In a period of welfare state retrenchment, Australia's neo-liberal government is continuing to implement an expensive National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS). Australia is among the pioneers of welfare measures funded from general revenue. Until recently, however, attempts to establish national schemes of social insurance have failed. The paper reviews this history through the lenses of path dependence accounts. It then presents contrasting descriptions of the NDIS by its Chair, the politician who inspired him, and two feminist policy analysts from a carers’ organisation. Path dependence, these accounts illustrate, has been broken in some respects but consolidated in others. In particular, the dynamics of ‘managed’ capitalist markets, gendered notions of abstract individuals and organisations, and the related difficulties in accounting for unpaid labour are constraining the transformative potential of the NDIS.

This article uses information reported by over 54,000 children aged 8–12 years old about their daily activities in a diverse sample of 16 countries across four continents. It explores between-country similarities and differences in patterns of activities across this age range. The analysis focuses on four topics identified in previous research – involvement with housework, the emphasis on educational activities, the balance between active and sedentary leisure activities, and the balance between time spent with family and friends. The results suggest diverging age variations in children's activities across countries between the ages of 8 and 12 including tentative evidence of differences between low-income and high-income countries. They also highlight the need to understand children's daily activities within the specific context of individual countries.

This paper presents the findings of a literature review on public private partnerships (PPPs) in two sectors – education and health – in Africa, Asia and Latin America. It highlights the heterogeneity of the category within and across sectors and shows that the key predictions of the PPP doctrine – cost-efficiency for improved social service delivery to the poor – are hardly fulfilled in practice. Moreover, PPPs – both as policy model and practical arrangements – are underpinned by a narrow conception of education and health, which denies their broader embeddedness within the economy and society. The paper identifies theoretical and methodological limitations of the existing scholarship. It underlines the scarcity of data on the corporate sector and, more broadly, about the economics of education and health PPPs. It also stresses the little attention paid to the beneficiaries. The paper finally calls for further research to open up the ‘black box’ of PPPs.

The past few decades have seen the growing popularity of public-private partnerships (PPPs) across the health sector – a catch all term used to encompass diverse activities involving both public and private sector entities in areas of global and domestic health. In the article we consider the factors that have led to this proliferation of PPPs in the healthcare delivery field and consider the link to the process of ‘scientization’ of healthcare. With a focus on sexual and reproductive health the article also considers two commonly used mechanisms employed in SRH service delivery that have been used in PPPs – social franchise and health voucher schemes. We then reprise key points from the existing critical literature on gendered health systems and go on to consider their application to such service provision-oriented PPPs, using an exploratory analysis of a case study of the use of maternal health vouchers in India.

The article reviews the literature on Public Private Partnerships (PPPs) and policy on girls’ schooling in developing countries. It considers the ways in which aims around gender equality and women's rights are positioned in policy texts concerned with girls’ education PPPs. The argument made is that these documents exemplify an oscillation, using a multipolar register, between pragmatic initiatives that recognise existing sites of power, and attempts to develop a political project that dissolves differences between public and private constituencies, who share an interest in getting girls into school. The potential and limits of this approach to support integrated policy around rights and equalities is considered using the case of DFID's Girls’ Education Challenge. An analytical framework is sketched that maps a political and epistemological process termed dispersal, which is used to consider some ways to investigate the effects of PPPs as a mechanism to address intersecting inequalities.