Public Policy

"The Interest Group for the Anthropology of Public Policy (IGAPP) promotes the anthropological study of policy, including
its making, workings and effects. IGAPP seeks to advance the contributions of the anthropology of policy to theory and
method in anthropology, as well as to research in public policy. It became one of the largest interest groups in the American Anthropological Association. It has now become a full-fledged section of the AAA called ASAP (Association for the Anthropology of Policy. website: http://www.aaa-asap.org/) This brief report describes some of the papers presented at the American Anthropological Association Meetings in Washington, D.C. 2007. "

"A successful mixed farmer from north-central Saskatchewan, Robert
Weir was federal minister of Agriculture in R.B. Bennett’s Conservative government during the worst years of the Great Depression and the prolonged drought that devastated grain farmers in the Palliser Triangle. Weir’s original policies for agricultural recovery in Canada were of very limited assistance to wheat growers in the relatively arid south of the Prairie Provinces. Faced with worsening economic, social and political conditions on the prairies, Weir eventually introduced a major program of soil and water conservation and drought land reclamation through the Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Act, an initiative that was soon claimed by Jimmy Gardiner and the federal Liberal government under William Lyon Mackenzie King."