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This paper shows how culture is used and transformed as it becomes mobilized as a strategic resource in a regional development project within a neoliberal economic discourse. The focus is how four smaller municipalities in the transnational Swedish/Danish Öresund region initiate a process of cultural mappings in order to incorporate local culture and cultural heritage in the regional tourist economy. By using the concept of magic, the paper discusses how the practice of cultural mapping can be envisioned as an enactment of power. The analysis of the mapping practice is based on an actor-network ontology to show how interactions between humans and a software protocol transform both the mapped subjects and the regional landscape in a material sense. It is concluded that cultural mapping is a problematic practice, politically as well as morally, as it is driven by the commoditization of culture and constitutes a technologically mediated, normative shaping of a region framed by a rhetoric of objectivity and the common good.

This article contributes to the ongoing discussion, revived by the service-dominant logic thesis, on value propositions in service organizations. Against a backdrop of understanding value as a pluralistic social construct that takes place across different institutionalized practices of valuation or regimes of value, we argue that value propositions transcend the immediate localness of both value in exchange and value in use. Correspondingly, we claim that service practitioners may draw advantages from engaging with a politics of value that addresses multiple regimes of value, whether commensurable or not. A case study of waste management services in Sweden serves as an illustration of such a politics that combines practical, economic, political, and environmental aspects of value propositions.

The story of Swedish waste management in the last forty years is the story of A farewell to landfills. This farewell is paramount to a happy-end tale of sustainability. "Sweden is today recycling 97% of its household waste" (Avfall Sverige, 2010) proudly tells that Sweden has opened an era of sustainable waste management. But is sustainability really so simple? Can there be another side to the story of how Sweden has developed a successful combined policy of incineration, recycling and biological treatments? Could Sweden's pleasant farewell to landfills be a tale that conceals unpleasant things? A critical reading of Sweden's farewell to landfills in the light of ecosophy (Næss, 1989) and the European Waste Directive (European Union, 2008) shows that it is a tale that silences and neutralises alternative views and corporate strategies on waste and sustainability. For example, it is a tale silencing that incineration is a method rejected in many countries, and that not everybody considers energy recovery to be a form of recycling. Moreover, it is a fundamentally anthropocentric tale but that paradoxically ignores the economic and behavioural dynamic that let humans produce waste in the first place. And, it is a tale that labels waste as a resource which is a label that fits better with waste growth than with waste minimisation, despite the fact that the latter is definitely more sustainable than the former. A convincing story of an undeniable success, A farewell to landfills is a feel good story. But feel good stories are conservative stories that invite us to dig us deeper in the cushions of our sofas. The question is whether digging us deeper into the cushion of petty recycling practices can actually stand for a sustainable way of producing and consuming.

Overuse of resources is accelerating today's negative trends in climate change, ecosystem destruction, and biodiversity loss. The ultimate result is contemporary human societies are reaching or exceeding the limits of planetary boundaries. It is therefore imperative to articulate a new theoretical understanding of resources and the ethical, political and environmental conditions of their use. In this article, we introduce a radical departure from existing paradigms, which treat resources as having fixed essential qualities usually ready-to-exploit by anyone who finds them, to a non-essentialist theory of how resources never exist in this fashion as such. Instead, they come into being as the result of social processes. We label this approach resourcification. This shift offers a new theoretical platform for developing a post-sustainability understanding of the relationships of humans to humans, to other living creatures, and to the physical environment, which is more suited to meet the challenges of working with the sustainable development goals in the Anthropocene.

Overuse of resources is accelerating current negative trends in climate change, ecosystem destruction, and biodiversity loss. The ultimate outcome is that contemporary human society is reaching or exceeding the limits of planetary boundaries. It is therefore imperative to articulate a new theoretical understanding of resources and the ethical, political, and environmental conditions of their use. In this article, we take a radical departure from treating resources as having fixed, essential and ready to exploit qualities, and offer a non-essentialist theory that considers that resources come into being as a result of social processes. We label this approach resourcification. This shift offers a new theoretical platform for developing a post-sustainability understanding of the relationships of humans to humans, to other living creatures, and to the physical environment, one that is more suited to meeting the challenges of working with the sustainable development goals in the Anthropocene. ; Published version

This book offers a critical perspective on the issue of organising waste in cities, which has often been positioned in terms of relatively narrow engineering, economic and physical science approaches. It emphasises the ways in which the notion of waste, and the narratives and discourses associated with it, have been socially constructed with corresponding implications for waste governance and local waste handling practices.Organising waste in the city takes a broad and international approach to the ways in which the issue of waste is framed, and brings together narratives from cities as diverse as Amsterdam, Bristol, Cairo, Gothenburg, Helsingborg and Managua. Organised into four main sections and with an integrative introduction and conclusion, the book not only provides new insights into the hidden stories of urban and municipal household solid waste and waste landscapes, but also connects concerns regarding urban waste to such issues as globalisation, governance, urban ecology, and social, economic and environmental justice