This volume focuses on the evolution of public policy and the role of agenda setting with regard to policymaking in countries of the Global South. The authors illustrate the emergence of public policy research as an academic discipline, and highlight various aspects of history, governance, politics, and economics as components of public policy theory development. By offering a cross-national perspective, the papers contribute to a better understanding of when, how, and by whom a given policy agenda is designed, which is essential to grasping how policy is implemented. In turn, the authors investigate how the development of public policy research has influenced policymaking in fields such as democratization, migration, corruption, agriculture, environment, education, and entrepreneurship and, more specifically, agenda setting in selected countries of the Global South.

As China and the U.S. increasingly compete for power in key areas of U.S. influence, great power conflict looms. Yet few studies have looked to the Middle East and Africa, regions of major political, economic, and military importance for both China and the U.S., to theorize how China competes in a changing world system. China's Rise in the Global South examines China's behavior as a rising power in two key Global South regions, the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa. Dawn C. Murphy, drawing on extensive fieldwork and hundreds of interviews, compares and analyzes thirty years of China's interactions with these regions across a range of functional areas: political, economic, foreign aid, and military. From the Belt and Road initiative to the founding of new cooperation forums and special envoys, China's Rise in the Global South offers an in-depth look at China's foreign policy approach to the countries it considers its partners in South-South cooperation. Intervening in the emerging debate between liberals and realists about China's future as a great power, Murphy contends that China is constructing an alternate international order to interact with these regions, and this book provides policymakers and scholars of international relations with the tools to analyze it.

This first-of-its kind volume spans the breadth of disability research and practice specifically focusing on the global South. Established and emerging scholars alongside advocates adopt a critical and interdisciplinary stance to probe, challenge and shift common held social understandings of disability in established discourses, epistemologies and practices, including those in prominent areas such as global health, disability studies and international development. Motivated by decolonizing approaches, contributors carefully weave the lived and embodied experiences of disabled people, families and communities through contextual, cultural, spatial, racial, economic, identity and geopolitical complexities and heterogeneities. Dispatches from Ghana, Lebanon, Sri Lanka, Cambodia, Venezuela among many others spotlight the complex uncertainties of modern geopolitics of coloniality; emergent forms of governance including neoliberal globalization, war and conflicts; the interstices of gender, race, ethnicity, space and religion; structural barriers to redistribution and realization of rights; and processes of disability representation. This handbook examines in rigorous depth, established practices and discourses in disability including those on development, rights, policies and practices, opening a space for critical debate on hegemonic and often unquestioned terrains. Highlights of the coverage include: Critical issues in conceptualizing disability across cultures, time and space The challenges of disability models, metrics and statistics Disability, poverty and livelihoods in urban and rural contexts Disability interstices with migration, race, ethnicity, ge nder and sexuality Disabilit y, religion and customary societies and practice · The UNCRPD, disability rights orientations and instrumentalitie · Redistributive systems including budgeting, cash transfer systems and programming. · Global South–North partnerships: intercultural methodologies in disability research. This much awaited handbook provides students, academics, practitioners and policymakers with an authoritative framework for critical thinking and debate about disability, while pushing theoretical and practical frontiers in unprecedented ways.

The second volume in the SIRCA book series investigates the impact of information society initiatives by extending the boundaries of academic research into the realm of practice. Global in scope, it includes contributions and research projects from Asia, Africa and Latin America. The international scholarly community has taken a variety of approaches to question the impact of information society initiatives on populations in the Global South. This book addresses two aspects— Impact of research: How is the research on ICTs in the Global South playing a role in creating an information society? (e.g. policy formulation, media coverage, implementation in practice) and Research on impact: What is the evidence for the impact of ICTs on society? (i.e. the objectives of socio-economic development). This volume brings together a multiplicity of voices and approaches from social scientific research to produce an engaging volume for a variety of stakeholders including academics, researchers, practitioners, policy-makers and those in the business and civil sectors of society.

Offers a groundbreaking analysis of the distinctive substantive, theoretical and methodological contributions of subnational research in the field of comparative politics.

This open access volume addresses the role of external actors in social protection in the Global South, from the Second World War until today, analysing the influence of colonial powers, superpowers during the Cold War and contemporary donor agencies. Following an introduction to the analysis of external actors in social policy making in the Global South, the contributions explore which external actors were dominant in the decades after World War II, and how they shaped early and contemporary social protection making in developing countries. The latter half of the collection elucidates important players in the contemporary transnational social policy arena, such as donor organizations and international organizations, and critically evaluates the potential for and limits of the explanatory power of external actors in social protection making in the Global South, considering the relative contribution of external and domestic influences. By examining how transnational relationships and external actors have influenced the formation, development and transformation of social policies in the developing world, this collection will be an invaluable resource for scholars interested in social protection in the Global South from a range of disciplines. These include political science, social policy, and sociology, as well as historians of the welfare state, international relations scholars and scholars working on global and transnational social policy and development policy.

In recent years civil society has been seen as a key route for democracy promotion and solving development ‘problems’ in low-income countries. However, the very concept of civil society is deeply rooted in European traditions and values. In pursuing civil society reform in non-Western countries, many scholars along with well-meaning international agencies and donor organisations fail to account for non-Western values and historical experiences. Civil Society in the Global South seeks to redress this balance by offering diverse accounts of civil society from the global South, authored by scholars and researchers who are reflecting on their observations of civil society in their own countries. The countries studied in the volume range from across Africa, Latin America, Asia and the Middle East to give a rich account of how countries from the global south conceptualise and construct civil society. The book demonstrates how local conditions are often unsuited to the ideal type of civil society as delineated in Western values, for instance in cases where numerous political, racial and ethnic sub-groups are ‘fighting’ for autonomy. By disentangling local contexts of countries from across the global South, this book demonstrates that it is important to view civil society through the lens of local conditions, rather than viewing it as something that needs to be ‘discovered’ or ‘manufactured’ in non-Western societies. Civil Society in the Global South will be particularly useful to high-level students and scholars within development studies, sociology, anthropology, social policy, politics, international relations and human geography.