共查询到10条相似文献，搜索用时 109 毫秒
1.
Substitution and scalar politics: negotiating environmental compensation in Cardiff Bay 总被引：1，自引：0，他引：1
Richard Cowell 《Geoforum》2003,34(3):343-358
One of the most contested dimensions of sustainable development is the issue of substitutability--the extent to which environmental qualities can be substituted, either for human-made assets, or for some equivalent environmental function. The main argument of this paper is that dominant economic discourses of sustainability neglect long-standing geographical concerns with scale, embeddedness and abstraction that are inevitably embroiled in the practical negotiation of substitutability. In particular, it seeks to demonstrate how relations of ecological and political scale frame the ‘decision space’ within which debates about substitution take place. These arguments are developed by analysing conflicts over the development of an amenity barrage across the Taff-Ely estuary in Cardiff, South Wales, and the provision of new wetlands to compensate for the resulting loss of wildlife habitat. This case shows that the scale at which environmental ‘assets’ are constructed--whether local, national or global--can reveal or obscure distributive effects incurred in maintaining environmental capital through compensatory measures. It also demonstrates how the re-scaling of governance arrangements (in this case to the European Commission) can empower the delivery of environmental management measures but simultaneously re-structures the objects of sustainability, rendering habitats and wildlife populations as disembedded symbols. 相似文献
2.
Kathrin Hörschelmann 《Geoforum》2007,38(3):456-468
This paper analyses how the authority of west German media workers to produce ‘truthful’ representations about unification and eastern Germany after 1989 was discursively constructed. Rather than simply assuming the superiority of western knowledge, I show that the right of western media producers to speak for and about east Germany had to be constructed and defended discursively on a number of registers. Western journalists, in particular, had to demonstrate their credibility towards west and east German audiences, evidence their ability to report objectively and authoritatively, and prove themselves superior in the production of knowledge. Their truth claims had to be negotiated in the midst of a range of competing discourses. The complicated constitution of audiences meant that western journalists had to cast themselves in various different roles to justify their position as ‘knowing subjects’: as explorers, surveyors, observers, commentators, mediators and/or educators. The paper explores, how the divergence between these different positions was reconciled through a number of discursive strategies. I highlight the ambivalences and internal contradictions produced within journalistic discourses as well as through the existence of differentiated audiences. 相似文献
3.
Alistair Fraser 《Geoforum》2007,38(2):299-311
Market-Led Agrarian Reform (MLAR), which is advocated by the World Bank and is being implemented in various contexts around the world, is a more neo-liberal approach to land reform than that we have seen implemented in the past. MLAR principles have underpinned South Africa’s land reform programme, being based on the ‘willing-seller, willing-buyer’ principle, which guarantees market-related prices to sellers. Evidence presented in this paper, however, raises serious questions about the extent to which the South African government has held on to MLAR principles. Specifically, the paper argues that South Africa’s peculiar geo-historical context has in some instances led the government to fuse market-led approaches with more authoritarian interventions that dictate to land reform beneficiaries how the land will be used. A case in point is the government’s approach to the restitution of land rights to communities dispossessed from the Levubu area of Limpopo province. As the paper illustrates, the government has imposed on the intended beneficiaries a so-called ‘strategic partnership’ between them and agribusinesses. Although the government touts the approach as a way to protect the commercial viability of the land and to transfer skills from white farmers to the beneficiaries, the terms of the Levubu solution may turn out to be less than favourable for the beneficiaries. 相似文献
4.
Navigating the terrains of transnational education: Children of Chinese ‘study mothers’ in Singapore
This paper demonstrates the value of child-centred migration studies which highlight children’s role in shaping the migration journeys of their families, as well as their own projected journeyings. It examines the case of children from China who move to Singapore, an aspiring global education hub, expressly for the purpose of an overseas education that will facilitate longer-term migration and life goals. Focus is given specifically to the children of ‘study mothers’ or peidu mama (literally: ‘mothers accompanying their children who are studying’). Through interviews with the teenagers and the conceptual optic of ‘social navigation’, our paper demonstrates that children are resilient and creative beings able to navigate the twists and turns of their immediate trajectories, as well as develop their own goals and projected destinations for their futures. The paper calls for a refinement in the way we understand children’s mobilities. First, in arguing that their spatial journeying across the terrains of transnational education cannot be decoupled from their process of social becoming and emotional development from passive followers to active negotiators, we wish to disrupt hegemonic discourses and dominant representations of children in migration as simply ‘migrant’s children’ and restore them to the status of ‘migrant children’. Second, adopting the concept of social navigation as an analytical lens allows us to highlight the fluid ways that young people think about their futures and the different pathways by which they can get there. This leads us to conceive of social and cultural capital accumulation through transnational education as a process with many more degrees of provisionality than what is often presented in the literature as a ‘strategic project’ with a fixed and abstract goal. 相似文献
5.
Marcus Power 《Geoforum》2009,40(1):14-24
One important (though often neglected) part of the ‘development business’ committed to principles of partnership is the Commonwealth, a voluntary association of 54 independent countries, almost all of which were formerly under British rule. This paper focuses on the Commonwealth’s contemporary sense of ‘responsibility’ for shaping African development through ‘partnership’ and by promoting ‘good governance’ and examines the particular example of Mozambique, which joined the Commonwealth in 1995. In exploring exactly what membership of this post-colonial ‘family’ has meant for Mozambique the paper explores the neocolonial paternalism and sense of trusteeship that the Commonwealth has articulated in its often very apolitical vision of African development which seems to lock the continent into a permanent stage of tutelage and to repetitively reduce Africa to a set of core deficiencies for which externally generated ‘solutions’ must be devised. More generally, the paper also examines the wider context of the Commonwealth’s involvement in Africa by looking at the connections it has made to British industry, British charities and the British Department for International Development (DFID). The paper concludes with an assessment of the ‘showcase’ potential of Mozambique and its importance to Commonwealth and DFID narrations of an African ‘success’ story of peace, stability and growth since the end of the country’s devastating civil war in 1992. 相似文献
6.
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
7.
In 1988, four states in the northeastern USA commissioned a study to address land use changes in the Northern Forest, 26 million acres of temperate and boreal forest extending from Maine to eastern New York State. Against a backdrop of economic destabilization and concerns regarding social and ecological implications of a real estate boom, the sustained deliberative dialogue catalyzed by this study has come to rely heavily on the ambiguous concept of “working forest.” To clarify political and environmental dynamics in the region, we analyzed how people respond to and seek to capitalize on the interpretive flexibility of the term working forest. We combine an analysis of socio-political discourses of working forest based on a structured literature review with an assessment of local peoples’ definitions of working forest based on a survey conducted in a pair of contrasting New York State communities. The first study site represents an amenity-oriented community (i.e. a place where the forest supports a service economy including recreation and tourism) and the other study site represents a timber-dependent community. By linking data from community-level analysis to data derived from a general analysis of forest politics, we seek to develop a more robust perspective. By comparing discourses across differently structured communities, we investigate how local forest politics are mediated by local economic development processes. Our study empirically illustrates contested and geographically uneven processes of social construction of environment and rural development in a region confronting pressures of globalization. Results indicate that timber harvesting is a heavily privileged management objective, as a logic of ‘the forest that pays is the forest that stays’ dominates. Environmental politics in the region, and perhaps more generally, increasingly conforms to a form of pragmatism in which economic opportunities structure conservation planning and investment. 相似文献
8.
9.
Though the concept of sustainable development originally included a clear social mandate, for two decades this human dimension has been neglected amidst abbreviated references to sustainability that have focused on bio-physical environmental issues, or been subsumed within a discourse that conflated ‘development’ and ‘economic growth’. The widespread failure of this approach to generate meaningful change has led to renewed interest in the concept of ‘social sustainability’ and aspects thereof. A review of the literature suggests, however, that it is a concept in chaos, and we argue that this severely compromises its importance and utility. The purpose of this paper is to examine this diverse literature so as to clarify what might be meant by the term social sustainability and highlight different ways in which it contributes to sustainable development more generally. We present a threefold schema comprising: (a) ‘development sustainability’ addressing basic needs, the creation of social capital, justice and so on; (b) ‘bridge sustainability’ concerning changes in behaviour so as to achieve bio-physical environmental goals and; (c) ‘maintenance sustainability’ referring to the preservation - or what can be sustained - of socio-cultural characteristics in the face of change, and the ways in which people actively embrace or resist those changes. We use this tripartite of social sustainabilities to explore ways in which contradictions and complements between them impede or promote sustainable development, and draw upon housing in urban areas as a means of explicating these ideas. 相似文献
10.
Transfrontier conservation has taken Southern Africa by storm, where the modus operandi remains simple and intuitive: by dissolving boundaries, local benefits grow as conservation and development spread regionally. However, in the case of South Africa’s section of the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park, political and economic change redirects benefits to support ‘modern’ economies at the expense of rural livelihoods through community-based natural resources management (CBNRM). Neo-liberal agendas promoted by government and the transfrontier park derail efforts at decentralizing CBNRM initiatives beyond markets and state control. This paper argues that ‘hybrid neoliberal’ CBNRM has arisen in private and public sector delivery of devolved conservation and poverty relief projects as ‘tertiary production’ for regional development. As a result, ‘CBNRM’ projects related to and independent of transfrontier conservation support private sector interests rather than the resource base of rural livelihoods. Concluding sections assert that CBNRM can counter this neoliberal trend by supporting the land-based economy of local users living near the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park. 相似文献