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1.
This paper presents a critical engagement with current initiatives for ethically-labeled goods in South Africa, thus offering an intervention in a literature on ethical consumption that has previously prioritized the global North. Through an interview-based methodology supported by focus groups in the Western Cape, the paper attends specifically to the strategies shaping recent forms of ethical consumption in South Africa on the part of business and civil society. Campaigns and strategies associated with three of the most prominent ethical labeling initiatives in South Africa—Proudly South African, Fairtrade Label South Africa and the Southern African Sustainable Seafood Initiative (SASSI)—are evaluated. Barnett et al.’s (2011: 90) notion of “mobilizing the ethical consumer” is brought into conversation with ethical consumption literature on local embeddedness in order to assess the ways in which the organizations responsible for these initiatives combine globalizing business and political networks of responsibility with local institutions and values in South Africa. The role played by the discursive construction of a growing South African ‘middle class’ is also acknowledged as part of the process of encouraging ethical consumption on the part of these actors. In conclusion, it is suggested that understanding ethical consumption in South Africa, as elsewhere, requires sensitivity to both transnational networks of globalizing responsibility and localized expressions of ethical consumption.  相似文献   

2.
This paper examines the increasing complexity of interactions between temporary staffing agencies and their client firms within the local labour market of Birmingham, UK. Temporary Staffing Agencies have been identified as active and influential agents in local, national and international labour markets. Their influence on local labour market functioning, national labour regulation and international regulatory frameworks is growing. Existing literature demonstrates the power of large multinational temporary staffing agencies in both established and emerging temporary staffing markets. Such analyses also contend that multinational agencies operate in very different ways to smaller independent ‘back-street’ temporary staffing agencies, with different types of clients and at different ends of the market. However, the research conducted in Birmingham, UK suggests that the reality is more complex. It is argued that there can be more subtle and intricate nuances of relevance to the temporary staffing industry in respect of the relationships that exist between large and small temporary staffing agencies, as well as between such agencies and their clients. We highlight how smaller agencies in Birmingham are utilising a variety of strategies and tactics to creatively ‘bolt-on’ to more formalised national agreements established by multinational agencies with their clients. Moreover, smaller agencies – in some instances – are able to exploit their knowledge of local labour markets to subvert, sabotage and/or infiltrate the activities of multinational agencies in increasingly astute ways. In turn, this generates a series of questions for understanding the nature of ‘market making’ associated with the temporary staffing industry more broadly.  相似文献   

3.
This paper explores the precarious working conditions in the Chinese restaurant industry in Sweden – a country considered to have one of Europe’s most liberal labour immigration policies. Drawing upon a theoretical framework inspired by scholarship on precarious work and time geography, the paper argues that precarious work performed by migrant labour can be usefully understood through three interrelated temporal processes that, when they work together, produce and maintain precarious work-life situations. They are: (1) work-time arrangements: that is, actual working hours per day and over the annual cycle, the pace and intensity of work and the flexibility demanded of migrant workers in terms of when work is carried out, (2) the spatio-temporal ‘waiting zones’ indirectly produced by immigration policies that delay full access to labour markets and in which precarious work-time arrangements consequently arise, and (3) migrant workers’ imagined futures, which motivate them to accept precarious work-time arrangements during a transitory period. The paper thus also illuminates that the Chinese chefs in Sweden’s restaurant industry are not just passive victims of exploitative work-time arrangements. Rather, waiting – for a return to China or settlement in Sweden – may be part of migrants’ strategies to achieve certain life course trajectories.  相似文献   

4.
Although the number of directions which geographical research on transport is taking has recently increased, the extent to which transport geography capitalises on theoretical advancements made in other sub-disciplines of human geography is still fairly limited. This especially pertains to economic geography which, in contrast to the predominantly positivist and quantitative transport geography, has developed over the last few decades a more post-positivist and qualitative profile. By means of focusing on passenger air transport – one of the most neglected industries in economic geography – this paper aims to help bridge this gap. Three under-researched aspects of air transport are identified and a combination of two economic-geographical approaches – global production networks (GPN) and evolutionary economic geography (EEG) – is advocated as a useful conceptual basis for further, more qualitative and more critical research on this dynamic sector. The paper argues that GPN and EEG would help research on air transport to: (1) employ network thinking beyond the infrastructural understanding of networks of air connections and thus better explain the multi-actor nature of the aviation sector, (2) complement the research on supra-national and national regulatory frameworks with more attention to the array of sub-national environments that shape the aviation industry ‘from below’, and (3) explore how the relations between aviation and economic development are moulded by different place-specific institutional factors. To lay foundations under further research the paper conceptualises the aviation industry as a global production network and uses the example of Polish passenger air transport to highlight the paper’s key empirical implications.  相似文献   

5.
This paper examines the application of private governance through certification labels and industry initiatives in the tourism industry. These efforts are sold as a way to achieve decent working conditions for tourism workers who participate in global value chains in the global South. The question at hand is, are these mechanisms an effective way to support tourism labor? Specifically, this research documents two main findings. First, I evaluate the programs through a tourism global value chain approach and demonstrate how tour operators use language about sustainability and the certification of accommodation suppliers for brand product differentiation and marketing. My findings demonstrate that these programs do not support tourism workers. Second, even with certification and recommendations, the standards are limited and do not include measures to protect against precarious employment, gendered divisions of labor, and emotional labor demands. Thus, these initiatives do not fully protect tourism workers. Finally, I argue a new governance research approach focused on workers’ rights and empowerment provides insights into achieving a more equitable international tourism landscape. This has implications for a governance analysis focused on rights and ‘synergistic’ governance strategies.  相似文献   

6.
In this paper I offer a critical analysis of ‘sharing’ as a discursive formation in the emerging on-demand economy or, as its more commonly known, ‘sharing’ economy. The set of firms and digital platforms that constitute the on-demand economy evade precise definition, though in popular commentary include Uber, Lyft, Airbnb, Taskrabbit, Couchsurfing, and Yelp, among others. I argue that sharing is a discursive formation that is produced through neoliberal economic practices and contributes to their constitution and performance, connoting the embeddedness and inter-determination of the economic with the social. I analyze interview material with software developers and others working for on-demand economy firms in San Francisco to underscore how the sharing discourse is produced, and to examine the possible relationship between the sharing discourse and working practices in the on-demand economy. I explore how sharing, though a fragile and contested discourse, has been used by some proponents of the on-demand economy in an attempt to justify and normalize flexible and precarious work through an ambiguous association between capitalist exchange and altruistic social values. This ambiguity is productive insofar as sharing has become associated variously with transactional platforms, digital peer review via surveillant and punitive ratings systems, and algorithmically mediated, precarious, and ‘entrepreneurial’ contract work, while retaining affective associations with community, inclusion, and participation.  相似文献   

7.
This paper engages with contemporary debates in labour geography through its focus on: migrant workers as active agents of change; precarious employment, its complexities and consequences; and the importance of material spaces in migrant labour struggles. Since the early 2000s the South Korean government has been strengthening the institutionalised regulation of low-wage migrant workers. A key tool in this process is the Employment Permit System (EPS), in force since 2004. Under this policy migrant workers are temporary sojourners and effectively socio-politically, culturally and spatially excluded from Korean society. EPS restricts migrants’ freedom to choose or change workplaces, which renders them vulnerable to economic and social precarity. Employers use these restrictions to segregate migrant workers from co-nationals, and low-waged migrant workers often find themselves in exploitative working conditions in isolated places. This paper is based on deep ethnographic fieldwork in “Nepal Town” in Seoul and remote Nepalese workers’ accommodation. We examine how such precarious working conditions and isolation impact on workers’ active involvement in the formation and transformation of Nepal Town in Seoul. We examine the ways in which Nepal Town is a site of spatial agency and praxis for Nepalese workers and explore the potentialities of ‘reactive ethnicity’. The empirical insights provided, suggest that the regulatory migration regime for low-wage migrant workers is strongly linked with new formations of material landscapes of connection, mobility, freedom and safe space. Such space production enables migrant workers to perform agency and employ tactics of resistance in order to create spaces of possibility.  相似文献   

8.
The increasing ‘trans-scalar’ conditions of urbanity imply unique opportunities and threats for urban policies. When drawing up strategic urban policies, cities are confronted with the dominance of higher level policy programmes and even more so with the hegemonic power of globalizing markets. Could urban policies also undergo a similar change and actively pursue the enlargement of local power and energies by becoming actively involved in the higher level scaled networks? By building on useful concepts of urban regime theory and more recent rescaling theories, the authors argue that this element of ‘foreign policy’ should be integrated in the core analysis of urban policy approaches. The case is explored and illustrated in two European examples of strategic urban planning, namely Barcelona and Copenhagen. The cases provide evidence of the enlargement of local power via active trans-scalar policies. For civic groups, however, this strategy still appears to be a bridge too far in both cases.  相似文献   

9.
This paper uses the resource curse hypothesis to explore diamond exploitation in Sierra Leone during the period 1930–2010. Focusing on national and local level analysis, it examines whether the net impact of diamond exploitation was a ‘resource curse’ or ‘blessing’ during four time periods: colonial and early post-independence era, the APC era, the civil war period, and post-war era. The paper argues that the net impact of diamond exploitation in Sierra Leone has not been constant; rather it has changed between resource blessing and curse over different major periods of Sierra Leone’s history and at local and national scales since inception of diamond exploitation. This paper illustrates that during the period 1968–1992 patrimonial politics undermined official diamond exploitation and significantly contributed to a pendulum shift in the net effects of diamond exploitation from resource blessing to curse. The study shows that the net effect of diamond exploitation was: a resource blessing (especially at the national level) prior to 1968; more of a resource curse during the APC era; a full blown manifestation of the curse during the civil war period; and that governance of the diamond sector has improved sufficiently in post-civil war Sierra Leone to start the gradual transformation of diamonds to resource blessing, at national and local levels.  相似文献   

10.
Private sector actors are playing an increasingly significant role in the definition and governance of ‘sustainable’ agri-food practices. Yet, to date little attention has been paid by social scientists to how greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are addressed as part of private agri-food governance arrangements. This paper examines how private actors within agri-food supply chains respond to emerging pressure for measures to reduce GHG emissions from agriculture. Drawing upon the Anglo-Foucauldian governmentality literature, we introduce the notion of the corporate carbon economy to conceptualise the practical techniques that enable private agri-food actors to make GHG emissions thinkable and governable in the context of existing market, regulatory, and supply chain pressures. Using a case study of the Australian dairy industry, we argue that private agri-food actors utilise a range of techniques that enable them to respond to existing government environmental regulations, balance current market pressures with future supply chain requirements, and demonstrate improved eco-efficiency along food supply chains. These techniques – which include environmental self-assessment instruments, tools for measuring GHG emissions, and sustainability reporting – have little direct relevance to the ‘international climate regime’ of carbon trading, and carbon markets more broadly, yet individually and in combination they are crucial in enacting an alternative regime of GHG governance. In concluding, we contend that the growing use of sustainability metrics by international food companies is likely to have the most powerful implications for GHG governance in the agri-food sector, with potentially far-reaching consequences for how future action on climate change is rendered thinkable and practicable.  相似文献   

11.
Labour geography foregrounds the role of workers in shaping geographies of work by paying attention to the larger actions of labour in response to the capital and state. It however pays less attention to the everyday geographies of labour and the complexities of the ‘social being’ in trying to understand workers motivations and responses. This review argues for labour geography to look beyond the factory gates to understand the nuanced politics of labour as relations get ‘reworked’ within a patriarchal-capitalist society. It argues for paying close attention to the life stories and experiences of workers, to create linkages between lives as waged workers in a formal workspace with the informal nature of work-life outside, without losing sight of the larger struggles of labour and global processes, to develop a more grounded understanding of worker’s agency and actions.  相似文献   

12.
Environmental conservation is increasingly operated through partnerships among state, private, and civil society actors, yet little is known empirically about how such collectives function and with what livelihood and governance outcomes. The landscape approach to conservation (known also as the ecosystem approach) is one such hybrid governance platform. Implemented worldwide over the past decade by international NGOs, the landscape approach employs the ‘ecosystem principles’ of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). In spite of its prominence as a conservation and development strategy, little political ecology scholarship has considered the landscape approach. This article offers a case study of a conservation landscape in the Congo Basin, the Tri-National de la Sangha (TNS), which connects tropical forests in Cameroon, Republic of Congo, and Central African Republic. Led by NGOs, the TNS has since 2001 relied on partnerships among logging companies, safari hunters, the state, and local communities. Although the landscape approach purports to facilitate re-negotiations of user rights, resource access patterns in the TNS appear to have molded to pre-existing power relations. Rather than incorporating local concerns and capabilities into management, local knowledge is discredited and livelihoods are marginalized. As a result, management occurs through spatially-demarcated zones, contrasting the fluidity of interactions among diverse groups: both human (loggers, hunter-gatherers, safari guides, NGOs) and non-human (trees, elephants). These findings are situated within a burgeoning literature on neoliberal environmental governance, and suggest that ensuring ecologically and socially positive outcomes will require careful and iterative attention to linkages between ecological processes and evolving power dynamics.  相似文献   

13.
Voluntary associations are at the heart of Swedish rural policy and strategies for governance as partners in bringing about ‘development from below.’ Examining the implications of this new responsibility being placed on the civil society in new modes of multilevel governance, I ask: do these changes presage greater political space for individuals vis à vis the state or is Swedish rural policy premised on ideas about an institutional context that might be disappearing? In comparative research in rural Sweden, I discuss state and civil-society relations at the macro level in light of the gendered micro-politics of associational life on the ground. Through ethnographic research with people involved in development work of different kinds, I examine how ideas about community associations are used to mobilize rural policy. I analyze its’ political implications and argue for the importance of analyzing macro in relation to the micropolitics on the ground for a better theoretical understanding of democracy and power in rural governance, in particular its gendered implications. I argue that past collaborative relations between the civil society and the state’s administrative apparatuses as well as the current focus of rural policy have enabled the state to hand over service functions to the civil society and diluted their ‘voice,’ incongrously endangering the institutional basis of rural policy itself. Further, attention to the gendered micropolitics of associational life makes apparent cleavages within civil society and its underlying relations of gender and power that challenge current conceptualizations on the neoliberalization of rural policy.  相似文献   

14.
Building on recent criticisms within the literature on queer migration raised by Andrew Gorman-Murray and Nathaniel Lewis, the article explores ‘unconventional’ trajectories of queer migration: a Global North metropolitan area-Global North metropolitan area one and a Global North metropolitan area-Global North ordinary city one. Two very different migration patterns are analyzed: the movement of young queer ‘creative’ Italians from different metropolitan areas (Rome, Milan, Bologna, Catania, Naples, Padua and Turin) towards Berlin (Germany) and the relocation of young queers from the major Italian cities (Rome and Milan) towards ordinary/small size towns. Aimed at highlighting the complexity of material and immaterial factors leading the decision to migrate in times of crisis, austerity politics and increasing unemployment, the article introduces the role of welfare regimes in shaping migration’s choices. This way, queer migrants and their socio-economic status and possibilities find materially situated within national/local welfare regimes, thus challenging the teleological binarism of the ‘coming-out’ journey always presuming a rural/urban movement for queer subjects. Within such a framework, the ordinary/small size town can become a place for ‘outness’ and self-realization of queer migrants who create bridges and connections with the metropolitan areas, thus queering the provincial contexts.  相似文献   

15.
In most Latin American countries, issues concerning water governance and control also reflect broader conflicts over authority and legitimacy between the state and civil society. What lies behind the diverse water policy reforms is not simply a question of governing water affairs but also a drive to control or co-opt water user groups. This paper examines the efforts by the present Ecuadorian government to ‘control water users’ through new forms of ‘governmentality’ (Foucault, 1991). We use the ‘cathedral and bazaar’ metaphor (Lankford and Hepworth, 2010) to illustrate government rationale and practices in water governance shifts in the last decades. We analyze how Rafael Correa’s government sets out to reshape the relations between state, market and society. In its ‘Twenty-first Century Socialism’ project, based on a proclaimed ‘Citizen Revolution’, actual policy reform does not reverse but rather transforms the process of neoliberalizing water governance – creating a hybrid bazaar-cathedral model. We argue that the current water govermentality project implements reforms that do not challenge established market-based water governance foundations. Rather it aims to contain and undermine communities’ autonomy and ‘unruly’ polycentric rule-making, which are the result of both historical and present-day processes of change. Interestingly, water user federations that emerged during the neoliberal wave of the last two decades now claim water control space and search for new forms of democratizing water governance. They act as agents who fiercely – yet selectively and strategically – oppose both elements of the State-centered (cathedral) and market-based (bazaar) water governance models.  相似文献   

16.
Critical academic research has yet to comprehensively identify conceptual linkages and tensions between information communication technologies (ICTs) and land governance projects. In order to make a contribution to these complex research fields, this article examines three Kenyan projects to illustrate different aspects of competing theoretical frameworks for ICT-based land rights projects. The projects documented land and property in the informal settlements of Kibera and Mathare in Nairobi, and in the rural community of Lari in Kiambu County. Drawing particularly on conceptual frameworks that emphasize the ‘disruptive’ potentials of ICTs, and frameworks based on e-government models, the article argues that these projects include both disruptive aspects, which work through applying pressure on the state, and more ‘integrative’ approaches which seek to build state capacity. The projects also rely on multiple stakeholders, and cannot be easily categorized within simple narratives of crowdsourcing, for example. Instead the realities are more complex and ‘success’ is difficult to assess, and potential uses of such projects are open and multiple.  相似文献   

17.
In recent decades, water has been subjected to different commodification and de-collectivization processes. Increasingly, this is also affecting collective irrigation water management. Critical analysis of this privatization and de-collectivization wave in the irrigation sector has mainly focused on neoliberal institutional policies and market-oriented legislation. However, subtly and silently but equally determinant, the adoption of water-saving technologies is fostering the penetration of private enterprise and market-based governance into these hydro-social settings. This paper discusses this phenomenon through a case study of the community of Senyera in Valencia, Spain, tracking the privatization and subsequent contestation and re-takeover of water management by irrigation system users. The article shows how privatization removes users’ autonomy in the name of common well-being, and increases irrigation costs in a context of little transparency. But the case also highlights users’ capacity to re-value and re-signify their past collective action, remembering and ‘re-membering to’ the collective. Senyera water users critically and reflexively analyse privatization, reconstruct societal relationships around and embedded inside the new technology, and re-collectivize and re-moralize irrigation management in a new hydro-social scenario.  相似文献   

18.
In Vietnam, initial programs to Reduce Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) have proliferated through international finance and new governance regimes for climate change mitigation. National capacity and legal frameworks have been adjusted to make the country eligible for REDD+ financing. In some local areas, activities have been implemented to ‘produce’ carbon credits intended for the international voluntary carbon market. Through a case study of a pilot REDD+ project in the Central Highlands of Vietnam, we examine how REDD+ has intersected with property rights institutions and agrarian change to influence changing property relations and commodity markets. Our findings show that REDD+ implemented through state and local institutions has articulated with the local political economy to coproduce conditions that embody local norms, needs, and desires. Specifically, local actors negotiate state-sanctioned tenurial instruments used for REDD+ governance, not for the purposes of carbon sequestration but instead in order to reassert their rights to land and forest for the cultivation of boom crops—the antithesis of REDD+ objectives. In the fine balancing act of adjusting local forestland holdings, REDD+ implementation has effectively facilitated increased opportunities for upland villagers to strategically claim land titles from local political authorities in the form of communal land certificates for forests called ‘Red Books’. In securing communal Red Books, villagers redefine or co-constitute the purpose of REDD+ to secure land for cash crop and commercial timber production. As with other forms of environmental governance, REDD+ is thus co-constituted locally in line with state and local institutions and histories and present day realities.  相似文献   

19.
This essay examines neoliberal forms of resource governance and emerging struggles over control of sea space between coastal fishers, the para-statal oil industry and government authorities in the State of Tabasco, Mexico. The analysis focuses on the changing mechanisms of resource governance and networking related to contested claims over rights to offshore space. The study is based on material collected during ethnographic field research in Tabasco in 2011–2014. By linking a post-Foucauldian approach to governmentality with a Deleuzian perspective on networks, our research examines resource governance as a socio-political arena, constructed in negotiation between multiple governmental, private and civil society actors, including heterogeneous groups from local populations. The study demonstrates how hybrid techniques of resource governance lead to fishers’ socio-spatial displacement, marginalization in the fields of political representation and subjection to ideas of aquaculture entrepreneurship. The ensemble of private regulation and governmental control provides a venue for drawing fishers into clientelist practices of governing while it diffuses questions of responsibility. These modes of governance fragment the fishers’ efforts to mobilize politically, making them rely on less visible networks of contestation shaped by heterogeneous fishing groups, with varying access to resources and political representation. Recent transformations in environmental legislation and the fishers’ mobile tactics of networking may offer opportunities for them to reclaim their resource rights.  相似文献   

20.
Fair Trade emerged to commercialise Southern products in the Global North on terms overtly beneficial to Southern producers. However, a contemporary phenomenon is the development of Fair Trade consumer markets within the Global South itself: and the paper explores this as a contribution to the evolving geographies of ethical consumerism. Data was captured from secondary sources and field visits that included in-depth interviews and participant observation. Analysis is informed by theories of market creation developed in economic geography and economic sociology. As such we focus on understanding (1) the architecture, or networks and institutions, of commercialisation, governance and certification and (2) the marketing practices and strategies, designed to resonate with and develop cognitive association amongst consumers. Given the alternative geographies of South–South vis-à-vis South–North Fair Trade, we deepen the geographical focus by applying frameworks emerging from the concept of ‘geographical entanglement’. Findings identify the similarities and differences of both Southern Fair Trade market creation and marketing compared to the European experience. In some cases, the place-based ‘othering’, often used to develop sympathetic cognitive frames in Northern marketing, is identified, but this time operates around alternative geographical binaries. In other cases, we highlight instances that avoid such divisive place-making, and which instead draw on inclusive, rather than divisive, imagined geographies, overlaid with the collective aspiration for development, pride and dignity. These findings therefore inform the nature of geographical entanglement followed by ethical market creation, as well as contributing to the wider theoretical understanding of moral geographies endogenous to the Global South.  相似文献   

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