The revised edition of Southeast Asia provides a grounded account of how people in the region are responding to - and being affected by - the changes sweeping through the region.

At a time when the world’s wealthiest nations struggle to make health care and medicine available to everyone, why do resource-constrained countries make costly commitments to universal health coverage and AIDS treatment after transitioning to democracy? Joseph Harris explores the dynamics that made landmark policies possible in Thailand and Brazil but which have led to prolonged struggle and contestation in South Africa. Drawing on firsthand accounts of the people wrestling with these issues, Achieving Access documents efforts to institutionalize universal healthcare and expand access to life-saving medicines in three major industrializing countries. In comparing two separate but related policy areas, Harris finds that democratization empowers elite professionals, such as doctors and lawyers, to advocate for universal health care and treatment for AIDS. Harris’s analysis is situated at the intersection of sociology, political science, and public health and will speak to scholars with interests in health policy, comparative politics, social policy, and democracy in the developing world. In light of the growing interest in health insurance generated by implementation of the Affordable Care Act (as well as the coming changes poised to be made to it), Achieving Access will also be useful to policymakers in developing countries and officials working on health policy in the United States.

I am both pleased and honored to introduce this book to readers, and I want to take a few moments to explain why. Michael Romanos and Christopher Auffrey have produced a volume which will be of immense value to several different types of people. Planners and other specialists concerned with the development of the Southeast Asian region and the issues and opportunities associated with urban growth and sustainable development will find much to interest them in this book. But the book, I believe, has much wider appeal, and that is what I want to touch on briefly here. The University of Cincinnati, where Michael, Chris, and I work, is attempting to globalize itself - to develop its institutional capacity for international activities, to infuse its curriculum with international themes, and to promote and increase global competence among its graduates. Many American universities are doing this, of course. In the process, we are seeing some very interesting experiments in pedagogy, as faculty look for "learning moments" in new and sometimes exotic places. Michael, Chris, and their colleagues have, it seems to me, developed an outstanding model for learning across national and cultural boundaries. In the chapters which follow, you will read the results of their work. What will be less apparent, however, is the process by which that work was produced.

More than the Soil focuses on the social, cultural, economic and technological processes that have transformed rural areas of Southeast Asia. The underlying premise is that rural lives and livelihoods in this region have undergone fundamental change. No longer can we assume that rural livelihoods are founded on agriculture; nor can we assume that people envisage their futures in terms of farming. The inter-penetration of the rural and urban, and the degree to which rural people migrate between rural and urban areas, and shift from agriculture to non-agriculture, raises fundamental questions about how we conceptualise the rural Southeast Asia and the households to be found there.

With accelerating urbanization and growing inter-dependence of rural and urban dwellers on the markets and resources they each offer, rural urban linkages have become a very important focus in recent years for research and policy relating to local and national economic development, poverty reduction and governance. The emergence of new livelihoods based on diversified income sources and mobility reflects profound social, cultural and economic transformations, and new forms of resource allocation and use. This volume collects the key contributions in the field, covering the conceptual background, the key issues and the current debates, locating different approaches in their wider intellectual and historical contexts. It also includes important recent empirical work from all the relevant geographical regions that that will be the basis for future thinking. Fifteen papers are clearly organized around the principal themes and accompanied by a valuable editorial introduction clearly setting out the issues, the arguments and the evidence. Suggestions for further reading and additional information sources are also included. Published with IIED.