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1.
Lado C 《GeoJournal》1997,41(1):43-53
The paper examines the socio-economic and political issues of sustainable water supply in Botswana. It pays particular attention to the actual and potential role of economic instruments. Water consumption occurs both in a market and non-market contexts (producer = consumer). Due to rapidly increasing water demand and the fact that the "easy" solutions to increase water supply have largely elapsed, Botswana is concerned with water shortages which may hamper peoples basic needs and industrial development in the future. Other sustainability concerns relate to the environment (pollution), social factors (equity and affordability) and economic considerations (cost recovery and efficiency). Prices, costs and the value of water are instrumental in striking a compromise between these goals. Trends in pricing and their relationship with costs and resource value are presented, and the impact of prices and subsidies on water demand and supply reviewed in order to assess their contribution towards a sustainable equilibrium. There is a substantial scope to improve the performance of economic instruments such as price subsidies and tax relief. The long-term marginal costs calculated in the Botswana National Water Master Plan contribute to prices approaching the costs of water production, but it excludes the environmental considerations. Resource scarcity is partly reflected where it increases the water supply costs; the indirect use and non-use values and external impacts are not incorporated in the water charges. Higher prices would increase the economic feasibility of water recycling and water harvesting and generate investment capital needed for the expansion of the water supply systems. Government subsidies may discourage efficient resource use. It is generally concluded that there is need for greater emphasis on re-use of waste water and control of the demand by harmonizing fees or tariffs between urban and rural areas as far as non-essential use is concerned; and provide more incentives for large-scale consumers to increase water use efficiency and sustainability. 相似文献
2.
《Geoforum》2015
Economic instruments are being promoted as a desirable alternative to public sector action in the allocation and management of natural resources. A wide body of literature has developed that critically analyzes this phenomenon as part of a wider project of ‘neoliberalization of nature’, trying to uncover the underlying rationale and commonalities of geographically specific phenomena. The case of water is at the vanguard of these processes and is proving to be particularly contentious. In the European Union water policies are increasingly emphasizing the application of economic instruments to improve the allocative equity and economic efficiency in the use of scarce resources. However, there are few analyses of how these instruments are really working on the ground and whether they are meeting their objectives. This paper aims to contribute to this debate by critically analyzing the experience with water markets in Spain, the only country in the European Union where they are operative. It looks at water permit sales during the 2005–2008 drought period using the Tajo–Segura transfer infrastructure. The paper describes how the institutional process of mercantilización of water works in practice in Spain. It shows that the use of markets requires an intense process of institutional development to facilitate and encourage their operation. These institutions tend to favor the interests of clearly identifiable elites, instead of the public interest they supposedly promote. 相似文献
3.
South Australian farmers’ markets: tools for enhancing the multifunctionality of Australian agriculture 总被引：1，自引：0，他引：1
This paper critically examines the role of farmers’ markets in Australian agriculture. A case study is undertaken in South Australia, where all stallholders at three farmers’ markets situated in Adelaide, Willunga and Berri were surveyed regarding their production and marketing techniques. Overall responses supported literature highlighting the importance of farmers’ markets to the producers who chose to exploit this marketing niche. A strong co-reliance on ‘wholesale sales’ was also recognised, suggesting an important integration of productivist and post-productivist approaches to agricultural development. Of most promise for long-term agricultural sustainability was evidence that certain groups of farmers were found to be realising the potential of these and other alternative markets, in terms of their risk reducing capacity, and diversifying to include various conservation values into their agricultural enterprises. These groups were less concerned about market fluctuations and more concerned with issues of social equity, environmental health and having fun, which meant they unwittingly epitomised the goals of political ecology, by challenging the dominant agricultural methods of production and marketing. It seems these groups also recognised that the direct nature of their transactions would sow beneficial social, environmental and economic ‘seeds’ for change. Finally, it is argued that policies to improve access to farmers’ markets and reduce the cost of participation would assist small scale Australian agricultural producers to evolve smoothly into a multifunctional era. 相似文献
4.
Judith A. Rees 《Geoforum》1982,13(4):289-300
Without denying the physical relaity of water shortages during the 1982 Australia drought, it is argued that some of the difficulties arise not from climatic factors but from the way the water resource is managed. An attempt is made to explain why metropolitan Australia can continue to make profligate use of water, while rural Australia suffers scarcity. The system of administration is considered and the capacity planning and pricing policies of supply authorities analysed. Finally, a call is made for the introduction of an effective integrated management system. 相似文献
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6.
Matthew W. Wilson 《Geoforum》2012,43(6):1266-1275
The production and consumption of geographic information is becoming a more mobile practice, with more corporate actors challenging the traditional stronghold of Esri- and government-based geospatial developments. What can be considered a geographic information system has expanded to include web-based technologies like Google Earth/Maps, as well as more recent developments of Microsoft’s Bing Maps and the mobile version of ArcGIS available for the iPhone. In addition to these developments, a discursive shift toward ‘location’ is occurring across the Internet industry. Location has become the new buzzword for social-spatial strategies to target consumers. As reported in 2010, venture capitalists have, since 2009, invested $115 million into ‘location start-ups’ – software companies that provide location-based services to mobile computing consumers (Miller and Wortham, 2010). Applications like Foursquare, Loopt, Gowalla, and most recently, Facebook Places allow users to ‘check-in’ at restaurants, bars, gyms, retail outlets, and offices, thereby sharing their location within their social network. These developments enable consumers to (re)discover their proximities to products, while feeding a desire for making known one’s everyday movements. Here, I discuss the development of location-based services as the proliferation of a peculiar form of geographic information: conspicuous mobility. Through discussion of a recent gathering of location-aware software professionals and through analysis of discourses that emerge over a battle between ‘check in’ companies, I sketch an area of study that explores the implications of these emerging geographic information ‘systems’, and new everyday cartographers. 相似文献
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Clive Barnett 《Geoforum》2012,43(4):677-686
Post-Marxist and poststructuralist ontologies of the political have been important reference points for recent discussions of democracy in critical human geography and related fields. This paper considers the conceptual placement of contestation in a strand of democratic theory often denigrated by these approaches, namely theories of deliberative democracy informed by post-Habermasian Critical Theory. It is argued that this concern with contestation derives from a focus on the relationships between different rationalities of action. It is proposed that this tradition of thought informs a distinctively phenomenological approach to understanding the situations out of which democratic energies emerge. In elaborating on this phenomenological understanding of the emergence of political space, the paper proceeds in three stages. First, it is argued that the strong affinities between ontological conceptualisations of ‘the political’ and the ontological register of canonical spatial theory squeezes out any serious consideration of the plural rationalities of ordinary political action. Second, debates between deliberative and agonistic theorists of democracy are relocated away from questions of ontology. These are centred instead on disputed understandings of ‘normativity’. This move opens up conceptual space for the analysis of phenomenologies of injustice. Third, using the example of debates about transnational democracy in which critical theorists of deliberative democracy explicitly address the reconfigurations of the space of ‘the political’, it is argued that this Critical Theory tradition can contribute to a distinctively ‘topological’ sense of political space which follows from thinking of political action as emerging from worldly situations of injustice. In bringing into focus this phenomenological approach to political action, the paper has lessons for both geographers and political theorists. Rather than continuing to resort to a priori models of what is properly political or authentically democratic, geographers would do well to acknowledge the ordinary dynamics and disappointments which shape political action. On the other hand, political theorists might do well to acknowledge the limits of the ‘methodological globalism’ that characterises so much recent work on the re-scaling of democracy. 相似文献
9.
Ebenezer Forkuo Amankwaa 《GeoJournal》2017,82(2):329-344
This article explores the experiences of sachet water vendors along traffic lights in Accra, Ghana. It particularly focuses on the entry dynamics, job orientation, and the possible existence and consequences of job discomfort. The findings reveal that vendors fall into three main work categories: ‘seekers’ (who actively chose the ‘female’ occupation), ‘finders’ (who did not actively seek the occupation but who found it in the process of a job search) and ‘settlers’ (who actively chose the occupation, due to rising unemployment, and then settled in the job). In terms of job orientation, settlers are associated with intrinsic rewards than finders who seek extrinsic rewards. The findings further indicate that men sell 10 bags daily less than what women sell 15 bags—an indication of vendors contribution to the booming sachet water business in Accra. Averagely, while men earn GH¢25 daily, women earn GH¢35 which is almost 6 times higher than the daily-minimum-wage (DMW) pegged at GH¢6. 相似文献
10.
《Geoforum》2015
What is ‘good food’? Is it fair trade, local, organic or ethically produced? With an ever-expanding array of products and ‘qualities’ to consider, consumers in the global North may find it increasingly difficult and time-consuming to make the ‘right’ choices. As a result, a range of intermediaries, including food apps and collective buying groups, are emerging to support and influence people with their food choices. While intermediation refers to all activities linking producers and consumers, this paper narrows the focus and considers one important, yet poorly understood, intermediary function within the food marketplace: ‘curation’. Although the concept of curation has long been associated with museums and art worlds, curatorial practices are evolving in the contemporary marketplace and are performed by a growing range of actors operating in physical, temporary and virtual spaces. Rather than acting as brokers or gatekeepers, curators interpret, translate and shape the marketplace by sorting, organising, evaluating and ascribing value(s) to specific products. They also offer general and personalised recommendations to consumers. Although the literature on local food privileges the direct relations between producers and consumers, this paper considers the important role of intermediaries. Drawing on interviews and participant observation in Sweden it contributes to the existing literature on curation by examining the spatial dynamics and nature of curatorial practices, the motivations behind them and the values they create for consumers. The findings demonstrate that a range of activities can be understood as curation and that in order to nuance and extend existing conceptualisations of curation a wider and more dynamic range of actors (food apps), spaces (blogs) and values such as inspiration, convenience and sense of community need to be considered. 相似文献
11.
The article discusses research undertaken in East London into perceptions of educational choice amongst a group of middle-class parents drawn from all the main ethnic groups. It focuses on the way in which faith schools are slowly being drawn into the mainstream discourse of choice and how many groups are now beginning to regard such schools as their fall back of choice when it becomes apparent that they are unlikely to get their child into a preferred non-selective secondary school (and increasingly a preferred primary school). This mainstreaming of faith schooling is driven by the attractions to such parents of these schools’ ethos, their perception of them as having a favourable social mix of ‘people like us’ and their generally high record of attainment. It is argued that this increase in demand for faith schools is leading to changes in the recruitment patterns away from primarily faith-based criteria to ones based around a more diffuse (and middle-class) ethos and educational potential. In addition, where such schools once served a wider East London geographical area, there is some evidence that they are now becoming more focused around a local ‘catchment area’ in ways similar to the same popular non-selective schools to which the same group of parents aspired. 相似文献
12.
Walter H. Rambousek 《Geoforum》1982,13(2):163-175
Cameroon's economic development is without doubt a story of success. Since independence, the country has been favoured by internal and external advantages but, as in most African countries south of the Sahara, the results of regional development policies — in spite of an existing and sound planning structure — are disappointing. Cameroon was always well-provided with the now fashionable ‘integrated’, ‘basic need-oriented’, ‘bottom-up’ and ‘development-from-within’ regional policy programmes. In discussing such a programme and proposing elements of a modified development strategy, it can, however, be argued that even the first step of creating a basic regional development project has been far from satisfactory. Further, in spite of government rhetoric, no regional development policy as normally defined exists. What does exist are regional effects of development projects. This prompts the question of whether it may be preferable to replace the term ‘regional development policy’, and to return to a ‘regionally based, comprehensively planned, project policy’, based on facts which first have to be collected and analysed. 相似文献
13.
Along with carbon emission regulations launched by governments and consumers’ rising concerns about climate changes and global carbon footprint, interests of academia and industry have risen in carbon-efficient supply chain management. This research focuses on some product supply chain to make a literature review-based investigation on proposing a theoretical framework. We also solve potential research issues of how diverse carbon emission regulations can work on supply chain performance as well as emission; in what way we can find coordination mechanisms and optimal policies for supply chain operations to abate emission and enhance system profitability within different scenarios; and also to evaluate the effect on emission reduction for each emission regulation aforementioned through comparing their associated supply chain performances and system emission. Both practitioners in industry and academia might find this study useful, as it generates concepts with a formal framework of potential and values theoretical issues in the emerging field of carbon-efficient supply chain management which combines carbon emission regulations with mature operation management to enrich the theory of supply chain management. This study is perhaps to be valuable and constructive both for operational decisions in firms and for the enactment as well as implementation of emission-reduction regulations. This study should activate further potential researches. 相似文献
14.
Martin Oteng-Ababio 《GeoJournal》2014,79(3):357-371
Urbanization is a product of development and in recent years, most cities have been experiencing unprecedented growth with improvements in their infrastructure. The obvious benefits of the process tend to paradoxically overshadow its insidious symptoms, as unregulated growth tend to create huge unmet needs such as lack of access to good-quality services, increasing poverty and deteriorating environment. The origin of this dichotomy is rooted in the governance practices where city authorities pay greater attention to issues of managing the ‘global commons’ than the critical ‘brown issues’, such as improving water supply and sanitation that affect the urban poor. Using multiple research techniques, this study highlights how such neglected necessities consign sections of the population to one of the deadly infectious diseases Ghana has ever known—cholera. The paper calls for an all-inclusive and explicitly pro-poor community-led orientation as one of the effective strategy for achieving equity in the urban settings and possibly, helps win the ‘war’ on poor sanitation. 相似文献
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Geo-information tools for participatory spatial planning: Fulfilling the criteria for ‘good’ governance? 总被引：2，自引：0，他引：2
The last few decades have seen increasing attempts to foster ‘collaborative’ and ‘participatory’ approaches to spatial planning and decision-making, with a more sophisticated conceptualisation of the contested term, participation. Participatory, ‘bottom-up’ geo-information technologies have been concurrently developing and these are expected to strengthen participatory spatial planning; important among these has been the transformation of conventional mapping and GIS tools into Participatory GIS (PGIS). In this paper we explore the potential contributions of participatory geo-information tools towards participatory spatial planning, in terms of the principles and criteria of good governance. We discuss five fundamental principles of ‘good’ governance: accountability, legitimacy, respect, equity, and competence, and the potential of geo-information tools to contribute to, and detract from, such principles; although we focus especially on participation and the recognition and validation of local knowledge. We derive criteria for the five principles, and we identify a range of evaluation questions which can be operationalised so as to interrogate the criteria for judging the contribution of participatory tools and participatory spatial planning activities. We conclude by summarily assessing the potentials of participatory geo-information tools, particularly participatory mobile GIS, participatory 3-dimensional modelling, and visualisation features in PGIS. 相似文献
17.
There has been considerable debate about whether the controversial tyrannosauroid dinosaur ‘Nanotyrannus lancensis’ from the uppermost Cretaceous of North America is a valid taxon or a juvenile of the contemporaneous Tyrannosaurus rex. In a recent Cretaceous Research article, Schmerge and Rothschild (2016) brought a new piece of evidence to this discussion: the morphology of the dentary groove, a depression on the lateral surface of the dentary that houses neurovascular foramina. They argued that an alleged ‘Nanotyrannus’ specimen, which possesses a groove, cannot be referable to Tyrannosaurus rex, which they considered as lacking the groove, and they hypothesized that ‘Nanotyrannus’ is closely related to albertosaurine tyrannosauroids, which also are said to possess the groove. However, we show that the groove is a widespread feature of tyrannosauroids that is present in T. rex and many other specimens, and that it is an ontogenetically variable feature that changes from a sharp, deeply-impressed groove to a shallower sulcus as an individual matures. As a result, the presence or absence of a dentary groove does not clarify the validity of ‘Nanotyrannus’ or its phylogenetic position among tyrannosauroids. We consider it most parsimonious that ‘Nanotyrannus’ specimens belong to juvenile T. rex. 相似文献
18.
W Kampschuur 《Tectonophysics》1975,27(1):57-81
Data are presented which make it possible to complete the alpine deformation scheme in the rocks of the eastern Sierra de los Filabres (southeast Spain). The deformation schemes of the basal part and cover of the Nevado—Filabride complex have been compared in order to establish the possible existence of a pre-alpine regional metamorphism. It is further argued that the first alpine kinematic metamorphism in the Nevado-Filabride rocks has not taken place under typical HP-LT conditions. Evidence is given to show that the ‘late’ thrust masses — distinguished by H.W. Voet (1967) — should be considered as distinct tectonic units whereby the Nevado—Filabride rocks are grouped together in the ‘higher Nevado-Filabride units’. 相似文献
19.
Karen J. Bakker 《Geoforum》2003,34(3):359-374
A little over a decade after privatization, the water supply industry in England and Wales is undergoing a period of restructuring; many water companies have withdrawn from equity markets, some have separated asset ownership from operation and maintenance, and others have made proposals to return water supply infrastructure to public control through ‘mutuals’ or ‘customer corporations’. This paper situates the restructuring of the water industry within broader debates over ‘associative self-governance’ taking place in Britain. Underpinned by a conceptual framework drawing on insights from regulation theory, in which governance models are enacted through regulatory practice, the interrelationship between restructuring and re-regulation of the water supply industry is analyzed. The paper argues that the failure of the post-privatization regulatory model to contain the contradictions between stable returns and the efficiency imperative, on the one hand, and politically acceptable rates of return and the equity imperative, on the other, led to a re-regulation of the water supply industry, which was a key factor in restructuring. Restructuring has entailed multiple strategies (diversification, internationalization, vertical de-integration, mutualization, securitization), which are briefly analyzed. In contrast to analyses which depict restructuring as a ‘retreat of the market’, the analysis presented in this paper emphasizes the continuity of the commercial governance model applied in the water supply industry in 1989. In interpreting restructuring as an industry response to re-regulation of services provision, the paper interrogates the incentive structure underpinning current proposals for a ‘mutual’ future for public services in Britain. 相似文献
20.
《Geoforum》2016
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