The Production of Model HIV Prevention Campaigns in Non-Democratic States

• In Event: 1549 - The Rhetoric of Development

Abstract

Theories of the 21st century developmental state emphasize the role and importance of civil society and democracy in leading the state to take on expansive new agendas, including the provision of important new social services. Yet, cases where non-democratic governments have instituted new social programs without substantial pressure from civil society challenge the notion that democracy is a precondition for the taking on of new agendas. However, little is known about the processes by which non-democratic regimes come to take on important new social agendas. How do such governments negotiate provision of important social services? What role, if any, does civil society play in the process? How does illumination of these dynamics help to refine our understanding of developmental states and the provision of social policy more broadly? This paper examines these questions in a neglected domain of social policy – HIV prevention – in two critical periods in two countries that have produced model responses to the epidemic: China and Thailand. We find China’s response to AIDS to have been financed and directed almost entirely by the state-party regime with limited NGO involvement. Different local state responses, however, dramatically structured the possibilities and limits of NGO cooperation and precluded more radical state-civil co-production of HIV prevention policy. In Thailand, by contrast, a caretaker regime engineered a remarkable turnaround on AIDS on the back of a provincial state-run program and the activism of an unelected minister with an NGO background. These strikingly different dynamics point to the need for more research on the co-production of social policy by states and civil society in non-democratic developmental states.

Authors

• Jennifer YJ Hsu, University of New South Wales

• Joseph A. Harris, Boston University