An initial scoping of transitional justice for global climate governance

Geopolitical changes combined with the increasing urgency of ambitious climate action have re-opened debates about justice and international climate policy. Tensions about historical responsibility have been particularly difficult and could intensify with increased climate impacts and as developing countries face mounting pressure to take mitigation action. Climate change is not the only time humans have faced historically rooted, collective action challenges involving justice disputes. Practices and tools from transitional justice have been used in over 30 countries across a range of conflicts at the interface of historical responsibility and imperatives for collective futures. Central to this body of theory and experience is the need to reflect both backwards- and forwards-oriented elements in efforts to build social solidarity. Lessons from transitional justice theory and practice have not been systematically explored in the climate context. This article conceptually examines the potential of transitional justice practices to inform global climate governance by looking at the structural similarities and differences between the global climate regime and traditional transitional justice contexts. It then identifies a suite of common transitional justice practices and assesses their potential applicability in the climate context.

POLICY RELEVANCE

• Justice disputes, including about historical responsibility and future climate actions, are long-standing in the climate context and could intensify with increased climate impacts and broadened mitigation pressures.

• Lessons from efforts to use transitional justice mechanisms could provide insight into strategies for balancing recognition of harms rooted in the past, while creating stronger future-oriented collective action.

• Several areas of transitional justice practice including: the combination of amnesties and litigation, truth commissions, reparations and institutional change could provide useful insights for the climate context.

     

Urban agriculture and the sustainability fix in Vancouver and Detroit

Both Vancouver, British Columbia, and Detroit, Michigan, have significant and growing urban agriculture movements. In this article, I follow recent work investigating the connection between urban agriculture and neoliberalization to determine how these local governments have used urban agriculture in narratives of economic development to selectively pursue a sustainability fix. I analyze how different regimes of local governance have influenced the urban agriculture movements, leading to local, hybridized fixes that adapt to different material and discursive contexts in each place. I argue that in both cities, urban agriculture has radical potential as a grassroots response to economic and environmental injustice, but has also been enrolled as a device by the local state in which the primary goal of sustainability planning becomes enhanced economic competitiveness. Pursuing an agenda of food justice requires examining the larger context and effects of municipal involvement with food movements.     

A political-cultural map of Europe. Family structures and the origins of differences between national political cultures in the European Union

Differences between the national political cultures of the European states are puzzling. They are too often taken for granted or treated as an elusive explanation for residual differences that can not be accounted for in comparative politics. Here they are put at the core of a comparative analysis. This article explores the origins of differences between national political cultures. It deals with national political cultures from the perspective of Cultural Theory or grid-group analysis. A national political culture is conceived as a ‘conversation’ between subcultures associated to national political institutions and practices (and not as an aggregated pattern of individual orientations toward political objects). National political cultures can be characterised on the basis of ideal typical patterns of relations between the basic cultures or rationalities distinguished by Cultural Theory. After an assessment of the differences between the national political cultures of the Member States of the European Union, the paper considers traditional family structures as possible sources of differentiation, elaborating upon the work of the French political historian Emmanuel Todd who has documented the correspondence between the geography of traditional family structures and the geography of ideologies in Europe. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

基于广州实证的后改革时代中国城市住房权问题

社会公正是当前地理学的一个热点也是传统研究课题。住房问题往往是社会公正研究和实践的重点案例。中国住房制度改革之后,中国住房拥有率及人均住房面积均大幅度提高。然而在住房分配的过程中,不平等和不公正现象时有发生。如何区别平均和公正,如何看待中国住房改革中的社会公平与不公共存的现象,是了解中国新城市现象的一个重要途径。本文从近期西方政治学和地理学关于住房权（housing rights）、社会公正以及城市权利等文献的讨论出发,通过在广州的实证研究,运用结构方程模型和Pratt指数对涉及住房权主要方面的住房分异的发生途径及其公正性进行综合分析。实证研究说明在住房分配领域,存在着制度因素延续下来所导致的分异。一些制度因素已经转化为市场因素,直接或间接影响个人居住条件和住房所有权的获得,并通过后者进一步影响住房分异。与此同时,纯粹市场因素的影响则相对薄弱。上述结论有助于了解当前中国城市住房权的核心问题,认识社会公正的发展前景,以及探寻减少社会不公正的制度利器。     

尺度政治视角下的地缘能源安全评价方法及应用

通过引入政治地理学的尺度政治、国际关系学的安全理论和能源安全理论,考虑到能源争夺中的尺度转换、地缘环境中的地缘关系和地缘结构以及安全的三个属性等因素,重新构建了地缘能源安全评价模型,并基于此模型对1995-2010 年俄罗斯太平洋石油管道建设中的中国地缘石油能源安全进行了定量评价。结果表明：① 从时间上来看,中国在俄罗斯太平洋石油管道建设中的地缘石油安全指数不断攀升,中国在此石油能源尺度政治争夺中越来越处于不利地位,考虑到今后韩国、美国等国家的参与,竞争将更加激烈;② 从地缘关系上看,中日两国能源竞争指数趋于减少,但是两国从俄罗斯进口能源竞争加剧;③ 俄罗斯能源出口战略长期以来一直偏重欧洲,但是已经出现转向的趋势,其能源出口战略指数已显著下降;④ 中国石油消费的比重稳定和中俄之间友好关系在一定程度上缓解了中国地缘石油能源安全;⑤ 从地缘结构上来看,中国经济增长带动下的整体综合国力的增强,将会加剧东北亚地区的地缘石油竞争。     

大城市地区农村改革的政治生态学分析--以北京市农村地区为例

运用政治生态学(politicalecology)的基本观点,以北京市农村地区为对象,在对平原、丘陵、山区4个不同类型村庄多年实地调查基础上,分析了在政治体制改革、市场经济影响下北京郊区农村的组织形态、产业结构、土地利用、耕地质量、生态环境的变化过程。研究揭示,1979以来北京农村政治改革与生态环境的关系与其他的农村地区不同,国家与地方政府的政策变化使北京农村生态环境在不同时期呈现出恶化-改善的波动性过程;根据长期研究,政体改革、政策变化在总体上起到了抑制生态恶化、改善农村环境的作用。     

Problematising justice definitions in public food security debates: Towards global and participative food justices

In the current environment of austerity, social justice concerns are increasingly permeating the food security agenda. However, there is a need to clarify what it means to create socially just food systems conceptually and practically. To address this gap, this paper proposes an analytical framework to embed a more complex conceptualisation of justice in food security debates that also serves as a bridging device across competing narratives. This framework is mobilised to analyse the framing process of the UK media, which plays a key role in developing narratives that provide audiences with schemas for interpreting events. Results show the emergence of eleven frames which highlight different solutions to deliver food security. The application of the justice analytical framework evidences the contingent relationship between food security and justice claims and discusses how these food security frames address differently what counts as a matter of justice (including economic, socio-cultural and political dimensions) and who counts as a subject of justice, tackling issues around delimitation of scales and sites of justice. The analysis reveals polarised positions between whether the sites subject to justice should be individuals or structures and uncovers how political and global elements of justice are largely by-passed in food security debates. These conceptualisations of justice and associated policy recommendations neglect the potential for people to participate fully in the conditions and decisions that give rise to particular distributions of goods and bads in the first place; limiting the construction of shared responsibilities to deliver global and participative food justices.     

Electoral behaviour behind the gates: partisanship and political participation among Canadian gated community residents

Gated communities have been characterised as representing processes of 'forting up' and 'civic secession', in which their residents use gating as a strategy for withdrawing from political life and from taking collective responsibility for others. The assumption is that the residents of private gated communities should be less likely to participate in political life, and/or be more likely to support political parties on the right who advocate privatisation, reduced government expenditures and lower taxes. If the act of living in a gated community is associated with either greater support for parties and policies on the right of the political spectrum, or limited political participation, then the growth of such forms of privatised communities has potential implications for the future of urban politics and even for national political systems. However, despite surveys that have dealt with social attitudes 'behind the gates', insufficient attention has been paid to the politics of gated community residents. This paper fills this gap through a comparative analysis of electoral behaviour during the 2006 federal election at the level of the polling station. Electoral participation and partisanship in 27 gated communities in three Canadian metropolitan areas is compared against that of non-gated residents. Regression analysis is conducted in order to determine whether gated community residents differ from their non-gated counterparts in the way they vote and their levels of electoral turnout, after controlling for social composition. The potential implications of this research are then discussed.     

A Review of “Managing the Infosphere: Governance,Technology, and Cultural Practice in Motion”

The antiquated and undemocratic rules operating in the United Nations Security Council do not reflect and serve today’s integrated global society, nor does the institution adequately represent the diversity of member states. Despite General Assembly discussions that have lasted a quarter-century, no result has materialized on the expansion issue. The author concludes that regional rivalries, the veto, the onerous Charter amendment process, and the failure to devise a truly representative model are responsible for the lack of progress. A model with eighteen rotating seats, based on population, area, and regional position, and four elected seats deserves consideration as an alternative. Key Words: metageography, political geography, population and area ratings, United Nations Security Council.     

Developing the Commons: The Contradictions of Growth in Exurban Montana

Property development in exurban areas has the capacity to undermine the amenity values that undergird that development. Predicated on that contradiction, this research seeks to explain the emergence of local, informal, planning-based regulations in the traditionally antiregulatory context of rural Montana. Adopting both the insights of institutional common property theory and those of critical materialist analysis of economic growth, the work reconciles accounts of development as inherently ecologically self-destructive with those stressing creative development and adoption of rules for collective self-governance. Using a detailed case analysis of a Montana county undergoing rapid growth, it examines what drives localized land use regulation, what controls are enacted, and whether such controls are resisted or facilitated by development capital. Findings suggest that informal regulations seek to control externalities of development on valuable amenity commons and that they are adopted with the acceptance, if not encouragement, of the development community. These fragile instruments are vulnerable to opposition, however, highlighting problems of more general relevance: Growth depends on a deregulated development regime, which produces externalities that undermine the valorization of property. Localized regulatory planning regimes are therefore both a solution to contradictions inherent in growth and a potential source of future planning problems.