AIDS and Governance

The political impact of HIV/AIDS varies greatly and is difficult to map. States depend on how governments choose to manage the political implications of HIV and AIDS, both the implications stemming from the erosions of its own capacity, as well as those stemming from their changing relationship both nationally as well as internationally. Across the developing world, HIV/AIDS is slowly killing adults in their most productive years, hollowing out state-structures, deepening poverty, reversing achievements in education, lowering productivity, weakening intergenerational formation, and changing the composition of families. Clearly, in terms of its trajectory and impact, the epidemic raises profound questions that touch on the organization of all aspects of social, economic and political life. With the epidemic showing scant signs of slowing down anywhere in the developing world, this volume assesses how HIV/AIDS affects governance, and conversely how governance affects the course of the epidemic. This title employs a compelling analytical and polemic framework for mapping the multiple dynamic mechanisms of governance and HIV/AIDS. It brings together contributions from renowned international scholars from a variety of disciplines. It is an innovative text drawing on comprehensive as well as detailed perspectives on the roles of actors, institutions and structures. It offers an incisive study of a global plague which threatens existing social, economic and human interrelations. The specific dynamics and mechanisms for how HIV/AIDS impacts on actors, institutions or frameworks, as well as how their responses and changes affect the epidemic, require the careful judgment and analysis of the contributors. The authors offer their informed views on factors that have been conducive as well as constraining in actors to respond, which allows for a comprehensive picture of the 'politics of reform' as well as 'effective practices'.