motivations and strategies reveals a great distance between city-level actors and the residents of the neighbourhoods that they aim to help. Program designers fail to understand the true barriers to healthy eating in predominantly poor and minority communities and thus intervene with programs that do little to meaningfully change the food environment in ways that address residents' needs.

This is a comparative case study of income maintenance policy formation involving six economically underdeveloped countries, i.e. Bolivia, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), Ghana, Mauritius, Thailand and the United Arab Republic (now Egypt). The major questions raised are: what are the types of income maintenance programs in the selected countries?; are there specific factors associated with the adoption of those programs? If so, what are they?; and what are the conditions, if any, under which certain factors may become active in association with the program types? In this study, the income maintenance program was defined as a body of statutory measures designed to help assure a minimum income for selected or all sectors of population through direct transfers of cash or benefit-in-kind. The specific program components examined were food subsidies, public education, public health, demogrants, modified negative tax and public assistance in the non-occupational sector and social insurance, provident fund, corporative profit-sharing and subsidized commissary in the occupational sector. For the purpose of cross-national analysis, four basic program types determined by the level of pertinent expenditures, the number and type of components involved, population coverage and the relative balance between occupational and non-occupational components were delineated and employed. In addition to exploring the substantive questions, this study attempted to formulate a conceptual model which may be useful for future studies in terms of defining the problem, generating hypotheses and comparing the findings of one study with those of another. The basic problem of the study relates to theories of choice in the social field. The selection criteria of the study settings were: the level of economy as represented by per capita income (US $137-157 and US $209-211 brackets), the income maintenance program variation and data availability. This study covers various historical junctures of the post World War II period, usually coinciding with the life span of one government in each country. In one country only (Mauritius) a period of nearly 20 years was covered because the evolvement of the income maintenance program in that country took that long. Of existing theories and hypotheses of public policy, the study findings generally support a political one, particularly those involving the political self-interest theory of Anthony Downs, Theodore Riker, Daniel Ellsberg and others. This, however, does not rule out the secondary or conditional significance of non-political factors such as needs, resources, economic context, demography, technical assistance, socio-cultural and institutional factors and external factors. The overall concept of income maintenance policy determination emerging from the study findings as a whole is represented by a systems model distinguished by politico-kinetic dynamics among all the underlying factors. In this model, the policy-making environment is envisaged as a kinetic field in which the movements of and the relationships between all underlying factors of income maintenance policies are controlled by a shifting balance of forces among political factors, such as pressure group influence, power requisites of political leadership, the leadership orientation and commitment, ideology, and so on. These political factors are conceived to change not only in their relative strengths but also in their aims or directions, and thus cause modifications in the income maintenance program. With the changes in the controlling factors and their relationships, the non-political factors are regarded to change also in terms of their relative strengths and dispositions in relation to the political factors as well as in relation to one another, thus undergoing changes in their powers of influence upon the program. The pattern of inter-factor relationships represented in the model is regarded to hold at any given moment in time as well as over a period of time. The conceptual model that best embodies the above dynamics among the underlying factors may appropriately be termed a politico-kinetic paradigm.

This study examines the politics of responsibility for dengue fever, the world’s fastest growing mosquito-transmitted viral disease, drawing on ethnographic research in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Inhabitants of favelas (squatter communities) and other low-income areas are blamed for dengue in Brazil, yet entrenched poverty and political abandonment of the poor drive dengue outbreaks in Brazilian cities: inadequate sanitation in areas where the poor live leaves trash to accumulate and collect standing water, creating ideal breeding grounds for dengue mosquitoes. The study examines three central questions: What forces influence relationships among the urban poor, more socioeconomically powerful groups in civil society, and state actors who occupy various positions of influence within public health, sanitation, environmental, and public safety sectors in the context dengue fever in everyday life? What are the cultural assumptions about the causes of dengue in Brazil, and where do they place responsibility for its prevention? How do interactions among inhabitants of favelas and well-to-do neighborhoods, waste pickers, health surveillance agents, and police officers affect processes of social inclusion and exclusion in overlapping contexts of dengue, trash, urban space, and security in the city Rio de Janeiro? Throughout the study’s analysis, I map social and physical spaces of Rio where people, trash, mosquitoes, and dengue viruses move in and out of view, in order to reveal how symbolic and material interactions in the past and present continually reshape political economies of responsibility. I argue that negotiations over social worth and collective health play out in Rio through historical, economic, and ecological entanglements, and that from these entanglements arise practices that securitize urban space and health yet, paradoxically, produce new forms of vulnerability.

Thesis (SJD) -- Bond University, 2005. / "A thesis submitted to Bond University in fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Legal Science"-- t.p. Bibliography: pages 320-340. Also available via the World Wide Web.

Thesis (LL. M.)--University of Toronto, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references.

published_or_final_version / Public Administration / Master / Master of Social Sciences

Indonesian broadcasters are less than enthused about switching from an analog signal to digital terrestrial television (DTT). The nation’s telecommunications industry appears mostly indifferent, consumers are reluctant to spend money on the necessary new equipment, and electronics producers are pessimistic about the new market. Despite the fact that few stakeholders are in support of this transition, the Indonesian government is moving forward on DTT. Why could this be? Indonesia is the largest archipelago in the world, with more than 16,000 islands and a diverse geography that complicates the implementation of new broadcast and telecommunications infrastructure. By taking it as a case study, this project explains why, despite broad national ambivalence, high costs, and uncertain benefits, a developing country might still find itself accepting an externally imposed standard. Primary research questions include: What incentivizes nations to accept new technological standards when domestic enthusiasm is sparse? How do foreign interests and a fear of isolation from an “inevitable” global technofuture reshape civic priorities? Which segments of society are legitimized in this process, and which are ignored? The processes at play are nuanced. Building on the scholarship of Grewal (2008), this dissertation contends that Indonesia’s decision to transition to DTT is understood as neither entirely voluntary nor entirely coerced. Rather, it is the result of a complex web of power plays and rhetorical frames. International bodies seek to impose a universal broadcast standard even in countries where it is counterproductive as certain domestic corporations attempt to influence the process in order to maintain and consolidate their dominance. At the same time, prevailing narratives of “necessity” and “inevitability” obscure policy choices better suited to the Indonesian situation, and hide the reality that DTT is not only a technological issue, but a social one as well.

Reproductive controversies are never only about reproduction and health. They serve as proxies for more fundamental questions about citizenship, the state, national identity, class and gender. In a post-colonial context such as the Philippines, where a particular historical relationship between the Church and the state has developed, policymaking on reproduction, sexuality and health answers to both development goals and religious norms. At the same time, women's everyday frameworks of (reproductive) meanings are also inextricably bound with state policies and popular culture. My ethnographic study examines the relationship between state governance, religion, reproductive politics, and competing understandings of embodied sexual morality. My study argues that at the heart of the complex politics involved in policymaking on reproductive health in the Philippines is the entanglement of national and religious identities. Reproductive policy then operates as a frame through which the politics of the nation, religion and the state get filtered and played out. Taking the Philippines as a case study, I focus on women's `lived religion' and practices; the local, national and international institutions and actors that exert influence on reproductive policy and popular sentiment; and how these shape women's reproductive practices in the context of everyday life. Through the women's narratives, I show how class, gender and religion work in tension with one another. Lastly, the study also investigates how the historical entanglement between religion and the state configures practices of governance, such as policymaking, in postcolonial contexts.

Traditionally youth policy has been studied from a psycho-social perspective that treats the concept of youth as a natural developmental stage. This dissertation adopts a political perspective and analyzes how political actors shape the social construction of youth. It documents the extent to which five sub-issues of youth policy--education, criminal justice, public health, social services, and workforce development--were present on the congressional agenda from 1973-2008. This research question is addressed through an analysis of congressional hearing data from a researcher-designed database of all congressional hearings held on youth-related issues during this 35 year-period (n = 986). This descriptive analysis provides a longitudinal picture of what Congress chose to consider with regard to youth issues. The dissertation then empirically probes possible explanations as to why the five sub-issues of youth policy were more or less prevalent on the congressional agenda. Drawing from existing literature, this research posits two competing theories that may explain congressional attention to youth issues over time. The external events hypothesis argues that youth issues are present on the agenda as a result of external events catalyzing an increase in attention to youth issues, whereas the internal actors hypothesis asserts that internal actors such as congressional leaders and interest groups are responsible for promoting youth issues. These competing explanations are then tested with a content analysis of the hearings, supplemented with data from a small number of elite interviews. Results suggest that both hypotheses are partially correct, but that the first theory better explains the peaks in the number of hearings, signifying the role external conditions played in motivating Congress to hold more youth hearings.