How do decentralised government and private healthcare options shape women’s preferences regarding maternal healthcare and desire to use it? Since 2000, national campaigns across Asia have attempted to improve utilisation of maternal healthcare to combat persistently high maternal mortality rates. Despite theoretical expectations that government decentralisation will improve local accountability and service provision, women continue to under-utilise accessible, affordable, and publicly-provided maternal healthcare. Through a comparison in take-up rates of prenatal care in Indonesia and the Philippines between 1997 and 2017, this talk traces the potential for decentralisation to “close the gap” between traditionally strong urban and traditionally weak rural care provision and access. However, in the earliest stages of decentralisation, widespread healthcare privatisation played a key substitutive role in urban areas, which offset improved local public provision in rural areas.
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Speaker and Chair Biographies:
Sarah Shair-Rosenfield is Chair of Comparative Politics at the University of York. Her areas of specialisation include comparative politics, political institutions, gender, and Southeast Asia, and her work has been published in outlets such as Oxford University Press, University of Michigan Press, the Journal of Politics, Gender & Society, and the Journal of East Asian Studies. She is joint Editor-in-Chief of Political Studies, has recently convened multiple early career training programmes funded by the British Academy and American Political Science Association, and is a co-founder of the Women in Southeast Asian Social Sciences (WiSEASS) network.
Prof. John Sidel is Director of the Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre, and the Sir Patrick Gillam Professor of International and Comparative Politics at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). Professor Sidel received his BA and MA from Yale University and his PhD from Cornell University. He is the author of Capital, Coercion, and Crime: Bossism in the Philippines (1999), Philippine Politics and Society in the Twentieth Century: Colonial Legacies, Postcolonial Trajectories (2000), Riots, Pogroms, Jihad: Religious Violence in Indonesia (2006), The Islamist Threat in Southeast Asia: A Reassessment (2007), Thinking and Working Politically in Development: Coalitions for Change in the Philippines (2020, with Jaime Faustino) and Republicanism, Communism, Islam: Cosmopolitan Origins of Revolution in Southeast Asia (2021).