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ItemUsing Courts to Realize Education Rights: Reflections from India and Indonesia(World Bank, 2018-05-22)This paper examines the role of courts in promoting fulfillment of the right to education in developing country democracies, focusing on India and Indonesia—two countries that have experienced increased education rights litigation in recent years. The paper argues that this litigation has been part of broader struggles over education policy, inequality, and the capture of educational institutions by political and bureaucratic forces; and that the extent to which litigation has been used and led to policy changes has depended significantly on the nature of, and access to, the court system; the presence of support structures for legal mobilization; the ideology of the courts and judges; and the roles and willingness of litigants to pursue redress. Broadly, litigation has served the interests of the poor and marginalized, although gains have largely come through better access to education, while issues of improving quality have been less prominent.
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ItemThe political economy of teacher management reform in Indonesia(Elsevier, 2018-07-01)Indonesia faces serious problems in the number, cost, quality and distribution of teachers. In recent years, its central government has introduced a range of reforms to address these problems but they have produced modest results. This paper suggests that this outcome reflects the way in which predatory political and bureaucratic elites have used the school system for decades to accumulate resources, distribute patronage, mobilize political support, and exercise political control rather than promote improved learning outcomes. Efforts to reduce teacher numbers, enhance teacher quality, and improve teacher distribution have accordingly constituted an assault on the interests of these elites, provoking powerful, if often subterranean, resistance. Broadly, reform has only occurred where the central government has employed policy instruments that have disciplined local governments and maintained a commitment to these instruments in the face of resistance. The paper concludes by assessing the implications for Indonesian education.
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ItemUsing the Government Financial Reporting Framework to Redraw the State and Market Boundary in China: A Two-Step Approach(The World Bank, 2018)After four decades of remarkable economic achievement under market reforms, the leadership has called for a reset in the boundary between the State and the Market as an important corrective to help China sustain rapid economic growth, by imposing hard budget constraints on government and insulating SOEs from local government predation. This could start with revealing and reviewing the current operation and finance of the government through the new Government financial reporting framework (GFRS). The sheer size of SOEs and their engagement in provision and finance of public goods and services poses great challenge for China to immediately adopt international standard for GFRS. Given their huge size and diverse characteristics, it is neither correct nor practical to include all SOEs in the public sector. We therefore proposed a two-step approach for using the GFRS to redraw the boundary of the state and market. The first step is to adopt an accounting framework that aims to provide a comprehensive count of government operation and finance, focuses on the fiscal impact of entities, and simplifies the reporting requirements for the vast majority of SOEs. The second step is to review the government operation and finance with an economic framework. It is also hoped that the exercise itself will stimulate further reform of SOEs and a rethinking of the division of responsibilities between government and market. While one should not expect to reach a clear and ideal division between the state and market overnight, with successive iterations, the exercise will lead incrementally to greater clarity and improvements, as the process of implementing the GFRS sets off a beneficent cycle for China’s economic transformation to a higher quality and sustainable growth.
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ItemBudget reform in China: Progress and prospects in the Xi Jinping era(ANU Press, 2018)
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ItemRegular sound change: the evidence of a single example(Faculty of Humanities. University of Indonesi, 2018-01-01)The Neogrammarians of the Leipzig School introduced the principle that sound changes are regular and that this regularity is without exceptions. At least as a working hypothesis, this principle has remained the basis of the comparative method up to this day. In the first part of this paper, I give a short account of how historical linguists have defended this principle and have dealt with apparent counter evidence. In the second part, I explore if a sound change can be regular if it is attested in one instance only. I conclude that it is, provided that the concomitant phonetic (and phonotactic) evidence supporting it is also based on regularity. If the single instance of a sound change is the result of developments which are all regular in themselves, it is still in line with the regularity principle.
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ItemWorld Council of Anthropological Associations (WCAA)(John Wiley & Sons, 2018-10-05)Since the early twentieth century, countless modern anthropological studies have paid tribute to the richness of cultural diversity across societies, as well as highlighting some of the existential conditions we all share as human beings. The discipline has not been able to serve as an undistorted mirror of this unity in diversity, however, because scholars from a few privileged nations have dominated the process of anthropological knowledge construction over most of this period of time. The World Council of Anthropological Associations was founded to overcome this deficit by providing a global platform for free communication and democratic participation in the spirit of a new “world anthropologies” paradigm.
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ItemRemembering Suffering and Survival: Sites of Memory on Buru(Palgrave Macmillan, 2018)Survivors and their families have remembered the events of 1965 and the related suffering of persons targeted in the violence in complex ways. In the absence of state recognition of the suffering of victims of 1965, survivors and families have had to pass on their memories in personal ways making their own meanings of these sites of terror within families and communities of former political prisoners. This chapter considers this process in terms of memories of imprisonment on the remote eastern Indonesian island of Buru.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableGendering cosmopolitanisms: Hospitality and the asylum seeker Other(PERGAMON-ELSEVIER SCIENCE LTD, 2018-03-01)Debates about cosmopolitanism have pointed both to its exclusionary character as a problematic child of western modernity, analytically and politically dubious, and to the possibilities offered by the new cosmopolitanisms stressing cosmopolitan practice and ethics. This paper suggests that a gendering of such arguments can add important dimensions to these debates. Exploring the gendered character of the hospitality at the heart of cosmopolitanism's founding arguments, the discussion is grounded in an examination of the situated cosmopolitan hospitality offered by several prominent women-centred asylum seeker and refugee support and advocacy groups in Australia. These groups have created significant spaces of hospitality welcoming “Others,” deploying explicitly feminine imaginaries against the counter-cosmopolitanisms of the increasingly securitized and militarized border politics of the Australian state, and xenophobic anti-refugee nationalisms. The situated cosmopolitan hospitality and affective politics of these practices are linked to feminist arguments about political mobilizations of the feminine, especially the maternal, in social movements.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableBook review: Migrant Returns: Manila Development, and Transnational Connectivity(SAGE PUBLICATIONS INC, 2018-11-01)
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ItemParticipatory natural resource management in rural China: Making and unmaking environmental narratives(John Wiley & Sons, 2018-01-01)Victoria University of Wellington and John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd Environmental and development discourses in China can be categorised into three narrative motifs framing human–nature relationships: peasant, indigenous, and community. Indigenous and community narratives have been widely adopted by environmental NGOs (eNGOs) in China in promoting community-based natural resource management projects, but there has been very limited critical research on such phenomena. Analysis of socio-economic change in two ethnic minority communities in Yunnan shows that neither narrative theme is fully internalised by the relevant communities. Instead narratives may be strategically modified or even rejected by local communities. This is due to different agendas being held by local communities and eNGOs, and two factors pertinent to rural China: the incompatibility of concepts of ‘community’ in Chinese and international contexts results in confusion, and a lack of recent territorial and cultural claims by rural communities since the collectivist era makes it difficult to construct the identity of a community. It remains challenging for eNGOs in China to advocate either community or indigenous narratives in contexts of rapid socio-economic change.
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