Suchergebnisse

This paper develops a novel framework for analysing how planning became implicated in the Irish boom, bubble and bust years, as planners and politicians alike focused on generating positive visions for the future, whilst variously working to displace, defer and transfer the political tensions of the present. Empirically we focus on both national planning reforms and the high hopes for city regional planning in Cork Ireland after the publication of an innovative, non-statutory strategic plan in 2001. A decade or so later, the plan has faltered, unable to broker a sustained commitment to its core principles from all partners. The reasons for this, we argue, relate to the wider problems of planning in Ireland during the Celtic Tiger years, as an economic boom got translated into a property bubble, something that few officials cared to recognize or challenge publicly at the time. There were, however, doubters-but they were sidelined or vilified. Framing our analysis in terms of recent literature on soft spaces and post-politics, we argue that soft space planning for metropolitan Cork exposes deep-seated problems in Irish planning. © 2012 Taylor & Francis.

In the UK, the Labour government (1997-2010) introduced various experiments to uplift English regional and sub-regional spatial strategy to a more prominent position in sub-national governance but much of this has been subsequently guillotined by the incoming Coalition government in May 2010. This paper assesses the prospect for the survival of strategic spatial thinking under the Coalition government's ethos of 'localism'. It first considers some of the broad conceptual issues relating to strategic spatial planning, identifying three key conundrums around flexibility of scaling, institutional structures and capacity, and core values and forms of knowledge. It then provides one of the first comprehensive accounts of what was achieved during the outgoing Labour administration, and what ultimately went wrong with the English regional planning project. Finally, an initial assessment is made of the future prospects for strategic planning in England to survive in new spatial contexts, despite the hostile conditions associated with the Coalition government. © 2013 Copyright Taylor and Francis Group, LLC.

This special issue looks at spatial planning and the new localism, focusing on the recent changes to policy in England following the May 2010 elections when the Coalition government came to power. As Bas Waterhout, Frank Othengrafen and Olivier Sykes note in their contribution, changes in English planning seem to be more frequent and more dramatic than in many other European countries. Partly in consequence of this, planners and critics in other countries watch carefully the English experience for what they can learn about reforming planning systems. © 2013 Copyright Taylor and Francis Group, LLC.

This paper explores the use of evidence in the making of local development frameworks in England, introduced as part of the 2004 Planning and Compulsory Purchase Act. The reforms dictate that for a plan to be considered 'sound', the policy choices it contains must be justified through the compilation and use of an appropriate evidence base. The paper draws on research undertaken as part of the UK government-sponsored Spatial Plans in Practice (SPiP) project looking into the operation of the reformed spatial planning system in England. It draws on the findings of a number of reports produced as part of this research on the use of evidence in the making of local development frameworks in England as well as wider components of the SPiP project including interviews with local authority planning officers, documentary review of adopted planning documents (core strategies and area action plans) and a longitudinal suite of case studies covering a number of local planning authorities using both qualitative semi-structured interviews and a strategic survey. The paper finds grounds to believe that, although local planning authorities are collecting more evidence than ever before, the culture of using evidence to inform policy-making is far from a well-established or uniform practice. © 2010 Taylor & Francis.

The involvement of local people in protected area management a key factor in the sustainable and efficient protection of wildlife, and an economically preferable approach for the effective everyday care and protection of the environment. This paper aims to explore the community participation and protected area management challenges faced by national park authorities in developing countries, through a case study of the Pelister National Park in the Republic of Macedonia. The paper focuses on the multiple social, economic and political expressions of flexibility in national park management at the local scale. These examinations are based on field research in Pelister, executed in the summer of 2006, and involving 20 in-depth interviews with local policy-makers, nature protection experts and local inhabitants, as well as a questionnaire survey of 140 residents of three villages in and around the park (Nizhepole, Malovishta and Brajchino). © 2009 Springer Science + Business Media B.V.

I challenge the popular notion of European rural development group dynamics and argue for a better understanding of the role of micro-politics as a means of enhancing the performance of these groups. The views are research based and have relevance to the broader rural development and regeneration sector. Micro-politics involves knowledge, power, trust, perceptions, understanding, social networks, values and traits that arise as a result of individuals interacting within a group whilst working on a shared goal, such as rural development. The monetary and time costs to a community of failing to address micro-politics and nurture positive group relations are considerable. These include time spent in unproductive meetings and poorly prioritized—and ultimately unsuccessful—funding applications as a result of failure to agree priorities. Successful groups rely on individuals interacting in a way that achieves a greater social good. Mutual trust amongst the actors lies at the heart of effective group activity. Effective management of micro-politics requires steps to nurture a culture of mutual trust to ensure that rural development actors co-operate rather than play destructive games with one another. A case study example of a relatively straightforward approach illustrates how this might be done in practice.

This paper examines the drought that hit Athens between 1989 and 1991 and analyses the role of this natural phenomenon as the "ferment" for ongoing political-economic transformations in the direction of liberalisation and privatisation of water management and allocation in Greece. The paper analyses how the drought was marshalled as an effective discursive vehicle to facilitate and expedite the state-led neoliberal political-economic agenda. It shows how the social consensus around a number of "emergency measures" that the state adopted to deal with a "natural" crisis was grounded in a particular discourse on water and in the political-economic "positioning" of "nature" as a source of crisis. In turn, this change in the "discursive" production of nature fused with the rhetoric and practice of market-led development and privatisation and, ultimately, facilitated important transformations in the social and political-economic (material) production of nature. © 2003 Editorial Board of Antipode.

This paper examines the delivery of infrastructure requirements related to the plan-making (LDF) process in England introduced as part of the 2004 planning system reforms. Success or otherwise in terms of plan implementation and infrastructure delivery is crucial if the reformed spatial planning system is to be successful. The paper draws on research undertaken as part of a government-sponsored research project into the operation of the new LDF process. The research reveals a significant gap between government expectations and current practice. It suggests that longer-term commitments by central government, alongside improved understanding of the spatial planning process and the role of local government as part of a continued drive for 'culture change' among local planning authorities and delivery partners, will be required if the current barriers to the delivery of infrastructure are to be overcome. Otherwise, the new-style LDFs are as likely to be plagued by implementation gaps as were their predecessors.

Political protests have visibly increased in frequency and intensity in South Africa in recent years, and they seem to indicate a more adversarial relationship between the post-apartheid state and civil society. This article uses the 2002 Johannesburg World Summit on Sustainable Development, and the protests which accompanied it, to illuminate these broader trends. It analyses the legacy of the Summit as a 'mega-event', and highlights the importance of the 'mega-protests' in 2002. The most important effects are shown to be the disruption of South African extraversion; the marginalization and repression of particular social movements; and the exacerbation of broader trends toward a more polarized political landscape in South Africa. Importantly, however, the article concludes that such developments are not evidence of growing distance between the state and civil society, but rather between those considered legitimate and responsible partners, and those who are excluded from 'normal' politics. Thus the Johannesburg Summit illuminates broader trends toward the governmentalization and transnationalization of politics in South Africa, and destabilizes conventional understandings of what and where 'South African politics' actually is, as well as raising important questions regarding the impacts of such mega-events in the future. © The Author 2010. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Royal African Society. All rights reserved.

In this paper I seek to describe, explain, and evaluate three decades of Left geographical change. Now that 'critical geography'-rather than 'radical geography'-has become the privileged descriptor for Left geographical inquiry, it is argued that this temporal switch of labels is of more than merely semantic significance. Specifically, it is suggested that the supercession of the 'radical geography' label is symptomatic of a substantive shift in the nature and purposes of Left geographical inquiry. This shift has entailed the 'professionalisation' and 'academicisation' of Left geography. Both developments have occurred in the context of a thirty-year transition from a 'modern' to an 'after-modern' higher education system. Taking the Anglo-American case, it is argued that the current vitality of the geographical (read 'critical') Left in the academy correlates with its detachment from 'real world' political constituencies and also a blindness to the academic changes underpinning this inverse correlation. Rather than worrying over their apparent failure to connect with constituencies 'out there', it is argued that geographical Leftists need to recapture something of the radical geography spirit of action and engagement in order to contest changes occurring 'in here': that is, changes in the political and moral economy of the higher system that enables and constrains our academic labours. A brief manifesto for a 'domesticated critical geography' is offered by way of a conclusion.

The study of far-right parties and politics is one of the most high-profile research areas in political science and related disciplines. Far-right parties have been the subject of vast amounts of varied scholarship since their turn-of-the-century resurgence. However, as the far right has become a mainstay, with Brexit and the election of Donald Trump in 2016 blurring the boundaries between mainstream and far-right politics, it has become crucial to pay attention to the process of mainstreaming. Beyond a focus on far-right electoral success, studies of mainstreaming, as well as a critical account of the concept and role of the 'mainstream', have proved elusive. This article provides a heuristic framework to understand these concepts and the mainstreaming of the far right. Key to our approach is a more holistic analysis, extending beyond traditional approaches which focus mostly on the electoral outcomes of far-right parties, positioning the mainstream as a relatively inert target or bulwark against them. To achieve this, we seek to reframe the focus towards the centrality of discourse both in the process, and as an outcome, of mainstreaming. Only by doing so can we account for the significant role played by the mainstream in this process.

Feminist critics of power-sharing argue that power-sharing structures privilege ethnic/ethnonational identity and impede women's descriptive and substantive political representation. This paper extends these arguments to consider the extent to which consociational theory addresses the role of civil society and women's political voice in postconflict societies. We argue that power-sharing is overly concerned with formal representation to the detriment of understanding the role civil society can play in peace building. Whilst we acknowledge the importance of civil society retaining a critical distance from political institutions, we suggest several mechanisms for incorporating civil society into power-sharing arrangements. We argue that a consideration of civil society can highlight the gendered issues that are ignored in power-sharing settings, and we conclude that a broader understanding of both "politics" and "conflict" is required for power-sharing to be more equitable to women's descriptive and substantive representation.

This article identifies a central problem in the theory and practice of democracy in divided societies: the systematic exclusion of Others. Defining the exclusion-amid-inclusion (EAI) dilemma of consociational power-sharing, whereby in including the main groups to the conflict it works to exclude those beyond these groups, the article offers the first systematic conceptualization of this issue. The article outlines the type of individuals and groups affected by the EAI dilemma, the varying strategies they adopt to navigate power-sharing frameworks and the potential routes out of this normative and empirical puzzle. Finally, it lays out a challenge for scholars to build on this conceptualization and address the EAI dilemma in future research.

This article revisits the gendered implications of the Dayton peace settlement in Bosnia-Herzegovina and assesses possibilities for the meaningful integration of the Women, Peace and Security agenda into the consociational structures and post-conflict political agenda. This article outlines how the reification and legitimization of ethno-nationalist power over two decades of Dayton has restricted the terrain for gender activism. A critical assessment of post-Dayton governance reveals an unanticipated stratification of the agreement. International pressure for the stability of the peace settlement further constrains the complex task of addressing the gendered legacies of conflict and conflict transformation. In this context, local and international efforts to navigate Dayton's afterlives through gender activism act as a powerful reminder that Bosnia-Herzegovina's unfulfilled peace must remain a priority in research, activist and policymaking agendas.

Imagining a future scenario where human beings have evolved in ways so that they are no longer human but post- or transhuman has been a recurrent trope in science fiction literature since the very inception of the genre. More recently, the possibility of a future including posthumans has received significant philosophical attention due to the emergence of activist 'transhumanism'. This paper will analyse some of the philosophical problems in evaluating whether a posthuman future is a good future that we ought to pursue. It will first briefly describe the transhumanist conception of the posthuman, and the different routes envisaged from the current human condition to the future posthuman condition. The second part will then present and analyse some fundamental philosophical problems we encounter when we try to assess whether and to what extent the posthuman future is good and/or desirable; and it will be concluded that assessing the ethical desirability of the posthuman future is close to impossible.