Civics & Commerce

54

Stories on the political forces shaping business and community. civicsandcommerce.substack.com

  1. The politics of wedding planning

    14h ago

    The politics of wedding planning

    Show notes The story in this episode is composite, drawn from real events. The identifying details have been changed to protect privacy, but the situations and the political contexts are real. The real-world events the story draws on, full citations, and further reading are below. REAL-WORLD EVENTS REFERENCED IN THIS EPISODE Marriage as a political institution - The political theory of marriage in liberal modernity has been a substantive field of scholarly work for more than half a century. The Welsh-Australian political philosopher Carole Pateman, whose career has spanned positions at the Australian National University, the University of Sydney, and the University of California, Los Angeles, advanced one of the most influential contemporary statements in The Sexual Contract (1988), which argues that the marriage contract in modern liberal society is not a freely-entered agreement between equals but the historical institution through which women’s subordination was consolidated alongside the formal political contract of citizenship. - The Nigerian philosopher Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí, in The Invention of Women (1997), argues that the gendered marriage contract European societies treated as natural was a particular cultural form, not a universal one. In pre-colonial Yoruba society, seniority rather than gender was the primary organising principle of social relations. Colonial administration imposed gendered marriage and the male-headed household as the legal-political form. The wedding industry as a post-war consumer creation - For most of European history, marriage was an economic institution before it was a romantic one. The notion of marrying for love became culturally dominant only in the nineteenth century. - The white-wedding consumer apparatus that Australian and other English-speaking wedding industries have built around themselves, including the engagement ring, the elaborate ceremony, the photographer, the hen’s night, and the wedding magazine and trade-show economy, was largely built up in the post-Second-World-War decades through the marketing of an aspirational middle-class ritual. Australian marriage rates and demographic shift - Australian marriage rates have been falling since the early 1970s. The crude marriage rate has fallen by roughly half over that period. The Australian Bureau of Statistics released its most recent Marriages and Divorces, Australia data on 23 July 2025, reporting 120,844 marriages registered in 2024, a crude marriage rate of 5.5 per thousand people aged 16 and over, and a median age at marriage of 32.8 years for men and 31.2 years for women. - Cohabitation has risen sharply over the same period. A majority of couples who do marry have lived together first. The economic and structural drivers of marriage delay and decline include the housing crisis, longer schooling and later workforce entry, shifting gendered patterns in paid work, and the loss of marriage as the default container for partnership. - In 2024, 4,746 marriages were registered for couples of the same or non-binary gender, around 3.9 per cent of all marriages, up 4.1 per cent on 2023. Aboriginal customary marriage and the colonial Marriage Act - Aboriginal customary marriage, the system of partnership and kinship recognition developed by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples over tens of thousands of years, was for most of the twentieth century not recognised by Australian law. - The Marriage Act 1961 (Cth) codified a European model as the only legally-recognised form of marriage in Australia. The protection regime that took children from Aboriginal families across the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, now known as the Stolen Generations, operated in part on the explicit basis that Aboriginal families and marriages were not the right kind of family or marriage. - Recognition came in pieces: family law reform from the mid-1970s, partial recognition of Aboriginal customary law in some state jurisdictions including the Northern Territory and Western Australia, and a wider literature of legal and political scholarship documented in the Australian Law Reform Commission’s foundational 1986 report on the Recognition of Aboriginal Customary Laws. - The Marriage Amendment (Definition and Religious Freedoms) Act 2017 (Cth) expanded the legal definition of marriage to “the union of two people” to include same-sex couples. The amendment followed the Australian Marriage Law Postal Survey conducted between September and November 2017, in which 61.6 per cent of respondents voted Yes on a participation rate of 79.5 per cent. The Act did not address the customary-marriage question. The international picture: Netherlands and Japan - The Netherlands became the first country in the world to legalise same-sex marriage on the first of April 2001. The Wet openstelling huwelijk, the Act on the Opening Up of Marriage, was passed by the Dutch parliament in the second half of 2000 and signed by Queen Beatrix on 21 December 2000, taking effect on 1 April 2001. Four couples were married at midnight at Amsterdam City Hall to mark its commencement. As of 2026, around thirty countries have legalised same-sex marriage. - Japan has moved in the other direction on the broader question of marriage formation. The Japanese marriage rate has fallen sharply since the 1970s, driven by housing pressure, long working hours, women’s increased participation in paid work outside the home, and a wider questioning of what marriage costs people who enter it. Japan’s birth rate has fallen with the marriage rate, and the demographic implications of the trend are now one of the country’s central political questions. REFERENCES [1] Goran Therborn, Between Sex and Power: Family in the World 1900-2000 (London: Routledge, 2004). [2] Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988). [3] Stephanie Coontz, Marriage, A History: How Love Conquered Marriage (New York: Viking, 2005). [4] Vicki Howard, Brides, Inc.: American Weddings and the Business of Tradition (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006). [5] Australian Bureau of Statistics, Marriages and Divorces, Australia, 2024, released 23 July 2025 (Canberra: ABS). [6] Commonwealth of Australia, 2023 Intergenerational Report (Canberra: The Treasury, 2023); Australian Institute of Family Studies, Families in Australia survey reports (Melbourne: AIFS). [7] Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí, The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997). [8] Marcia Langton, Welcome to Country: A Travel Guide to Indigenous Australia (Richmond, Vic: Hardie Grant Travel, 2018); Australian Law Reform Commission, Recognition of Aboriginal Customary Laws, Report No 31 (Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service, 1986). [9] Marriage Act 1961 (Cth); Marriage Amendment (Definition and Religious Freedoms) Act 2017 (Cth); Australian Bureau of Statistics, “Australian Marriage Law Postal Survey, 2017,” catalogue 1800.0 (Canberra: ABS, 15 November 2017). [10] Wet openstelling huwelijk (Act on the Opening Up of Marriage), Government of the Netherlands, effective 1 April 2001; Pew Research Center, “Key facts about same-sex marriage around the world, 25 years after the Netherlands legalized it,” published 25 March 2026. [11] Mary C. Brinton, Lost in Transition: Youth, Work, and Instability in Postindustrial Japan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); National Institute of Population and Social Security Research, Vital Statistics of Japan (Tokyo: IPSS, annual). FURTHER READING Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884). The foundational nineteenth-century materialist account of marriage as a political institution tied to property, inheritance, and the patriarchal household. Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (2004). On the family, women’s labour, and the witch hunts as a moment of primitive accumulation that disciplined women’s reproductive work into the heterosexual household. Anne Manne, Motherhood: How Should We Care for Our Children? (2005). An Australian argument about the political economy of care, the family, and women’s work, with attention to the policy choices that shape household formation. Andrew J. Cherlin, The Marriage-Go-Round: The State of Marriage and the Family in America Today (2009). On the institutional destabilisation of marriage in the contemporary United States and its sociological causes. Hortense J. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (1987). Foundational essay on family, kinship, and gender under and after slavery in the United States. Eva Illouz, Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism (2007). On how love, romance, and partnership have been shaped by the rise of consumer and emotional capitalism. Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (1990). On Black family, motherhood, and the politics of kinship. All works, organisations, scholars, legislation, and historical events listed above are real and citable. For any source intended for formal academic or professional writing, direct verification against the original publication or institutional record is recommended. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit civicsandcommerce.substack.com

    10 min
  2. The politics of Indigenous tattooing

    4d ago

    The politics of Indigenous tattooing

    Show notes The story in this episode is composite, drawn from real events. The identifying details have been changed to protect privacy, but the situations and the political contexts are real. The real-world events the story draws on, full citations, and further reading are below. REAL-WORLD EVENTS REFERENCED IN THIS EPISODE Tā moko and its colonial suppression - Tā moko, the customary Māori practice of marking the face and body, was almost extinguished in Aotearoa New Zealand across the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Missionary stigmatisation through the nineteenth century stripped public legitimacy from the practice; the Native Schools Act of 1867 removed Māori children from the language and knowledge networks in which tā moko transmitted; and the Tohunga Suppression Act 1907, in force until its repeal in 1962, criminalised the work of traditional specialists, including tohunga tā moko. - By the middle of the twentieth century the male facial moko had effectively ceased to be applied, and the women’s chin moko, the moko kauae, had declined sharply. - The tā moko revival from the 1980s onwards has been led by Māori practitioners and scholars, including Te Arawa scholar Ngāhuia Te Awekōtuku, whose Māori and Psychology Research Unit at the University of Waikato, funded by a Marsden Fund grant, produced the contemporary reference work Mau Moko (2007) with Linda Waimarie Nikora, Mohi Rua, Rolinda Karapu, and photographer Becky Nunes. Tikanga and the moko kauae revival - Tikanga, the body of Māori protocols rooted in customary law and relational obligation, governs the application and receiving of tā moko. The work proceeds through layered permissions: from the recipient’s iwi, from kaumātua, and within the practitioner’s own teaching lineage. - The moko kauae revival, accelerating from the late 1990s and into the 2000s and 2010s, has seen growing numbers of wāhine Māori receive the chin moko as an assertion of cultural and political authority. The revival has been documented as one of the most visible expressions of Māori women’s political agency in this period. Samoan tatau and the Pacific traditions - Samoan tatau, the full-body male tatau and the women’s malu, is one of the few Pacific tattooing traditions that survived the colonial period substantially unbroken, transmitted across generations by the masters of tatau, the tufuga tā tatau. - The English word tattoo entered the language from the Samoan tatau, picked up by Captain James Cook’s expedition to the Pacific in the 1770s. The word travelled into global English while the practice itself was suppressed across most of the colonised Pacific. - Samoan novelist and scholar Maualaivao Albert Wendt’s essay “Tatauing the Post-Colonial Body” (Span 42-43, 1996), republished as the afterword to Inside Out: Literature, Cultural Politics, and Identity in the New Pacific (1999), is one of the foundational scholarly readings of Pacific tatau as political and literary practice. Wurundjeri Country, Aboriginal sovereignty, and inter-Indigenous protocols - Naarm Melbourne sits on the Country of the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung people of the Kulin Nation. Practices conducted in Melbourne by visiting Indigenous practitioners, including Māori tā moko artists, take place on Wurundjeri Country and customarily proceed with the engagement of Wurundjeri cultural authorities and Welcome to Country protocols. - Australian First Nations scholarship, particularly the body of work associated with Goenpul scholar Aileen Moreton-Robinson and the Indigenous sovereignty literature, has developed the political-philosophical argument that all relationship to land in Australia begins from the unceded sovereignty of First Nations peoples. Māori in Australia: the trans-Tasman diaspora - The 2021 Australian Census recorded 170,035 people of Māori ancestry in Australia, the largest Māori population outside Aotearoa New Zealand. Queensland holds approximately thirty-eight per cent of this population, New South Wales approximately twenty-three per cent. - The Māori diaspora in Australia is largely a post-1990 phenomenon, driven by the closure of New Zealand industries that had absorbed Māori labour in the postwar decades, the wage and housing gap between the two countries, and the Trans-Tasman Travel Arrangement that has historically allowed relatively open movement between Australia and New Zealand. - The result is a generation of Māori, including the second-generation diaspora born and raised in Australia, who carry ancestral practice in contexts away from their whenua and within reach of trans-Tasman family networks. REFERENCES [1] Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (London: Zed Books; Dunedin: University of Otago Press, 1999). [2] Ngāhuia Te Awekōtuku, Linda Waimarie Nikora, Mohi Rua, and Rolinda Karapu, Mau Moko: The World of Maori Tattoo (Auckland: Penguin, 2007). [3] Mason Durie, Whaiora: Māori Health Development, 2nd ed. (Auckland: Oxford University Press, 1998). [4] Hirini Moko Mead, Tikanga Māori: Living by Māori Values (Wellington: Huia Publishers, 2003). [5] Naomi Simmonds, “Mana Wahine: Decolonising Politics,” Women’s Studies Journal 25, no. 2 (2011): 11-25. [6] Sean Mallon and Sébastien Galliot, Tatau: A History of Samoan Tattooing (Wellington: Te Papa Press, 2018). [7] Albert Wendt, “Tatauing the Post-Colonial Body,” Span 42-43 (April-October 1996): 15-29; reprinted as “Afterword: Tatauing the Post-Colonial Body” in Inside Out: Literature, Cultural Politics, and Identity in the New Pacific, edited by Vilsoni Hereniko and Rob Wilson (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999), 399-412. [8] Aileen Moreton-Robinson, The White Possessive: Property, Power, and Indigenous Sovereignty (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015). [9] Australian Bureau of Statistics, Cultural Diversity in Australia: Census 2021 (Canberra: ABS, 2022). [10] Paul Hamer, Māori in Australia: Ngā Māori i te Ao Moemoeā (Wellington and Brisbane: Te Puni Kōkiri and Griffith University, 2007). FURTHER READING Ranginui Walker, Ka Whawhai Tonu Mātou: Struggle Without End, revised edition (Auckland: Penguin, 2004). Foundational political history of Māori-Crown relations. Michael King, Moko: Maori Tattooing in the 20th Century (Auckland: David Bateman, 1972). The first major late-twentieth-century documentary study of the practice. Marcia Langton, Welcome to Country: A Travel Guide to Indigenous Australia (Richmond, Vic: Hardie Grant Travel, 2018). On Aboriginal cultural protocols, including the engagement of visiting Indigenous peoples with First Nations custodians. Larissa Behrendt, Indigenous Australia for Dummies, 2nd edition (Milton, Qld: Wiley, 2021). On Aboriginal political and cultural history. Damon Salesa, Island Time: New Zealand’s Pacific Futures (Wellington: Bridget Williams Books, 2017). On the trans-Pacific and trans-Tasman political and demographic patterns shaping Māori and Pacific lives across Aotearoa New Zealand and Australia. Anne Salmond, Two Worlds: First Meetings Between Maori and Europeans, 1642-1772 (Auckland: Viking, 1991). On the early Pacific encounters that brought the word tatau into English as tattoo. Brendan Hokowhitu, ed., Indigenous Identity and Resistance: Researching the Diversity of Knowledge (Dunedin: Otago University Press, 2010). On Indigenous political and cultural authority in contemporary Aotearoa New Zealand. All works, organisations, scholars, legislation, and historical events listed above are real and citable. For any source intended for formal academic or professional writing, direct verification against the original publication or institutional record is recommended. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit civicsandcommerce.substack.com

    11 min
  3. The politics of clothing labels

    Jun 9

    The politics of clothing labels

    Show notes The story in this episode is composite, drawn from real events. The identifying details have been changed to protect privacy, but the situations and the political contexts are real. The real-world events the story draws on, full citations, and further reading are below. REAL-WORLD EVENTS REFERENCED IN THIS EPISODE The British anti-slavery sugar boycotts - In the 1790s, a popular British movement urged ordinary households to refuse sugar produced by enslaved labour in the British Caribbean. The campaign was largely organised by women at household and parish level, used pamphlets, shop boycotts, and lists of grocers who sold only free-grown sugar, and drew an estimated three hundred thousand households into a “free produce” practice at its peak. - Elizabeth Heyrick (1769-1831), an English Quaker abolitionist from Leicester, published Immediate, Not Gradual Abolition in 1824, criticising William Wilberforce and Thomas Clarkson for accepting a gradualist position on the abolition of West Indian slavery. She organised a local boycott of slave-grown sugar so effective that within a year roughly a quarter of Leicester’s population had stopped buying sugar. The pamphlet spread among women’s anti-slavery societies in Britain and influenced American abolitionists including William Lloyd Garrison and Lucretia Mott. More than seventy women’s anti-slavery associations were active in Britain by the late 1820s. American consumer activism: leagues, labels, fair trade, anti-sweatshop - The National Consumers League, founded in New York in 1899, with Florence Kelley as long-serving general secretary, ran white-label and union-label campaigns for clothing and other goods produced under fair conditions, and campaigned for the abolition of child labour and for shorter working hours. - The fair-trade movement developed from the 1940s through the 1960s, with organisations such as Ten Thousand Villages and SERRV importing handicrafts on fair terms from producers in lower-income countries. Fairtrade certification was established in 1988. - The student-led anti-sweatshop movement of the 1990s and 2000s, including United Students Against Sweatshops, targeted university apparel licensing and major fashion brands, and pushed for codes of conduct, factory monitoring, and the right of garment workers to organise.Black American consumer politics - The Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work campaigns of the 1930s, beginning in Harlem and spreading across Northern cities, organised boycotts of white-owned stores that refused to hire Black staff. - The Montgomery bus boycott of December 1955 to December 1956, sparked by the arrest of Rosa Parks, was sustained for more than a year by Black residents of Montgomery, Alabama, refusing to use segregated buses. The Montgomery Improvement Association, led by Martin Luther King Jr., ran an alternative carpool network during the boycott. - Operation Breadbasket, founded in Atlanta in 1962 by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and later run by Jesse Jackson from a Chicago base from 1966, used selective patronage and threatened boycotts to win jobs and supplier contracts for Black workers and businesses from white-owned firms operating in Black neighbourhoods.The consumer cooperative movement - On 21 December 1844, in Toad Lane in the Lancashire mill town of Rochdale, twenty-eight weavers and craftsmen opened a small shop they owned together. The principles they wrote down, known as the Rochdale Principles, included democratic member control on the basis of one member one vote, open membership, distribution of surplus to members in proportion to purchases, political and religious neutrality, and the education of members. The model spread quickly across Britain and the world and became the constitutional basis of the modern consumer and worker cooperative movements. - The Mondragon Corporation was founded in 1956 in the Basque country of northern Spain by Father Jose Maria Arizmendiarrieta and a small group of graduates from a local technical school. From a single workshop it has grown into one of the largest worker-owned cooperative networks in the world, with operations across industrial manufacturing, retail (the Eroski supermarket chain), finance (the Caja Laboral cooperative bank), and higher education (Mondragon University), employing tens of thousands of worker-owners. Australia and global garment supply chains - The Australian labour movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries built consumer cooperatives and union-label campaigns, including the Co-operative Bookshop tradition and Rochdale-style retail cooperatives in working-class suburbs. - Australian fair-trade and ethical-consumption institutions grew from the 1970s onwards, including the Oxfam Australia fair-trade shops and the Fairtrade Australia and New Zealand certification body. - Contemporary global garment supply chains depend heavily on the labour of migrant women in countries with low wages and weak protection of labour rights. A series of catastrophic factory deaths in the global garment industry in the 2010s, including factory fires and a major building collapse, focused international attention on conditions and prompted the Accord on Fire and Building Safety and the wider transparency movement now visible in Australian ethical-fashion brand campaigns. REFERENCES [1] Frank Trentmann, Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers, from the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-First (London: Allen Lane, 2016). [2] Lawrence B. Glickman, Buying Power: A History of Consumer Activism in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). [3] Kathryn Kish Sklar, Florence Kelley and the Nation’s Work: The Rise of Women’s Political Culture, 1830-1900 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995). [4] Charlotte Sussman, Consuming Anxieties: Consumer Protest, Gender and British Slavery, 1713-1833 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000). [5] Elizabeth Heyrick, Immediate, Not Gradual Abolition; or, An Inquiry into the Shortest, Safest, and Most Effectual Means of Getting Rid of West Indian Slavery (London, 1824). [6] Aldon D. Morris, The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for Change (New York: Free Press, 1984). [7] Robert E. Weems Jr., Desegregating the Dollar: African American Consumerism in the Twentieth Century (New York: New York University Press, 1998). [8] Johnston Birchall, The International Co-operative Movement (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997). [9] William Foote Whyte and Kathleen King Whyte, Making Mondragon: The Growth and Dynamics of the Worker Cooperative Complex (Ithaca: ILR Press, 1988). [10] Race Mathews, Jobs of Our Own: Building a Stake-Holder Society (Sydney: Pluto Press Australia, 1999). [11] Naila Kabeer, The Power to Choose: Bangladeshi Women and Labour Market Decisions in London and Dhaka (London: Verso, 2000). FURTHER READING W. E. B. Du Bois, Economic Co-operation Among Negro Americans (1907). The earliest scholarly study of mutual-aid and cooperative economic life in Black American communities. E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (1963). Includes the “moral economy” thread that informs how historians read the early consumer-political tradition and the relationship between custom, refusal, and the market. Andrew Ross, No Sweat: Fashion, Free Trade, and the Rights of Garment Workers (1997). Essays on the 1990s anti-sweatshop campaigns and the politics of the global garment supply chain. Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour (1986). Connects feminist political economy to the global production of consumer goods. April Linton, Fair Trade from the Ground Up: New Markets for Social Justice (2012). On the development and contradictions of the fair-trade movement from the mid-twentieth century onwards. Greg Patmore and Nikola Balnave, A Global History of Co-operative Business (2018). A wide-ranging history including the Australian cooperative tradition alongside European and American developments. Lawrence Glickman, A Living Wage: American Workers and the Making of Consumer Society (1997). Glickman’s earlier book, on how the living wage became central to American labour politics and how consumer identity entered working-class political thought. All works, organisations, scholars, legislation, and historical events listed above are real and citable. For any source intended for formal academic or professional writing, direct verification against the original publication or institutional record is recommended. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit civicsandcommerce.substack.com

    11 min
  4. The politics of pharmacies

    Jun 5

    The politics of pharmacies

    Show notes The story in this episode is composite, drawn from real events. The identifying details have been changed to protect privacy, but the situations and the political contexts are real. The real-world events the story draws on, full citations, and further reading are below. REAL-WORLD EVENTS REFERENCED IN THIS EPISODE Pharmacist scope of practice in Australia - Queensland’s Community Pharmacy Scope of Practice Pilot began in 2024 and was made a permanent feature of the state’s health system from 1 July 2025. Trained pharmacists can assess, treat, and prescribe for a range of acute common conditions under the Extended Practice Authority, with roughly 16 to 22 conditions covered. - Victoria’s Community Pharmacist Statewide Pilot reported a 97 per cent patient satisfaction rate and was made permanent with an $18 million investment, covering 22 conditions and offered at no cost to patients. - New South Wales, South Australia, Western Australia, and Tasmania have introduced or expanded pharmacist prescribing. Western Australia’s Enhanced Access Community Pharmacy Pilot is expected to begin service delivery by 2027. Scope is set state by state, and the Pharmacy Guild of Australia has called for the rules to be harmonised nationally. - The Productivity Commission and Queensland Government report Unleashing the Potential: An Open and Equitable Health System found that using pharmacists and other health professionals to their full scope of practice improves access to care and helps address workforce shortages, particularly in regional and rural areas. - The Australian Medical Association and the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners have opposed elements of the expansion, citing patient safety and fragmentation of care. Commentary has described the dispute as a turf war between the two professions. The professionalisation of medicine - Through the nineteenth century, medicine in the English-speaking world consolidated into a single licensed profession through registration and licensing laws, the standardisation of medical education, and control of hospitals. In Britain the Medical Act 1858 created a statutory medical register, and comparable registration regimes followed across the Australian colonies. - As the profession closed, women, who had long done much of the work of healing, were pushed to its margins. Midwifery was subordinated to a male-dominated obstetrics, and women were largely excluded from medical training for generations. Medicine and colonial power - Frantz Fanon, born in Martinique, trained as a psychiatrist and headed the Blida-Joinville psychiatric hospital in Algeria from 1953 until his resignation in 1957, during the Algerian war of independence from France. - His essay “Medicine and Colonialism,” published in A Dying Colonialism in 1959, described how colonial medicine operated as an instrument of domination, and how colonial doctors were legally required to report patients’ suspicious injuries to the authorities. Non-physician clinicians and primary health care - Mozambique, left with only a few dozen doctors after independence in 1975 and a prolonged civil war, trained a cadre of non-physician clinicians, the tecnicos de cirurgia, to perform major surgery. Studies over more than two decades found their surgical outcomes comparable to those of specialist doctors, at a fraction of the cost, with far higher retention in rural district hospitals. - The International Conference on Primary Health Care at Alma-Ata in September 1978 produced the Declaration of Alma-Ata, which set out primary health care and the goal of Health for All, giving community health workers a central role in delivering basic care. - In Australia, Ngangkari, traditional healers from the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Lands, have been integrated into South Australian hospitals. The Northern Adelaide Local Health Network entered a partnership with the Anangu Ngangkari Tjutaku Aboriginal Corporation in 2019. The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health Practitioner is a nationally registered profession, regulated through the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health Practice Board of Australia. REFERENCES [1] Andrew Abbott, The System of Professions: An Essay on the Division of Expert Labor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). [2] Eliot Freidson, Profession of Medicine: A Study of the Sociology of Applied Knowledge (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1970). [3] Eliot Freidson, Professional Dominance: The Social Structure of Medical Care (New York: Atherton Press, 1970); supporting source Magali Sarfatti Larson, The Rise of Professionalism: A Sociological Analysis (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977). [4] Paul Starr, The Social Transformation of American Medicine (New York: Basic Books, 1982). [5] Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: A History of Women Healers (Old Westbury, New York: Feminist Press, 1973); supporting source Anne Witz, Professions and Patriarchy (London: Routledge, 1992). [6] Frantz Fanon, “Medicine and Colonialism,” in A Dying Colonialism, translated by Haakon Chevalier (New York: Grove Press, 1965); originally published as L’An V de la revolution algerienne (Paris: Francois Maspero, 1959). [7] David Arnold, ed., Imperial Medicine and Indigenous Societies (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988). [8] C. Pereira, A. Cumbi, R. Malalane, F. Vaz, C. McCord, A. Bacci, and S. Bergstrom, “Meeting the Need for Emergency Obstetric Care in Mozambique: Work Performance and Histories of Medical Doctors and Assistant Medical Officers Trained for Surgery,” BJOG: An International Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology 114, no. 12 (2007). [9] World Health Organization, Declaration of Alma-Ata: International Conference on Primary Health Care, Alma-Ata, 6-12 September 1978 (Geneva: World Health Organization, 1978). [10] World Health Organization, Task Shifting: Rational Redistribution of Tasks among Health Workforce Teams; Global Recommendations and Guidelines (Geneva: World Health Organization, 2008). [11] Ngaanyatjarra Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Women’s Council, Traditional Healers of Central Australia: Ngangkari (Broome: Magabala Books, 2013); on the registered profession, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health Practice Board of Australia, Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency. FURTHER READING Eliot Freidson, Professionalism: The Third Logic (2001). Freidson’s final account of professionalism as a distinct way of organising work, set against the market and the bureaucracy. Ivan Illich, Limits to Medicine: Medical Nemesis (1976). A polemic arguing that an expanding medical monopoly erodes people’s capacity to care for themselves and each other. Keith M. Macdonald, The Sociology of the Professions (1995). A survey of how sociologists have understood professions as projects of monopoly, status, and social closure. Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, For Her Own Good: Two Centuries of the Experts’ Advice to Women (1978). Traces how a male-dominated medical and scientific establishment claimed authority over women’s bodies and lives. Megan Vaughan, Curing Their Ills: Colonial Power and African Illness (1991). On how colonial medicine in Africa classified and governed the people it claimed to treat. Charles E. Rosenberg, The Care of Strangers: The Rise of America’s Hospital System (1987). A history of how the hospital moved from a charitable refuge to the institutional centre of professional medicine. Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism (1959). The essay “Medicine and Colonialism” sets out how medicine became part of the machinery of colonial rule. All works, organisations, scholars, legislation, and historical events listed above are real and citable. For any source intended for formal academic or professional writing, direct verification against the original publication or institutional record is recommended. bout the host Liv Roe is a civic and political adviser based in Melbourne. She works with businesses, organisations, and individuals on the political and civic context of their work. Book a consultation at livroe.org. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit civicsandcommerce.substack.com

    10 min
  5. The politics of schooling

    Jun 2

    The politics of schooling

    Show notes The story in this episode is composite, drawn from real events. The identifying details have been changed to protect privacy, but the situations and the political contexts are real. The real-world events the story draws on, full citations, and further reading are below. REAL-WORLD EVENTS REFERENCED IN THIS EPISODE The political project of mass public education - Victoria passed an Education Act in 1872 that made schooling free, compulsory, and secular, the first of the Australian colonies to do so. New South Wales followed with the Public Instruction Act in 1880, and the other colonies legislated comparable systems through the 1870s and 1880s. - Historians of education describe mass public schooling as a deliberate political project whose purposes were contested from the start: the formation of citizens able to take part in public life, the production of a literate and disciplined workforce for an industrialising economy, and the building of a common national language and loyalty. Education for Self-Reliance - Julius Nyerere led Tanganyika, later Tanzania, to independence in 1961 and governed the country until 1985. In March 1967, following the Arusha Declaration, he published a policy paper titled Education for Self-Reliance. - The paper argued that Tanzanians had demanded more schooling for years without asking what its purpose was, and criticised the education inherited from British colonial rule for selecting a few people out of their communities into clerical and administrative work while teaching the majority to undervalue their own villages and labour. Nyerere argued for an education that served the society funding it. The folk high school movement - N.F.S. Grundtvig (1783 to 1872), a Danish pastor, poet, historian, and politician, argued from the 1830s for an education built around what he called life enlightenment rather than examinations and Latin grammar, intended to prepare ordinary rural people to take part in public life. - The first folk high school opened at Rødding in 1844, and the movement spread across Denmark and the wider Nordic region over the following decades. Grundtvig was a member of the assembly that drafted Denmark’s first democratic constitution in 1849. School councils and the resourcing of public schools in Australia - Victorian government school councils are governing bodies constituted under the Education and Training Reform Act 2006 and associated Ministerial Orders. They are made up of elected parent members, school staff, the principal as executive officer, and sometimes co-opted community members, and their functions include approving the school budget and endorsing the strategic plan. Curriculum, staffing, and major funding decisions are determined centrally by the Department of Education and the Minister. - A significant share of many government schools’ discretionary funds is raised locally, through fundraising activities and voluntary parent contributions. Because the capacity of families to contribute varies widely, schools serving wealthier communities can raise substantially more than schools a short distance away. The exclusion of Aboriginal children from public schooling - Although the Australian public system was established as universal, Aboriginal children were widely excluded from it. From 1902, the New South Wales Minister for Public Instruction instructed government schools to remove Aboriginal children whenever a white parent objected to their presence, a practice known as Exclusion on Demand, alongside the earlier “clean, clad and courteous” provisions. - Excluded children were directed to mission schools or to separate Aboriginal schools with a deliberately limited curriculum, or were left without schooling. The capacity of school principals to exclude Aboriginal children was not removed from New South Wales policy until 1972. REFERENCES [1] Education and Training Reform Act 2006 (Vic); on the role and powers of Victorian government school councils, see Victorian Auditor-General’s Office, School Councils in Government Schools (Melbourne: Victorian Auditor-General’s Office, 2018), https://www.audit.vic.gov.au/report/school-councils-government-schools. [2] Education Act 1872 (Vic); on the colonial Education Acts that established free, compulsory, and secular schooling, see Alan Barcan, A History of Australian Education (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1980). [3] Andy Green, Education and State Formation: The Rise of Education Systems in England, France and the USA (London: Macmillan, 1990). [4] Julius K. Nyerere, “Education for Self-Reliance” (Dar es Salaam: Government Printer, 1967); reprinted in Julius K. Nyerere, Freedom and Socialism / Uhuru na Ujamaa: A Selection from Writings and Speeches, 1965-1967 (Dar es Salaam: Oxford University Press, 1968). [5] Mark K. Smith, “Julius Nyerere, Lifelong Learning and Education,” The Encyclopedia of Pedagogy and Informal Education, https://infed.org/mobi/julius-nyerere-lifelong-learning-and-education/. [6] Steven M. Borish, The Land of the Living: The Danish Folk High Schools and Denmark’s Non-Violent Path to Modernization (Nevada City, California: Blue Dolphin Publishing, 1991). [7] “N.F.S. Grundtvig,” Encyclopaedia Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/biography/N-F-S-Grundtvig. [8] Ministerial Order 1280 (Constitution of Government School Councils) 2020 (Vic); Victorian Department of Education, “School Council: Composition, Eligibility and Office Bearers,” Policy and Advisory Library, https://www2.education.vic.gov.au/pal/school-council-composition-and-office-bearers/policy. [9] Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron, Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture, translated by Richard Nice (London: Sage, 1977); Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America: Educational Reform and the Contradictions of Economic Life (New York: Basic Books, 1976). [10] Review of Funding for Schooling: Final Report, chaired by David Gonski (Canberra: Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations, 2011). [11] Jim Fletcher, Documents in the History of Aboriginal Education in New South Wales (Carlton, New South Wales: J. Fletcher, 1989); “Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Schooling,” Dictionary of Educational History in Australia and New Zealand, https://dehanz.net.au/entries/aboriginal-and-torres-strait-islander-schooling-1/. [12] National Indigenous Youth Education Coalition, The School Exclusion Project Research Report (2024); on the persistence of the exclusion policy until 1972, see also the historical overview in the Dictionary of Educational History in Australia and New Zealand entry cited above. FURTHER READING Julius K. Nyerere, Freedom and Socialism / Uhuru na Ujamaa (1968). The collection containing Education for Self-Reliance and Nyerere’s wider writing on the politics of a newly independent society. Steven M. Borish, The Land of the Living: The Danish Folk High Schools and Denmark’s Non-Violent Path to Modernization (1991). A study of the folk high school movement and its place in Danish democratic development. Andy Green, Education and State Formation (1990). On why modern states built mass education systems, and what they wanted those systems to do. Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron, Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture (1977). The classic statement of how schooling can reproduce social class rather than dissolve it. John Dewey, Democracy and Education (1916). The foundational argument that the purpose of public education is the formation of a democratic public. Alan Barcan, A History of Australian Education (1980). A standard history of how schooling was built across the Australian colonies and states. Nigel Parbury, Survival: A History of Aboriginal Life in New South Wales (1986). A history that includes the exclusion of Aboriginal children from public schooling and the long struggle for access to it. bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (1994). On education as a practice of freedom and the classroom as a political space. All works, organisations, scholars, legislation, and historical events listed above are real and citable. For any source intended for formal academic or professional writing, direct verification against the original publication or institutional record is recommended. About the host Liv Roe is a civic and political adviser based in Melbourne. She works with businesses, organisations, and individuals on the political and civic contexts. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit civicsandcommerce.substack.com

    10 min
  6. The politics of youth services

    May 31

    The politics of youth services

    Show notes The story in this episode is composite, drawn from real events. The identifying details have been changed to protect privacy, but the situations and the political contexts are real. The real-world events the story draws on, full citations, and further reading are below. REAL-WORLD EVENTS REFERENCED IN THIS EPISODE The shadow state - The American geographer Jennifer Wolch set out the concept of the shadow state in a 1990 study of the voluntary sector. She used it to describe a layer of voluntary organisations that carry out social services once delivered directly by government, funded and shaped by government through service contracts, while remaining outside the reach of ordinary democratic politics. - The arrangement Wolch described took hold across the United States, Britain, Australia, and other countries through the 1970s and 1980s, as governments moved from delivering services themselves to purchasing them from non-profit and for-profit providers under contract. The non-profit industrial complex - In 2004, the organisation INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence held a conference at the University of California, Santa Barbara, titled The Revolution Will Not Be Funded. The conference, and the 2007 book that followed, gave currency to the term non-profit industrial complex. - The critique describes how dependence on foundation and government funding can channel organisations away from advocacy and structural change toward narrower, measurable, fundable service delivery, professionalising movement work and managing dissent. Contributors drew on the United States non-profit sector, in which more than a million organisations hold tax-exempt status under section 501(c)(3) of the tax code. Charities, advocacy, and political activity - In its 2012 federal budget, the Conservative government of Canada provided the Canada Revenue Agency with additional funding, later totalling around 13 million dollars, to audit the political activities of registered charities. Charity law at the time allowed charities to devote up to 10 per cent of their resources to political activities; partisan activity was, and remains, prohibited. - The first wave of audits targeted environmental charities that had criticised government energy and pipeline policy, and later widened to anti-poverty, human rights, international development, and religious charities. Researchers documented an advocacy chill across the sector. The audits were suspended in 2017, and in 2018 a court found the political-activity limits an unjustified restriction on freedom of expression, after which the relevant law was changed. Community control and the Aboriginal community-controlled sector - In July 1971, Aboriginal activists opened the Aboriginal Medical Service in a shopfront on Regent Street in Redfern, Sydney. It was the first Aboriginal community-controlled health service in Australia, founded in response to the racism and neglect Aboriginal people faced in mainstream health services at a time before universal health care. - The service was built on the principle of community control, that it should answer to the Aboriginal community through an elected board rather than to a government department. It struggled with funding in its early years, operating on bank overdrafts and community donations while government payments and decisions were delayed. The model spread, and by the 2010s around 150 Aboriginal community-controlled health services operated across Australia, represented by the National Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisation. REFERENCES [1] Jennifer R. Wolch, The Shadow State: Government and Voluntary Sector in Transition (New York: The Foundation Center, 1990). [2] INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, ed., The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex (Cambridge, Massachusetts: South End Press, 2007; reissued Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2017). [3] Dylan Rodríguez, “The Political Logic of the Non-Profit Industrial Complex,” in The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex, edited by INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence (Cambridge, Massachusetts: South End Press, 2007). [4] Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “In the Shadow of the Shadow State,” in The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex, edited by INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence (Cambridge, Massachusetts: South End Press, 2007). [5] Clive Hamilton and Sarah Maddison, editors, Silencing Dissent: How the Australian Government Is Controlling Public Opinion and Stifling Debate (Crows Nest, New South Wales: Allen & Unwin, 2007). [6] “Canada Revenue Agency’s Political-Activity Audits of Charities,” CBC News, 5 August 2014, https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canada-revenue-agency-s-political-activity-audits-of-charities-1.2728023. [7] Gareth Kirkby, “An Uncharitable Chill: A Critical Exploration of How Changes in Federal Policy and Political Discourse Are Affecting Advocacy-Oriented Charities” (MA thesis, Royal Roads University, 2014); “Revenue Minister Suspends Political Activity Audits of Charities,” CBC News, 4 May 2017, https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canada-revenue-agency-political-activity-diane-lebouthillier-audits-panel-report-suspension-1.4099184. [8] “Our History,” Aboriginal Medical Service Co-operative Limited, Redfern, https://amsredfern.org.au; “The Aboriginal Medical Service Redfern: Improving Access to Primary Care,” Royal Australian College of General Practitioners, https://www.racgp.org.au. [9] National Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisation, on the principle of Aboriginal community control, https://www.naccho.org.au. [10] On the early funding history of the Redfern Aboriginal Medical Service and the Aboriginal community-controlled sector, see the Redfern Oral History project, http://redfernoralhistory.org, and the published histories of Australia’s Aboriginal community-controlled health organisations. [11] Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, Australia’s Youth (Canberra: Australian Institute of Health and Welfare), https://www.aihw.gov.au. [12] On the effects of short-term and competitive funding cycles on community-sector organisations in Australia, see the community-sector research published by the Australian Council of Social Service, https://www.acoss.org.au. FURTHER READING Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation (2022). A collection on the state, organising, and the limits of the non-profit form, from one of the contributors to the non-profit industrial complex critique. John Clarke and Janet Newman, The Managerial State: Power, Politics and Ideology in the Remaking of Social Welfare (1997). An account of how managerialism and contracting reshaped the way social welfare is delivered. Mark Considine, Enterprising States: The Public Management of Welfare-to-Work (2001). A study of the contracting of welfare and employment services, with close attention to the Australian case. Anand Giridharadas, Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World (2018). A critical account of philanthropy and the management of social change by the powerful. Edgar Villanueva, Decolonizing Wealth: Indigenous Wisdom to Heal Divides and Restore Balance (2018). An argument about the politics of philanthropic money and a reparative alternative to it. Dean Spade, Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next) (2020). A short, practical case for mutual aid as an alternative to the charity and non-profit model. All works, organisations, scholars, legislation, and historical events listed above are real and citable. For any source intended for formal academic or professional writing, direct verification against the original publication or institutional record is recommended. About the host Liv Roe is a civic and political adviser based in Melbourne. She works with businesses, organisations, and individuals on the political and civic context of their work. Book a consultation at livroe.org. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit civicsandcommerce.substack.com

    11 min
  7. The politics of mechanical workshops

    May 29

    The politics of mechanical workshops

    Show notes The story in this episode is composite, drawn from real events. The identifying details have been changed to protect privacy, but the situations and the political contexts are real. The real-world events the story draws on, full citations, and further reading are below. REAL-WORLD EVENTS REFERENCED IN THIS EPISODE The car as a political object - André Gorz (1923 to 2007), the Austrian-born French philosopher and journalist who helped found the tradition of political ecology, set out an early and influential argument that the motor car was a political technology rather than a neutral one in his 1973 essay The Social Ideology of the Motorcar, published in the French magazine Le Sauvage. - Gorz’s wider work argued that an ecological transition is a political contest over who controls and benefits from change, a theme running through his book Ecology as Politics. Just transition - The concept of a just transition originated in the North American labour movement. In the late 1980s and early 1990s the trade unionist Tony Mazzocchi, a leader of the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers Union, proposed a fund to support and retrain workers displaced by environmental regulation, an idea first called a Superfund for Workers and later renamed just transition. - The principle holds that the costs of moving away from harmful industries should be shared across society rather than concentrated on affected workers and communities. The International Labour Organization adopted formal guidelines on just transition in 2015, and the preamble to the 2015 Paris Agreement refers to a just transition of the workforce. Norway and the electric vehicle transition - In 2025, battery-electric vehicles made up 95.9 per cent of new passenger car sales in Norway, according to the Norwegian Road Federation, up from roughly a third a decade earlier. In 2017 Norway set a target of ending sales of new fossil-fuel cars by 2025. - The transition was driven by two decades of sustained government policy and tax incentives. Norway is also one of the world’s significant exporters of oil and gas, and manages its petroleum revenue through a large sovereign wealth fund. Cobalt, the Congo, and extractivism - Cobalt is a key component of most lithium-ion electric vehicle batteries. The Democratic Republic of the Congo produces well over two-thirds of the world’s cobalt, and between roughly 15 and 30 per cent of Congolese cobalt is produced through artisanal and small-scale mining, much of it in hazardous conditions, with documented child labour. - The Ecuadorian economist Alberto Acosta, a former president of Ecuador’s Constituent Assembly, has written extensively on extractivism, the economic model in which regions are organised around exporting raw materials. Acosta and others argue that an energy transition reliant on large-scale mineral extraction can reproduce the same pattern. The right to repair - For around two decades, independent repairers and consumer advocates internationally have campaigned for a right to repair, the principle that owners and independent trades should have access to the information, parts, and software needed to fix the products they own. The European Union introduced vehicle repair information access rules in 2007, and the US state of Massachusetts passed an automotive right-to-repair law in 2012. - In Australia, the Productivity Commission examined the question in its 2021 Right to Repair inquiry. The Motor Vehicle Service and Repair Information Sharing Scheme, legislated in 2021 and in effect from 1 July 2022, requires manufacturers to share service and repair information with independent repairers. Data transmitted wirelessly from newer connected vehicles to their manufacturers sits largely outside the scheme. REFERENCES [1] André Gorz, “The Social Ideology of the Motorcar,” Le Sauvage, September-October 1973; English translation by Patsy Vigderman in André Gorz, Ecology as Politics (Montréal: Black Rose Books, 1980). [2] André Gorz, Ecology as Politics (Montréal: Black Rose Books, 1980); first published in French as Écologie et politique (Paris: Galilée, 1975). [3] Les Leopold, The Man Who Hated Work and Loved Labor: The Life and Times of Tony Mazzocchi (White River Junction, Vermont: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2007). [4] International Labour Organization, Guidelines for a Just Transition towards Environmentally Sustainable Economies and Societies for All (Geneva: International Labour Office, 2015). [5] United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, Paris Agreement (2015), preamble; International Trade Union Confederation, Just Transition Centre materials, https://www.ituc-csi.org. [6] “Norway new car sales hit 96% electric in 2025 as Tesla dominates,” CNBC, 2 January 2026, reporting figures from the Norwegian Road Federation, https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/02/evs-norway-new-car-sales-hit-96percent-electric-in-2025-as-tesla-dominates.html. [7] Norwegian Petroleum (official petroleum information service of the Norwegian government), https://www.norskpetroleum.no. [8] “DRC is the world’s largest producer of cobalt: how control by local elites can shape the global battery industry,” The Conversation, 19 September 2025, https://theconversation.com/drc-is-the-worlds-largest-producer-of-cobalt-how-control-by-local-elites-can-shape-the-global-battery-industry-236205; “Why Cobalt Mining in the DRC Needs Urgent Attention,” Council on Foreign Relations, https://www.cfr.org/articles/why-cobalt-mining-drc-needs-urgent-attention. [9] Alberto Acosta, “Extractivism and Neoextractivism: Two Sides of the Same Curse,” in Beyond Development: Alternative Visions from Latin America, edited by Miriam Lang and Dunia Mokrani (Amsterdam: Transnational Institute; Quito: Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, 2013). [10] “Driving on Destruction: How EVs Are Exploiting Congo’s Mines,” UCL Bartlett Faculty of the Built Environment, July 2025, https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/news/2025/jul/blog-driving-destruction-how-evs-are-exploiting-congos-mines. [11] Australian Productivity Commission, Right to Repair: Inquiry Report (Canberra: Productivity Commission, 2021). [12] Motor Vehicle Service and Repair Information Sharing Scheme, Australian Government, in effect from 1 July 2022; Australian Automotive Aftermarket Association, materials on the scheme and on access to vehicle telematics data, https://www.aaaa.com.au. FURTHER READING André Gorz, Capitalism, Socialism, Ecology (1994). Gorz’s later argument on the politics of work, ecology, and the conditions for a transition that serves people rather than industries. Les Leopold, The Man Who Hated Work and Loved Labor: The Life and Times of Tony Mazzocchi (2007). A biography of the union leader who built the labour-environmental alliance and gave just transition its name. Miriam Lang and Dunia Mokrani, editors, Beyond Development: Alternative Visions from Latin America (2013). A Latin American collection on post-development and post-extractivism, including Alberto Acosta’s essay on extractivism. Thea Riofrancos, Resource Radicals: From Petro-Nationalism to Post-Extractivism in Ecuador (2020). A study of resource politics and post-extractivist movements, directly relevant to the minerals the energy transition depends on. Siddharth Kara, Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives (2023). A reporting-based account of artisanal cobalt mining in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Aaron Perzanowski, The Right to Repair: Reclaiming the Things We Own (2022). The leading book-length treatment of the right to repair movement and its legal and political stakes. Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work (2009). An argument for the worth of skilled manual and repair work, and a useful companion to the question of who gets to fix things. Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate (2014). A wide account of why the politics of transition, and not only the technology, decides who carries its costs. All works, organisations, scholars, legislation, and historical events listed above are real and citable. For any source intended for formal academic or professional writing, direct verification against the original publication or institutional record is recommended. About the host Liv Roe is a civic and political adviser based in Melbourne. She works with businesses, organisations, and individuals on the political and civic context of their work. Book a consultation at livroe.org. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit civicsandcommerce.substack.com

    11 min
  8. The politics of a community group

    May 28

    The politics of a community group

    Show notes The story in this episode is composite, drawn from real events. The identifying details have been changed to protect privacy, but the situations and the political contexts are real. The real-world events the story draws on, full citations, and further reading are below. REAL-WORLD EVENTS REFERENCED IN THIS EPISODE Civic participation: theory and traditions - Sherry Arnstein’s 1969 article A Ladder of Citizen Participation, which set out eight rungs of participation grouped into three bands: nonparticipation (manipulation and therapy), degrees of tokenism (informing, consultation, and placation), and degrees of citizen power (partnership, delegated power, and citizen control). It became one of the most cited works in planning theory. - Ella Baker (1903 to 1986), the African-American organiser who worked across the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and whose model of group-centred leadership shaped the participatory-democracy strand of the civil rights movement. - Paulo Freire (1921 to 1997), the Brazilian educator whose 1968 book Pedagogy of the Oppressed introduced conscientization, the development of critical consciousness, into popular education and community organising worldwide. Australia - The green bans, beginning in June 1971 when the New South Wales Builders Labourers Federation, asked by a group of women in the Sydney suburb of Hunters Hill, refused to supply labour for a housing development on Kelly’s Bush, the last bushland remnant in the area. - The conduct of the green bans between 1971 and 1974, with the union placing more than forty bans, each imposed only at the request of a resident group and only after a public meeting demonstrating community support. - The proliferation of resident action groups across Sydney from 1971, numbering around one hundred by 1974, and the formation of the Coalition of Resident Action Groups in 1972 to coordinate their efforts. - The exclusion of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people from the franchise. The Commonwealth Franchise Act 1902 effectively barred most Aboriginal people from the federal vote. The Commonwealth Electoral Act 1962, which received assent on 21 May 1962, extended the federal vote to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. Queensland in 1965 was the last state to grant the state franchise, and compulsory enrolment followed in 1984. - Research on community consultation in Australian local government documenting the consistent under-representation of renters, younger residents, shift workers, and recent arrivals in council engagement processes. Switzerland - The Swiss system of direct democracy, in which citizens vote several times a year at communal, cantonal, and federal level on concrete questions through referendums and popular initiatives. - The Landsgemeinde, an open-air cantonal assembly with medieval origins in which citizens vote by a show of hands, still practised in the cantons of Glarus and Appenzell Innerrhoden. - The late extension of the franchise to Swiss women. A referendum on 7 February 1971 granted women the federal vote. Appenzell Innerrhoden was the last canton to admit women to cantonal voting, doing so only after the Swiss Federal Court ruled in November 1990 that the exclusion breached the federal constitution. Kenya - Harambee, a Swahili word meaning all pull together, a tradition of community self-help in which residents pool funds and labour to build shared facilities such as schools, clinics, and roads. - The adoption of harambee as a development strategy and as the national motto by Jomo Kenyatta after independence in 1963, and its part in building a large share of the country’s post-independence schools. - The later entanglement of harambee with political patronage, as wealthy figures seeking political office used large donations to harambee fundraising drives to build legitimacy and support. REFERENCES [1] Sherry R. Arnstein, “A Ladder of Citizen Participation,” Journal of the American Institute of Planners 35, no. 4 (1969): 216 to 224, https://doi.org/10.1080/01944366908977225. [2] Barbara Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003). [3] Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, translated by Myra Bergman Ramos (New York: Herder and Herder, 1970), first published as Pedagogia do Oprimido (1968). [4] Meredith Burgmann and Verity Burgmann, Green Bans, Red Union: Environmental Activism and the New South Wales Builders Labourers Federation (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 1998); National Museum of Australia, “First Green Bans,” https://www.nma.gov.au/defining-moments/resources/first-green-bans. [5] Meredith Burgmann and Verity Burgmann, Green Bans, Red Union: Environmental Activism and the New South Wales Builders Labourers Federation (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 1998); James Colman, The House That Jack Built: Jack Mundey, Green Bans Hero (Sydney: NewSouth Publishing, 2016). [6] “Green Bans Movement,” Dictionary of Sydney, https://dictionaryofsydney.org/entry/green_bans_movement. [7] “The Way to Modern Direct Democracy in Switzerland,” About Switzerland, Swiss Federal Department of Foreign Affairs, https://www.aboutswitzerland.eda.admin.ch/en/the-way-to-modern-direct-democracy-in-switzerland. [8] “50 Years of Women’s Suffrage in Switzerland,” In Custodia Legis, Law Library of Congress, 28 April 2021, https://blogs.loc.gov/law/2021/04/50-years-of-womens-suffrage-in-switzerland/. [9] “Harambee, n.,” Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press), https://www.oed.com/dictionary/harambee_n; Philip M. Mbithi and Rasmus Rasmusson, Self Reliance in Kenya: The Case of Harambee (Uppsala: Scandinavian Institute of African Studies, 1977). [10] Joel D. Barkan and Frank Holmquist, “Peasant-State Relations and the Social Base of Self-Help in Kenya,” World Politics 41 (1989); Philip M. Mbithi and Rasmus Rasmusson, Self Reliance in Kenya: The Case of Harambee (Uppsala: Scandinavian Institute of African Studies, 1977). [11] Nicole Brackertz and Denise Meredyth, Community Consultation and the “Hard to Reach”: Concepts and Practice in Victorian Local Government (Hawthorn, Victoria: Institute for Social Research, Swinburne University of Technology, 2005). [12] National Museum of Australia, “Indigenous Australians’ Right to Vote,” https://www.nma.gov.au/defining-moments/resources/indigenous-australians-right-to-vote; Australian Electoral Commission, “Electoral Milestones for Indigenous Australians” (2019). FURTHER READING Carole Pateman, Participation and Democratic Theory (1970). The foundational modern argument that democratic citizenship is learned by taking part in the institutions of everyday life, not only at the ballot box. Archon Fung, Empowered Participation: Reinventing Urban Democracy (2004). A close study of how devolved decision-making over schooling and policing can work when ordinary residents are given a share of the power. Barbara Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision (2003). The definitive biography of Baker and the clearest account of the group-centred organising tradition she built. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968). The founding text of critical pedagogy and a continuing reference point for popular education and community organising. Meredith Burgmann and Verity Burgmann, Green Bans, Red Union (1998). The standard history of the New South Wales green bans and the resident action movement that worked alongside them. James Colman, The House That Jack Built: Jack Mundey, Green Bans Hero (2016). A biography of the union leader most closely associated with the green bans. Saul Alinsky, Rules for Radicals (1971). A practical and much-argued-over handbook of community organising from the American tradition. Iris Marion Young, Inclusion and Democracy (2000). A political-philosophical case for why democratic processes have to actively include the perspectives of marginalised groups to count as legitimate. All works, organisations, scholars, legislation, and historical events listed above are real and citable. For any source intended for formal academic or professional writing, direct verification against the original publication or institutional record is recommended. About the host Liv Roe is a civic and political adviser based in Melbourne. She works with businesses, organisations, and individuals on the political and civic context of their work. Book a consultation at livroe.org. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit civicsandcommerce.substack.com

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