Publications by Public Services & Democracy

  • Impacts of expansion of sugarcane monocropping for ethanol production
    January 2009
    TNI
     Maria Luisa Mendonça

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    This article was originally published in Portuguese in Os impactos da produção de cana no
    Cerrado e Amazônia (PDF)    , Rede Social de Justiça e Direitos Humanos e Comissão Pastoral da Terra, October 2008

  • Re-examining the "agrarian movement-NGO" solidarity relations discourse
    January 2009
    TNI
     Saturnino M. Borras Jr
    The demands of transnational agrarian movements for their own autonomous voice and representation have transformed their relationship with NGOs, and clarified the kind of solidarity that is acceptable to both, writes Jun Borras.

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  • Then and now, Venezuela and Cuba, 1960-2008
    December 2008
    Saul Landau

    Watching Hugo Chavez orate on Venezuelan television rings old memory bells. “Socialism.

  • A revolution without borders: reappraising Bolivia’s crisis
    December 2008
    TNI
     Samuel Grove and Pablo Navarrete

    Bolivia, a country used to being ignored by the western media, has hit the headlines in recent months due to the marked increase in violence among opponents and supporters of the government. Back in December 2005 Bolivia, a country in which 62 per cent of the population identify themselves as indigenous, elected its first indigenous president, Evo Morales, on a mandate of radical reform.

  • Postcard from Venezuela
    December 2008
    Saul Landau
    “The construction of socialism in Venezuela is ratified, and now we will take charge of deepening it.”

    -- President Hugo Chavez, after learning the results of the November 23 elections.

    Chavez’s PSUV (United Socialist Party of Venezuela) won 17 of 23 governorships, approximately 60-40%.

  • In 90 minutes, why couldn’t Frontline have presented the other side of the story on Chavez?
    December 2008
    TNI
     Steve Ellner

    On November 25 PBS’s Frontline broadcast its 90 minute The Hugo Chávez Show. The Frontline team contacted me when they were here in Venezuela about 5 months ago and paid my fare to Caracas as well as hotel and per diem expenses in order to interview me.

  • Local politics and the sustainability of rural life
    December 2008
    TNI
     UNAC Rural Democratisation Research Team

    To be a strong peasant movement in a place like Chokwe, Mozambique requires going beyond ambiguous compromises to develop collective political thinking and to develop the capacity to use political power in ways that ensure that governmental and non-governmental organisations that help the peasantry act in line with what peasants wish and need.

  • Rural democratisation in Mexico’s deep south
    December 2008
    TNI
     Jonathan Fox, Carlos García Jiménez and Libby Haight

    Has political regime change led to changes in state-society relations? This study begins to address this question by analysing rural movement efforts to exercise newly-won citizen rights. The specific focus is on rural civil society initiatives to use the “right to know” as a tool to bolster long-standing campaigns to build self-managed, community-based economic development institutions, to bolster peasant influence over the policy process, to defend human rights, and to respect indigenous rights.

  • Rural social movements and their historical contribution for building democracy in Brazil
    December 2008
    TNI
     Sérgio Sauer

    Brazil has not experienced any sort of major agrarian reform since then, but dozens of rural movements have been organised and hundreds of thousands of landless peasants have acquired the right of access to land (especially through settlement projects) as a result of these social movements’ struggles. After so many years of fighting and popular mobilisation, what are these movements’ contributions to building rural democracy? This study seeks to understand this process by evaluating social movements’ alliances (both rural and urban alliances) and evaluating their relationships with political parties, especially with the Workers Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores – PT) and with the Brazilian Federal Government.

  • If not capitalism, what?
    November 2008
    Hilary Wainwright
    This moment of collapse of banks and their total dependence on public authorities is the moment to turn them into public utilities.