Political Attention and Public Spending in the United States

According to Jones and Baumgartner's disproportionate information processing model, it is crucial to study fluctuations in congressional attention over time and across policy issues to understand congressional policy decisions including decisions on the federal budget. Drawing on classical ideas about reelection-oriented behavior, on the one hand, and the blocking power of federal agencies, on the other, this paper extends and specifies the attention-spending predictions of the disproportionate information processing model. Specifically, spending effects of congressional attention shifts are argued to be crucially dependent on both the spending preferences expressed by the U.S. public and on pressure from spending advocates. An empirical evaluation of the association between changes in congressional attention measures and federal budget appropriations across 12 spending domains and 33 years (1970–2003) supports this conditional hypothesis derived from the extended disproportionate information processing model.     

Editorial

Abstract

A recent online article in The Daily Beast listed archaeology as one of the thirteen most useless undergraduate degrees. The article failed to identify transferable job skills gained while engaged in archaeological work. Further, archaeological field programmes and labs offer an alternative learning environment that benefits some students. This article reviews two archaeological projects that used archaeology as a form of social activism to provide employment and education to an under-served community as a fundamental aspect of its goals. The Hopedale Archaeology Project is an archaeology field project based in a north-east Canadian community that provides education and work opportunities for Inuit students. The Veterans Curation Program based in the United States provides temporary employment to recently discharged military veterans in an archaeological and archival curation lab. These programmes assist individuals to re-establish themselves within the workforce and add to their academic and professional growth, as well as incorporate a public outreach component that makes archaeology and history more accessible to the public.     

全球化时代的文化安全

全球化的发展促进了世界范围内的跨文化交流,同时也为西方文化在世界范围内的传播创造了重要条件,从而严重地影响着我国的文化安全。当今世界,文化竞争已成为综合国力竞争乃至民族生存竞争的重要内容,文化重要性的凸起和文化竞争的空前激烈要求我国必须努力维护民族文化的安全,充分发挥文化强国的作用。     

Editorial: The Sympathetic Agnostic: Britain's Next Prime Minister

Abstract

This essay engages the "politics of vision" as a potential template for choosing future presidents. The rhetoric of "vision" is drawn from theological precepts that are grounded in prophetic and transformational discourses. The current politics of popularity, and the reality show atmosphere that surrounds presidential elections, have not held the nation in good stead. We labor under the myth of our own goodness and believe that it doesn't matter who runs the nation, since the balance of power between the branches of government, and a free activist press will protect us from our own bad choices. Recent history proves that we must pay more attention to the criteria by which individuals are selected, because twenty-first-century high stakes political strategies can neutralize even the best laid plans of the nation's founders. To analyze the criteria for selecting future presidents, I turn to the work of writer/activist James Baldwin, theologian/activist William Stringfellow, and ethicist/politician Barbara Jordan. They conclude that vision does not require a crystal ball, just prophetic discourse and moral responsibility. The next President of the United States should be a spiritually mature truth-teller, whose vision for America is congruent with the hopes and dreams of a weary electorate.     

试论全球化背景下的我国文化安全维护

全球化背景下政治、经济、文化和社会的交互发展,对我国加强文化建设以及提高文化软实力带来了新的机遇和挑战,向时也对我国文化安全带来了直接的影响。如何保持我国文化系统的相对完整、稳定、独特和富于活力,保护文化的社会实效与创造潜能,已成为我们用发展的眼光进行积极谋划的当务之急。     

Disappearing culture? Globalisation and a Canary Island fishing community

This article looks at a Canary Island fishing community, examining its interactions with global processes that are seen as part of a development stretching back to the first Spanish colonisers. The focus is on recent events including tourism, and the article depicts the fishing culture and analyses whether such a thing can be said to be disappearing. It is argued that the indigenous individuals, foreign settlers and tourists involved are all active agents in the globalisation process. Furthermore, the particular type of tourism has specific influences that are broad and deep and impact on the local economy, gender roles, relationships, and attitudes towards the environment and business strategies. The identity of the village is also examined and found to retain its links with fishing. However, some elements of the local culture are certainly disappearing. Although in contrast, other elements have been strengthened by global processes.     

对全球化环境下我国政治文化建设的若干思考

全球化对我国的政治文化发展既带来了新的机遇,又提出了严峻的挑战。积极参与全球化交流,批判地借鉴西方政治文化,对于加强我国主流政治文化建设,不断提高全民族的文化素质具有极其重要的现实意义。     

全球化时代中国共产党发展政治权威的路径选择

中国共产党的政治权威在全球化时代面临着各方面的挑战:主流意识形态的相对淡化,新兴阶层的出现和利益团体的分化,社会转型期矛盾冲突的加剧,社会发展后人们期望值的提高。为此中国共产党必须在意识形态、政策绩效和体制上进行创新,不断提高和发展自己的政治权威。     

Geographical Leadership Mobility and Policy Isomorphism: Narrowing the Regional Inequality of Social Spending in China

The link between geographical leadership mobility and policy isomorphism is rarely discussed in the extant literature. We argue that the geographical leadership mobility encourages local executives to converge their development experiences in their original working jurisdictions and their current positions. The distinct Chinese political personnel system provides an ideal environment that allows researchers to examine the isomorphic effects of geographical leadership mobility. This research builds a dataset of local social spending between 1998 and 2011 as well as a database of the leadership mobility history of provincial executives in China. Results of the spatial panel analysis (SPA) demonstrate that the geographical leadership mobility (i.e., horizontal, top-down, and bottom-up) of governors stimulates the regional isomorphism of provincial education and health care spending. The empirical findings affirm the effectiveness of the effort of the Chinese central government in narrowing the regional inequality of social welfare provision through the geographical mobility of local leadership.     

Placing GIS in sustainability education

As public awareness about sustainability grows and as higher education advances sustainability more comprehensively, geographers have an opportunity to take a role in sustainability education. This article examines (1) what constitutes sustainability education, (2) how geographic concepts and Geographic Information System (GIS) are relevant to sustainability education, and (3) how geospatial thinking can be incorporated into the sustainability curriculum using GIS. This research proposes five geospatial inquiries that students can make to explore sustainability issues using GIS, which are spatial distribution, spatial interactions, spatial relationships, spatial comparisons, and temporal relationships. Definition, examples, and uses of these five geospatial inquiries supported by GIS are provided.     

全球化背景下我国生态安全问题及应对措施

生态安全问题是最突出的全球性问题之一,已经成为影响国家安全及人类社会整体生存安全的大问题。我国的生态安全面临着来自国内和国际两方面的双重压力,而且生态安全恶化对我国经济社会的可持续发展带来了极大的负面影响。处理这些问题时,既要从国际环境法的角度加以考虑,又要从国内环境法的角度加以防范。     

Risk and the Arborist in the Remaking of the Australian Urban Forest

The emerging profession of arboriculture has influenced Australian urban landscapes over the past decade. Arborists manage the urban forest as a core component of urban sustainability. We analyse qualitative interviews with 53 professionals involved in tree management in six eastern Australian cities to determine the ways in which a concern with risk management has shaped both the urban forest and the professional status and role of arborists. We found tree‐related risk has, in part, worked against urban greening by reducing tree size. However, an emerging risk culture has encouraged the development of the profession of arboriculture, which, in turn, has pioneered sophisticated ways, familiar to neither engineers nor ecologists, of ensuring the cohabitation of people and trees.     

International curriculum transfer in geography in higher education: an example

Internationalization of geography in higher education comes in many guises. This paper discusses some of these, with particular attention to curriculum development and transfer. The context is Bangladesh and a case study is presented of a link programme between three higher education institutions in that country and one in the UK. The British Council funded project INSPIRE provided funding and organizational support for a project that lasted 4 years and enabled 22 staff visits from Bangladesh to the UK and 6 in the other direction. As a result, curricula of 43 teaching modules in the general area of environmental hazard and risk, environmental change and climate change have been initiated or revised. While this type of transnational knowledge transfer has its drawbacks, we argue that there are specific circumstances in which it can work.     

Social sustainability tool for assessing land use planning processes

The aim of this paper was to develop a social sustainability tool to clarify what social sustainability means in land use planning processes. The tool was developed through a robust research process covering a large amount of scientific literature and built environment sustainability assessment tools. To assess how the developed tool works in practice, we used it as a coding system for the assessment of social sustainability in a case study from Finland. The case study includes the master planning process of a medium-sized city and the legal framework guiding it. The theoretical contribution of the paper lies in creating a holistic tool for the assessment of social sustainability in planning processes. This study also provides a strong practical contribution, as it goes beyond theoretical definitions to the pragmatic level by providing exemplary measures to be used in designing and implementing processes. Therefore, this paper is a valuable source for those stakeholders (for example planners, developers and policymakers), who struggle with the issue of the successful implementation of social sustainability practices, and it will help them to benchmark their processes against the themes found in the tool.     

全球化与中国政治发展刍议

全球化的客观现实及西方政治发展理论的启示,促使人们必须对中国的政治发展进行理性的分析。在全球化背景下,要实现我国政治民主化、政治法制化、政治稳定化以及公民民主精神的提升等政治发展的战略目标,必须对在此背景下政治发展中的目标选择、发展动力、发展模式以及途径和方法等进行必要的研究。     

Local sustainability initiatives: innovation and civic engagement in societal experiments

ABSTRACT

Local sustainability initiatives are studied from two scholarly perspectives: the perspective of sociotechnical innovation, which relates to the capacity of bottom-up initiatives to contribute to the development of sociotechnical alternatives; and the perspective of civic engagement which relates to the capacity of citizens to organize themselves in order to pursue community goals. This paper argues that taking both these perspectives into account overcomes the problem of being too instrumental or the problem of neglecting the role of technology and innovation in local initiatives. The perspective of sociotechnical innovation presents different types of innovation pursued by local initiatives: the creation of new technology, the application of existing technology and the development of social innovation. Furthermore, innovations might diffuse over wider society by: replication, scaling up, and translation. In turn, civic engagement may take the shape of: the strengthening of social capital, the formation of social movements, and the substitution of functions and services. The insights from literature are illustrated and qualified by applying them in the context of concrete local initiatives. Finally, local initiatives will be portrayed as social contexts that are successful in gathering actors with different motivations and world views and that may contribute to the democratization of innovation.     

Teaching European Identities

Under fiscal pressure and grappling with technological transformations, more and more universities are attempting to re-invent themselves as technologically facilitated educational institutions, fast and flexible enough for networking times. The adoption of new instructional technologies poses challenges to universities and education as we know it. This paper considers the educational challenges and opportunities offered by sociotechnical networks such as the Internet. Using the case of a second-year undergraduate course on globalisation, it outlines some practical educational possibilities for using the Internet that might facilitate, instead of compromise, critical thinking. It suggests that geography educators need to begin developing a critical technoliteracy that will respond to our informationally mediated world, a literacy not merely of technical competence but one which contextualises the Internet within a political economy of globalisation and continuously deconstructs, destablises and displaces its presentation as a spectacle and cyber-utopia.     

全球化背景下的中国新生弱势群体与保护性的社会政策

改革开放所进行的资源重组带来的一个重大变化就是社会分化程度进一步拉大,这一变化在全球化的背景下又得到了进一步的强化和凸现,形成了一个具有相当规模的新生弱势群体。其主要体现在:农民的“弱势”特征在全球化背景下逐步显露出来;城镇新生贫困群体有进一步扩大趋势;处于边缘状态的城市农民工生活状况日益令人担忧。因此对弱势群体而言,在全球化背景下,建立和完善弱势群体的社会支持网络,具有特别的意义。据此,首先要提高认识,采取积极的措施,切实把解决弱势群体的问题当作一件影响国计民生和社会稳定的大事来抓;尽快建立综合性的城市社会救助系统;迅速、全面推进社会保险制度建设;进一步完善社会保障责任共担机制。     

Reflective Journals as a Tool for Auto-Ethnographic Learning: A Case Study of Student Experiences With Individualized Sustainability

This paper critically evaluates the use of journals as a pedagogic tool to encourage reflection, critique and self-analysis by students. Based within a postgraduate teaching module that has operated annually since 2008 and was awarded the Royal Town Planning Institute's Award for Teaching Excellence in 2009, reflexive journals were employed as a method of assessment which, supplemented by conventional lectures and student focus groups, sought to explore the relations, opportunities and obstacles for sustainable development at the individual level.     

Improbable Art: The Creative Economy and Sustainable Cluster Development in a Hong Kong Industrial District

A noted Singapore-based cultural geographer and specialist on Asia analyzes the emergence and functioning of a unique artistic cluster in Hong Kong's Fotan light industrial district. The objective of the research is to understand how artistic work in the cluster, despite some challenges, has thus far proven sustainable in cultural, social, and economic terms. The findings of this case study permit further clarification of several dimensions of an emerging theory of cultural/creative clusters, which should be considered as distinct from business and industrial clusters. Selective comparisons between the Fotan cluster and the Moganshan Lu cluster in Shanghai demonstrate that cultural/creative clusters do not face uniform challenges in striking a balance between economic and cultural sustainability.