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1.
《Geoforum》2017
The global ‘land grab’ debate is going urban and needs a specific conceptual framework to analyze the diverse modalities through which land commodification and speculation are transforming cities across the globe. This article identifies new avenues for research on urban land issues by drawing on an extensive body of academic literature and concrete cases of urban land transformations in Asia, Latin America and Africa. These transformations are analyzed by focusing on three types of urban investments – investments in property, investments in public space and public services, and investments in speculation, image building and ‘worlding’ – and the way these investments are intermingled with and enhanced by processes of gentrification and speculative urbanism. Addressing real estate and infrastructure investments, speculation and gentrification through a land-based lens allows us to deepen the discussion on urban land governance in the global South. We argue that urban land acquisition cannot be thoroughly understood in isolation from the workings of urban real estate markets, public policies, and displacement processes. The urban land grab debate needs to consider the dialectic interplay between land use change and general socio-spatial transformations both in central – or recentralized – and peripheral areas. This is why we plea for a kaleidoscopic perspective on urban land governance by uncovering the complex patchwork of urban land acquisitions and their diverse temporalities and spatialities, their hybrid character in terms of actors involved, and the multiple and often unpredicted ways in which urban dwellers try to gain control over and access to urban land. 相似文献
2.
B.M. Taylor 《Geoforum》2012,43(3):507-517
Extensive rural regions are facing major socio-economic, political and environmental change from the dual effects of agricultural restructuring and environmental degradation. While central governments often rely on regional level policy responses, local actors, such as rural local governments may resist these ‘top-down’ initiatives. This paper examines the oppositional response of 34 rural local governments to state-led regionalisation for economic development and natural resource management in the extensive and sparely populated Wheatbelt region of Western Australia. The analysis explores how state threats of amalgamation; shifting national policy empathies in rural development; and, local preferences for horizontal rather than vertical forms of cooperation are influential in catalysing a brand of defensive regionalism amongst local government actors. Adopting this defensive posture allowed local actors to both buffer state intervention and improve the effectiveness of their own cooperative planning and management activities for sustainable development. These observations are interpreted through concepts of collective identity formation, providing an analytical perspective that is sensitive to the inter-scalar politics in rural governance. 相似文献
3.
Aaron Kingsbury 《Geoforum》2006,37(4):596-609
Business associations (BAs) represent a widely prevalent institution contingent upon a plethora of regional and industrial contexts around the world. Although their role in local development is rarely highlighted this paper argues that analysis of the structure and strategies of BAs reveals important insights into the problematic nature of external economies, typically based on the willingness of highly independent small firms to share and possibly fund some common service(s). BAs illustrate cooperative behaviour and their fragmentation indicates limits to cooperation and thereby to the contested nature of this particular external economy. Conceptually, the paper interprets BAs as institutional expressions of local cooperation and theorizes their strategy and structure in terms of a ‘logic of exchange’ model. This model defines the relationships between BAs, their members (organizational domains) and governments in terms of the logics of ‘membership’ and ‘influence’ that help understand the opportunities afforded and tensions imposed by the rationale and dynamics of cooperation. Empirically, the paper examines the formation and performance of BAs in the restructuring of the Okanagan’s wine industry that was stimulated by the Free Trade Agreement (FTA) between the US and Canada in 1989 and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) of 1991. In the Okanagan wine industry, a newly formed BA was vital in helping firms overcome the crisis generated by free trade. However, subsequent fragmentation that arose out of member disenchantment with logics of influence and membership, indicated limits to local cooperation that may constitute a significant diseconomy in a future crisis. 相似文献
4.
《Geoforum》2015
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
5.
Despite being a poorly defined and vague concept, empowerment is currently of political and theoretical significance and nowhere more so than in South Africa, where it seen as central to post-apartheid transformation. This paper explores the ways in which empowerment has been understood, defined and deployed by post-apartheid governments in the context of a gradual shift from nation-building to neo-liberal governance. It examines the impact of legislation and government policy through a critical examination of empowerment initiatives in the wine industry. Drawing on research conducted in the Western Cape in 2004, the paper analyses how empowerment is interpreted and appropriated both within legislation and specifically within the wine industry. It explores what the wine industry reveals about the disempowering work of neo-liberalism, even as it is couched in the discourses of empowerment. Findings suggest that equating empowerment with economic empowerment threatens to reinforce structures of domination, rather than transforming them, while leaving power relations largely untouched. The case study reveals that until more radical understandings of power and empowerment are acknowledged and incorporated into government policies the failure to address broader issues of social and economic transformation will persist and policies aimed at the empowerment of marginalised individuals and communities will continue to have apparently pre-determined and depoliticised outcomes. 相似文献
6.
Ronald V. Kalafsky 《GeoJournal》2017,82(6):1135-1144
Exporting, despite its potential for fostering increased overall sales, presents substantial obstacles for firms when compared to serving domestic or spatially proximate markets. Some of these problems center on accessing market information and selecting export destinations. Such challenges become even more demanding for small-and-medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), given their resource constraints and in many cases, relative inexperience with global markets. Export promotion programs are a way by which firms can potentially explore new markets. If firms take part in such programs, how do they access global markets and with which countries do they choose to engage? This research note examines the results of a recent export promotion program for SMEs located in North West England. It explores how firms utilized this program and more importantly, it explores market choice for firms participating in two types of direct buyer interaction: onsite visits and trade fair attendance. The results suggest that firms, even in light of trade promotion assistance, often choose to explore proximate or similar markets. 相似文献
7.
Most advanced market economies have met difficulties retaining a manufacturing base. Domestic production remains important,
however, given the downstream economic impacts of the manufacturing sector, including the advantages of export-base industries.
In order to keep producing domestically, firms must persistently innovate and increasingly look to new markets. To explore
the issue at greater length, this paper examines the case of Japan’s metal forming machinery industry, a key capital goods
sector in terms of its criticality to overall durable goods manufacturing and its recent export success. This paper examines
recent performance as an example of a successful industry that retains significant domestic production while simultaneously
maintaining high export levels. 相似文献
8.
《Geoforum》2016
Due to the importance of venture capital (VC) firms in spurring regional economic growth, the geography of VC firms and VC investments have attracted a lot of attention. However, the spatial patterns of cross-regional VC flows have rarely been explored, particularly in the context of emerging economies. Drawing on a unique dataset on VC firms and investments related to domestic initial public offerings (IPOs), this study combines location analysis with network analysis to investigate the spatial patterns of VC activities in China. The results confirm that Beijing, Shenzhen and Shanghai are the leading VC centres in the country. Although Yangtze Delta Area hosts the largest number of investments, Beijing and Shenzhen have a considerable advantage over Shanghai in terms of the number of VC firms, investments, and the number of domestic VC-backed IPOs. Beijing and Shenzhen also appear more central than Shanghai in China’s VC networks, with Beijing-Shenzhen representing the most important city-dyad in terms of VC investment flows. The article explains how the dynamics of the VC centres is embedded in China’s institutional and cultural context, critical to understanding the evolution and geography of China’s VC industry. 相似文献
9.
The aim of this paper is to contribute to an understanding of clusters, including both the material and discursive dynamism of cluster construction, and shed light on how clusters—once established—affect the actors, institutions and processes that constitute them. It does this by viewing clusters as an actant, i.e. something that acts or to which activity is granted by others. The empirical analysis examines two clusters in the public cluster programme Norwegian Centre of Expertise (NCE): the Møre maritime cluster and the Hordaland subsea cluster. It focuses on the type of development paths they are following and how the material and discursive processes are interweaved in these paths. The clusters are related to the concept of cluster construction, which is triggered by ideas, representations, policy and industry practice. The Møre maritime cluster is characterized by bottom-up clustering processes and illustrates how the material practices of firms can trigger clustering processes such as the establishment of a cluster and the identification of a prototype of best cluster practice. On the other hand, the Hordaland subsea cluster expresses a top-down process and how the ideal world of academics and policy-making can encourage processes of clustering among co-located firms. Based on these observations of material and discursive interweaved clustering processes and how they affect both those who are practicing and those who are promoting them, we find it reasonable to argue for a stronger awareness of such feedback loops in cluster studies. 相似文献
10.
This article seeks to contribute to our understanding of the internationalization processes of business service sectors through an analysis of the 20 leading TNCs in the temporary staffing industry. While these TNCs broadly conform to a loosely coordinated decentralized or multinational organisational model, there is significant firm-to-firm, spatial and temporal variability in the internationalization strategies that they employ, deriving from both the breadth of the industry - i.e. the range of different staffing activities that it encompasses - and the inherently territorially-embedded nature of staffing industry activity. These complexities are exemplified through consideration, in turn, of the scope of staffing TNCs, their foreign direct investment strategies, levels of central coordination, and degrees of standardization. The analysis demonstrates that, due to the need to respond to markets, temporary staffing TNCs exhibit highly spatially and temporally variable internationalization strategies and there are considerable barriers to both the centralization of control and the standardization of business practices. 相似文献
11.
Contract farmers in central Honduras have been producers of Asian vegetables for American markets since 1989. Contract farming
holds the potential to provide benefits to small farmers who would otherwise be unable to access export markets but production
relations between firms and farmers are often asymmetric and can be exploitative. Poor communication and legacies of mistrust
between commodity agriculture and small farmers lead to ambiguities in the contracting system that are misinterpreted by both
firms and farmers, creating social tensions between contracting parties. This article will consider how farmers’ navigation
of the contracting system and competition between export firms has led to changes in the system. Through competition for a
limited pool of outgrowers, firms adjust their policies in favor of farmers without explicit attempts of labor organization
on the part of the farmers.
相似文献
| Valerie ImbruceEmail: |
12.
《Geoforum》2018
The paper explores value chain governance through a discourse approach to an event which included an exhibition and a conference. This approach appears promising for investigating industries in their formative phase and is particularly relevant for new renewable energy sectors. By studying the European offshore wind value chain, the paper investigates the coupling between wind industries and offshore industries as an encounter of various conventions. The key speakers at the conference, particularly those from the utility companies, introduced new principles for organizing the value chains they are leading, in order to reduce costs, and turn the immature sector into a mature one. Their storyline of industrialization by standardization breaks, however, with the storyline demonstrated by the firms in offshore oil and gas, and maritime industries at the exhibition. The latter offshore suppliers find evidence of quality in their business history and their trust-based relations to their clients. Theoretically the paper contributes to the global value chain governance debate by offering another perspective on power. The discourse approach helps us explain how influential actors could enforce one convention over another. The paper contributes methodically by suggesting a discourse approach to events. Events appear as a significant arena for negotiating industry formation and convenient for researcher’s data gathering for text analysis. 相似文献
13.
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
14.
《Geoforum》2016
Eco-certifications have become an important site of power struggles in commodity sectors such as forestry, fisheries, aquaculture, palm oil, and soy. In each, multiple eco-certification initiatives have been developed and resisted through interactions among non-governmental organizations, governments, and commercial actors. This paper contributes to understanding how power is embodied in certifications by exploring how territoriality manifests in the international struggle over defining what products are ‘sustainable’ and which producers will have access to markets that require ‘sustainable’ products. Focusing on the wild capture fisheries sector in which the non-governmental Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) administers the preeminent eco-certification initiative, we explore the emergence of new fisheries eco-certification initiatives in Japan, Iceland, Alaska, Canada, and the US that insist there is no transnational monopoly on judgments over fisheries sustainability. We argue that these new eco-certifications attempt to defend and embed territorial social and regulatory relations of production within the contested domain of transnational sustainability governance. The initiatives accommodate both the territorially embedded material interests, institutions, and discursive strategies of producers (and their state supporting agencies) and transnationally embedded governance norms for assessing and communicating sustainability. They also counter the globally applicable institutions of the MSC in favor of making space for state and non-state actors to contend with demands for sustainability in the global seafood market by combining place-specific attributes with transnational governance norms. 相似文献
15.
《Geoforum》2014
The EU biofuels market is stimulating expansion of oil palm plantations in Indonesia. Little research has yet examined the impacts on water resources arising from this large-scale land use conversion to cultivation of biofuel feedstock or positioned contextual water resource governance in Indonesian locales in a wider political ecology of European climate politics. Through the concept of ‘hybrid accountability’, we examine primary evidence from an extensive action research process in Central Kalimantan Province, Indonesian Borneo, to assess whether the EU’s Renewable Energy Directive and existing certification schemes offer a way to improve the accountability of market actors and promote sustainable water resource management. We conclude that these initiatives have had no bearing on safeguarding local livelihoods and the water resources they depend on, with governance mechanisms largely failing to address people’s grievances. Rather, the EU’s policies on biofuels have supported a de-politicisation of what needs to be seen as ‘distributional water politics’. Furthermore, certification schemes such as the Roundtable for Sustainable Palm Oil offer, at present, only cosmetic tools and are insufficient to address deep structural governance issues. We argue that further hybridisation of market-based certification and governmental regulation should be designed with the purpose of providing new transnational recourse mechanisms and remedies for affected communities. 相似文献
16.
《Geoforum》2015
The difference between bank-based and market-based financial systems is a longstanding and influential conceptual staple of the interdisciplinary literature on finance. This dualistic model has been subjected to wide-ranging critiques over the past decade. Yet, while those critiques productively problematize the relationship between banks and markets presumed by the model, they fail to address the underlying distinction between banks and markets that is also presumed by the model. This article questions that distinction. It argues that financial markets are best understood not as places or platforms where banks and other financial actors come to interact – and thus as essentially separate from banks – but, instead, as, in large part, their interaction; as constituted by it. The article further argues for the political as well as scholarly importance of reconfiguring our ideas of what financial markets are. The idea of markets as separate, reified phenomena not only underpins the scholarly model of bank- and market-based financial systems – it does political work in the wider world, with the appeal to financial markets or, more nebulously, “the market” to rationalize and justify political decision-making having become a commonplace of contemporary public policy discourse. 相似文献
17.
Agriculture in arid and semi-arid regions faces two of the principal global challenges: sustainability and water scarcity in the context of climate changes. To overcome the water scarcity constraint, Tunisia adopted different strategies and policies. Since 1989, it has embarked on a policy of decentralization and participatory water management in irrigated areas “IA.” This policy has led to the state disengagement in favor of collective water management. Since then, water management becomes a task of irrigator associations. These associations have experienced a series of transformations ranging from “collective interest associations: CIA” to the current form “Development Agricultural Groups: GDAs.” In spite of these institutional changes, GDAs are suffering from several problems impeding their functioning such as budgetary deficit, conflicts between stakeholders, leaving of irrigated activity by some farmers, and inequality. The current situation of GDA and most IA hypothesizes the existence of local governance problems; these governance problems are causing a performance decrease in IA. The analysis of the interdependence between governance and performance of irrigation water management, in Nadhour IA, is the main aim of this paper. To conduct this analysis, the strategic analysis approach was adopted. Assuming that IA forms a concrete action system, the analysis of structured games between actors allowed assessing their power, convergence, divergence, and ambivalence. Results confirm the hypothesis of a significant effect of governance problems, including political source, on the performance of water management in IA. 相似文献
18.
The role of power in economic activity has been researched across the social sciences but there has been little engagement with the spatialities of power relations. This paper thus draws on a recent reinvigorated interest in power within economic geography to develop an approach for understanding how the spatiality of power relations in economic practices are constituted through different forms of proximity. It argues that proximity needs to be conceptualised as multi-dimensional including physical, cultural, virtual and organizational proximity between firms and actors. It further contends that the development of different forms of proximity shape the agency of empowered actors in industry clusters and regional economies. This general proposition is explored by presenting research into a case study: the UK-based private equity industry. The research focuses on the nature, role and development of different forms of proximity between private equity firms and the investee firms that are the subject of investments. 相似文献
19.
Re-scaling collective bargaining: union responses to restructuring in the North American auto industry 总被引：1，自引：0，他引：1
John Holmes 《Geoforum》2004,35(1):9-21
Historically, political struggles to define the geographical scale at which labour relations and collective bargaining will be conducted have been of crucial significance to the labour movement. Today, workers and their unions face very difficult challenges. In many manufacturing industries changes in the organizational structure of production at different geographical scales have undermined the effectiveness of the organizing and collective bargaining strategies associated with traditional industrial unionism. This paper focuses on collective bargaining strategies developed by North American autoworkers’ unions to respond to the extensive restructuring of the automotive industry that took place during the 1990s. These strategies include innovations in the structure and content of collective bargaining and efforts to redefine the scale at which collective bargaining takes place. Following a brief discussion of the challenge posed by the integration of Mexico into a continent-wide production system, the analysis focuses on the strategies devised by the Canadian Auto Workers (CAW) union during the 1996 and 1999 rounds of collective bargaining to address issues raised by outsourcing and modular manufacturing. With outsourcing, the automakers are not so much eliminating jobs as they are deciding who gets to do them, at what price, and under what working conditions. With modular manufacturing, the organizational boundaries between firms are blurring and the terms and conditions of work in one firm arguably are becoming dependent upon management decisions made in another firm. The CAW’s response has been to develop new collective bargaining strategies including the concepts of ‘work ownership’ and ‘satellite bargaining’ which involves redefining the traditional geographical extent of the bargaining unit. While the empirical focus is on the North American automobile industry, the general issues related to the re-scaling of production, and especially outsourcing and modular manufacturing, are common across a range of manufacturing industries. 相似文献
20.
能源合作是“一带一路”战略的重要内容,我国作为世界最大的能源消费国,每年要从世界各地进口大量能源资源特别是油气资源,并且对外依存度逐年攀升,油气安全问题令人担忧。实施“一带一路”战略,加强与沿途国家的能源合作,能为我国能源安全提供保障。天然气作为清洁、高效能源,对缓解能源短缺和环境污染具有重要作用,在世界能源消费结构中占据重要地位。通过对“一带一路”主要能源国家天然气产量、消费量、进/出口贸易量数据的搜集与分析,明确了主要国家天然气供需及贸易特点,并且提出了一些在“一带一路”合作框架下更有力地发展我国天然气行业的建议。 相似文献