Civil Society, Social Capital and Governance: Liberal Policy Agendas and Indigenous Civil Society: the Fa'asamoa as a Case Study

<p>The funding of civil society has become a key aspect of the governance agenda for international aid. This arises out of a number of theories linking civil society to better governance through the leveraging of social capital. These theories find their genesis in a distinctly liberal body of work that has drawn its findings from Western historical experience. In particular, the work of Robert Putnam and many like him in the 1990's draws its inspiration from Alexis d'Tocqueville's observations of democratic life in the early nineteenth century United States. Here, civic associational, according to Tocqueville, played a key part in the vibrant democratic spirit of the USA. Putnam's own findings, on the difference between governance outcomes in Southern and Northern Italy, mirror those of Tocqueville. Although the formulations of civil society and social capital inherent in this liberal tradition are but one among many theories, they are the ones that have influenced the international donors and the allocation of development assistance money has reflected this. Civil society funding generally goes to ideal types of organisations that most resemble a Western conception of civil society. In particular, Non-Governmental Organisations (NGO's) have proliferated to take advantage of this. This may well be overlooking many key forms of civil society that already exist in developing countries. A liberal reading of civil society that focuses on the associative values of civil society organisations would miss groups that are characterised more by kin, ethnicity or tribal ties. The fa'asamoa (or 'Samoan way') is an example of just such an institution that may be viewed as too traditional and backward looking by liberal theory, but upon reflection performs many of the key roles ascribed to civil society including as an important provider of social capital. It could be that donors concerned with good governance would do better to further engage with traditional institutions such as the fa'asamoa, than to simply create a new class of civil society, dominated by NGO's over the top of existing social structures.</p>

Civil Society, Social Capital and Governance: Liberal Policy Agendas and Indigenous Civil Society: the Fa'asamoa as a Case Study

<p>The funding of civil society has become a key aspect of the governance agenda for international aid. This arises out of a number of theories linking civil society to better governance through the leveraging of social capital. These theories find their genesis in a distinctly liberal body of work that has drawn its findings from Western historical experience. In particular, the work of Robert Putnam and many like him in the 1990's draws its inspiration from Alexis d'Tocqueville's observations of democratic life in the early nineteenth century United States. Here, civic associational, according to Tocqueville, played a key part in the vibrant democratic spirit of the USA. Putnam's own findings, on the difference between governance outcomes in Southern and Northern Italy, mirror those of Tocqueville. Although the formulations of civil society and social capital inherent in this liberal tradition are but one among many theories, they are the ones that have influenced the international donors and the allocation of development assistance money has reflected this. Civil society funding generally goes to ideal types of organisations that most resemble a Western conception of civil society. In particular, Non-Governmental Organisations (NGO's) have proliferated to take advantage of this. This may well be overlooking many key forms of civil society that already exist in developing countries. A liberal reading of civil society that focuses on the associative values of civil society organisations would miss groups that are characterised more by kin, ethnicity or tribal ties. The fa'asamoa (or 'Samoan way') is an example of just such an institution that may be viewed as too traditional and backward looking by liberal theory, but upon reflection performs many of the key roles ascribed to civil society including as an important provider of social capital. It could be that donors concerned with good governance would do better to further engage with traditional institutions such as the fa'asamoa, than to simply create a new class of civil society, dominated by NGO's over the top of existing social structures.</p>

Internal Migration and Sectoral Shift in the Nineteenth-Century United States

We study the relationship between internal migration and industrialization in the United States between 1850 and 1880. We use the Linked Representative Samples from IPUMS and find significant amounts of rural-urban and urban-urban migration in New England. Rural-urban migration was mainly driven by agricultural workers shifting to manufacturing occupations. Urban-urban migration was driven by foreign-born workers in manufacturing. We argue that rural-urban migration was a significant factor in US economic development and the structural transformation from agriculture to manufacturing.

Extra-illustration, preservation and libraries in the nineteenth-century United States

Extra-illustration, usually considered an eighteenth-century and early-nineteenth-century British phenomenon, is abundantly present in the creative book practices of the late nineteenth-century United States, but it is often overlooked in scholarship. Analysing the collecting, cutting and pasting habits of Massachusetts banker Nathaniel Paine, this article argues that extra-illustration was closely connected to the then emerging modes of information organization that have since shaped modern libraries. Paine added hundreds of mass-produced images of US president George Washington to the volumes in his library, including a group of pamphlets printed just after Washington died in 1799. This unusual group of pamphlets, as well as Paine’s other extra-illustrative supplements to his volumes and scrapbooks, reveal an effort not only to preserve a particular version of the past but also to develop an indexing scheme built around pictures.

Constructing Ableism

This essay builds upon research in disability studies through the extension of Garland-Thomson’s figure of the normate. I argue that biopower, through the disciplinary normalization of individual bodies and the biopolitics of populations, in the nineteenth-century United States produced the normate citizen as a white, able-bodied man. The normate citizen developed with the new political technology of power that emerged with the transition from sovereign power to biopower. I focus on the disciplinary normalization of bodies and the role of industrial capitalism in the construction of able-bodied norms. I argue that the medical model of disability is produced through a dual process of incorporation: the production of corporeal individuals and the localization of illness in the body.

Government by Improvisation? Towards a New History of the Nineteenth-Century American State

Over the last thirty years, historians and historically minded political scientists have effectively overturned the long-held perception of the nineteenth-century United States as a polity defined by its lack of an effective state. By highlighting the myriad interventions of its energetic and enterprising federal government and by incorporating subnational governments and private actors and organizations as evidence of its impressive “infrastructural” power, a generation of scholars have, collectively, described a nineteenth-century state that was both more assertive and more robust than was previously thought. Yet other scholars have begun to ask whether this interpretation has concocted a state stronger and more coherent in prospect than it was in practice. By highlighting the piecemeal and often partial nature of the nation’s institutional development and the contradictions and incoherence that accompanied its infrastructural power, these scholars have laid the foundations for a new “improvisational synthesis” that stresses the equivocal nature of American state-building and considers its enduring vulnerabilities.

The Contradictions of Reform: Prosecuting Infant Murder in the Nineteenth-Century United States

“The Contradictions of Reform” analyses the complications of reform of legislation regulating punishment for women convicted of infanticide in Connecticut between 1790 and 1860, within the context of broader social, cultural, and legal understandings of the crime within the US. These changes are investigated through a close reading of petitions for clemency to Connecticut's General Assembly in which women convicted of the crime petitioned the state legislature seeking reduced sentences. The article argues that although the nineteenth century opened with legislation that promised death to all women convicted of infanticide, in practice courts and juries never imposed the penalty. Instead, juries proved reluctant to convict and/or death sentences were not imposed, even if juries found women guilty. In the early decades of the nineteenth century, the Connecticut Assembly reformed existing infanticide law in response to a number of social debates about the merits of the death penalty, particularly for women. The article argues, however, that these reforms counter-intuitively resulted in less favorable outcomes for those convicted of the crime, as they found themselves facing lengthy prison sentences. Such an outcome was unlikely in the early decades of the nineteenth century. The article, therefore, demonstrates, the “contradictions of reform.”

Is She Not an Unusual Woman? Say More

Germaine de Staël and Lydia Maria Child were both among the most well-known female intellectuals of their times and places: Staël in eighteenth-century Europe, Child in the nineteenth-century United States. Both women were influential in spreading the ideas of eighteenth-century German philosophy, and both used philosophical ideas to articulate their insights on the progress of history and the moral potential of art. Both also used their philosophical skills to address the moral crisis of slavery and to articulate the burden of being an unusual woman. As Staël’s first American biographer, Child helped extend Staël’s ideas beyond Europe and into the United States. Comparing their philosophical views provides us with an echo of women’s involvement in eighteenth-century German philosophy in the tumultuous American nineteenth century.