Policy towards the Diaspora and Ethnic (Return) Migration: An Estonian case

This article examines the Estonian diaspora-policy and ethnic (return) migration from the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) to Estonia in the 1990s. Ethnic migration to re-independent Estonia began in 1992, when the Estonian government evacuated 170 ethnic Estonians from areas caught up in the Georgian-Abkhazian war. Along with this was created the institutional framework for receiving ethnic migrants from crisis areas of the CIS. Later, support and facilities were also granted to ethnic Estonians migrating from elsewhere in the CIS. As a result, about 1,200 ethnic Estonians from the CIS settled in Estonia in 1992–1996. The research supports that ethnic migration is a phenomenon in which the state policy plays a decisive role both in inducing migration and in selecting those who are granted the right to relocate.     

Changes of landscape structure in Estonia during the Soviet period

The development of land-use structure during the Soviet period (1940–1991) has been analyzed. The main trends in land-use dynamics have been a decrease in the percentage of agricultural land and an increase in the share of forests. The most important driving factors of such a shift have been the land reforms of 1940, 1949 (collectivization followed by deportations), and 1989; and urbanization and concentration of agricultural production. Changes in land-use structure on the county level reflect well the socio-economic and political changes in Estonian society. An especially significant decrease in agricultural lands took place during the first ten years of collectivization. In coastal areas it has been combined with state political activities. Natural conditions also play an important role, particularly in local changes of land-use structure. The concentration of agricultural production, which is greater in the eastern part of Estonia (Upper Estonia), has caused many environmental problems. Likewise, land amelioration is one of the reasons for environmental disturbances. It has shifted agricultural activities from former arable lands to marginal areas (natural grasslands, wetlands). That is one of the reasons for nutrient cycling disturbances in agricultural landscapes. Despite many disturbances, Estonia has a well- developed network of ecologically compensating areas consisting of nature protection areas, forests, wetlands, and coastal waters. It is important to maintain this ecological network during privatization.     

Abandoned bodies and spaces of sacrifice: Pesticide drift activism and the contestation of neoliberal environmental politics in California

Recent research suggests that many key strands of California’s agrofood activism appear to accommodate, rather than confront, the neoliberalization of environmental governance, and that such accommodations might problematically constrain the transformative potential of activists’ work. In this paper, I examine the case of pesticide drift activism in California, which, as an exception to this trend, provides a provocative and useful case study for interrogating the influence of neoliberalization on social/environmental activism. I argue that California’s pesticide drift activism can be understood as a reaction to the spaces of sacrifice created and exacerbated by the failure of unionization-based pesticide reform efforts, a promising but compromised regulatory apparatus, longstanding farmworker powerlessness, neoliberal regulatory rollback, and neoliberalized pesticide politics – a mosaic of factors that have worked together to produce a regulatory structure that has always been better at registering pesticides than at reducing pollution. I show that pesticide drift activists’ reliance on confrontational practice, collective action, and strategic alliances have been crucial to the movement’s success with bringing visibility to this issue and with gaining traction in the political arena. Thus, at the same time that neoliberalization can exacerbate physical spaces of sacrifice, this case study illustrates that it can also, unexpectedly perhaps, generate new, non-neoliberal political spaces for social change.     

Africa in the rise of rights-based development

This paper explores the rise of rights-based development (RBD) and its endorsement by prominent international institutions (such as the United Nations) and International Development Agencies (IDAs) like the World Bank. It situates RBD in global political context and analyses it in relation to the international politics of development, especially the politics of neo-liberal adjustment policies in Africa. The paper shows how RBD emerged against a backdrop of debate about four international issues associated with neo-liberalism and its discontents, namely globalisation and uneven development; capability and good governance; human rights and human development; and NGOs in the politics of development. Debates about those four issues keep repositioning the state as the central actor in RBD, and holding the state accountable for development (or the lack thereof) under international law. The paper’s basic point is that state-centric RBD is paradoxical and highly political. Greater accountability is being demanded of states––especially in Africa––from the same neo-liberal forces (such as the World Bank) charged with weakening state capacity, undermining democracy, and diminishing state authority. In terms of international power relations and the politics of development, RBD does signal something of a willingness to rethink certain aspects of the dominant neo-liberal agenda. And yet adjusted states are being subjected––in the name of RBD––to novel methods of international surveillance and forms of conditionality. States are ultimately held responsible for human rights violations, even when it is non-state actors (and their neo-liberal policies) that caused those rights to be violated in the first place. RBD is, therefore, a partial answer (at best) to the questions of empowerment and change raised by critics of neo-liberalism.     

Locating the transgenic landscape: Animal biotechnology and politics of place in Massachusetts

The first major wave in the conflict over modern biotechnologies took place in the United States at the federal level. Biotechnology proponents were able to capture the federal regulatory structure, so today, a second wave of anti-biotech activism focused at the local and state levels is emerging. This article examines what enables or constrains place-based anti-biotech activism through a case study of the conflict over genetically engineered (GE) animals in Massachusetts. I demonstrate how, in spite of a highly visible animal advocacy and anti-GE presence, GE animal proponents have mobilized effective politics of place strategies to suppress local debate by exercising territorial control in relation to two places – the state of Massachusetts as a whole and the animal research laboratory specifically.     

In bed with the state: political geography and sexual politics

Part of the task of reconfiguring Political Geography must be to consider forms of political activism and participation other than those which have traditionally been the mainstay of the discipline. The rise of new democratic struggles and new social movements, including those around sexual politics, must be integrated into the agenda of a reformulated Political Geography. This paper considers some of the most pressing concerns of contemporary sexual politics—queer politics, sexual citizenship, and AIDS activism—as a way of opening up Political Geography to ‘sex’.     

uTshani BuyaKhuluma––The Grass Speaks: the political space and capacity of the South African Homeless People’s Federation

The point of departure for this article is the contemporary tendency towards localisation of politics in the context of neo-liberal globalisation. Mediated through institutional reforms, political discourses and localised struggles, this localisation of politics produce new and transformed local political spaces. The purpose of the article is to examine the capacity of popular movements to use and transform such political spaces within the South African housing sector. This analysis is done through a combination of conceptual examination of political space and actor capacity and a concrete case study of the political strategies and capacities of The South African Homeless People’s Federation. The article argues that the Federation has utilised political relations at different scales to mobilise resources such as land and subsidies for housing for its members. It has also influenced the formulation of housing policies through its discourses and practical experiences with people-driven housing processes. In consequence the Federation’s ability to function as a civil/political movement has granted them a certain capacity to participate in the complicated process of turning de jure rights to adequate shelter into de facto rights for the urban poor as citizens of a democratic South Africa.     

Cloning colonialism: Residential development,transnational aspiration,and the complexities of postcolonial India

Within this article, we discuss/unpack a speculative international property development born out of a license agreement between the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) and real estate investment company, Anglo Indian. The proposed building of twelve cloned, MCC branded, cricket communities in India–targeted to the consumption-based lifestyles of India’s new middle class–is addressed within the context relational to the political, economic, and cultural rationalities of postcolonial India, shifting power dynamics within the international cricket formation, and the associated re-colonisation of cricket-related spaces/bodies. Anglo Indian’s proposed communities are understood as part of a complex assemblage of national and global forces and relations (including, but certainly not restricted to): transnational gentrification; urban (re)development; and, revised understandings of historical and geographic connections between places, governance, and the politics of be(long)ing in branded spaces. This analysis explicates how Anglo Indian’s idealized community development offers a literal and figurative space for embodied performance of “glocal competence” for consumption-based identity projects of the new Indian middle-class (Brosius, 2010, p. 13) through the somewhat ironic mobilization of colonial spatial logics and cultural aesthetics.     

Entrepreneurial Regionalist Planning in a Rescaled Spain: The Cases of Bilbao and València

European politics and planning have recently been characterized by a shift to economic entrepreneurialism at sub-national scales, and the planned redevelopment of the city-region in pursuit of global competitiveness, which scholars have interpreted in light of political-economic “rescaling” or regionalization and the emergence of a “new regionalism.” Analyzing rescaling largely in terms of shifting economic and institutional structures, however, many accounts underestimate the complexity and enduring power of so-called ‘old’ regionalist politics of culture and identity as backdrop to urban redevelopment planning. In this paper we address how the urban planning process mediates between the seemingly dichotomous tendencies of regionalized entrepreneurialism and cultural regionalism. Using case studies of two Spanish autonomous regions and their major urban centers – the Basque Country or Euskadi (Bilbao) and the Comunitat Valenciana (València) – we review the historical geography of planning in the European region in order to explore how cultural regionalism collides with economic rescaling and entrepreneurialism, in and through the planned landscape. We propose that such emerging and hybrid politics and planning be understood as a form of entrepreneurial regionalism, a culturally inflected form of economic competitiveness characteristic of but not unique to the Spanish region. This specific notion of entrepreneurial regionalism may illuminate how planners mediate global and local imperatives within political discourse and landscapes that materialize them, and allow us to better reconceptualize the relationship between economic globalization, state restructuring, and cultural politics in a new Europe of the Regions.     

Entrepreneurial Regionalist Planning in a Rescaled Spain: The Cases of Bilbao and València

European politics and planning have recently been characterized by a shift to economic entrepreneurialism at sub-national scales, and the planned redevelopment of the city-region in pursuit of global competitiveness, which scholars have interpreted in light of political-economic “rescaling” or regionalization and the emergence of a “new regionalism.” Analyzing rescaling largely in terms of shifting economic and institutional structures, however, many accounts underestimate the complexity and enduring power of so-called ‘old’ regionalist politics of culture and identity as backdrop to urban redevelopment planning. In this paper we address how the urban planning process mediates between the seemingly dichotomous tendencies of regionalized entrepreneurialism and cultural regionalism. Using case studies of two Spanish autonomous regions and their major urban centers – the Basque Country or Euskadi (Bilbao) and the Comunitat Valenciana (València) – we review the historical geography of planning in the European region in order to explore how cultural regionalism collides with economic rescaling and entrepreneurialism, in and through the planned landscape. We propose that such emerging and hybrid politics and planning be understood as a form of entrepreneurial regionalism, a culturally inflected form of economic competitiveness characteristic of but not unique to the Spanish region. This specific notion of entrepreneurial regionalism may illuminate how planners mediate global and local imperatives within political discourse and landscapes that materialize them, and allow us to better reconceptualize the relationship between economic globalization, state restructuring, and cultural politics in a new Europe of the Regions.     

Maps and mapping in Estonia

Estonia may be taken as an example of how cartography has developed in the national languages of the Baltic States. Late in the 17th century the first survey of Estonian and Latvian territories was carried out by the Swedes. Masterpieces of the 18th century and the first half of the 19th century are the Atlas of Livonia by L. A. Mellin and a special map of Livonia by C. G. Rücker. The first maps in Estonian appeared more than one hundred years ago. The short period of independence, 1918–1940, was one of rapid development in cartography, interrupted by occupation of the Baltic States by the USSR. Maps were destroyed or declared secret; use of maps was limited. From the beginning of the 1990s, a rapid renaissance of national cartography began.     

Young people’s voiceless politics in the struggle over urban space

This article discusses the particularity of young people’s politics as it unfolds in the practice of everyday life. By exploring a conflict concerning the use of a public park in the City of Oulu, Finland, we discuss how young people may participate in struggles over urban space trough politics that is not based on voice but voicelessness. This political engagement can be understood as a form of nonparticipatory politics that is easily left unnoticed—politics that shirks civic involvement, customary participatory practices and articulated resistance. We deem it important to acknowledge such action as political for two reasons. First, voiceless politics is a weapon of the weak: It is used when other political agencies are not feasible e. Viewing non-participation as apolitical will only further marginalize those who practice politics in such ways. Second, it is important to find ways of acknowledging nonparticipatory action because, while not commonly understood as politics, it is not easily bypassed in political struggles either. By distinguishing political aspects from young people’s urban behaviors, instead of hearing their presence as mere noise, provides tools for bringing their politics to the public agenda and thus developing more democratic urban spaces.     

Rethinking multi-level governance in a changing European union: why metageography and territoriality matter

The literature on multi-level governance in Europe offers important insights into the institutional character of emerging spaces of political practice and the ways in which they are part of a politics of scale that has been unleashed in the wake of neo-liberal reform. What is less clear is the extent to which new multi-level governance arrangements are moving Europe beyond a political geography rooted in the Westphalian state system. This paper argues that a deepened understanding of the possibilities and limitations of multi-level governance requires consideration of the emerging territorial arrangements and practices that are shaping how things are organized on the ground and how people conceptualize Europe as a geographical construct. Focusing on questions of territoriality and metageography can offer insights into the socio-political significance of multi-level governance while directing attention to developments that have the potential to undermine dominant political-territorial framings of Europe.     

Enrolling a goddess for Delhi’s street vendors: The micro-politics of policy implementation shaping urban (in)formality

In a world of persistent and growing informality of working and living conditions in cities, and increasing policy efforts to formalise the informal, why are some forms of informality criminalized while others enjoy sanction of the state? This paper argues that analysis of the politics of policy implementation of formalisation efforts can provide rich insights into urban formal-informal relations in cities of the global south, to complement policymaking or policy impact analyses. We present an in-depth case study analysis of the contested implementation of a unique policy effort to formalise street vendors in Delhi, India. A public authority lens reveals the micro-political practices employed by non-state and state actors in bureaucratic, judicial, political, market and other arenas aiming to control urban space. We argue that policy implementation outcomes are significantly shaped by ‘horizontal' contestations within society and within the state, to complement and intermesh with ‘vertical' state-society struggles. Moreover, contestants for public authority exploit official rules but also informal practices by the state, to engage and advance state fragmentation, enduringly shape cityscapes and to affect which forms of informality are condoned or condemned.     

Conservation planning, boundary-making and border terrains: The desire for forest and order in the Gran Sabana, Venezuela

Conflicts surrounding protected area management often emerge from contested processes of boundary-making. Such productions of bounded conservation spaces are contingent in part on processes of identity formation, where some social groups are legitimized as belonging to conservation units, while others are constructed as out-of-place. This article draws on the literature in postmodern geopolitics and the political ecology of fire to interrogate processes of boundary-making and identity formation in the savanna landscape of Canaima National Park, Venezuela. The institutional culture of the environmental management agency EDELCA is in part premised on narratives of history and indigeneity coupled with a desire for an imagined, forested landscape. Because of the social constructions shaping this institutional culture, the agency maintains an approach to fire management that emphasizes fire suppression. However, an ecological field study suggests that fire suppression is leading to increased fuel loads, especially in ecologically significant boundaries between grasslands and forest. Although these boundary zones are the focus of indigenous practices of prescribed burning, they fall in-between the state management categories of forest and ecotone. As a result, these interstitial spaces become theaters for performances of domination and resistance, leading to contradictory and inconsistent approaches to fire management that place gallery forests at risk.     

Regionalism as resistance: Governance and identity in Western Australia’s Wheatbelt

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.     

Space as a mode of political thinking

This article examines the relationship between space and politics though an exploration of the political theories of Arendt, Laclau, Mouffe and Rancière. It starts with an engagement with ideas about spatial metaphors and space, and argues that space may be considered as a mode of political thinking. It then provides an examination of the theories of these thinkers, paying close attention to the role space and spatiality plays in their conceptualisations of politics and the political. The article concludes with some observations on the relationship between space and politics.     

Privatizing farm worker justice: Regulating labor through voluntary certification and labeling

This paper assesses the possibilities and limits of efforts to incorporate social accountability into California agricultural production through voluntary certification and labeling, in the context neoliberal governance. We argue that, in its contradictory role as market mechanism, regulatory form, and social cause, certification both resists neoliberalization of the agro-food system and reinscribes neoliberal thinking. Unlike more traditional forms of social justice organizing, which have historically sought to alter power relations between labor, capital, and the state, the very notion that production conditions can be regulated through voluntary, third-party monitoring and labeling embraces several key neoliberal principles: the primacy of the market as a mechanism for addressing environmental and social ills, the privatization of regulatory functions previously reserved for the public sphere, and the assertion of the individual rights and responsibilities of citizen–consumers. Interviews with certification actors lead us to conclude that the strategic embrace of certification is driven by contradictory motivations within the movement for social accountability in agriculture, which can only be understood in relation to the confluence of a broader neoliberal political–economic order with California’s particular arrangements of farm labor politics and agro-food activism. Specifically, agro-food consolidation, rollback of protective labor regulation, the evisceration of the farm worker movement, and the conservative agrarianism of the sustainable agriculture movement intersect to circumscribe the realm of possibility and create conditions that undermine farm worker representation in the governance of agricultural labor practices.     

The politics of urban entrepreneurialism in Glasgow

North American literature on the changing role of the local state these past two decades has been dominated by the view of a transition from urban managerialism to urban entrepreneurialism. Associated with the transition has been the emergence of a New Urban Politics (NUP). Within a political economy framework. the NUP has been rooted in the material redistributive effects of the transition. This paper explores the character of this NUP, as experienced by one British city, and highlights some fundamental differences with the established political economy reading. Our argument, based upon the city of Glasgow, draws attention to two distinctive features. First, the institutional structure of urban governance in Glasgow differs from that of cities in the United States. In Glasgow, it has been the Left controlled local Council which has orchestrated the transition to entrepreneurialism, rather than the North American model of a coalition between local capital and the local state. Secondly, the transition in Glasgow has been marked not by a significant transfer of local state revenue from service provision to local economic development, but by a symbolic reorientation of the local state as marked by the central importance of large place marketing hallmark events. These events represent the city in ways which differ from traditional ‘self’ identities. Consequently, the transition has evoked a political response which has focused upon the symbolic posturing of the local state rather than the material consequences of the shift. In focusing upon local identity, the politics of urban entrepreneurialism in Glasgow points to a dimension of conflict which has received inadequate treatment in accounts of the NUP to date.     

The Baltic press and the environment: A study of the coverage of environmental problems in Estonian and Latvian newspapers 1992–1993

For most people, both in the West and the former Soviet empire, the mass media is an important source of information about the environment, but little has been known about the ways in which environmental issues are treated in the mass media in the former communist states of East Europe. In this paper, articles dealing with environmental issues in the Estonian and Latvian press during 1992 and 1993 were analysed, and the type of problems dealt with in the articles, the sources of information used and the locations of the places referred to were examined. The results of this study show that a majority of the articles in the Estonian and Latvian press were concerned with environmental issues that were concentrated in a few places within these countries, and that when international issues were treated, these were localized to nearby European countries. Despite the existence of problems with air pollution, especially in the north-east of Estonia, these were seldom mentioned in the press. The main sources of information used in the articles were the authorities.