Imposition to agonism: Voluntary poverty alleviation resettlement in rural China

Implementation of voluntary Poverty Alleviation Resettlement (PAR) in Shanxi Province, rural China is a function of the democratic processes of village governance under the Organic Law of Villages Committees and Assemblies. Villages consult with their constituent households on the decision to resettle and aspects of the process of rebuilding homes and livelihood adaptations. This article analyses the participatory process through an analytic of government that exposes the contingency of local governance as liberal techniques are negotiated amongst historical illiberal governance norms. Processes of subjection during resettlement decision making and implementation defy a liberal/illiberal binary as the effects of power during governance can have a duel nature. These effects produce dialectical tensions that the local Party-state draws on to smooth consent for their political economic goals. Villagers in response draw on multiple political and economic subjectivities to reposition themselves and contest intersubjective norms that define relations between governor and governed. Contestation is most aptly defined as agonism which represents the permanent provocation (Foucault, 1982) between liberal and illiberal governance and the potential for equitable resettlement outcomes.     

Mayors and urban governance: discursive power,identity and local politics

This article combines political and economic geographies with social and cultural theory by reviewing structural and actor-centred approaches to urban governance alongside work on identity, community, masculinity and ‘rights to the city’. The article seeks to bring these literatures into dialogue via an analysis of mayoral politics, presenting empirical research from a UK city in order to highlight the influence of class, sexuality and racism on urban politics. It shows how theoretical and empirical engagement with unequal social relations and their discursive construction through cultural forms and practices offers fruitful avenues for geographical understanding of territorial and relational urban governance.     

China,the international criminal court,and global governance

ABSTRACT

This article explores the Chinese policies towards the International Criminal Court (ICC) in the context of global governance. Despite China’s fast-growing foreign policy competence, the level of confidence held by China in engaging with global governance systems has not yet fully transmitted to the legal institutions governing human rights issues, and the ICC is such an example. This article examines specific policy concerns of China regarding the ICC in light of China’s engagement with global governance, and some of the traditional concerns that have had an impact on that engagement. It discusses the extent to which these concerns should still be regarded as policy barriers preventing China’s full accession to the ICC in years to come.     

Gender and emergent water governance: comparative overview of neoliberalized natures and gender dimensions of privatization,devolution and marketization

This article provides a critical reading of some of the gendered dimensions of emergent water governance regimes, specifically those related to the privatization, marketization and devolution of water resources management. After first providing an overview of recent nature–society contributions related to neoliberalization processes, the article comparatively evaluates insights with respect to the gender dimensions of recent shifts in water governance. I make several arguments at the intersection of relevant literatures. First, there is a need for gender theorists interested in water resources and nature–society debates to engage more with issues, theories and processes associated with neoliberalization. Second, there is a need for more attention to gender, feminist theory and approaches to inequality and socio-spatial difference in discussions of neoliberalized natures. Third, reading these literatures together reveals that there is a need to be self-reflexive and critical of elements of the gender and water literature that implicitly endorse foundational elements of the neoliberal turn in resource governance. Finally, there are particularities with respect to gender theory and politics, and water materialities that hold importance for understanding recent water governance shifts in the broader context of political and economic changes associated with neoliberalization.     

1902年中葡交涉述论

1902年中葡交涉过程中,葡方先后提出扩大澳门界址、在澳门及周围各岛范围内任建工程并协助缉私、修造广澳铁路等项要求,并以承认中外新定税则和协助清政府在澳门征税缉私作为交换条件.中方对葡方企图扩大统治区域等严重侵害中国领土主权的要求给以坚决抵制,使葡方的主要目标不能实现;但为了取得葡方承认新定税则和协助中方征税缉私的目的,在修造广澳铁路问题上对葡方做出一定让步.     

Global governance and the politics of culture: campaigns against female circumcision in East Africa

International organizations, national governments, and civil society organizations have condemned female genital cutting (FGC). In doing so, campaigners and policy-makers often describe female excision as backward, barbaric, and a problem of African culture. What does widespread international condemnation of FGC as a so-called traditional practice mean for campaigns against excision ‘on the ground?’ Drawing on critical global governance scholarship, this article argues that pervasive understandings of female excision as a problem of African culture obscure the far-reaching politics of campaigns against genital cutting. Focusing on efforts to criminalize female circumcision and educational projects in Tanzania and Kenya, I illustrate ways in which campaigns against female circumcision are dynamic sites of conflict characterized by politicized negotiations and resistance. I argue that initiatives that view FGC as a cultural problem in narrow terms may have unanticipated consequences when campaigns inscribe the communities they identify with female excision as local, traditional, and marginal. Notably, campaigns against the so-called traditional culture can counterproductively politicize diverse practices of excision as reified markers of ‘insider’ cultural identity. As a result, campaigns against excision may lead to outcomes antithetical to their stated goals of reducing practices of genital cutting.     

Soft power,global governance of cultural industries and rising powers: the case of China

This article addresses the importance of cultural industries for the strengthening of the soft power of the rising powers and it seeks to understand how the cultural industries allow rising powers to shape the structures of their international environment. More specifically, studying the cases of People’s Republic of China and of the movie industry, my article focuses on the current evolution of the relationship between the Chinese authorities and the film industry, as well as on the development of the domestic film market. I further aim to draw up an inventory of China’s role within the global governance of cultural industries. Finally, I aim to highlight the global cultural competition that China faces, emphasizing the practices of the US administration and Hollywood. I argue that even if China is the current centre of gravity within the world economy, it still has a long way to go in order to shape the distribution of resources within the global governance of cultural industries and to play a crucial role in the international battle of cultural symbols.     

Materializing a form of urban governance: when street building intersected with city building in Republican Canton (Guangzhou), China

In the early twentieth-century China, the imperial court collapsed and modern cities emerged. How did a new form of governance become materialized, conceivable, and understandable? This article presents a case study of street building Canton (present-day Guangzhou) in the 1920s and 1930s. Drawing on discussions of material power, infrastructures, and governmentality, it attends to the role of material artifacts in creating the modern Chinese city. In particular, it illustrates the entangled emergence and development of modern streets and urban governance, a new form of governance essential to fashioning the Chinese nation-state and Chinese modernity. The unstable, evolving process of creating a new built environment provided specific, material reference points for various stakeholders to imagine and think about the modern city as governable space. This case analysis suggests an alternative perspective to urban history in China, and contributes to the broader discussion on the symbiotic relationship between urban politics and infrastructure.     

Governmentality and power in politically contested space: refugee farming in Hong Kong's New Territories, 1945–1970

A small proportion of Mainland Chinese refugee flows into British Hong Kong following the 1949 Communist Revolution in the People's Republic of China were vegetable farmers, who by the late 1960s engendered a vegetable revolution in New Territories agricultural space. Heterogeneous actors and their differing modalities of power in the late-colonial government possessed an active managerial role in this vegetable revolution anchored in issues of marketing and land tenure. While post-World War Two developmentalist ontologies help explain government intervention in the post-war agricultural economy, this research focuses primarily on the disciplinary techniques deployed within the governance rationalities of the early Cold War period to cultivate pro-government loyalties among a potentially proletarianized, trans-border refugee farming population perceived by colonial authorities as being susceptible to Communist influence. As ‘experimental space’, marketing innovations were a qualified success, but progress in land reform failed because of the local geopolitical context of colonial rule in the contested space of the New Territories.     

Real-estate Boom,Commodification and Crises of Social Reproductive Institutions in Rural China

Based on 12 months of ethnographic, interview and archival research in a poor rural county in China, this article argues that three state policies, namely the concentration of rural educational resources in the county seat, the decision to make access to county-seat public schools conditional upon homeownership in school districts, and the (former) one-child policy, have compelled rural households to participate in the real-estate market to meet the reproductive needs of basic education and marriage. The increasing commodification of education and marriage has fuelled a local real-estate boom during the past decade. At the same time, it has put peasant-migrant households under severe economic pressure, forcing them to relocate unpaid female care labour away from the village and to become heavily indebted. These outcomes have had serious repercussions for two other reproductive institutions, leading to a breakdown in intergenerational care and financial support for the elderly, and a sharp decline in the rural birth rate. The Chinese countryside as a social space in which peasant-migrant households were able to reproduce themselves in a relatively non-commodified manner has disappeared.     

Towards relational geometries of public participation and hydropower governance in the Lower Mekong River Basin

The Lao People's Democratic Republic's aspirations to become the ‘battery’ of Southeast Asia has involved plans for a cascade of hydropower dams on the mainstream of the transboundary Mekong River. This has triggered the unprecedented undertaking of public stakeholder consultations under the Mekong River Commission's Procedures for Notification, Prior Consultation and Agreement (PNPCA). This paper focuses on PNPCA stakeholder consultations organized in Thailand and Cambodia, and seeks to understand how these stakeholder consultations, despite their merits in information sharing, have come to be criticized by civil society as a ‘rubber stamp’ for ‘participation’ in Lao hydropower development. Building upon the literature on public participation in development, critical hydropolitics, and stakeholder engagement in Mekong water governance, we seek to conceptualize a critical politics of public participation by adopting a relational approach towards identifying the key challenges relating to participation. We suggest that a relational approach must consider how the interrelations between the multiple formal and informal tracks of stakeholder engagement shape one another and overall opportunities for participation, and how power relations within these spaces impact on perceptions towards public participation. Distrust towards state-organized participatory spaces can be traced from the state-organized participatory spaces to another key interrelation: the power relations between state and nonstate actors in the multi-scalar political spaces that extend beyond participatory spaces. This paper examines how anti-participatory forces pose a challenge to the emergence of both state and nonstate participatory spaces, providing additional insights into the state-society dynamics that influence environmental outcomes around large-scale infrastructural development.     

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.     

The Key Role of Water Resources Management in Ecological Restoration in Western China

The interactions of nature and society are intimately reflected in the degradation of the vast, yet diverse, landscapes and ecosystems of arid western China. The development of agriculture, especially irrigation, has altered rivers, soils and ecosystems so much that major ecological rehabilitation and restoration efforts have been needed since 1950. The catchments of the Tarim River in southern Xinjiang (the Tarim Basin) and of the Black River (Hei He) in Gansu Province and western Inner Mongolia provide examples of the benefits, difficulties and conflicts involved in dryland water management. In the early stages of the human development of these catchments, agriculture depending on irrigation using water from these inland rivers was encouraged. The over‐exploitation of these water resources led to such ecological problems as desiccation of lakes, drying out of rivers, degradation of soils and vegetation and lowering of groundwater levels, with consequent environmental and economic impacts. Since 1990 several high‐cost, national projects to re‐establish ecosystems have been initiated. Water is now released from dams in the headwaters of the rivers in order to restore water flows to the dried out lake basins. Such schemes have inevitably led to social problems and difficulties for the people who depended on the water from the dams for local irrigation. The contrasts in adjustments and attitudes over the use of water for agriculture and other economic activities, as opposed to schemes of restoration of ecosystems and ecological engineering, stem largely from two issues; inconsistent provision of information from the scientific community, and differing ideologies, namely environmental protection versus economic development.     

Rural regeneration strategies for declining regions: trade-off between novelty and practicability

ABSTRACT

Innovation comprises both novelty and practicability. These two dimensions of innovation correlate partly negatively in our analysis of survey data about planning processes in declining rural districts. As argued in the literature, declining regions need innovative concepts beyond traditional counteracting strategies to ‘shrink smart’. Competitions are suggested as feasible-to-initiate innovative local concepts by the state. The German Federal Ministry of Food and Agriculture invited 39 particularly affected rural districts to participate in such a competition among the best concepts. We address the questions of how the districts dealt with the requirements for novelty and practicability in their concepts and how the rules of competitive bidding procedures influence those concepts. Answering these questions, we conducted a survey and statistically tested hypotheses deduced from governance and innovation theory. Moreover, we analysed the bidding documents. The results show that most districts came up with hardly novel and only partly practicable concepts because the organization of the competition, and local bargaining processes impede innovation. Furthermore, the ministry’s requirements for the competition overburdened local actors with a lack of resources in declining regions. As a policy implication, we propose to integrate external experts in local networks and to accompany declining regions over a longer time instead of short-term competitions and projects.     

Bringing politics into class analysis: state power and class formation in post-Mao China

Traditional class theories invariably embrace the ‘proposition of economism’, either extruding politics from the causality of class formation or treating politics as epiphenomenal. Similar ideas of class inform much of the literature on class in the People's Republic of China (PRC). This article contends that social stratification and class formation in post-Mao China cannot be fully understood without recognising state power as a critical determinant of life chances and a major organising principle in the country's class map due to the authoritarian nature of the Party-state and the ubiquity of state power in the economic sphere. It proceeds to illustrate the part that state power plays at the macro and micro levels in the production and reproduction of class.     

The many shades of grey in urban governance: How illegality shapes urban planning,policy and development

Most research on urban planning, policy and development only considers legal practices and actors, and treats illegal ones as insignificant anomalies, unable to structurally affect the governance of urban space. However, this approach is inadequate for explaining urban governance in contexts (e.g. several countries in the Global South, the former Soviet bloc and Southern Europe) where illegal practices such as corruption and organized crime infiltration are widespread in many public and economic sectors. This paper addresses the role of illegal actors and practices in urban governance in the Italian context, using urban regime theory as the theoretical frame of reference. The research centres on the analysis of two case studies in the city of Rome (the In-between world investigation of a criminal network that had infiltrated the local administration and shaped several urban policies, and the investigation of episodes of corruption related to the project for the new A.S. Roma soccer stadium). It shows the existence of two shades of ‘grey urban governance’: firstly, the presence of a dark urban regime, centred on a criminal organisation and parallel to the ‘regular’ one; secondly, the use of corruption as a customary practice with which real estate entrepreneurs influence municipal decisions. Overall, this research contributes to moving away from a rhetoric of ‘gentlemanly’ urban capitalism and politics, and suggests the need to revise several aspects of urban regime theory – as well as other approaches to urban governance dynamics in general – in order to incorporate the role of illegal actors and practices.     

Conceptualising environmental governance in turbulent times: Insights from Brexit and waste in the UK

Institutional turbulence created by the UK's EU exit (Brexit) prompts a wider need to re-think whether our conceptualisations of governance in the environmental sphere sufficiently understand the dynamics of change. In this context, Boltanski and Thévenot's ‘Orders of Worth’ (OoW) framework, has particular merit. This conceptualises governance regimes as composed of compromises between plural and incommensurable orders of the public good, with innate potential for instability; especially - we would add - when the territoriality of governance is in flux. The OoW approach is applied to an analysis of waste governance debates in the UK following the 2016 EU referendum. Documentary and interview data show how present and prospective governance arrangements in the waste and resources sector are subject to rival justifications, with actors advancing different compromises between economic, industrial, civic and environmental orders, but that each is also attached to conceptions of the relevant governance scale (EU, UK, devolved nation). Our study shows the wider potential fragility of environmental reforms, arising from the secondary status of environmental concerns in compromises with dominant market, industrial and civic orders. The ‘orders of worth’ framework requires attention to the scales of political authority being mobilised in disputes, which add their own incommensurability.     

Groundwater Quality in Rural Cambodia: Measures and Perceptions

Two studies of domestic water quality were undertaken in rural Cambodia. The first was a programme of quantitative groundwater quality testing and modelling. The second was a qualitative study of perceptions of groundwater quality. This research aimed to compare and contrast findings of these studies in two communes in rural Cambodia. The quantitative study found that in both communes, there is a high risk of encountering bore water with levels of chemical contamination that are detrimental to human health. The qualitative study found that messages from water users is mixed – 60% of bore water users thought their groundwater was of good quality, but 97% treated their water at the point of use before drinking. Results suggest that villages in rural Cambodia would benefit from a better community understanding of groundwater quality and safe water, and the development of more informed domestic water options.     

Negotiating Green Space with Landed Interests: The Urban Political Ecology of Greenway in the Pearl River Delta,China

Land‐centred urbanisation has precipitated shortage of green space in Chinese cities. However, in the Pearl River Delta, an ambitious greenway system has recently managed to flourish. It is intriguing to ask how this has become possible. Informed by the perspective of urban political ecology, this paper finds that the greenway project in the Pearl River Delta represents a set of politically realistic endeavours to alleviate urban green space shortage by adapting to, rather than challenging, powerful landed interests. Three interlocking dimensions about land—municipal land quota, rural land use claims, and real estate development—have influenced why, where and how greenways have been created. Based on these findings, we argue that research on China's politics of urban sustainability necessarily needs to understand the country's land politics.