Europeanization through biodiversity conservation: Croatia’s bid for EU accession and the Natura 2000 designation process

This paper explores the impacts of Europeanization on the environments of EU accession and candidate countries. By bridging research in political geography on Europeanization (Moisio et al., 2013; Clark and Jones, 2011) with theories of the production of nature (Smith, 1984; Katz, 2005), this work illustrates that the Europeanization process has distinct spatial impacts. Using a case study on nature protection in Croatia, this study investigates changes to law, governance, and conservation mapping in order to show the pathways by which the Europeanization process produces uniquely European natures within candidate countries.     

The URBAN programme and the European urban policy discourse: successful instruments to Europeanize the urban level?

The European Community Initiative URBAN, explored in this article for seven countries in general and for two individual cities in the Netherlands in more detail, is a micro example of the ongoing struggle between European and national policy actors who contest each others’ authority. The programme, aimed at solving social-economic problems in deprived neighbourhoods in European cities, has acted as a catalyst for new forms of cooperation.Whether it has directly contributed to Europeanization at the local level seems questionable, but it has certainly helped some city administrations to enter the European stage. Whereas European urban policy discourse could not be found at the Dutch urban level in the mid 1990s, the discourse has become dispersed and is now increasingly used.     

Privatization of neighborhood governance in transition economy: a case study of gated community in Phu My Hung new town,Ho Chi Minh City,Vietnam

Literature on common-interest development (CID) in housing, most common in the form of gated communities, has been based largely on the US’s experience, where the interpretation has centered on the interaction between three actors (local government, private developer, and homeowner association) and barely focused on the privatization of neighborhood governance in transition economies. This paper, through a case study of gated community in Phu My Hung new town shows that Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam—in the context of transition from centrally-planned to market-based economy—has been witnessing this privatized phenomenon of neighborhood governance. It employs both primary data, collected through observation and key informant interview, and secondary data to explain the contextual factors for the rise of gated communities in the city and find out the mechanism of neighborhood governance. In the city, housing privatization reforms, influx of foreign direct investment, and the formation of urban middle class have constituted the supply- and demand-side factors for the rise of gated communities. In addition, the reforms towards grassroots participation created a favorable environment for a privatization of neighborhood governance in which the private developer plays a dominant role in partnership with local government and homeowner association. To a certain extent, this privatization is similar to the case of US’s gated communities, however, it does not threaten the public authority and instead maintains a good collaboration between these three actors. This is an indigenous innovation of gated communities in Vietnam due to its socio-economic conditions and political context.     

Towards ‘hybrid accountability’ in EU biofuels policy? Community grievances and competing water claims in the Central Kalimantan oil palm sector

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.     

Antagonistic structures in border areas: Local milieux and local politics in the Polish-German twin city Gubin/Guben

Cross-border communication and co-operation at the Eastern fringe of the European Union seems so far to have been a matter of political initiative and a lot of good will at the levels of national, regional and local governance. This article maintains that everyday culture must be given more notice when cross-border activities are regarded at the local level, especially in twin cities. The case of the German-Polish twin city Guben/Gubin reveals a strong tendency towards a new divergence of thought and action between formal and informal levels of action, namely the level of local politics and governance and the level of local everyday milieux. While the politics of Euroregions, local administrations and local governments is very often directed towards establishing symbolic gestures of border-crossing and mutual understanding, social milieux at the ‘base’ of local societies are rather driven by a paradoxical mixture of hope, anxiety, resentments and prejudice, thus producing contradictions and even conflict with official political initiative. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

“The vice of distant knowledge”: Licensing and the geography of jurisdiction on the Scottish wartime Home Front

This article considers how licensing law conceives and practices jurisdiction. It examines the limits of attempts to define and exploit jurisdiction in the regulation of social problems connected to alcohol. Using the case study of a prohibition on the sale of spirits in the Scottish town of Motherwell during the First World War, it analyses how ‘vertical’ legal appeals through higher courts intersected with everyday ‘horizontal’ challenges to the jurisdiction of the local licensing magistrates as the ban pushed drinkers and the problems of drunkenness onto neighbouring authorities. Those higher court challenges importantly confirmed the localness of licensing, but they could not guarantee the effectiveness of the magistrates’ policy. By showing the potentially disruptive daily habits of ordinary citizens and urban infrastructure, the article promotes a social and material legal geography of licensing. In conclusion, it calls for a critical examination of the ‘local’ in local government, and the political geographies that result from appeals to space and scale in the division of governance functions.     

How a court, a commissioner and a lobby group brought European transport policy to life in 1985

Until the mid-1980s, transport policy was considered by many as one of the least successful domains of the European integration project. However, from the early 1990s onwards, there are clear signs of a single European transport policy, along with the accompanying implementation of infrastructure projects. What is the explanation for such a change in pace? This paper aims to offer insight in these processes by looking at the mechanisms which form and transform this policy domain. To understand the state of a policy domain and its dynamics over time an institutional approach is taken. Two concepts in political science, ‘policy arrangements’ and ‘supranational governance’ are combined and used as a framework to analyse the European transport policy domain. This analysis describes the development of several elements: organisations, rules, the transnational society, power, resources, and the central transport discourse. It demonstrates that all of these elements have developed from an intergovernmental setting towards a more supranational one. This development was slow in the first decennia when European transport policy was rather passive, but it picked up speed in the 1980s and 1990s. In the pivotal year of 1985, pressure from the transnational society resulted in a rapid change of the rules, the resources and the discourse.     

Making territory through infrastructure: The governance of natural gas transit in Europe

Recent political and military events in Ukraine have brought into sharp focus concerns over the security of European gas supplies from Russia. At the same time, the creation of an infrastructural and political ‘energy union’ has become a key stated priority for the governing bodies of the European Union. Both contingencies have highlighted the 28-nation bloc’s dependence on energy sources well beyond its state boundaries, underpinned by the existence of a transnational network for the transport and distribution of natural gas. We develop a theoretical framework predicated upon assemblage and governance approaches to explore the regulatory practices and spatial features associated with this hitherto largely unexplored infrastructural realm. Qualitative evidence from interviews, policy documents and media reports is interrogated interpretively and with the aid of social network analysis techniques. The paper reveals the existence of a socio-technical assemblage for the transmission of natural gas across national boundaries emerging as a result of the erosion of decision-making power away from established state actors, and the rise of new institutional orders. While undermining the organizational arrangements that have traditionally dominated the European gas sector, these contingencies also challenge existing understandings of transnational energy governance as they apply to overland gas transit.     

Party politics,civil society and local democracy – Reflections from Johannesburg

Party politics are generally absent from urban governance or urban politics theories or debates, or present only anecdotally or as a ‘black box’, whilst they are more and more described, especially in Cities of the South, as central to urban societies, access to resources and social dynamics. This paper attempts, through the case of the role of the ANC in civil society in Johannesburg, to uncover the place and the role of political parties in urban governance. It first argues that the party local branch is often crucial as a platform of mobilization, expression and debates around local needs, being more structured and able to access channels of decision than other civil society organizations or local government participatory structures. However, its strong embededness in urban local societies also means a form of social control restricting the ability of civil society to revolt and challenge urban policies more radically.     

REDD+ for Red Books? Negotiating rights to land and livelihoods through carbon governance in the Central Highlands of Vietnam

In Vietnam, initial programs to Reduce Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) have proliferated through international finance and new governance regimes for climate change mitigation. National capacity and legal frameworks have been adjusted to make the country eligible for REDD+ financing. In some local areas, activities have been implemented to ‘produce’ carbon credits intended for the international voluntary carbon market. Through a case study of a pilot REDD+ project in the Central Highlands of Vietnam, we examine how REDD+ has intersected with property rights institutions and agrarian change to influence changing property relations and commodity markets. Our findings show that REDD+ implemented through state and local institutions has articulated with the local political economy to coproduce conditions that embody local norms, needs, and desires. Specifically, local actors negotiate state-sanctioned tenurial instruments used for REDD+ governance, not for the purposes of carbon sequestration but instead in order to reassert their rights to land and forest for the cultivation of boom crops—the antithesis of REDD+ objectives. In the fine balancing act of adjusting local forestland holdings, REDD+ implementation has effectively facilitated increased opportunities for upland villagers to strategically claim land titles from local political authorities in the form of communal land certificates for forests called ‘Red Books’. In securing communal Red Books, villagers redefine or co-constitute the purpose of REDD+ to secure land for cash crop and commercial timber production. As with other forms of environmental governance, REDD+ is thus co-constituted locally in line with state and local institutions and histories and present day realities.     

The legal meaning of Lefebvre’s the right to the city: addressing the gap between global campaign and scholarly debate

There is a growing consideration globally of a right to the city in urban policies, strategies and legislation. The mention of this concept in the UN’s New Urban Agenda vision statement, in relation to human rights, both acknowledges and encourages this trend. It is also a result of lobbying and contestation. In the Anglo-American scholarly literature, there has been caution as to whether Henri Lefebvre intended a legal and institutionalized meaning for his ‘right to the city’. This paper reviews these debates and from that perspective examines Lefebvre’s positions on law, rights and the right to the city. It locates this within his wider political strategy and in particular the three-pronged strategy he put forward in The Urban Revolution to address the urban question—political foregrounding of the urban, promotion of self-management, and introduction of the right to the city into a transformed contractual system. By contextualizing and reviewing Everyday Life in the Modern World (published immediately before Right to the City), the paper examines Lefebvre’s thinking on rights formation, within ‘opening’, or the process of inducing change. The paper engages with meanings Lefebvre provides for rights in his concept of the right to the city, including his later conception of a contract of citizenship. The paper suggests that engagement with a fluid role of law and rights, in combination with Lefebvre’s other strategies, is important in opening the pathway he charts for the realization of this right, whether through local or global initiatives.     

The real-time city? Big data and smart urbanism

‘Smart cities’ is a term that has gained traction in academia, business and government to describe cities that, on the one hand, are increasingly composed of and monitored by pervasive and ubiquitous computing and, on the other, whose economy and governance is being driven by innovation, creativity and entrepreneurship, enacted by smart people. This paper focuses on the former and, drawing on a number of examples, details how cities are being instrumented with digital devices and infrastructure that produce ‘big data’. Such data, smart city advocates argue enables real-time analysis of city life, new modes of urban governance, and provides the raw material for envisioning and enacting more efficient, sustainable, competitive, productive, open and transparent cities. The final section of the paper provides a critical reflection on the implications of big data and smart urbanism, examining five emerging concerns: the politics of big urban data, technocratic governance and city development, corporatisation of city governance and technological lock-ins, buggy, brittle and hackable cities, and the panoptic city.     

Trans-scalar embeddedness and governance deficits in global production networks: Crisis in South African fruit

The governance of labour in global production networks (GPNs) has become a critical area of concern amongst academics and policymakers alike. To date, GPN research has focused on the role of private company codes and multi-stakeholder ethical initiatives primarily driven by lead-firms. Other GPN studies highlight the critical role of civil society organisations (CSOs) in challenging lead-firm purchasing practices and shaping regulatory outcomes at local production sites. However, GPN research has not sufficiently incorporated the role of nation states in regulating work through legislative frameworks and enforcement regimes, often referred to in the literature as ‘state’ or ‘public’ governance. This is despite a ‘regulatory renaissance’ taking place across certain developing countries, seeking to strengthen their national regulatory labour institutions (Piore and Schrank, 2008:1).The GPN framework provides an analytical lens through which to conceptualise cross-cutting strands of trans-scalar governance regimes, involving complex networks of state, private and civil society actors operating at multiple scales. Notions of territorial and societal embeddedness are used to elucidate how global ethical standards derived from particular country contexts become enmeshed in national regulatory frameworks and local societal relations, shaping governance outcomes for precarious workers incorporated into GPNs. The paper draws attention to the ‘trans-scalar embeddedness’ of labour governance regimes which interact across geographical scales and, in the case of South African fruit, reflect a ‘trans-scalar governance deficit’ for precarious workers. It is argued that the influence of national regulatory regimes should be more fully incorporated into analytical frameworks for understanding governance outcomes in GPNs.     

Collaborative governance and territorial rescaling in the UK: a comparative study of two EU Structural Funds programmes

Contemporary capitalist development facilitates the large-scale geographical reorganization of economic activity, involving both spatial clustering and decentralization. In the European Union the resulting regional disparities have provoked concerns about growing inequality on the one hand and poor competitiveness on the other. The concept of ‘territorial cohesion’ has been adopted to address such issues, with the need for co-operation across local, regional and national boundaries encouraged as a means of constructing more effective economic zones. This then raises the question whether the European Union’s own Structural Funds programme has been able to contribute to such collaborative working. Evidence from South Yorkshire/Sheffield in England and the Central Valleys/Cardiff in Wales suggests that any contribution is likely to be modest. Both areas were covered by Objective 1 programmes between 2000 and 2006, but differed markedly in the extent to which collaborative governance structures and processes developed. Key factors were the extent to which moves in this direction were already under way, and the extent to which management and decision-making were devolved from the centre to local and sub-regional actors.     

Water reform governmentality in Ecuador: Neoliberalism,centralization, and the restraining of polycentric authority and community rule-making

In most Latin American countries, issues concerning water governance and control also reflect broader conflicts over authority and legitimacy between the state and civil society. What lies behind the diverse water policy reforms is not simply a question of governing water affairs but also a drive to control or co-opt water user groups. This paper examines the efforts by the present Ecuadorian government to ‘control water users’ through new forms of ‘governmentality’ (Foucault, 1991). We use the ‘cathedral and bazaar’ metaphor (Lankford and Hepworth, 2010) to illustrate government rationale and practices in water governance shifts in the last decades. We analyze how Rafael Correa’s government sets out to reshape the relations between state, market and society. In its ‘Twenty-first Century Socialism’ project, based on a proclaimed ‘Citizen Revolution’, actual policy reform does not reverse but rather transforms the process of neoliberalizing water governance – creating a hybrid bazaar-cathedral model. We argue that the current water govermentality project implements reforms that do not challenge established market-based water governance foundations. Rather it aims to contain and undermine communities’ autonomy and ‘unruly’ polycentric rule-making, which are the result of both historical and present-day processes of change. Interestingly, water user federations that emerged during the neoliberal wave of the last two decades now claim water control space and search for new forms of democratizing water governance. They act as agents who fiercely – yet selectively and strategically – oppose both elements of the State-centered (cathedral) and market-based (bazaar) water governance models.     

Addressing the impacts of large-scale land investments: Re-engaging with livelihood research

What started as a media-driven hype about the global land rush has developed into a well-established academic debate on land governance and an important domain for policy intervention. Research over the past decade has deepened our understanding of how land, water and forests, which were once considered to be local assets and the sources of livelihoods, are transformed into global goods and the focus of capital investments. We are now clearly aware that such transformation generates significant impacts on the livelihood security of vulnerable groups. In response to this, a variety of policy interventions have been devised to minimize the negative impacts (‘do not harm’) and create new opportunities (‘do good’). Yet, it is still unclear how actual policy implementations play out on the ground, what the real impacts are at the local level and whether these interventions help people to improve their livelihoods. In this paper, we present an overview of the existing intervention approaches and their theoretical underpinnings, and discuss how to optimize the developmental outcomes. We argue that the once popular livelihood research framework should be revised and then incorporated more robustly in the existing intervention approaches, as it could help investors and governmental actors to engage in making their investments more relevant to local development.     

Between social and spatial convergence and divergence: an exploration into the political geography of European contact areas

The European continent, the motherland of nationalism, and the part of the world where political borders and different territorial and cultural identities are mostly interrelated, is now facing new challenges regarding how best to represent its numerous interests within one system. With the increase of international integration European countries began to devote greater attention to the development problems of their border areas that had to be helped to undertake certain functions in the international integration process. The fostering of a more balanced regional development also resulted in a strengthening of regional characteristics, which the new model could no longer ignore. Regional characteristics in turn have always been preserved in Europe by persistent historical and cultural elements of ethnic and linguistic variety. Therefore, it is not surprising that the process of European integration based on the new regional development model was accompanied by a parallel process of ethnic or regional awakening of minorities and other local communities. The key question for contemporary European (though of course this is not limited to Europe) political geography is, then, how the process summarised under the twin labels of social convergence and deterritorialisation will effect the persistent maintenance of regional identities and the corresponding divergence of regional spaces. Or, in other words: is the ‘unity in diversity’ European programme ever practicable and exportable on a world-wide scale or are we to be absorbed by a new global ‘melting pot’?     

The realm of freedom in new rural governance: Micro-politics of democracy in Sweden

Voluntary associations are at the heart of Swedish rural policy and strategies for governance as partners in bringing about ‘development from below.’ Examining the implications of this new responsibility being placed on the civil society in new modes of multilevel governance, I ask: do these changes presage greater political space for individuals vis à vis the state or is Swedish rural policy premised on ideas about an institutional context that might be disappearing? In comparative research in rural Sweden, I discuss state and civil-society relations at the macro level in light of the gendered micro-politics of associational life on the ground. Through ethnographic research with people involved in development work of different kinds, I examine how ideas about community associations are used to mobilize rural policy. I analyze its’ political implications and argue for the importance of analyzing macro in relation to the micropolitics on the ground for a better theoretical understanding of democracy and power in rural governance, in particular its gendered implications. I argue that past collaborative relations between the civil society and the state’s administrative apparatuses as well as the current focus of rural policy have enabled the state to hand over service functions to the civil society and diluted their ‘voice,’ incongrously endangering the institutional basis of rural policy itself. Further, attention to the gendered micropolitics of associational life makes apparent cleavages within civil society and its underlying relations of gender and power that challenge current conceptualizations on the neoliberalization of rural policy.     

Voluntarism,defensive localism and spaces of resistance to health care restructuring

This paper examines the evolving role of volunteers and the voluntary sector in shaping community responses to structural change in health care systems. It contributes to the emerging understanding of the different forms voluntarism can take within and among places, including as a space of resistance to contemporary restructuring initiatives such as regionalization. Within the geographies of voluntarism literature, however, little attention has been directed towards interrogating the local dynamics of such voluntarism, especially as it is reflected in public discourse. We address this deficiency through a media-based case study of public reaction to the recent implementation of Ontario’s Local Health Integration Networks (a type of regional health authority). Specifically, we examine a decade of newspaper coverage in a mid-size Canadian city region to document and characterize how the activities of volunteers and voluntary sector organizations in the community are portrayed in light of the structural imperatives to integrate health care services and regionalize health care governance. The media findings reveal a suite of public concerns and related activities, with the voluntary sector called upon in various ways to defend the autonomy of the community against the perceived threats to local services, employment and vulnerable populations. We interpret the evident complexity of voluntary sector resistance as a form of ‘defensive localism’ and discuss implications for developing informed policy on health care restructuring and for advancing knowledge on the local geographies of voluntarism.     

Policy responses to informality in urban Africa: the example of Maputo,Mozambique

In the global South informality constitutes one of the leading issues for urban policy makers. The planning challenges around informality are particularly relevant in urban Africa as most Africans make their livelihoods in the informal economy. This paper examines issues of state policy responses to informality through the lens of street traders. Under scrutiny are policy responses towards street trading in Mozambique’s capital, Maputo, a city that has experienced the advance of informalization. It is argued that the dominant approach towards informal trading across urban Africa is of a ‘sanitising’ policy response by the local state which is rooted upon traditions of modernist urban planning in search of ‘ordered development’. The research discloses that in Maputo national and municipal authorities have adopted a more tolerant approach to the informal economy, mainly because it provides a livelihood to so many of the city’s poor and because of potential social unrest likely to be triggered by a repressive approach. In Maputo the core narrative is of an urban informal economy viewed by officials as an important livelihood for the city’s poor, albeit one which is subject both to periodic harassment and encouragement to ‘formalize’. The analysis represents a contribution to the expanding corpus of writings on Africa’s informalising cities and specifically concerning policy responses towards street trading.