Search Results

This chapter examines the issue of how to respond to the growing neoliberalization of the welfare state. The chapter makes the case that neoliberalism is hegemonic and there is nothing to be gained by trying to wish it away. Instead of trying to work around neoliberalism, efforts should be made to work through neoliberalism to get to a more progressive future where social welfare policy works to empower ordinary people rather than discipline them to capitulate to the dictates of the increasingly unequal economy. The chapter discusses how a radical, as opposed to a status-quo-reinforcing, incrementalism can pave the way forward, by working for small changes in policy now that are designed to lay the basis for more fundamental transformations in the political economy over time. The example of Obamacare is used to suggest how this might be done so as to not just help people now within the constraints of neoliberalism but to do so in a way that creates the basis for getting beyond neoliberalism and building a more inclusive, solidaristic social welfare state.

In this chapter, the goal is to work through the multi-vocality at the grassroots of Africa’s urban environments, in places like Pikine in Dakar, Kibera in Nairobi, or the Cape Flats in Cape Town. The grassroots are crucial for addressing urban environmental issues, and the voices of people at the grassroots and the margins are often justifiably pushed to the center in political ecological analysis. The experts show that there are myriad complex environmental problems in Africa’s cities. Previous chapters argue for seeing the beginnings of these problems in the past; for understanding the cityscape both physically and spiritually as a part of the political-environmental dynamics; and for seeing the problems from ecocritical perspectives. This chapter turns to what is being done at the grassroots across many cities. One segment surveys some of this terrain, beginning with the intellectual terrain of urban political ecology, followed by a set of urban contexts on the continent, before moving to an in-depth focus on Cape Town. The contemporary context of what Edgar Pieterse calls ‘rogue urbanism’ calls for ‘radical incrementalism’ built around the grassroots, but this is seldom successful on the continent.

Amidst the growing enthusiasm for the application of behavioural insights from behavioural economics, psychology and the neurosciences in social policy, there has been a shift in emphasis from structural, through individuated and towards neuromolecular scales of explanation for social problems. This chapter explores the role of these trends in carving out new spatialities of social policy. The chapter considers the scale at which government intervention is deemed necessary, effective and efficient; and who should be responsible for health, productivity and wellbeing in liberal societies. It traces continuities between behavioural and neuroscientifically-informed public policy through analysis of international and supra-national policy documentation within societies in which neoliberalism is increasingly recognised as a source of social harm and economic instability. The chapter develops an approach to ‘critical neuro- geography’ which sheds new light on the strategic importance of scalar claims and other spatialities to forms of governance targeted at the mind, body and soul.