Impact of a climate network: The role of intermediaries in local level climate action

Local governments have set highly ambitious greenhouse gas emission reduction targets on a strategic level, in some cases influenced by intermediary networks. Yet, the quantitative impacts of climate strategies or the sharing of best practices on emissions still remain largely unknown. The aim of this study was to examine the impact of an intermediary network on municipal greenhouse gas emissions. This was done through an econometric analysis of the emissions of municipalities that are members of the Finnish Hinku (Towards Carbon Neutral Municipalities) network, and through comprehensive qualitative interviews conducted in 40 of those municipalities. Our quantitative results show that Hinku network membership has successfully led to the lowering of greenhouse gas emission levels in participating municipalities. The qualitative interviews suggest that this is due to systematic local level climate work, enhanced by network membership. The network functions as an intermediary in two ways: by providing expertise and enabling peer-support. In addition, it has also succeeded in legitimising local level climate action. Ambitious local level climate action can also affect the ambition of national climate policy, which in turn may reflect on the amount resources allocated to local climate action.     

Curating the quest for ‘good food’: The practices,spatial dynamics and influence of food-related curation in Sweden

What is ‘good food’? Is it fair trade, local, organic or ethically produced? With an ever-expanding array of products and ‘qualities’ to consider, consumers in the global North may find it increasingly difficult and time-consuming to make the ‘right’ choices. As a result, a range of intermediaries, including food apps and collective buying groups, are emerging to support and influence people with their food choices. While intermediation refers to all activities linking producers and consumers, this paper narrows the focus and considers one important, yet poorly understood, intermediary function within the food marketplace: ‘curation’. Although the concept of curation has long been associated with museums and art worlds, curatorial practices are evolving in the contemporary marketplace and are performed by a growing range of actors operating in physical, temporary and virtual spaces. Rather than acting as brokers or gatekeepers, curators interpret, translate and shape the marketplace by sorting, organising, evaluating and ascribing value(s) to specific products. They also offer general and personalised recommendations to consumers. Although the literature on local food privileges the direct relations between producers and consumers, this paper considers the important role of intermediaries. Drawing on interviews and participant observation in Sweden it contributes to the existing literature on curation by examining the spatial dynamics and nature of curatorial practices, the motivations behind them and the values they create for consumers. The findings demonstrate that a range of activities can be understood as curation and that in order to nuance and extend existing conceptualisations of curation a wider and more dynamic range of actors (food apps), spaces (blogs) and values such as inspiration, convenience and sense of community need to be considered.     

Canonical elements and Keplerian-like solutions for intermediary orbits of satellites of an oblate planet

Within the framework of the Canonical Formalism in the extended phase space,a general Hamiltonian is investigated that covers a wide class of radial intermediaries accounting for themajor secular effects due to a planet's oblateness perturbations.An analytical, closed-form solution for this generic Hamiltonian is developed in terms of elementary functions via the corresponding Hamilton-Jacobi equation. The analytical solution so obtained can be contemplated according to a simple geometrical and dynamical interpretation in Keplerian language by means of the usual relations characterizing elliptic elements along ahypothetic Keplerian motion.Appropriate choices for the terms appearing in the proposed Hamiltonian lead to recovering the analogues of some well-known, classical radial intermediaries (those introduced by Deprit and the one built by Alfriend and Coffey), but also certain new ones derived by Ferrándiz for the Main Problem in the Theory of Artificial Satellites of the Earth. In any case, the results are also applicable to problems dealing with orbital motion of other planetary satellites.The generality of this pattern leads to asystematic obtaining of solutions to the considered intermediaries: special choices of the Hamiltonian yield the correspondinganalytical solution to the respective intermediary problem.