Disequilibrium in Development Finance: The Contested Politics of Institutional Accountability and Transparency at the World Bank Inspection Panel

This article examines the dynamic nature with which independent accountability mechanisms operate. Focusing on the World Bank, the authors argue that its Inspection Panel evolves according to internal and external pressures. In seeking to achieve equilibrium, and protect its authority and independence, the Panel has gone through several distinct phases: negotiation, emergence, protracted resistance, assertion of independence and authority, renewed tension, and contestation. The core novelty of the article is its application of concepts from outside the field of development studies — notably institutional accountability from the governance literature, and judicialization from the legal studies literature — to the topic of the Inspection Panel. Examining the Panel in this way demonstrates that accountability mechanisms represent a hybrid of transnational governance influenced by a range of actors including project‐affected peoples, national governments, managers and development donors. Accountability in development finance is about competing interests as well as competing conceptions and expectations of accountability. In such a complex and multi‐scalar system, the Panel is not only concerned with delivering well‐researched investigation reports; it is also an entity seeking to ensure its own survival, as well as an arbiter of its own brand of legitimacy and accountability.     

The New Development Bank and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank: China's Ambiguous Approach to Global Financial Governance

The creation of the New Development Bank (NDB) and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) has generated a great deal of attention and controversy in the development community and beyond. Do these banks indicate that China is promoting a new model of multilateral development finance that undermines the existing system dating back to Bretton Woods? What are the forces shaping China's policy choices in this area? In contrast to the prevailing tendency to view these banks as part and parcel of the same challenge or opportunity for multilateral development financing, this article highlights major distinctions between the NDB and the AIIB. The fact that China is playing a prominent role in both the NDB and the AIIB suggests that China is not promoting a coherent new model of multilateral development financing, but is instead straddling different traditions in this realm of global financial governance. The ambiguity in China's approach to multilateral development finance is shaped by its multiple identities and complex economic and political interests.     

Efficiency of Innovation Systems in Europe: An Institutional Approach to the Diversity of National Profiles

Globalization did not create convergence to a unique economic model among countries. Even in developed countries, the answers to the pressures of markets underline the existence of a variety of capitalisms. The analysis of innovation systems, in particular at the national level, is adequate as a preliminary approach to understand the diversity of profiles and institutional architectures. The article benefits from the broader notion of national innovation system to understand the profiles of 15 European countries. By analysing central building blocks and institutional complementarities through the creation of indexes based on 64 variables and a cluster analysis, it was possible to understand the different levels of institutional efficiency in the analysed dimensions for the selected groups of countries.     

A Rhetoric of Change: The Language of the Howard Government's 2005 Work Choices Agenda

Understanding how public political discourse acts or does not act as a persuasive force in promoting and justifying political policy remains of critical importance. This paper presents a rhetorical criticism of the public political language used by the then Prime Minister John Howard and Minister Kevin Andrews, the chief spokespersons for the introduction of the Work Choices legislation. We demonstrate that these speakers drew upon a metaphor of evolutionary change as a means of promoting their legislation to the Australian working public. We argue that although this metaphor has persuasive utility, this merit was outweighed by the contradictions that arose when the metaphor was situated within a surrounding discourse promoting the concept of individual choice.     

完善县域旅游发展规划的途径

为促进我国旅游业科学有序地发展,搞好县城旅游规划是非常重要的战略步骤,认真解决县域旅游规划实践中的问题,将会给我国旅游事业带来巨大的效益。     

The Modern Girl around the World: A Research Agenda and Preliminary Findings

Our research collaboration examines how the Modern Girl emerged as a global phenomenon in the first half of the twentieth century. By wearing provocative fashions and pursuing romantic love, Modern Girls everywhere appeared to disregard the roles of dutiful daughter, wife and mother. We develop the Modern Girl as a heuristic category that allows new insights into forces of globalisation and manifestations of gendered modernity. Through a case study of cosmetics advertising in China, India, South Africa, Germany and the United States, we show that the Modern Girl in each locale was shaped through multidirectional citations of elements from elsewhere, through transnational processes of racialisation and through distinct articulations of nationalism.     

Gender In Third World Development Studies: An Overview Of An Underview

This paper reviews twenty years progress in the study of gender in Third World development and the extent to which gender has been incorporated within mainstream development theory and practice. Special reference is made to the role geography has played in this arena. It is argued that while gender as a theoretical framework for explaining women's differential but continued subordination should be reaching maturity, there has been little attempt to formulate cohesive models which integrate micro-and macro-level concepts and which could provide a firm base for future theory-building. More important, studies of gender in the Third World development have seldom addressed the question of development policy or put forward practical solutions for the integration of gender issues in development planning. As a case study of gender in development planning the paper examines the Australian Government's women in development (WID) policy, the ways in which it was informed, and the extent to which it has been implemented.     

Beyond Boundaries: Nature,Culture and a Holistic Approach to Domestication in the Levant

The main objective of this paper is to suggest an alternative approach for the investigation of domestication in the Levant. First, basic data regarding domestication in the Levant are presented. Then the various traditional approaches towards domestication in the prehistoric Levant, labeled (1) environmental, (2) social and anthropological, and (3) cognitive, are briefly reviewed. This discussion forms the basis for a proposal of a “holistic approach,” in which domestication is regarded as a long-term, multidimensional and multirelational phenomenon, including many elements—such as plants, animals, humans, material culture and ancestors—with increasing human manipulation of these various constituents. After a presentation of the theoretical framework, a growth metaphor is used to reconstruct the process of domestication (ca. 20,000–6500 B.P.) as a number of phases: (1) germination in the Kebaran; (2) development in the Early Natufian; (3) retreat/dormancy in the Late/Final Natufian; (4) growth in the Pre-Pottery Neolithic A; (5) florescence in the Early- and Middle Pre-Pottery Neolithic B: (6) further development in the Late Pre-Pottery Neolithic B; (7) dispersal in the Final Pre-Pottery Neolithic B and the Pottery Neolithic. In each of these phases, relations between the various elements are dealt with, special attention being paid to symbolical relations, as evidenced by “art” and ritual.     

The German Approach to Counterinsurgency in the Second World War

From the German attack on Poland, the political aims of National Socialist ideology replaced other considerations in the field of counterinsurgency. This tendency escalated during the following years, with the invasion of the Soviet Union as the key turning point. The fighting at the front and against insurgents became interconnected with the destruction of the European Jews, and the radicalisation of the German approach provoked further resistance from underground movements throughout Europe. In the form of a literature review that presents the current state of research on six operational areas (Poland, France, Yugoslavia, Greece, Italy, and the Soviet Union), this article argues that German counterinsurgency policy between 1939 and 1945 combined military necessity, ideology, and mentality in a way that facilitated genocide.     

An Immanentist Approach to the Urban

Abstract: This paper is a critical engagement with immanentist approaches to cities. Geographers approaching the urban through an immanentist lens—primarily inspired by Gilles Deleuze's work—have called into question transcendent determination, namely the determination of material reality by an external and ontologically distinct substance. This has been an implicit assumption in approaches that reduce contemporary urban developments to “effects of globalization” or “impacts of neoliberalism”. I identify two major shortcomings within the recent immanentist critique: first, their rejection of the notion of a structure in toto, and second, their noticeable silence on Louis Althusser despite his unique contribution to the question of complex causality and his shared trajectories with and influence on Deleuze. By using illustrations from the ongoing urban renewal program in Istanbul, I speculate on the ways in which an Althusserian notion of “immanent structure” could contribute to a better understanding of cities as multiplicities.     

Acknowledging the Racial State: An Agenda for Environmental Justice Research

Abstract:  This paper argues that environmental justice scholars have tended to overlook the significance of the state's role in shaping understandings of race and racism, and argues for the use of critical race theory to deepen insight into the role of the state in both fostering and responding to conditions of racialized environmental injustice. Critical race theory offers insights into both why and how the state manages racial categories in such a way as to produce environmental injustice, and how the state responds to the claims of the environmental justice movement. Closer attention to the interplay between the racial state and the environmental justice movement as a racial social movement will yield important insights into the conditions, processes, institutions and state apparatuses that foster environmental injustice and that delimit the possibilities for achieving environmental justice in some form or another.     

走向世界的中国开发区

<正>随着改革开放的不断深入,中国经济与世界经济联系更为紧密,开发区作为对外开放的排头兵,与世界经济的关联度进一步增强,外向型经济受国际市场的影响也陡然增大。开发区是中国对外开放的重要"窗口"。推动开发区高水平的对外开放,不仅要在"引进来"上下功夫,也要在"走出去"上做好功课。北京经济技术开发区位于北京亦庄地区,是北京市唯一同时享受国家级经济技术开发区和国家高新技术产业园区双重优惠政策的国家级经济技术开发区。自1992年建设以来,开发区始终承