Rescaling regions in the state: The New Regionalism in California

A “new civic regionalism” – based on participatory, inclusive and partnership models of governance – has recently been rolled out in California to tackle the challenges of urban growth, planning and economic development across the State's diverse metropolitan and rural regions. Backed by non-profits and private foundations, California's New Regionalism has been packaged as a flexible and responsive grassroots governance initiative, which is designed to circumnavigate State and local government. Its proponents have been influenced by New Regionalist ideas and practices circulating nationally and internationally. Despite this, our explanation for the rise of the New Regionalism in California is not grounded in these wider theoretical and policy developments; nor do we see it as the outcome of a “new politics of scale” framed around the region. Instead, California's newest regionalism is part of a much longer-standing social movement spearheaded by large-scale business interests and directed at reorganizing local and State government powers particularly in urban regions. This regional reform movement has sought to rationalize land use and environmental planning, coordinate infrastructure, and make government more fiscally efficient and responsive to growth. Over the longer term, its efforts have been undermined by the fiscal fallout of the property tax revolt, Proposition 13. Our analysis calls into question some of the claims in the literature on state rescaling and suggests the value of collapsing the conceptual distinction made between new spaces of political regionalism and regional economic spaces.     

From May to October: Reassessing the 1968 Generation

Since the early 1980s, France has transformed its pattern of economic policy‐making from a state‐led or dirigiste approach to a more market‐oriented one and generated a new set of dynamics between French business and government at regional, national, and European levels. Business has become more independent of the central state as a result of deregulation, privatisation, regional integration, and Europeanisation, more interdependent as a result of cross‐shareholdings, and more international in consequence of cross‐border mergers and acquisitions. State interventionism, where it remains, has become more circumscribed and less directive, targeting firms only in strategic areas or in trouble.     

From Demographic Transition to Fertility Boom and Bust: Iran in the 1980s and 1990s

Although it is widely recognized that demographic transition is not an uninterrupted process, demographers and population economists have treated short‐term swings in fertility with a measure of curiosity. Iran's experience of population growth after the Revolution in 1979 points to a double paradox of a steep and unprecedented surge in population growth in the 1980s followed by a swift restoration of fertility decline in the 1990s. Both periods have been characterized by extensive socio‐economic and institutional changes combined with radical and far‐reaching sways in Iran's post‐revolutionary population policy. This article applies standardized decomposition analysis to separate out and quantify the proximate components of change in the crude birth rate during these two fertility ‘boom’ and ‘bust’ phases. The aim is to ascertain to what extent structural/demographic or behavioural factors can explain the dynamics of change in fertility and population growth in Iran since the late 1970s. Our findings point to a hitherto neglected role of population momentum in initiating the ‘Islamic baby boom’ as well as a more limited role for population policy in explaining the genesis(rather than the momentum) of both boom and bust phases.     

Geographical Takes on Three Decades of Economic Reform in Australia

The idea of an economy taking a geographical journey highlights the importance of changing spatialities and how these shape and result from economic change. It also focuses on the geographical scaling of key processes. Using these insights, this paper explores three decades of economic change in Australia in which the nation State has played a central role in the operation of markets and accumulation processes, albeit with dramatic shifts in the qualitative nature of that role. Such shifts have been crucial during the emergence of Australia's particular variety of neoliberalism. The paper explores the liberalisation of Australia's financial and corporate environment, trade policies and the industrial relations environment. The three cases suggest contradictions inherent in the State's adherence to a neoliberal reform agenda, in the name of globalisation, while facing: first, political needs to retain sovereignty over national security and tighten border protection; and second, multi‐scaled political processes including clashes with State governments grappling with regional and local impacts of change. There has been no simple roll‐out of neoliberalism in Australia since the mid 1990s. Geographical scales, constructed contingently by social and political agents, have contributed in fundamental ways to the power and direction of economic reform. Despite powerful re‐scalings to both global and local levels over the past three decades, there is no evidence of a diminished role for the nation State.     

Pax Ottomanica No More! The “Peace” Discourse in Turkish Foreign Policy in the Post‐Davutoğlu Era and the Prolonged Syrian Crisis

Turkey's eight years between 2008 and 2016 has been dominated by Ahmet Davuto?lu's vision of foreign policy, which was derived from his multi‐edition book Strategic Depth (2000). In order to be able to present itself in its larger periphery as a pro‐active, trustworthy actor, Davuto?lu argued, Turkey needed to change the foreign‐policy paradigms with which it was stranded. As the Strategic Depth vision unfolded, it drew explicit parallels between modern Turkey and the Ottoman neighborhood policy. Turkey‐Syria relations since 2008 had been providing the seekers of neo‐Ottomanist tendencies in the contemporary Turkish foreign policy with abundant examples, because Syria, once an Ottoman territory and always a challenge to modern Turkey, came to be the first poster country in the shift towards Turkey's imperial awakening. In the post‐Davuto?lu era, however, the rhetoric and practices of the past eight years seemed suddenly to disappear from the use of the Turkish agents of foreign policy; the new code of terms and actions to replace the Strategic Depth version is yet to be decided. This study seeks to pin down the neo‐imperialist character of Turkey's foreign‐policy discourse of the aforementioned eight years and contribute to discussions of the Turkish aspiration of neo‐Ottomanism with focus on the Syrian crisis through the Justice and Development Party's re‐invented peace discourse. In doing so, it aims to find out and elaborate on the current tendencies of Turkish foreign policy, which are no longer as explicit and articulated as they were during Davuto?lu's ministry and prime ministry. As Turkey's cross‐border operation to Syria — the Euphrates Shield — ends and another one in Idlib begins, a discursive analysis stretching from Davutoglu's diplomatic “zero problems” with Damascus to the military use of ground troops and air force is timely. Such an endeavor would be essential in understanding the spectacular swing from one edge to the other in Turkey's inclination over a phantasmagorical empire.     

Go East,Young Cadre: Experiments in Inter‐Provincial Training of Party and State Managers in China

This article situates China's local policy experimentation in the broader context of policy experiments in decentralized political systems, through a case study which represents a local state response to China's transition to a market economy. With growing regional and urban–rural inequalities evident after the initial reform period (1978–1994), local party leaders of inland provinces devised strategies for addressing these inequalities and encouraging public–private sector mobility among party officials. County and township‐level leaders pursued local policy experiments in which they selected and sent officials to find private‐sector work in China's booming coastal cities. Initiated in the 1990s and peaking in the 2000s, these policy experiments and inter‐provincial transfers demonstrate the discretion that local officials possess to conduct programmatic/policy experiments in a unitary political system and show how officials resort to extra‐institutional strategies in order to bridge perceived knowledge gaps. The ultimate demise of these programmes illuminates the challenges to extra‐institutional policy innovations in transitioning states.     

The Greening of the Queensland electorate?

The Greens at the 2004 Queensland State election almost trebled their primary vote from 2001, an increase suggesting the party has already filled the vacuum left by the declining Australian Democrats as the State's principal Left-of-Centre minor party. This article argues, first, that much of this growth in support can be attributed to the substantial interstate migration to the State's southeast, a pattern that has contributed to a partial transformation of Queensland's traditional political culture to one more disposed to Green support. Second, given that this growth is set to continue, it is argued that the Queensland Greens are yet to maximise their vote. This article analyses the 2004 Queensland State election results to determine the impact of Green preferences under the State's Optional Preferential Voting (OPV) system, and to locate where geographically, and among whom demographically, Green support was strongest. A rudimentary profile of the ‘typical’ Queensland Greens voter is also offered.     

‘Land of Fires’: Urban Growth,Economic Crisis,and Forest Fires in Attica,Greece

This study investigates the spatial distribution and basic characteristics of 2692 forest fires between 2000 and 2011 in Attica, Greece, a rapidly expanding urban region. Fire variables were assessed, together with variables describing the socio‐economic local context in three distinct periods of Athens’ expansion (2000–2003: semi‐compact expansion and economic growth before the 2004 Olympic Games; 2004–2007: infrastructure development and discontinuous expansion following the Olympic Games; 2008–2011: crisis‐driven decline of the construction industry). Fire characteristics changed over the three periods following the negative trends in the construction industry. Burnt areas decreased in the rural area around Athens and the opposite pattern was observed in the peri‐urban belt. Our findings suggest that the temporal and spatial distribution of forest fires in Attica reflects the construction boom stimulated by the 2004 Olympic Games and the subsequent economic crisis.     

Transnational Muslim solidarities and everyday life

ABSTRACT. Discussions of globalisation and identity have focused on the renewed relevance of various post‐national frameworks of belonging, including the Muslim umma. This article argues against the idea that the umma has come to constitute a primary referent in contemporary Muslim debates about identity or a form of globalised political consciousness. Furthermore, the advent of ‘post‐Islamism’ means that Islamic political mobilisation rarely seeks to establish alternative political orders within the container of the nation‐state. However, this does not mean that we are seeing a reaffirmation of the nation in Muslim contexts today. Rather, transnational Muslim solidarities represent an intermediate space of affiliation and socio‐political mobilisation that exists alongside and in an ambivalent relationship with the nation‐state. I point to two different socio‐religious movements that, without positing the primacy or exclusivity of the umma/Islamic identity, express discrepant visions of the relationship between Islam and the nation: (1) the Fethullah Gülen movement, which serves simultaneously as the vehicle for a particular vision of neo‐Ottoman Turkish nationalism and a critique of the Kemalist national order; and (2) the neo‐Salafist movement, read here as an effort to embed conceptions of public morality and accountability within the discursive tradition of orthodox Islam rather than the institutional framework of modern polity.     

The Islamic State lexical battleground: US foreign policy and the abstraction of threat

This article suggests that President Obama's consistent references to the extremist Sunni group as ‘ISIL’ (Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) is not a trivial matter of nomenclature. Instead, the Obama administration's deliberate usage of the ISIL acronym (as opposed to other commonly‐used terms such as ‘Islamic State of Iraq and Syria’ or ‘ISIS’, ‘Islamic State’, ‘IS’, ‘so‐called Islamic State’ and ‘Daesh’) frames the public perception of the threat to avoid engagement with the requirements of strategy and operations. Both the labelling and the approach could be defended as a response to the unique challenge of a transnational group claiming religious and political legitimacy. However, we suggest that the labelling is an evasion of the necessary response, reflecting instead a lack of coherence in strategy and operations—in particular after the Islamic State's lightning offensive in Iraq and expansion in Syria in mid‐2014. This tension between rhetoric, strategy and operations means that ‘ISIL’ does not provide a stable depiction of the Islamic State. While it may draw upon the post‐9/11 depiction of ‘terrorism’, the tag leads to dissonance between official and media representations. The administration's depiction of a considered approach leading to victory has been undermined by the abstraction of ‘ISIL’, which in turn produced strategic ambiguity about the prospect of any political, economic or military challenge to the Islamic State.     

The politics of water security in southern Saskatchewan

This paper examines long-term water and resource management in Saskatchewan. Agriculture has long sustained Saskatchewan's economy, but the province experienced a resource boom in oil and potash in the 2008–2015 time period. What potential water-related risks are posed by oil and potash? And is the province able to balance the short-term economic gains of these developments with the long-term goal of water security? The research is based on interviews with policy elites in the province of Saskatchewan and argues that four factors explain why the government continues to favour industry over water security: low-issue salience, economic and political interest, ideology, and political culture.     

Why the Pakistan army is here to stay: prospects for civilian governance

This article explores the prospects for civilian governance over Pakistan's military in the policy‐relevant future. After reviewing the Pakistan army's past interference in the country's judicial and political affairs, it turns to the ongoing political maneuvering of the current Chief of Army Staff, General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, despite Pakistan's ostensible democratic dispensation. The article dilates on the impact of US engagement on the robustness of the Pakistan army's dominance and questions the newfound US commitment to promoting democratization and civilian control. The article argues that while conventional wisdom places the onus disproportionately upon the military's penchant for interventionism, the army has intervened only with the active assistance of civilian institutions, which are subsequently further eroded with every military takeover. It concludes with a consideration of whether or not genuine civilian control would result in a significant change in Pakistan's foreign and domestic policies, particularly Pakistan's well‐known utilization of Islamist militants in India and Afghanistan.     

Ernest Blythe as Minister for Finance in the Irish Free State, 1923–32

This article explores Ernest Blythe's tenure as minister for finance of the Irish Free State, 1923–32. Using a range of sources, but particularly his papers in University College Dublin Department of Archives, this work aims to redress the academic neglect of one of the Free State's most infamous characters. In a broader sense, this study offers a commentary on Blythe's party, Cumann na nGaedheal, and Irish political culture generally. Throughout the text, attention is paid to the existing historiography of the period, and, where deemed necessary, some critiques are made.     

The "Trial" of Lee Benson: Communism, White Chauvinism, and The Foundations of the "New Political History" in the United States

Lee Benson was one of the first American political historians to suggest a “systematic” revision of traditional political history with its emphasis on narrow economic class analysis, narrative arguments, and over‐reliance on qualitative research methodologies. This essay presents Benson's contributions to the “new political history”—an attempt to apply social‐science methods, concepts, and theories to American political history—as a social, cultural, and political narrative of Cold War‐era American history. Benson belonged to a generation of ex‐Communist American historians and political scientists whose scholarship and intellectual projects flowed—in part—out of Marxist social and political debates, agendas, and paradigmatic frameworks, even as they rejected and revised them. The main focus of the essay is the genesis of Benson's pioneering study of nineteenth‐century New York state political culture, The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy, with its emphasis on intra‐class versus inter‐class conflict, sensitivity to ethnocultural determinants of political and social behavior, and reliance on explicit social‐science theory and methodology. In what follows, I argue that The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy has its roots in Benson's Popular Front Marxist beliefs, and his decade‐long engagement and subsequent disenchantment with American left‐wing politics. Benson's growing alienation from Progressive historical paradigms and traditional Marxist analysis, and his attempts to formulate a neo‐Marxism attentive to unique American class and political realities, are linked to his involvement with 1940s radical factional politics and his disturbing encounter with internal Communist party racial and ideological tensions in the late 1940s at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.     

Understanding Local Leadership in Building the Capacity of Rural Communities in Australia

Current approaches to rural community development in Australia provide for limited government intervention. Such intervention is usually housed within programmes that seek to build the internal capacity of communities to achieve long term socio‐economic sustainability. A fundamental implementation strategy for capacity building has been developing local leadership. The underlying assumption of this approach is that good leadership will result in existing resources being mobilised for a more sustainable function and new resources attracted. What though is good leadership in terms of building the capacity of rural communities to develop sustainable socio‐economic futures? This paper compares the conceptualisation of leadership within rural development policies and leadership training programmes with the nature of local leadership as it exists in on‐ground community building projects. From an in‐depth review of the role and nature of local leadership within six Australian rural communities it was found that local leadership could result in improved adaptive capacity if the leadership is similar in nature to Burn's (1978 ) transformational model of leadership. Within policy, local leadership was most often conceptualised as being similar to this transformational model. However, rural leadership training programmes tended to conceptualise leadership as a top‐down process, similar to Burn's (1978 ) transactional model. While this study of leadership within rural communities revealed that transactional skills, as taught in leadership training programmes, were important for successful project management, such skills did not necessarily result in improved community adaptive capacity. It is suggested that, while transactional leadership can have an important role in influencing the development of rural communities, greater attention needs to be given to developing strategies to support transformational leadership.     

Panorama of the Basque Country and its Competence for Self-Government

The aim of this article is to present a panoramic view of the Basque Country's capacity and competence for self-government. We have analysed the historical process of industrialization, the effects of the industrial crisis and new possibilities for development of the area's own regional policy based on new institutions (Government and Provincial Councils) that emerged from administrative decentralization in Spain after 1980. In the following section, we analyse the scope of authority in EU regions. Some of the cultural and transport infrastructure projects backed by these Basque institutions are studied. These projects have had a considerable impact on the Bilbao Metropolitan Area. The changes observed in the nation state, specifically in Europe, show contradictory effects. However, they have reduced the State's sovereignty but at the same time have prompted the State to retain powers rather than transfer them to lower institutional levels. This clashes with the desire of some regions or historical nations to access greater shares of self-government, such as the case of the Basque Country.     

The Odyssey Case: press,public opinion and future policy

The Odyssey Case refers to the dispute between Odyssey Marine Exploration Inc. (OME) and the Kingdom of Spain in the US courts to determine the ownership of more than 500,000 coins, as well as other artefacts, that OME recovered from a wreck‐site it had code‐named Black Swan. However, the process was much more than a dispute over the coins. It reflected many of the components involved in the protection of underwater archaeological heritage, especially when economic and political interests are at stake. Written from the perspective of an archaeologist working for the regional authority responsible for developing archaeological policy, this paper tries to assess the case's impact on future policy development.     

The regulation of direct foreign investment in the Australian mining sector

Although Australia has relied on foreign capital and multinational corporations to develop its mining sector, it has been successful in restricting foreign ownership and control to 50 per cent The Australian experience provides a valuable case study because its successive minerals and energy booms in the last two decades occurred before and after restrictions were imposed and the Foreign Investment Review Board established in the mid‐1970s. During the prior minerals boom when there were virtually no restrictions, levels of foreign ownership and control increased from less than 30 to 50 per cent. During the second energy boom, in the late 1970s to early 1980s, a firm policy of 50 per cent Australian participation in all mining projects was successfully implemented. Australia did not become a ‘client state’ of international capitalism, nor did its federal system preclude the regulation of foreign investment The article summarises the results of Australia's regulatory policy and examines the political and policy reasons for its success.     

Petztorme Women: Responding to Change in Lihir,Papua New Guinea

The goldmining project on Lihir Island in New Ireland Province, Papua New Guinea, has brought dramatic socio‐economic changes. In this matrilineal society, while women's economic contributions were substantial, their political status was not. Women's participation in decision‐making about the mine has been restricted, mainly because men have excluded them. The mining company established a women's section that has supported the development of women's organizations and a range of economic development projects. The women's organizations provide the context for new political roles for women but have experienced many setbacks that are common in such groups across Papua New Guinea. Through the Lihir experience in the first five years of the mine, this paper examines the tensions and divided loyalties that constrain women's organizations and often lead to the failure of income‐generating women's projects in Papua New Guinea.     

Regional development processes and policies in Australia: a review of research 1990–2002

This article offers a selective review of Australian research on regional development. The themes reviewed include divergence and convergence, resource dependent regional growth, the spatial centralization of the economy, spatial divisions, the social construction of regional identity and regional problems, differentiation between the capital cities and between rural areas, indigenous issues, the suburbanization versus centralization debate, the regional effects of economic reform, regional policy debates, and industry clusters. Australia illustrates regional development processes in a low population density, resource dependent, medium sized economy, managed by neo‐liberal economic policies and with limited government intervention in regional policy.