Mobilising non-participant youth: using sport and culture in local government policy to target social exclusion

ABSTRACT

The role of sport and cultural practices in policy initiatives tends to be assessed in both cases in terms of their assumed social benefits. However, the areas of sport and culture are often understood separately in research. Through an analysis of interviews with key local policy-makers and civil servants in two Swedish municipalities, the aim of this article is to explore how sport and culture are formed as means to promote social policy objectives regarding young people. In addition, we reflect on the political significance of this in relation to the development of local policy. The analysis demonstrates how a discourse of urban segregation and unequal opportunities underpins actions to mobilise non-participant and at-risk youth. This is achieved by establishing centres for sport and culture, and by enabling an educational approach which focuses on participation, empowerment and good citizenship. Reasons for mobilising practices involving culture and sport overlap, though each area of policy appears to be differently underpinned by discourses of enlightenment and conformity. Differences in emphasis between the discourses on sport and culture are discussed in relation to scientific discourse on the social utility of each policy area.     

Modernizing Democracy: Constructing a Radical Reform of the Planning System?

This paper evaluates the Labour Government's programme of modernizing local government and assesses the impact on the delivery of the town planning service. Four key elements of this strategy have been identified: a programme of democratic renewal, a new ethical framework, the promotion of best value in local service provision, and a revised local government finance system. The paper anticipates how these new ideas on sharpening the performance of local government will impact on the English planning system which is also coming to terms with the creation of two new regional agencies. New opportunities for democratic governance and alliance building are thus being generated. The paper argues that the accretion of rules over time and the conflicting demands on the planning system will act to circumvent the intentions of the present Government to reinvigorate citizen participation.     

Regional Foresight,Modes of Governance and Democracy

The aim of this article is to discuss democratic potentials and pitfalls inherent in the use of Foresight methodologies, especially on the regional level. Foresight is used on the regional level as a tool for developing common visions about the future, strengthening the cohesion between regional actors and enabling coordinated action towards common goals. Based on broad participation, foresight represents a departure from expert-based scenario building and planning. The emphasis on building common goals and achieving coordinated action makes it feasible to conceptualize foresight processes as instances of governance. Based on a discussion on generalized modes of governance, a contention is made to the effect that foresight processes most closely resemble network governance as a general mode. With this point of departure, the paper uses arguments from the debate on democratic network governance to substantiate the discussion on the democratic aspects of foresight.     

The Politics of Spatial Policy and Governance in Post-1990 Hungary: The Interplay Between European and National Discourses of Space

There is now a wealth of literature discussing how regional development and spatial planning practices in Central Eastern Europe have been shaped through the alignment with EU policy frameworks. However, scholars have tended to study governance dynamics in terms of adaptation and learning, paying thus little attention to how spatial policy change is inherently interlinked with the political contestation of nation-state spaces. This paper proposes to address this lack by combining insights from political economic work on state spatial restructuring and discourse theory. From this perspective, the institutionalization of spatial policies is examined as a political process in which particular understandings of space become seen legitimate and stabilized depending on how well they fit existing discourses. The paper demonstrates the added value of this approach through a case study of spatial policy change in post-1990 Hungary, and argues that the approach is more generally applicable to examine shifts in spatial policies and to address concerns with the increase in uneven development at different scales.     

The Discourse of Maendeleo and the Politics of Women’s Participation on Mount Kilimanjaro

Studies of participatory development and empowerment often fail to place people’s actions and motivations within their wider cultural, social, political and economic context. Drawing on fieldwork which looked at village‐based women’s groups on Mount Kilimanjaro, Tanzania, this article deconstructs the dominant discourse of development on the mountain (maendeleo) to show how women’s participation in their local organizations is used as a strategy to boost their social status and financial gains. Local, national and global discourses on development, modernity and gender are reappropriated by Chagga men and women to produce a normative Chagga developmental subjectivity which women can demonstrate by participating in women’s groups. The over‐representation of better‐off and higher‐status women in these groups suggests that, in excluding the poorest women, participation in women’s groups is serving to legitimate, and perpetuate, existing inequalities within Chagga society.     

The Abbott government and the Islamic State: a securitised and elitist foreign policy discourse

This article analyses the foreign policy discourse that surrounded the Abbott government’s 2014 decision to fight the Islamic State (IS). An analysis of parliamentary Hansard reveals that the debate featured three prominent axes: the legacy of the 2003 Iraq War; the strategies and objectives of the 2014 mission; and Australia’s domestic terror threat level. Throughout, the Abbott government not only marginalised dissenting views, but also justified its renewed engagement in the Middle East via a highly securitised and elitist foreign policy discourse. This finding has consequences beyond the battle against the IS. It reveals a deep-seated tension between the ideals of democratic pluralism and the reality that securitised and elitist foreign policy discourses protect governments from serious scrutiny.     

Past and future for public participation in Norwegian physical planning

From around 1970 protests against many plans in Norway forced discussions about the role and results of planning. Protest came from people directly affected by plans and many others concerned about the environment. Planning was criticised for among other things, neglecting local interests and protection issues and for being authoritarian and directed from the top down. At the root of the criticism was a rejection of the prevailing politics and planning ideology. Demands for more democratic planning arose. Through experiments, partly initiated and encouraged by The Ministry of the Environment during the 1970s and 1980s, and extended process rules in the Planning and Building Act, the idea of public participation gradually emerged and became a commonly accepted part of plan preparation. The main picture is that planning in these years developed from an instrumental rationality into a more communicative approach, many plans were changed so that inhabitants could accept them, and public participation created innovative proposals. From the 1990s citizens' influence on planning became challenged by co-operation between developers and public agencies and by privately initiated local plans where great power lies in developers' hands. In this article the development of public participation in Norwegian physical planning is discussed. Some methods used and results achieved are analysed, illustrated with examples from practice. In the concluding part of the article some features of tomorrow's planning in Norway are discussed with regard to public participation and co-operation, and a proposal for stronger public control over the planning process is made.     

Images as institution builders: Metropolitan planning in Madrid

This article chronicles recent changes in planning practice. It documents the rise of strategic planning and the move toward proactive planning centered on strategy, marketing, publicity and images. The author studies two cases. One is sub‐regional, of the ‘Great South’ of metropolitan Madrid. The other is regional, of the program ‘Madrid Metropolitan Region’. Planners created physical designs and rhetoric that encapsulated new images for the south and the entire metro area. The planners used the evoking image to craft the strategy, implement it, and build the institutions of regional planning and government. These cases suggest that external images (plans, photos) and internal images (in the mind's eye) are key to understanding how planning processes worked. It reveals the role images played in planning and political discourse, and how discourse was based on the image.     

Ambitions and realities in Norwegian regional planning

The article illustrates how regional planning processes in Norway are performed under the terms of the Planning and Building Act, considering the communicative turn in planning theory. It also analyses the coordination of nature management, regulated by the Nature Conservation Act, with regional planning and development. Discourse analysis is used and the story-lines, the discourse coalitions and the emblematic issues in planning and conservation are identified. It is concluded that planning in practice is quite different from the prevailing, theoretical understanding of regional planning. Nature management and regional planning are performed through separate, uncoordinated processes.     

Reconceptualizing Dialogue in Environmental Public Participation

In this article we argue that the attempt to overcome technical dominance with democratic procedures has reduced communication to fair procedural rules that do not fully recognize the rhetorical functions of dialogue. The meaning generation process, although important, is not sufficiently accounted for in current participation theories and models. Here, we use Mikhail Bakhtin's dialogic perspective to explore a "sense-making" discourse that includes embracing differences, generating new meanings, and engaging in an open-ended dialogue. This mode of discourse works to construct understanding through a multi-voiced, ongoing struggle among perspectives. It intermingles with a problem-solving discourse focused on developing agreement among disparate views within democratic processes. These types of discourse have differing, yet complimentary goals and we see them as alternating throughout public participation to encourage long-term interaction and relationship building. We highlight techniques that illustrate some ways of encouraging a sense-making discourse and touch upon several lessons they provide for implementing this type of discourse within democratic models.     

Urban Policy Mobilities: The Case of Turin as a Smart City

This article analyses urban policy mobilities taking into consideration the idea of the smart city, which is currently a sort of leitmotif used in many cities within the framework of discourses on urban development. More specifically, this article offers an analysis concerning the circulation and implementation of the idea of the smart city in Turin, Italy. It investigates the actors, processes and networks involved in the mobilization and reproduction of the idea, as well as the mechanisms, concerning the embedding of the smart city discourse in the institutional fabric of the city of Turin, Italy. It also emphasizes how urban policy mobility can develop even without processes of “imitation” and “adaptation” of best practices from other cities.     

Images of Catalonia

Abstract. The aim of this article is to offer an account of the Catalan nationalist discourse contained in the works of Jordi Pujol, leader of the Convergence and Unity Party (Convergéncia i Unió or CiU) which has been in power since the first democratic election to the Catalan parliament in 1980 having renewed its mandate for the fifth time in 1995. The article is divided into three parts. First, it explores the political scenario set up by the 1978 Constitution which recognised the existence of ‘nationalities and regions’ within Spain and allowed the country to be divided into seventeen autonomous communities. Second, it analyses the image of Catalonia contained in the 1979 Statute of Autonomy. Third, it offers an account of the nationalist discourses put forward by the four major Catalan nationalist parties emphasising their different content depending upon the political ideology with which they are associated. This section provides a detailed examination of the Convergence and Unity Party's nationalist discourse which is based upon the defence of a non-violent nationalism aiming at the development of Catalan identity without seeking independence from Spain and stressing the potential role of nations without a state in the constitution of a united Europe.     

The ‘Cultural Turn’ in Australian Regional Economic Development Discourse: Neoliberalising Creativity?

Regional economic policy‐makers are increasingly interested in the contribution of creativity to the economic performance of regions and, more generally, in its power to transform the images and identities of places. This has constituted a ‘cultural turn’, of sorts, away from an emphasis on macro‐scale projects and employment schemes, towards an interest in the creative industries, entrepreneurial culture and innovation. This paper discusses how recent discourses of the role of ‘creativity’ in regions have drawn upon, and contributed to, particular forms of neoliberalisation. Its focus is the recent application of a statistical measure — Richard Florida's (2002) ‘creativity index’— to quantify spatial variations in creativity between Australia's regions. Our critique is not of the creativity index per se, but of its role in subsuming creativity within a neoliberal regional economic development discourse. In this discourse, creativity is linked to the primacy of global markets, and is a factor in place competition, attracting footloose capital and ‘creative class’ migrants to struggling regions. Creativity is positioned as a central determinant of regional ‘success’ and forms a remedy for those places, and subjects, that currently ‘lack’ innovation. Our paper critiques these interpretations, and concludes by suggesting that neoliberal discourses ignore the varied ways in which ‘alternative creativities’ might underpin other articulations of the future of Australia's regions.     

A Picturesque Modernity in 1920s Peru and Argentina: Ruins,Cuzco and Americanism in the Photographic Reportages of Variedades and Plus Ultra

This essay focuses on a series of pictorial reportages on the city of Cuzco and the surrounding region published in the Peruvian illustrated magazine Variedades in 1924 and 1925. Looking at the interplay of the aesthetic and documentary value of photographs, I analyse how the reportages on Cuzco’s architecture and ruins contributed to the indigenista proposal of regional and national identity and how, in so doing, they articulated an idea of modernity which opposed the main narrative of Western modernization produced by the magazine. I argue that Variedades became the discursive place of an interplay between opposite ideas of modernity since it afforded its readers-viewers a dual, almost conflictive, experience. Moreover, I posit that the magazine ‘mediated’ the regional discourse for the Limeño readers through the discourses of tourism and the picturesque familiarizing them with those ‘unknown’ regions. By comparing the reportages with similar documents published in the same decade by the Argentine magazine Plus Ultra, I also show that this was not something exclusive to Peru, but rather part of a broader Americanist trend that was shaping the relationship between native tradition and modernization as well as giving form to a proposal for a ‘pan-American’ identity in the 1920s.     

‘Generation Emigration’: the politics of (trans)national social reproduction in twenty-first-century Ireland

Placing social reproduction at the heart of the experience of migration, this article attempts to move beyond regulatory discourses of emigration as tragedy, lifestyle choice or ‘the Skype generation’. Following a review of feminist literature on social reproduction, the article returns to research with Irish women migrants and non-migrants in the 1990s to demonstrate how technologically mediated ‘time-space compression’ and its promise of transnational proximity actually gave rise to the experience of gendered ‘time-space expansion’. The Irish Times' ‘Generation Emigration’ (GE) project is then introduced as a site in which similar gendered dynamics emerge as contemporary technologically mediated connections between emigrants and the homeland are celebrated through a compensatory (trans)nationalist discourse that competes with but also compensates for framings of emigration as national tragedy. The article suggests that discourses of emigration as tragedy, lifestyle choice, or new globalised practice serve to bring emigration into being in circumscribed ways and to produce emigrants as particular kinds of ‘recognisable’ subjects. It asks how the work of social reproduction in the context of emigration might be posed anew in ways that challenge dominant assumptions regarding the location and composition of the population to be reproduced. By moving beyond these regulatory discourses of emigration, and by emphasising the dynamics of technologically mediated transnational social reproduction, the article identifies the racialised heteronormative assumptions that intersect with national and global projects of economic production and social reproduction to produce uneven gendered effects.     

State,Politics and the Idea of Social Justice in Chile

This article explores the ways in which the idea of social justice has been utilized during this century as an idée-force in Chilean politics. It stresses the Catholic background of the concept and shows how it has been adapted to the political objectives of several doctrinal streams. The idea of social justice has been a powerful ideological instrument for governments in their attempts to deal with the social expectations of the electorate and to create a broad consensus between different political and social sectors. This idea has also been historically related to an active state role in the search for equity through income distribution and the adoption of progressive social legislation. While the recent military government (1973-90) radically reformulated both the social function of the state and the official definition of social justice, the current democratic authorities seem to have readopted the idea of social justice as a key element in their ideological discourse.     

Una mujer desnuda,de Lola Beccaria: Espacios y escrituras del cuerpo

This article discusses the applicability of postfeminist discourse to contemporary Spanish cultural production. Incited by the apparent confrontation with traditional feminist thinking, postfeminist theories are thought to be an obstacle to the rights of women in contemporary societies. Bearing in mind such complications of the term, our essay questions the recent criticism that postfeminism has received in the last few years and tries to elucidate how its implications affect the progressive development of the achievements of previous or simultaneous feminisms. Such discussion is presented in this essay through the study of the narrative texts of Lola Beccaria and La Fura dels Baus, who respectively present in her novel (Una mujer desnuda, 2004) and their film (Fausto 5.0, 2001) features of the feminine subjectivity in collision with the masculine gazes of the discourses that partake in the construction of the feminine characters.     

Dissolution and Reconstruction of National Identity: The Experience of Subjectivity in Taiwan

Abstract. Due to unique historical and structural conditions Taiwan society has long been troubled by a national identity problem. While this dilemma has captured significant academic interests in recent years, most treatments of the subject pay insufficient attention to the subjective factors which shape the national identity discourse on the island. This study attempts to reconstruct, from the subjects' perspectives, the discourses on national identity as they are devised by Taiwan residents. Based on Q methodology, we identify five discourses: Chinese nationalism, status-quoism, confused identity, Taiwan-prioritism and Taiwanese nationalism. These discourses are intertwined along the independence/unification continuum and share the common ground of respect for democratic institutions and liberal values and an awareness of Taiwan's de facto autonomy/independence. Our findings stand in sharp contrast to the ‘unification/independence’ dichotomy or the ‘unification/status quo/independence’ trifurcation commonly applied by the existing literature. Thus, the findings may serve as the basis for constructing a more comprehensive analytical framework facilitating further research on national identity issues in Taiwan.     

Negotiating Difference in a Muslim Society: A Longitudinal Study of Islamic and Secular Discourses in Turkey

This article explores the changes in attitudes among Islamic and secular groups in Turkey through an analysis of their discourses regarding Islam, democracy, secularism, and dialogue. We present the findings of a longitudinal study (Q study) conducted in Turkey in 2002 and 2007. The time period under investigation marks the first uninterrupted five‐year‐long term of an Islamic‐leaning government, Adalet ve Kalk?nma Partisi (AKP, Justice and Development Party), in office since the inception of the Turkish Republic in 1923. We suggest that the continuous electoral success of the AKP has played an important role in shaping Islamic and secular discourses in the Turkish public sphere. In contrast with its predecessor, the AKP has employed a rights‐based paradigm when defining the place of Islam in a secular society. This, we suggest, has softened the divide between Islamic and secular discourses in Turkey. In this article, after defining the core characteristics of both discourses that remained the same in both 2002 and 2007, we focus on the major shifts in discourses that have occurred during these five years. Our research reveals that during this time, both Islamic and secular discourses underwent important shifts with respect to Islam's place in a democratic society. We interpret the AKP's discursive shift toward a rights‐based paradigm and the increasing emphasis on dialogue in both Islamist and secular discourses as promising signs for expanding the scope for democratic polity in Turkey.