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Posted by Jason Lakin

Dispatch from Mexico City

To be honest, I had never really thought much about dengue before I went to India for the first time. When I heard about someone dying from the disease in New Delhi, my interest piqued. I had not thought dengue was the kind of disease one died from in big cities. To the contrary, I had assumed it was one of those diseases that only poor people, living in isolated villages, would succumb to.

I was wrong about dengue being only a rural disease, but dengue is a poor man’s disease, a mosquito-born illness which thrives in areas where there is a lot of standing water, even if the water is reasonably clean. It is not a disease which is found in rich countries. In the health sector, when countries become richer, they tend to make what is known in health jargon as an “epidemiological transition.” The transition is from the diseases of the poor- tuberculosis, malaria, maternal and infant mortality- to the diseases of the rich- heart disease, diabetes, and so on. For example, poor regions like Africa have a much higher incidence of “communicable” diseases, those passed from person to person, like tuberculosis, than wealthier regions like Latin America. In 2005, according to WHO data, Africa had an incidence of TB death of 74 per 100,000 population. By contrast, one of Latin America’s poorest countries, Bolivia, had an incidence of TB death of less than half this: 31 per 100,000.

According to the logic of epidemiological transitions, Mexico, and much of Latin America, are places where dengue should be disappearing. Unfortunately, the reverse seems to be happening. Read the rest of this entry »

Presidential candidates routinely propose big policy changes. They very rarely, however, propose big changes in how policies are decided in the first place. This Saturday, John Edwards did just that, when he unveiled his “One Democracy Initiative.” Along with voting and media reforms, Edwards calls for new “Citizen Congresses” to help shape policy-making:

Create a Citizen Congress: Most Americans can only exert significant influence on Washington by voting every two or four years. Despite the growth of communications technology, most voters are no closer to Washington policymakers than they were hundreds of years ago. Edwards believes in the wisdom of the American people and the power of deliberation. Every two years, he will ask 1 million citizens nationwide to participate in Citizen Congresses combining local town halls with the latest technology to create true national discussions, unfiltered by interest groups. Americans will discuss the challenges and trade-offs facing our country and offer advisory opinions to leaders. Part of an emerging movement to continue the democratic process between elections, citizen-centered projects have given ordinary people a voice in designs for the World Trade Center memorial, the redevelopment of New Orleans, health care reform in California and local issues in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

The devil is in the details, of course, and the citizen congresses are at this point only a general idea. Whether they strengthen democracy or fuel cynicism depends on how they are structured, what powers they have, and how they are linked to policy-making processes. If the citizen congresses give ordinary people a voice, will this voice actually change government policies? In some of the examples Edwards cites, this hasn’t happened, leaving participants frustrated. Elsewhere, however, experiments in participatory democracy have had more substantial effects.

For now, Edwards’ proposal at least opens up the discussion on citizen participation and American democracy. Will other candidates put forward their own plans for civic engagement?

Posted by Josh Lerner

Posted by Jason Lakin

Dispatch from Mexico

Sinaloa*

Nobody lives here anymore. Whole towns, completely abandoned. The only sounds: creaking doors, padlocked, when the wind surfs through, a few birds that hover and then abscond, the silence of a dreary sun peering through indolent clouds.

The families have left. The violence was too much. Bodies mutilated, decapitated, gunned down in busy streets at midday, floating in rivers, stinking behind garages, flapping in the breeze slumped over car window ledges (the windows were up, before, but are now smashed, the remaining glass jagged, and delicately placed in bloody fragments).

This would be hell. Except it’s empty.

Elections were this past Sunday. No one was allowed to drink, because election day is a dry day. Everything was closed so the citizens of tomorrow could put on their Sunday best, and head to the polls.

Except here. Here, there were no polls. This is one of ten communities in the south of the northern Mexican state of Sinaloa that did not vote on Sunday. Mostly because there are hardly any people left. And also because those who have stayed are too afraid to vote anyway.

Voting, like walking down the street to buy a bag of maize flour, might get you killed.

Welcome to democracy, narco style. Where the gangs rule, and the citizens cower. Where the police and the military are authorized to keep the peace, and everyone else is authorized to try their best not to get caught in the middle.

Good luck.

Sinaloa is not the poorest state in Mexico. Indeed, it has only 60 percent as many people as Chiapas, but its economy is about a sixth larger. It is a middling state when it comes to development, compared to Chiapas or Oaxaca, which are in last place. If you can stay away from the narcos, it is not such a bad place to live.

Good luck. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted by Jason Lakin

Dispatch from Chilpancingo, Mexico

Analysts of public policy in developing countries often bemoan the yawning gap between policy formulation and implementation. The “implementation problem” is frequently attributed to the fact that national policymakers, sitting in national capitals, do not really have the organizational control, or institutional “capacity,” to make sure that programs are actually implemented the way they are supposed to be in the rest of the country. In other words, when the feds say jump, nobody asks how high. In fact, nobody is even listening.

However, an equally important problem is that national policymakers often fail to provide continuity as programs move from conceptualization to implementation. Instead of a single directive from above, the feds send mixed messages, and the result is a muddle. Such is the case of Mexico’s recent attempts to create a universal health insurance program.

In 2004, the Mexican government created a new health insurance scheme known as Seguro Popular (SP). The program was designed to provide insurance to all Mexicans who did not already have health coverage through their employer, an estimated 50-60 million people. The program was not targeted only to the poor, though clearly the poor were disproportionately without insurance and would be prime beneficiaries. Poor affiliates were supposed to be exempt from the insurance premium, while others would pay according to their income.

The first implementation failure of this program was in the premium scheme: virtually no one ended up paying the required premium, even though only an estimated 40-50 percent of program beneficiaries are actually “poor” enough to be exempt. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted by Lydia Bean

Are you ready to move beyond the tired stereotypes of “secular left” and “religious right”? Then check out Revolution in Jesusland, a new blog launched by two progressive activists to introduce secular progressives to America’s “Fourth Great Awakening.” Zack Exley and Elizabeth Wiley launched this site to shine a spotlight on a strong movement of young evangelical Christians who are quietly organizing to fight poverty and renew our civic culture.

If you’re curious about what’s going on with those crazy, crazy Christians, or if you’re just looking for a reason to hope, I highly recommend checking it out. My favorite part are their original interviews with grassroots Christian activists–even if you lack a single religious bone in your body, you’ll be inspired by their resourcefulness, leadership development, and imagination.

Here’s Exley and Wiley’s description of Revolution in Jesusland:
Read the rest of this entry »

Posted by Josh Lerner.

National politicians have rarely called for “community kitties” as a strategy for civic engagement. When the UK’s Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government recently did just that, however, she was referring to a British term for community-controlled pots of public money, and she was not alone. In broader parlance, she was endorsing an internationally recognized best practice of local governance, known as participatory budgeting.

Participatory budgeting is often referred to as a local experiment in the Brazilian city of Porto Alegre, in which city residents directly decide how part of the municipal budget is spent in a series of assemblies and meetings. Since Porto Alegre pioneered this process in 1989, however, it has spread rapidly throughout the world, enabling citizens to decide public spending priorities in a variety of contexts. According to the Worldwatch Institute, roughly 1,200 cities had participatory budgets by 2006. Several countries, such as Bolivia and the Dominican Republic, have passed laws making participatory budgeting obligatory for local governments. The World Bank and UN have actively promoted it, and even the Church of England is a fan.

Why such broad support? Read the rest of this entry »

Posted by Jason Lakin

Dispatch from Mexico City

This past week, the Mexican Congress dragged the head of the Ministry of Social Development (SEDESOL) to a hearing on the allegedly poor performance of the Ministry in alleviating poverty. Beatriz Zavala, the secretary of SEDESOL, was attacked for over 5 hours by leaders from each of the opposition parties. From newspaper reports, it is not clear exactly what the substantive complaints of the legislators were, but I am able to discern at least two (a rather paltry average for a 5-hour-plus session).

The first line of attack, pursued by the opposition PRI, is that the government is focused on helping the economic “haves” through a variety of neoliberal policy reforms, while the have-nots continue to multiply. The irony of a PRI legislator attacking the government for its neoliberal policy orientation is thick. Although the Party of the Institutional Revolution may like to use its name to suggest otherwise, the PRI pioneered the neoliberal reforms of the 1980s in Mexico, which the current administration has simply extended. No major change in the overall policy direction of the government has occurred in Mexico since the early 1980s. In other words, the second PAN administration of the last seven years is simply maintaining the policies of the three PRI administrations of the previous eighteen years.

The second line of attack, more plausibly pursued by the leftish PRD, is that the administration, and SEDESOL in particular, are just “administering poverty, and not eliminating it.” This critique is typical of the critics of neoliberalism, at least those who understand neoliberalism. (Those who misunderstand it think that neoliberals do not care about the poor, whereas the truth is that neoliberals almost exclusively care about the poor, and about a very narrowly defined band of poverty.) Read the rest of this entry »

Posted by Jal Mehta

Has testing taken over the goals of American schooling? There are certainly many reasons to think that it has: NCLB holds schools accountable for test score gains; charter schools generally promise increased test score results in return for their greater autonomy; vouchers, the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, and many other initiatives are evaluated on their ability to improve students’ test scores. Test scores, for better or worse, are the controlling external standard of American public education.

Or at least so you might think until you read NYU’s sociologist Mitchell Stevens’ excellent new book, Creating a Class, about the process of admissions to highly selective colleges. (Full disclosure: he is a friend of mine.) Stevens asks us to think about the social consequences of something we already think much about individually: the way that college admissions’ criteria organizes the social life of much of the upper middle class. I’d never quite thought about it this way before, but essentially the college admissions process introduces a second set of considerations for K-12 schooling on top of the ones created by the laws which regulate public education. Read the rest of this entry »

Dispatch from Mexico City

Posted by Jason Lakin

This week, I was going to write about the report of the Joint Congressional Committee on the Underlying Causes of Hostility to the United States in the Muslim World. The only problem is that there is no such Committee, and no such report. In the United States, we believe that if people attack us, they must be so insanely misguided that we should not even bother to ask what the underlying motives are. In other parts of the world, they have a slightly different approach to terrorist violence, plausibly because they have a lot more experience dealing with it. When terror is something you confront frequently, you learn to be a little more pragmatic and less dogmatic about it. Surprisingly, a bit of this pragmatism was on display last week in Mexico, as the country confronts a new age of terrorism at home. Might we be able to learn something from our neighbors to the South?

On September 10, a small terrorist group known as the EPR, the Ejército Popular Revolucionario, took credit for exploding oil pipes in two different states in Mexico. Read the rest of this entry »