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1.
The issue of the social geographical dimensions of climate change is timely and important. This paper sets out to explore one example of this: how people living in the Pacific who are most at risk of being made landless by climate change are portrayed in policy discourse, and how high-level international representatives of Pacific nations have responded to these portrayals. At the heart of this is contention over the portrayal of Pacific Island peoples as ‘climate refugees’. This paper analyses a number of documents since the 1980s, largely from non-governmental organisations (NGOs) that deploy the identity construct of ‘climate refugees’. Fieldwork undertaken at the United Nations in New York in 2004 also enabled seven interviews with national ambassadors representing Pacific small island states. Interviews revealed how Pacific ambassadors have responded to the category of ‘climate refugees’, and positioned themselves in the discursive field surrounding the climate change debate. A poststructuralist framework, drawing on Foucault’s ideas of discourse and subject categories provided a means to critically scrutinise and better understand how people from Pacific countries are imagined in the wider, global geopolitical arena, but crucially, how leaders from these nations also construct themselves in relation to climate change and its associated impacts. 相似文献
2.
Sally A. Weller 《Geoforum》2009,40(2):136-144
This paper uses Australia’s 1980s shift to a new accumulation strategy of ‘international competitiveness’ to examine the role of failure in shaping state strategic projects. The paper argues that the Australian strategy’s gradual shift from an interventionist to a market-led orientation played out in competing representations of failure. Whether particular policies were perceived as failures depended not only on their material effects, but also on the ways in which failure was defined and on the values underpinning those definitions. As representations of failure establish the boundaries between the incremental adaptations that stabilise an accumulation strategy and the more radical failures characteristic of crisis, they illuminate how processes of discursive selectivity ‘fix’ state projects’ temporal, scalar and spatial dimensions. 相似文献
3.
Carol Morris 《Geoforum》2006,37(1):113-127
This paper explores the role of knowledge in the development of more environmentally sustainable farming systems in the UK and specifically seeks to reveal the porosity of the boundary between state-led and farmer approaches to knowing nature. Its empirical focus is two government sponsored ‘agri-environment schemes’—the Countryside Stewardship scheme and the Environmentally Sensitive Area scheme—which offer financial incentives to farmers and other land managers who agree to undertake environmentally beneficial practices. As a framework for analysis, the paper draws on the notion of ‘knowledge culture’, with agri-environment schemes represented as an emerging ‘policy knowledge culture’ that is seemingly distinct, in its approach to knowing nature, from pre-existing ‘agrarian knowledge cultures’. Data are derived from two large scale, countrywide surveys of agreement holders in the two agri-environment schemes. These reveal that alongside some resistance to the policy knowledge culture of AES, there is also negotiation and interchange taking place between knowledge cultures, and the policy knowledge culture is adapting to and accommodating aspects of the other. As such, the paper contests the findings of previous studies which assert that the codified knowledge of agri-environment schemes always wins out in the implementation of scheme agreements, with the subsequent marginalisation of other knowledge(s). In turn, it suggests that policy knowledge cultures can give voice to farmers’ ways of knowing nature with benefits both for them and nature itself. The paper concludes with some reflections on the extent of knowledge culture transformation and offers some policy recommendations. 相似文献
4.
Claire Bénit-Gbaffou 《Geoforum》2008,39(6):1933-1950
The paper questions the pluralization of policing devices and security agents across the Johannesburg metropolitan area, which has been accelerated and actually encouraged by public policies in the post-apartheid period. Are the various security initiatives and networks coordinated in a metropolitan security “system” – the regulation of which would need to be analysed – or does their development lead to urban fragmentation? Based on an analysis of an extensive documentation of security services, as well as a series of interviews with involved (street level) actors, different dimensions of potential urban fragmentation linked to security are examined: spatial fragmentation, with the development of road closures and their contestation; financial fragmentation, emblematised by business improvement districts encouraged by the municipality; and political fragmentation, as reflected by the analysis of the broader security policy framework. The paper argues that although the integrated vision of Johannesburg’s policing creates the basis for redistribution of resources and forms of policing regulation at a metropolitan level (in contrast with the apartheid period), the choice of neo-liberal urban policies, of which security strategies form a part, tends to encourage policing fragmentation, or in other words, the differential and unequal provision of security services according to place, income and race. 相似文献
5.
As former industrial cities have experienced radical changes to the bases of their economies, the imperatives of finding new roles and functions has often led to the adoption of cultural policies. These are diverse and partial but have become part of place promotion policies designed to attract visitors and investors. The connection with a literary figure offers one exploitable quality and this paper explores the adoption of Dylan Thomas, poet and writer, as an icon for Swansea. What emerges is the existence of a diversity of interested individuals and groups, who start from different positions but work towards a common goal. The tensions about the life and works of the poet, evident over the 50 years since his death are still there but the key players, including the City and County of Swansea, are finding ways of reconciling their differences in the ‘production’ of Dylan Thomas. This use of a writer and his local connections forms part of the more general process of making a cultural policy for the city. 相似文献
6.
Framed by the UK Government’s efforts to combat social exclusion by encouraging a shift from welfare to work through (re)training, this paper explores the types of training courses being offered to and taken by women with young children in West London. Drawing upon qualitative research, the paper explores the actual and desired uptake of ‘body training’ courses among mothers, linked, in part, to the current ‘body work’ skills gap in the local economy. The encouragement given to women and the interest they have in engaging in ‘body training’ is, we suggest, linked to the discursive construction and performance of a highly feminised and, often, maternal identity, which emphasises women’s caring role and the caring self. By probing the body/training nexus through the motivations and choices of mothers in West London the paper raises questions about gender identity and stereotyping in relation to training-for-work policies and the role of training in (re)inforcing the woman-body coupling within Western dualistic thought. 相似文献
7.
An intense environmental dispute surrounds the maize-fields of Mexico. Mexican maize traditional varieties (or ‘landraces’) constitute a global genetic resource that may well be critical to future agricultural development and corn breeding. Many environmentalists, farmers, and consumers in Mexico are therefore concerned that their maize landraces may have been ‘contaminated’ by imported transgenic maize, grown in the USA. The criticisms of this transgenic technology are complex and call into question the nature of the boundary between political and ecological (i.e. scientific) disputes. Our paper surveys these criticisms, and this political-scientific boundary, in a three-part analysis. First, we turn to Gramsci’s notes on science from his eleventh prison notebook to rethink the political ecology of transgenic maize, i.e., the way the ecological analysis of transgenic introgression is treated as politics. Second, we present the multiple criticisms of transgenic maize as scalar phenomena. Third, we review the recent scientific literature on transgene introgression to evaluate recent calls for the ‘decontamination’ of Mexican maize. Our reading illustrates two dilemmas facing the group that occupies the hegemonic subject-position in this dispute, ecological scientists. First, the popular desire to ‘decontaminate’ Mexican maize exceeds their capacities (due to complications involved with sampling). Second, although the political debate surrounding ‘contaminated’ Mexican maize exceeds science, the boundary between the dispute’s scientific and parascientific elements cannot be adjudicated scientifically. In other words, the boundary between science and politics is porous. Thus in two respects the dispute is ecological, yet beyond the capacity of this science to resolve. Yet, following Gramsci, these findings should not lead us to see science as mere ideology, or apolitical, or encourage a retreat into metaphysics. Rather it points to the need for a social transformation that sees science as “humanity forging its methods of research … in other words, culture, the conception of the world.” By exploring the dilemmas of decontamination, the dispute over transgene introgression in Mexican maize-fields provides an opportunity to elaborate upon Gramsci’s neglected insights into the politics of science. 相似文献
8.
T. Herrschel 《Geoforum》2007,38(3):439-444
Since the collapse of the communist regimes some 15 years ago, the at first rather simplistic assumptions about the quite similar nature of the ‘other side’ of the Iron Curtain soon were revealed as such. The conditions in the different countries proved to be much more complex and differentiated, making policies more difficult to target and outcomes to predict than initially presumed and propagated. As it emerged, the process of ‘transition’, has thus emerged as a multidimensional, complex phenomenon of ‘transition’, shaped by a set of overlapping and intersecting variables, pointing to the need for a more detailed understanding and interpretation of the changes observed. And this includes the use of terminology, even such fundamental terms as ‘post-/socialism’ versus ‘post-/communism’ or ‘transition’ versus ‘transformation’. These differences reflect variations in the perception and implementation of post-communist regimes, as viewed and interpreted from both within and without the relevant countries or regions. And this is illustrated by the collection of papers in this special issue. 相似文献
9.
This paper aims to refine earlier research on the geographies of Islamic financial services (IFS) through a study of how cities are being connected through interlocking directorates in Shari’a advisory boards of IFS firms. The relevance of this analysis is discussed against the backdrop of recent critiques of mainstream ‘world cities’ research because of structuralist and universalizing tendencies. By applying a network concept to the relationalities of world cities within financial circuits, we explore the nested city/firm/actor structure behind Shari’a board membership, and reassess the connectivity of cities in the IFS network in terms of the role and spatialities of interlocking Shari’a boards. The results show that Gulf cities, most notably Manama, Dubai and Kuwait City are particularly well-connected, while also mainstay financial centres outside the Middle East, such as London and New York are networked by interlocking board memberships of a global Shari’a elite. The dominant position of Manama is traced back to its role as a standard-setting city for Shari’a-compliant investments, which materializes through the enacted presence of an array of highly interlocked regulatory bodies and mediating elites. 相似文献
10.
Tassilo Herrschel 《Geoforum》2007,38(3):469-484
This paper investigates the dual nature of regionalisation between imposed institutionalised territoriality and self-made ‘ad hoc’ collaborative regional arrangements between localities. This involves, as the paper sets out to show, different, but concurrent imagineerings of ‘regions’ to two audiences - within and without a defined region. They are applied to the same territory, albeit with different images and sets of actors for internal (local) and external (national/international) consumption. These developments are examined within the context of the ‘new regionalism’ debate, in particular the notion of a replacement of ‘old’ through ‘new’ regionalism as a sequence. This duality of region making challenges the frequently somewhat simplistic presumption of regions forming as one complete entity, ‘out there’ to compete on a global market. They also have to fight for their recognition internally, but with different arguments, rationales and policies. This means that the possibility of overlapping single purpose ad hoc formed regions, as postulated under the new regionalism, needs to take into account the likelihood of several meanings of one and the same territory. The examples demonstrate that the two possibilities overlap - multi-territoriality and multi-meanings of (new) regionalism. The paper uses the example of post-unification eastern Germany, where in 1990 a completely new set of traditional regions was established, implementing a 1960s-derived western German model. Since this common starting point, strong economic, cultural and geographic differences have emerged, leading not only to policy adjustments, but also changes to the understanding of regionalisation and regional policy, and the actors involved. 相似文献
11.
Anoop Nayak 《Geoforum》2003,34(3):303-315
This article seeks to bring young respondents more sharply into focus by considering fear of crime ‘through children’s eyes’. By incorporating children’s perspectives it is argued that more inclusive and integrative community safety initiatives may arise. Inspired by the recent flowering of research undertaken in childhood studies by social and cultural geographers, the study seeks to make a theoretical, empirical and spatial contribution to debates in the field. Based on the findings of a large-scale school survey, the responses indicate that children have an acute place-based sensitivity to a range of highly relevant community safety issues. This includes detailed reflections concerning the place of policing, boredom, youth gangs, motorcars and drugs in their neighbourhoods. It is suggested that the inclusion of children’s accounts into geographical debates not only enriches our knowledge of childhood studies, but also adds detail and texture to our understandings of fear of crime. 相似文献
12.
The paper presents a genealogy of the Bloomberg administration’s Opportunity NYC program, launched in 2007 as part of New York City’s explicitly experimental anti-poverty strategy. Opportunity NYC was modeled on “conditional cash transfer” programs, currently operating in more than thirty countries across the Global South, drawing direct inspiration from Mexico’s widely touted Oportunidades program. This striking case of South-North policy emulation calls attention to some distinctive features of what is characterized here as a transnationalizing “fast-policy” regime, based on technocratic forms of program evaluation and development, dense expert networks, and orchestrated communities of practice, within which a range of policy intermediaries—particularly those connected with multilateral agencies—are assuming significant new roles. What appears to be a pragmatic form of policy learning in fact operates in the context of narrow ideological parameters, within which there is a concerted technocratic “push” toward favored solutions. 相似文献
13.
Linda McDowell 《Geoforum》2007,38(2):276-286
The rise of the notion of ‘respect’ is a key part of the agenda for the third term of the British New Labour Government, first elected in 1997. Here I consider its relationship to and differentiate it from the idea of respectability - a term that has long been used to divide the working class - and consider the links between deference and respect. While the claim that working class youth, especially boys, are ‘disrespectful’ has a long history, I argue that the current focus on respect not only continues this association but also illustrates a deep ambivalence at the heart of the New Labour policy agenda, an uncertainty about the status of young people and a denial of their moral agency. Furthermore, there is a continuation in this agenda of a long-standing designation of certain areas in cities as places to avoid, associated with a disreputable working class population. 相似文献
14.
Following the well-established literature on women’s fear in urban contexts, a small but important literature has also begun to document accounts of boldness, fearlessness and empowerment. We extend this work by considering ways in which women live with, and beyond, experiences of fear. We argue that fear and fearlessness are not discrete and separate states, but rather they are often simultaneous conditions that women negotiate in complex ways. Moving away from a sense of victims and passivity, we suggest that women have spatial and social strategies that can be adopted when they face fear or take up forms of action that might be termed ‘bold’ or ‘courageous’. Consequently, this work draws on Koskela’s [Gender, Place and Culture 4 (1997) 301] previous discussion of ‘bold women’ in Finland to develop a notion of agency and highlight strategies that some rural women adopt in New Zealand. 相似文献
15.
Merje Kuus 《Geoforum》2007,38(2):241-251
This paper investigates the role of intellectuals in the production of geopolitical discourses. It analyzes how the cultural capital of humanist credentials and artistic aura functions to authenticate and legitimate geopolitical claims. Drawing empirically from Central Europe and especially Estonia, I argue that intellectuals are central to the production of a particular ‘cultural’ concept of geopolitics - the notion that foreign policy expresses the state’s and the nation’s identity. As cultural capital gives intellectuals a special license to speak about culture, it constitutes an essential component in geopolitical discourses in Central Europe.The paper contributes to Europeanist geography by clarifying the mechanisms through which Central Europe is cast externally and internally as a place particularly imbued with culture and identity - a place whose integration with the EU and NATO represents its cultural ‘return’ to Europe. It takes us beyond the romanticized notion of intellectuals - especially the formerly dissident ones - as ‘speaking truth to power’, and offers a more subtle account of their role as producers of power discourses.Beyond Central Europe, the paper underscores the political and cultural milieu of geopolitical claims and the specific structures of legitimacy through which these claims are justified and normalized. A nuanced understanding of the role of ‘culture’ in geopolitical discourses requires that we closely examine the cultural and moral capital of intellectuals. This would also enable us to better delineate human agency in the production of geopolitics. 相似文献
16.
With rising public awareness of climate change, celebrities have become an increasingly important community of non nation-state ‘actors’ influencing discourse and action, thereby comprising an emergent climate science-policy-celebrity complex. Some feel that these amplified and prominent voices contribute to greater public understanding of climate change science, as well as potentially catalyze climate policy cooperation. However, critics posit that increased involvement from the entertainment industry has not served to influence substantive long-term advancements in these arenas; rather, it has instead reduced the politics of climate change to the domain of fashion and fad, devoid of political and public saliency. Through tracking media coverage in Australia, Canada, the United States, and United Kingdom, we map out the terrain of a ‘Politicized Celebrity System’ in attempts to cut through dualistic characterizations of celebrity involvement in politics. We develop a classification system of the various types of climate change celebrity activities, and situate movements in contemporary consumer- and spectacle-driven carbon-based society. Through these analyses, we place dynamic and contested interactions in a spatially and temporally-sensitive ‘Cultural Circuits of Climate Change Celebrities’ model. In so doing, first we explore how these newly ‘authorized’ speakers and ‘experts’ might open up spaces in the public sphere and the science/policy nexus through ‘celebritization’ effects. Second, we examine how the celebrity as the ‘heroic individual’ seeking ‘conspicuous redemption’ may focus climate change actions through individualist frames. Overall, this paper explores potential promises, pitfalls and contradictions of this increasingly entrenched set of ‘agents’ in the cultural politics of climate change. Thus, as a form of climate change action, we consider whether it is more effective to ‘plant’ celebrities instead of trees. 相似文献
17.
《Geoforum》2017
This paper analyzes how Mexican hometown associations in New York City practice solidarity so that they might best meet the needs of the transnational communities that they serve. Commonly formed by immigrants in the United States, hometown associations are organizations which send money collectively to their home countries, supporting public infrastructure and community projects. Scholars have debated both the merits of remittance programs that channel migrant funds as economic development and the agency of immigrant economies in neoliberal development structures. Through primary data collected from interviews in New York City, I review the frustrations that hometown associations have with one such program: Mexico's programa tres por uno para migrantes. Concurrently, I examine how the same hometown associations engage ethical economic practices of collective remittance sending and community service provision in New York City. Drawing on feminist literature on diverse economies, I argue that the solidarity work of hometown associations disrupts the dominant remittance as development discourse. Migrants are not content to participate in tres por uno and through practicing solidarity they distance themselves from this neoliberal policy. 相似文献
18.
Pragmatic localism uncovered: The search for locally contingent solutions to national reform agendas
This paper analyses the complexity and attempted pragmatism of current practices surrounding the management of current local government policy reform in England. In particular, it focuses on the tensions and contradictions between a national policy dynamic which seeks to encourage locally contingent solutions to be developed for localised problems, and the centralising tendencies of the national state which result in ‘blueprints’ and ‘models’ being developed for local policy delivery and a requirement to meet centrally derived targets. These assumptions are explored through the experiences of local government attempts to introduce innovative and experimental praxis in line with the complex cultural and political changes of ‘modernisation’ agendas advanced by the UK government. This is being rolled out by an overarching project of ‘new localism’ - an attempt to devolve power and resources from the central state to front line local managers, sub-local structures and partnerships and to deliver ‘what works’. It is argued that new attempts at subsidiarity should be more flexible to local conditions rather than directed by national policy and that greater discretion and freedom should be given to local managers to achieve this task. Using the concept of ‘pragmatic localism’ and grounded examples from a recent initiative - Local Area Agreements - it is highlighted that there are signs that local state management of national policy could be becoming increasingly adaptable, enabling managers to deal with the fluid nature of ongoing public policy reform, although this is far from a completed project with many factors still constraining this change process. 相似文献
19.
Agricultural biotechnology (agbiotech) has intersected with a wider debate about ‘sustainable agriculture’, especially in Europe. Agbiotech was initially promoted as an alternative which would avoid or remedy past problems of intensive agriculture, but such claims were soon challenged. Agbiotech has extended the dominant agri-industrial paradigm, while critics have counterposed alternatives corresponding to an agrarian-based rural development paradigm. Amid controversy over environmental and health risks in the late 1990s, an extra issue emerged − the prospect that genetically modified (GM) material would become inadvertently mixed with non-GM crops. In response the European Commission developed a policy framework for ‘coexistence’ between GM, conventional and organic crops. This policy has aimed to ensure that farmers can freely choose among different production systems, which would develop side by side, yet specific proposals for coexistence rules favour some choices over others. Such rules have been contested according to different policy agendas, each promoting their model of future agriculture. Moreover, a Europe-wide network of regional authorities has promoted ‘GM-free zones’ as a territorial brand for green, localised, high-quality agri-food production, whose diverse qualities depend upon symbolic, immaterial characteristics. This alternative has been counterposed to the agri-industrial production of global commodities - symbolised by the European Union, especially its product authorisation procedure for the internal market. ‘Coexistence’ policy was intended to mediate policy conflicts over GM crops, yet it has become another arena for contending agricultural systems, which may not so readily co-exist in practice. Wherever an agrarian-based rural development paradigm gains local support, its alternative agricultures are in contradiction rather than coexistence with GM crops. 相似文献
20.
The everyday implications of a volatile geopolitical climate are increasingly recognised, but far less is known about how people’s emotional geographies are affected by geopolitical change. This paper offers a critical examination of how some young people in different parts of the world navigate fears and hopes that might be considered ‘global’ in nature, and those that might be considered ‘everyday’. We report from participatory research conducted with young people from a range of ethnic and cultural backgrounds living in New Zealand and the United Kingdom. We examine how personal fears and hopes intersect with wider anxieties about youth, urban crime and terrorism. The research suggests that global-everyday emotions are not separated out in young people’s analyses. They are critically reflexive about wider discourses of fear, while undertaking the day to day business of navigating what are sometimes challenging emotional topographies. 相似文献