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Understanding of the factors that contribute to policies diverging from neoliberal norms and accounting for situations when social movement activists prevail over the interests of more powerful opponents requires an analytical framework specifying the dimensions of interest. The case of Brazil’s pharmaceutical policies, especially those dealing with HIV/AIDS, is considered.

To understand the space and limits for progressive agency amidst contemporary globalization, previous articulations of dependent development and global capitalism require conceptual space with insights from social movement theory and normative framing.

Control over technology, political alliances, and normative appeals have changed since the concept of dependent development to today’s contemporary neoliberal globalization for understanding cases of progressive agency. Technology is based more on intangible knowledge, activism across the state-society boundary is more likely, and human rights has become the dominant idiom for naming and shaming more powerful opponents.

The analytic framework developed informs our understanding of pharmaceutical autonomy – the ability of a country to provide for the prescription drug needs of its population – in the case of Brazil. Further research of other situations requires the application of the framework to determine its merits.

A focus on technology, alliances, and norms provides a useful starting point for exploring situations of development autonomy that prevails over the interests of corporate power.

This chapter reviews the history of an approach to networking between practitioners which uses inquiry-based methods to document innovative examples of inclusive education. The networking task is located in the context of efforts to promote Education for All which have so far failed to include the economically poorest and most marginalised children. The case of the Pacific region’s efforts to include children with disability in education is presented as a particular challenge, given its small, multilingual and geographically scattered population. An emerging strategy is presented as a framework for analysing the context of, and promoting greater conceptual clarity around, inclusive education in the Pacific region. Ultimately this networking approach has the potential to measure progress towards a more nuanced conceptualisation of the inclusive education agenda.

The spatial and often binary orderings of development discussed above have underpinned the dominant formations of development knowledge and the configuration of whose authority counts in development decisions and debates. Since these orderings of knowledge, authority and space are a pivotal feature of development, it is important that qualitative researchers engage with and challenge them. The contributions by Humble and Smith and by Yanacopulos challenge the construction of development research along North/South lines. Exploring what counts as development research, Humble and Smith note a geographical orientation towards research in the South to the exclusion of other approaches, informed by the historical influence of colonialism, the anthropological tradition and an increasing de-politicisation of development. This spatial filtering privileges certain sets of development knowledge and hence conceptions of what development is or should be. Drawing on their experiences of research with NGOs and in UK schools the authors make the case for critical engagement with the meanings of development in the North, challenging the traditional boundaries of what counts as development research. Yanacopulos, in Chapter 3, also takes up this challenge, but in this case arguing that we need to “think about the ways that development actors, structures and dynamics operate at a global level” (p. 35). Focusing on the rise of Transnational Advocacy Networks (TANs) and their roles in development, Yanacopulos explores the methodological challenges of researching a potentially fluid formation across national boundaries. But in doing so, she also demonstrates the important role qualitative methodologies can play in generating new understandings which challenge the North/South boundaries of development.

In a country where judicial institutions are known to be inefficient and where activists have traditionally not engaged in legal mobilization, what explains the emergence of NGO strategic litigation? The author argues that a change in the legal opportunity structure impacts how activists interact with the legal system. Comparing two states in Mexico, the author demonstrates that the introduction of private prosecution rights opened the door for activists to litigate femicide cases. The emergence of strategic litigation has helped improve compliance with international human rights law and has had a demonstration effect on how to use the law to press for accountability.

This study examines the transformation of labour non-governmental organisations (NGOs) operating in Mainland China since the enactment of the 2017 Overseas NGO Management Law, which aims to regulate foreign concerns functioning outside the direct control of the state. It focuses on the extent to which these organisations have responded to the rapidly changing political and social environment by altering their goals and strategies in support of migrant workers. It also considers the relevance of Western social movement theories (SMTs) to China's grassroots labour movement in the 2020s. 

The research is based on case studies of ten labour NGOs operating in Beijing, Tianjin and Yunnan. It draws upon fifteen semi-structured interviews with the founders, leaders and activists affiliated with those organisations, as well as records and documented information of each of those organisations.

While the power and influence of labour NGOs markedly diminished, most have been able to adapt their goals and the strategies remain sustainable amidst both China's changing political and social climates and the global pandemic. It suggests that conventional SMTs can still offer valuable insights into understanding the development of labour NGOs in China, although they might not fully interpret the specific conditions and challenges faced by these organisations.

This study stands out as one of very few to offer empirical evidence on the inner workings of China's labour NGOs over the last six years. It also contributes to our understanding of social movements in a non-Western context.

This essay will consider three theories developed by international law scholars to analyze the international legal terrain and the strengths of each as well as issues it fails to address sufficiently in the dimensions of power, meaning, and social relationships: bottom-up lawmaking; transnational legal processes; and global legal pluralism. The idea of bottom-up lawmaking, already discussed, has the strength of beginning from the everyday practices by which problems are solved that lead eventually to the creation of a body of law. However, the phrase bottom-up suggests that this is a grassroots movement, while it is typically cosmopolitan elites who generate the informal rules that become established over time. Explicit attention to the power relationships underlying this process would help to clarify what “bottom-up” means. As Judith Resnick points out, the terms “soft law” and “hard law” are themselves problematic, incorporating gender ideologies and suggesting that some international laws are enforced firmly, which is rarely the case in practice (personal communication).

The historian Patrick Wolfe reminds us that the settler colonial logic of eliminating native societies to gain unrestricted access to their territory is not a phenomenon confined to the distant past. As Wolfe (2006, p. 388) writes, “settler colonizers come to stay: invasion is a structure not an event.” In the Gulf of Carpentaria region in Australia’s Northern Territory this settler colonial “logic of elimination” continues through mining projects that extract capital for transnational corporations while contaminating Indigenous land, overriding Indigenous law and custom and undermining Indigenous livelihoods. However, some Garawa, Gudanji, Marra, and Yanyuwa peoples are using creative ways to fight back, exhibiting “story paintings” to show how their people experience the destructive impacts of mining. We cannot know yet the full impact of this creative activism. But their body of work suggests it has the potential to challenge colonial institutions from below, inspiring growing networks of resistance and a collective meaning-making through storytelling that is led by Indigenous peoples on behalf of the living world.

Opening the special issue on global protest and democracy since 2011, this article surveys the key dimensions of the debate. It provides a critical overview of significant protest events in the post-2011 period and explores a range of the analytical tools that may be used to understand them, before proceeding to identify, disaggregate, and draw into question some of the major claims that have emerged in literature on the post-2011 mobilizations. The articles contained within this volume are then outlined, revealing the novel and nuanced insights provided by the contributors with respect to the post-2011 protests’ composition, mobilization forms, frames, democratic practices, and interrelationships with other actors in pursuit of democratic reform. The article concludes with a discussion of the opportunities for further research into protest and democracy.

Several countries in South Asia face the challenge of ineffective educational reforms manifest in increasing rates of school failure and poor learning outcomes after embarking along education for all. Critical voices from the South have questioned the relevance and appropriateness of ideas that have shaped these reforms. Narratives from the region tell us that importation of educational concepts and policy orientations have led to the dismantling of existing structures and processes of education, creating new forms of inequities and disadvantage. The sheer scale and diversity of populations within the region poses formidable challenges and opportunities for contextual innovation. The construction of national imaginaries in the diverse societies of South Asia has the potential to provide new discourses to educational reform; going beyond the abstract goals set by disconnected international experts and the institutional processes they represent. This chapter deliberates on the need to establish a persuasive critical perspective that can influence and shape the trajectories of policy and practice, research and theorization, within the field of comparative education in South Asia, and the global south.