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Item 'A light inside a pot': Sites and sources of power emerging from an ethnography of traditional healing in South India(Glob. Public Health, 2019) Devaki Nambiar; Arima MishraMedicine and healing have been critical elements of nation-building and governance in India. There is a clear hierarchy: biomedicine, followed by systems like Ayurveda which are to be 'mainstreamed,' and local health traditions, which are to be 'revitalised'. Mindful that power nonetheless resides in positions of marginality, this analysis drew from a health system ethnography on revitalisation of local health traditions in three southern Indian states. Data from multiple interviews with 51 healers, observations of meetings, healing sessions and events convened by healers, as well as a multi-stakeholder dialogue on local health traditions convened by authors were analysed using a grounded analytical process. The state was a source of power, but in an enmeshed, individualised form. Other sources of power included accomplished others who viewed healers and their practices with respect, healers' collectives that produced and reinforced power through the exercise of certain rituals, and the sacred calling to heal, which assumed stringent criteria for practice and training, while also creating a moral imperative for service orientation. Our study shows how power rests in or is derived from multiple sites and sources that inhere and interact in critical ways with the state and other systems of medicine.Item Advancing sexual and reproductive health and rights in low- and middle-income countries: Implications for the post-2015 global development agenda(Glob. Public Health, 2015) Adrienne Germain; Gita Sen; Claudia Garcia-Moreno; Mridula ShankarThe papers and commentaries in this special issue illuminate progress made by low- and middle-income countries towards implementation of the Programme of Action (PoA) agreed by 179 countries during the International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo in 1994. The PoA presents a path-breaking sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) framework for global and national population and health policies. While progress towards implementation has been made at global, regional and national levels, continuing and new challenges require that high priority be given to SRHR for all, particularly women and girls, during the remaining months of the millennium development goals and in the United Nations post-2015 development agenda. This paper highlights three critical gaps, raised in other papers: inequalities in access to sexual and reproductive health (SRH) information and services; the widespread need to improve SRH services to meet public health, human rights and medical ethics standards for quality of care; and the absence or inadequate use of accountability mechanisms to track and remedy the other two. We discuss priority actions to achieve equality, quality and accountability in SRHR policies, programmes and services, especially those that should be included in the post-2015 development agenda.