Land sharing not sparing in the “green economy”: The role of livelihood bricolage in conservation and development in the Philippines

In Southeast Asia’s green economy, conservation interventions intensify the production of resources as commodities through land sparing activities and zoning in extensively used landscapes. Such initiatives encounter problems where poor resource users diversify livelihoods in multi-functional landscapes over time. In terms of ‘livelihood bricolage’ – the mixing, matching and building of portfolios – we describe how forest users enhance security by building dynamic livelihood portfolios based on the economic and socio-cultural considerations of place. Philippine case studies show how disrupting livelihood bricolage in multi-functional landscapes with ‘intensifying interventions’ spatially constrains livelihood security and conservation objectives. We conclude that more equitable forest governance supports land sharing with diverse, extensive livelihoods in varied landscapes.     

Illuminating the practice of Knowledge Exchange as a ‘pathway to impact’ within an Arts and Humanities Research Council ‘Creative Economy Knowledge Exchange’ project

This article is concerned with the practice of Knowledge Exchange (KE) within the creative economy. Drawing on material collected as part of an ethnographic study of a small creative business support agency – Cultural Enterprise Office – based in Glasgow, Scotland, the article argues for a nuanced consideration of the complexities of doing KE in the creative economy. The study in question was titled ‘Supporting Creative Business’ and was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council under its Creative Economy Knowledge Exchange programme. This article describes the practice of KE, and the role that it might play as a ‘pathway to impact’. I explore the often-mundane activities that constitute KE ‘on the ground’, and argue for further attention to be paid to what I call ‘informal KE’. This article contributes directly to ongoing debates in geography about the effect that the impact agenda is having on academic practice. More specifically, the article examines the role of academics vis-à-vis consultants and other knowledge producers within the creative economy.     

江苏省海洋经济与区域经济耦合协调性研究

伴随着海洋资源开发和海洋科技进步,海洋产业在国民经济中扮演着日益重要的角色,海洋经济与区域经济的协调发展成为研究热点。江苏省是沿海地区经济发展强省,但其海洋经济发展优势并不突出,为了对其海洋经济与区域经济的耦合协调发展状态及耦合发展的制约因素进行研究,文章在探析海洋经济系统与区域经济系统耦合发展机理的基础上,借鉴物理学耦合度函数构建了海洋经济与区域经济的耦合协调度模型,并对2006~2012年江苏及其他沿海省市海洋经济与区域经济的耦合协调度进行了评价。结果表明2006~2012年间,江苏省海洋经济与区域经济的耦合协调度不断提高,逐步迈入了磨合发展的关键期,但海洋产业发展模式落后和海陆互动性弱等因素导致其与沿海其他省市相比仍有较大差距。本研究能够为江苏海洋经济发展提供科学建议。     

An index to assess maritime importance in the European Atlantic economy

Successive marine policies set by the European Union identify the maritime sectors as crucial drivers for growth and jobs in the EU economy. The design of marine policies and the assessment of the importance of the maritime economy need empirical support that provides the basic data to help the decision-making process. This paper proposes a metric, in the form of a synthetic index, to measure and compare the importance of the maritime sectors in the European Atlantic area. The index scores can be used to assess the position of each Atlantic region so that it is possible to compare its performance to the rest of the area. The results show the relative weight of the maritime sectors in the European Atlantic regions and the high heterogeneity among them. Analyzing the maritime economy with this index can provide guidance for the design of economic policies to identify and revitalize the regions with greater potential for Blue Growth in the Atlantic area. This may help to put into perspective the importance of the maritime economy and can serve to improve the socio-economic dimension of the use of marine waters.     

Institutional change and the political economy of water megaprojects: China’s south-north water transfer

This paper analyses the relationship between megaproject construction and change in water management institutions. Due to the wide geographical distribution of their costs and benefits, which often spans national and provincial borders, water supply megaprojects frequently prompt intentional or evolutionary institutional change. China’s South-North Water Transfer Project (Middle Route), the world’s largest interbasin transfer project, was completed in December 2014 and is now in operation. Based on extensive fieldwork and analysis of Chinese documents, this paper introduces the government actors involved in, and impacted by, the planning and construction of the project. By detailing the interests of these actors, and the way those interests have been affected by the political, economic and environmental changes wrought by the megaproject, it shows that the Middle Route project has already contributed to change in one major financial institution – water pricing – and is exerting pressure on at least two others—infrastructure financing and compensation. Despite the regulatory efforts of the Chinese central government, incomplete institutional change processes threaten the long-term viability of the megaproject. Megaprojects demand institutional change and this must be factored into policymaking processes; business as usual will not suffice if the real benefits of the South-North Water Transfer are to be fairly distributed and its negative social, economic and environmental effects mitigated and appropriately compensated.     

Green growth rhetoric versus reality: Insights from Indonesia

By 2030 Indonesia aims to reduce its CO₂ emissions by 29% while maintaining a 7% annual GDP growth rate, thus making “green economy” a reality. Based on a review of literature and secondary data and interviews with key informants, this article examines the gap between these national ambitions and the reality on the ground, with particular attention to the challenges of multi-scalar environmental governance. It first introduces the green economy concept and discusses the main green growth policies and initiatives at the national level. The article then examines green growth ambitions at the provincial level in East Kalimantan province. Our findings suggest that existing plans to further expand oil palm plantations are at odds with provincial efforts to reduce emissions. This highlights a key paradox we identify at the heart of the green economy concept as it is developing in Indonesia: between a development trajectory based on resource extraction and agro-industrial development, and ‘green’ aspirations linked to environmental protection and greenhouse gas emissions reductions. We conclude that the main challenges to address these contradictions are related to the lack of coordination between different governance scales and a political economy that is not conducive to reforms in the land-based sector. There is a need to align investment, planning, and green growth policies, based on a strong political commitment and an awareness of social and environmental trade-offs. On a more general level the article shows that the green economy concept refers to a form of environmental governance in which authorities and interests may overlap and come into conflict at different scales. Hence, differing priorities may lead the material expression of the green economy to diverge significantly from policy as it is initially laid out.     

Economic development and prosperity patterns around the world: Structural challenges for a global steady-state economy

Taking a global perspective this paper sets out to theoretically and empirically identify prosperity patterns for four groups of countries at different levels of economic development. It conceptualizes ‘prosperity’ in terms of ecological sustainability, social inclusion, and the quality of life and contextualizes this definition in global perspective. Subsequently, it operationalizes and measures these dimensions on the basis of data from sources such as the World Bank, the Global Footprint Network and the OECD for 138 countries and by applying dual multiple factor analysis. Building on earlier research that suggested that higher development levels in terms of GDP per capita are capable of providing social and individual prosperity but at the expense of environmental sustainability, we ask whether other interrelations between prosperity indicators exist on other levels of economic development. Empirically distinguishing between ‘rich’, ‘emerging’, ‘developing’ and ‘poor countries’ the paper finds that social and individual prosperity indicators largely increase with economic development while ecological sustainability indicators worsen. Our analyses further reveal that ‘social cohesion’ can be established under different economic and institutional conditions, that subjective wellbeing increases with income rises at all levels of economic development and that a decoupling of carbon emissions from the provision of prosperity is, in principle, achievable, while a reduction of the global matter and energy throughput poses a much greater challenge. The paper concludes by highlighting the repercussions of these findings for the trajectories that countries at different levels of economic development would need to undertake.     

基于核半监督判别分析的高光谱影像特征提取

针对高光谱影像特征提取中地物类别训练样本获取代价较高的情况,在线性判别分析的基础上,结合核方法和半监督学习理论,提出了一种基于核半监督判别分析(KSDA)的高光谱影像特征提取方法。该方法同时利用少量已知类别和大量未知类别样本数据进行模型的学习和训练。通过OMIS高光谱影像数据实验表明:在少量已知类别训练样本的条件下,经KSDA特征提取的样本数据在特征空间中能更好地聚集成团,且类别之间的距离较大,增加了类别之间的可分性,得到了较高的分类精度;同时,提取的特征影像能够较好地区分各种地物类别。     

Entangled Sidewalks: Queer Street Vendors in Los Angeles

This article is based on my own experiences in the field and the stories of queer Latina immigrant vendors collected from 2004 to 2014. I argue that through an onto-epistemological relational framework, we can further elucidate how entangled social worlds provide new ways of understanding the world we live in. I propose reading the materiality and embodied street vending practices as not separate from, but constitutive with, ideologies about sexuality, gender, and nationality that shape, restrict, and reproduce informal street vending practices in Latino barrios. Particularly, I analyze the embodied entanglements of culturally conservative ideologies about sexuality within immigrant Latino communities across borders, individual experiences with transmigration journeys, and context of reception in Los Angeles.     

Trouble in paradise: resilience and Vancouver’s second life in the “new economy”

Resilience is an increasingly important concept within urban studies, economic geography, and evolutionary economics for measuring the capacity of city-regions to respond to economic shocks. In this article, we provide a sympathetic critique of the resilience metaphor in urban studies, which we explicate through an analysis of the recent history of the Vancouver economy. On the surface, Vancouver seemingly showed resilience when it overcame the abrupt decline of its resource-based economy in the 1980s, and established an alternative flourishing “new economy” by the 1990s. But over the last five years, the key local “creative” industries such as video game development and film production have suffered, with a number of large firms leaving Vancouver, and industry employment declining sharply. Drawing on more than 40 interviews conducted over a five-year period with members of the local video game community, our paper documents the rise and more recent decline of Vancouver’s “new economy” sector. Our research raises questions about the value of the resilience metaphor in urban studies and highlights the difficulties facing city-regions reliant on highly mobile “new economy” industries.