Charity and Justice in Global Poverty Relief

Peter Singer's message in One World: The Ethics of Globalisation is that we must now consider the whole of the world and all of its peoples our home. The penultimate chapter ‘One Community’ argues that there are no good reasons why those individuals who have the means should not donate to organisations that address the problems of global poverty relief. This, however, is not an adequate ethic; it does not provide the foundation we need in order to construct a sustainably just world order. Singer's recommendations may well lead to the construction of a world in which there is a significant reduction in the level of global poverty. However, Singer's route to poverty reduction is via charity, not justice. Global justice is not the same as individualist practical ethics, even if the latter is applied on a global scale. Singer's concerns for long-term global poverty relief will be better served by an agenda that promotes global institutional change, rather than one that is limited to hoping against donation fatigue among the world's affluent.     

THE LIVING PAST

It is argued that although this book will be of interest to any scholar interested in Croce, Gentile, or de Ruggiero, it will be of particular interest to those interested in R. G. Collingwood, for the ultimate focus of the book is upon Collingwood's philosophy and how it developed in relation to the work of the Italian idealists. This is a subject that has not previously been investigated in any depth. Peters argues that the basic idea that unites all four philosophers is that “the past is not dead, but living”; but what distinguishes Collingwood's philosophy from the Italians' is the idea, and its justification, that “the past can live on even if we are not aware of it.” Collingwood explored and developed this idea in reaction to the “presentism” of the Italians, a position that is most obvious in the philosophy of Gentile but that is also to be found, albeit less obviously, in the philosophies of Croce and de Ruggiero. Without casting doubt upon the influence of the Italian idealists on Collingwood, it is suggested in this review that, as well as explaining that influence, Peters's book also throws Collingwood's similarities with Oakeshott into relief; by contrast with Collingwood, there is no evidence that Oakeshott ever read the Italian idealists.     

THE EFFECTS OF METROPOLITAN JOB GROWTH ON THE SIZE DISTRIBUTION OF FAMILY INCOME*

ABSTRACT. This article examines how a metropolitan area's job growth affects its income distribution, using CPS data from 1979 to 1988. Metropolitan growth increases the poorest quintile's income by a greater percentage than for the average family. Metropolitan growth also increases the value of property owned by the richest quintiles. Economic development programs to increase local growth will have a net progressive effect if the cost per job created is low, and these costs are financed by personal taxes. But programs with a high cost per job, or financed by cutting welfare, will reduce the net income of the poorest quintile.     

A Note on the Extremities of Local Moran's Iis and Their Impact on Global Moran's I

By defining local Moran's I_i as a ratio of quadratic forms and making use of its overall additivity to match global Moran's I, we can identify spatial objects with a strong impact on global Moran's I. First, we concentrate on the spatial properties of local Moran's I_i expressed by the local linkage degree. Depending on whether we use the W- or C-coding of the spatial connectivity matrix, the variance of local Moran's I_i for a small local linkage degree will be either large or small. Note that spatial objects associated with a local Moran's I_i with a large variance affect the global statistic much more than spatial objects associated with a local Moran's I_i with a small variance. Counterintuitively, global Moran's I defined in the W-coding is most influenced by spatial objects with a small number of spatial neighbors. In contrast, spatial objects with a large number of spatial neighbors exert more impact on global Moran's I setup in the C-coding. Second, we investigate the impact of the empirical data on local Moran's I_i and show that local Moran's I_i will only be significant for extreme absolute residuals at and around the reference location. Clusters of average regression residuals cannot be detected by local Moran's I_i. Consequently, spatial cliques of extreme residuals contribute more to significance tests on global autocorrelation.     

Europe and the new balance of global order

The European Union has become an important shaping factor in international relations, but how and under what conditions it can exercise influence and contribute constructively to global order are still not well analysed. In fact, the EU's contribution may resemble more that of a force in physics than of a great power in the traditional sense of international relations (which the EU is not, and will not become in the near future), and its influence depends probably more on what the EU represents and how well it manages its own realm, rather than on what it can do externally. In this sense, European influence in international relations presently benefits from past achievements, and may therefore have peaked if the twin challenges of enlargement and national structural deficiencies are not addressed effectively. But even if the European Union does master those challenges successfully, and thus manages to sustain and perhaps even enhance its influence as a force in international relations, it will still have to proceed cautiously and clearly focus its attempts on shaping its external environment and contributing to a ‘concrete’ or ‘civilized’ global order. In a global setting that, despite appearances to the contrary, seems characterized by a diffusion rather than a concentration of power and by strong tendencies towards entropy rather than order, the EU can and will probably not remain America's principal ally in sustaining Pax Americana. Nor does it seem likely to become an equal partner in a constructive, balanced transatlantic relationship, let alone a great power capable of challenging, perhaps together with others, America's apparent pre‐eminence. The most plausible assumption for the EU's future role in the new balance of global order is that of a ‘civilian force’ with a regional focus. It may best be able to contribute to global order by managing its own realm well, promoting the normative and institutional infrastructure for civilized international relations, not least in the sense of functioning statehood, and working towards effective multilateralism.     

THE SPATIALITIES OF ACTUALLY EXISTING NEOLIBERALISM IN GLASGOW, 1977 TO PRESENT

Resisting the temptation to view the neoliberalization of urban policy as unidirectional, pure and hegemonic, this article sets out to make sense of the biography of the process in one city in particular, Glasgow. It attempts to organize, marshall and discipline existing literature on the city's local economic, planning and welfare policies, so as to offer a longitudinal reading of Glasgow's encounter with neoliberal reform across the period 1977 to the present. The article questions whether Glasgow's new political‐economic dispensation is capable of stabilizing local capitalist social relations and securing a new local growth trajectory. Space emerges as a critical part of the story. Neoliberalism has interlaced with historical structures, ideologies and policies to produce a range of new hybrid and mutant socio‐spatial formations and because it does not amount to a pure and coordinated project these socio‐spatial formations contradict and collide as often as they reinforce. Precisely because of the contingent and complicated spatialities it deposits, neoliberalism will continue to struggle to secure a regulatory framework capable of stabilizing local accumulation indefinitely.     

Set-determined Process and the Growth of Spatial Structure

We present an analysis of the effects of different information flow patterns on the growth of spatial structure in a broad class of systems. Examples are drawn from plant and message diffusion processes, the growth of herding in animal populations and, in particular, the evolution of cities in human populations. We model the actions of an “individual” as a response to gradients in a transformation of the “real” space, this transformation being the individual's information map of the space. Interesting deductions occur as a result of allowing the individual's information map to vary from extremely local to extremely global. In the city growth model for example, if migration decisions are based upon extremely local information, then the system is characterized by instability and the lack of any well-defined spatial structure. As the localness of this information map decreases, the system is characterized by the development of well defined spatial structure with a characteristic distance separating the “cities.” In a particular case, we show that the wavelength of the dominant spatial structure is directly related to the size of an individual's information field. These effects are a consequence of interactions between individuals that arise from the nonlocalness of the information fields. We interpret the early growth stages in these models in terms of linear filters.     

The Saddlepoint Approximation of Moran's I's and Local Moran's Ii's Reference Distributions and Their Numerical Evaluation

Global Moran's I and local Moran's I_i are the most commonly used test statistics for spatial autocorrelation in univariate map patterns or in regression residuals. They belong to the general class of ratios of quadratic forms for whom a whole array of approximation techniques has been proposed in the statistical literature, such as the prominent saddlepoint approximation by Offer Lieberman (1994). The saddlepoint approximation outperforms other approximation methods with respect to its accuracy and computational costs. In addition, only the saddlepoint approximation is capable of handling, in analytical terms, reference distributions of Moran's I that are subject to significant underlying spatial processes. The accuracy and computational benefits of the saddlepoint approximation are demonstrated for a set of local Moran's Ii statistics under either the assumption of global spatial independence or subject to an underlying global spatial process. Local Moran's I_i is known to have an excessive kurtosis and thus void the use of the simple approximation methods of its reference distribution. The results demonstrate how well the saddlepoint approximation fits the reference distribution of local Moran's I_i. Furthermore, for local Moran's I_i under the assumption of global spatial independence several algebraic simplifications lead to substantial gains in numerical efficiency. This makes it possible to evaluate local Moran's I_i's significance in large spatial tessellations.     

THE CAUSES OF THE ASIAN FERTILITY DECLINE

The Asian demographic transition is treated as one aspect of the global Industrial Revolution, which started in the West but now involves the whole world. In fact, the multiplication of per capita income in Asia in the second half of the twentieth century has been the world's fastest. With the rise in female education, urban living and non-agricultural employment, as well as the mortality decline that began early in the twentieth century and government family planning programmes, fertility fell nearly everywhere from the 1960s presaging below-replacement fertility levels. The continent's macro changes are outlined and micro studies of the causes of fertility decline and the delay or forgoing of marriage are drawn from India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Thailand and South Korea. It is concluded that marriages will be increasingly forgone or delayed and that most, perhaps all, ESCAP Asia will this century experience below-replacement fertility. The path followed is much more likely to resemble that of Mediterranean Europe than Northern Europe.     

OPTIMUM LOCATION AND THEORY OF THE FIRM UNDER A REGULATORY CONSTRAINT*

This paper attempts to incorporate space in the theory of a regulated firm. It will show that the A-J effects are not affected in a spatial setting. In addition, it will also demonstrate that as the difference between the regulated fair rate of return and the unconstrained profit-maximizing rate of return on capital becomes greater, the optimum location of the regulated firm moves towards the site of the product market, if capital and labor are complements (substitutes) and if marginal transportation costs (with respect to distance) are an increasing (decreasing) function of labor usage.     

The Transmigration of Rights: Women,Movement and the Grassroots in Latin American and Caribbean Communities

In order to better understand both the global and local contours and impact of transnationalism as a political and cultural force, this article suggests the need for an exploration of shifting gender roles and expectations as they are becoming manifest in situated arenas. The awkwardness of transposing an international rights discourse into local communities and settings deeply infused with tradition, or onto grassroots nationalist movements that work to resist foreign impositions is a widely recognized concern. At the same time, the influence of diaspora populations is seen to leaven and situate global discourse for local movements in a sending country and translates more local interests into global concerns in important and effective ways. Transnational feminist discourse now often concerns itself with the different strategies employed by diasporas, the strategic uses of global discourse, and the meaningful efforts to resist it. Through illustrations drawn from a study of women refugees in El Salvador, the Haitian democracy movement, and a rural Brazilian women's organization, this article links the experience of transmigration to women's mobilizing efforts and the proliferation of rights discourses.     

Energy Colonialism and the Role of the Global in Local Responses to New Energy Infrastructures in the UK: A Critical and Exploratory Empirical Analysis

Governments, namely in the global North, are fostering the deployment of large‐scale low carbon and associated energy infrastructures (EIs), such as power lines, to mitigate climate change. However, when infrastructures are to be deployed, opposition is often found. Environmental justice—involving issues of distributive and procedural justice and recognition—and associated inter‐group relations, has been identified as a key aspect for local opposition. However, research has rarely examined local perceptions of environmental justice and associated practices, such as energy colonialism, within a global perspective. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach, we examine if and how different‐level intergroup relations and collective narratives shape people's social‐psychological and geographical imaginaries and responses to EIs. Focus groups were conducted with community members affected by proposals to construct high‐voltage power lines in the UK. Analyses suggest that narratives around England's colonial history—within Britain and beyond Britain—shape responses to EIs.     

Third Wave Evangelism and the Politics of the Global in Papua New Guinea: Spiritual Warfare and the Recreation of Place in Telefolmin

Third Wave pentecostalist theology envisages a global struggle against satanic forces as ‘spiritual warfare.’ Here I examine an instance of spiritual warfare that targeted the village of Telefolip as part of a national campaign. Embracing evangelical doctrines of the dependence of ‘physical development’ on ‘spiritual development,’ villagers burned ancestral relics and purport to have found ‘uranium gas’ on the site of a former spirit house. This discovery is held to be full of promise for the future: as a valuable (if imaginary) resource in Israel's struggles, uranium gas offers villagers wealth and a means of asserting local centrality in global terms. I conclude by arguing that an understanding of the conjunction of spiritual warfare's aims with villagers' hopes for a place in the world beyond the village is crucial to analyzing the dynamics of pentecostalist world‐breaking and world‐making.     

Is there a European culture?

Abstract

The article explores the historical roots of the current tensions between the local and the global in Europe, as expressed by the region's audio-visual industries. It suggests that current postures and initiatives have their origins in efforts, which began in the 1920s, to defend ‘an idea of nationhood which presumed sovereignty over culture’ (V. de Grazia), against the perceived onslaught of American cinema, jazz, radio, advertising, etc. The argument follows the evolution of these strategies of cultural protectionism and adaptation through the age of radio and television, down to the Internet. It suggests that ‘Europe’ as a cultural entity will not be formed by this experience, since although every society uses the same sort of tactics and language to face up to globalization, the impulse to cling to local identities and idiosyncracies is, if anything, getting stronger today.     

From Alpine clubs to Baggio and Berlusconi: Italy reflected through sport

Abstract

This article attempts to convey something of the importance of sport in Italy by tracing a brief outline of its development in parallel with the modern Italian state. It then looks at Patrick McCarthy's vision of Italian sport to see how this fits with the latest developments in this turbulent world. It suggests that the fortunes of Italian sport will be somewhat dependent on the wider economic and political system, where the past and present record is not encouraging. Much bolder reform is needed if the trends of bleeding sport dry through commercial exploitation and the erosion of local loyalties are to be reversed. But even if there is not further reform, sport will use its powers of resistance to survive. Much of the article focuses primarily on soccer, both because it is the country's most popular sport and because it has led trends affecting other major sports including cycling and motor racing.     

Twenty-five years of children's geographies: a planner's perspective

ABSTRACT

This paper considers the key trends and changes that have taken place in my 25 years of children's geographies research. I reflect on the growing awareness of children in research but also the continued marginalisation of children and children's concerns in my own planning profession, and the continuing need for a greater presence for Majority world children in research. I ask if we as children's geographers can rise to the growing global challenges children face. To do so will require greater interdisciplinary work and recognition of the ever more complex and dynamic nature of societies if we are to create a robust forward-looking research agenda with and for children.     

Europe as a global actor: empire by example?

The European Union (EU) spreads its norms and extends its power in various parts of the world in a truly imperial fashion. This is because the EU tries to impose domestic constraints on other actors through various forms of economic and political domination or even formal annexations. This effort has proved most successful in the EU's immediate neighbourhood where the Union has enormous political and economic leverage and where there has been a strong and ever‐growing convergence of norms and values. However, in the global arena where actors do not share European norms and the EU has limited power, the results are limited. Consequently, it is not only Europe's ethical agenda that is in limbo; some basic social preferences across the EU seem also to be unsustainable. Can Europe maintain, let alone enhance, its environmental, labour or food safety norms without forcing global competitors to embrace them? The challenge lies not only in enhancing Europe's global power, but also primarily in exporting rules and norms for which there is more demand among existing and emerging global players. This means that Europe should engage in a dialogue that will help it to establish commonly shared rules of morality and global governance. Only then can Europe's exercise of power be seen as legitimate. It also means that Europe should try to become a ‘model power’ rather than a ‘superpower’, to use David Miliband's expression. The latter approach would imply the creation of a strong European centre able to impose economic pains on uncooperative actors. The former would imply showing other actors that European norms can also work for them and providing economic incentives for adopting these norms. To be successful in today's world, Europe needs to export its governance to other countries, but it can do it in a modest and novel way that will not provoke accusations of ‘regulatory imperialism’.     

From Informal Recreation to a Geography of Achievement: Women's Soccer in South Australia

Since its inclusion amongst Olympic sports in the 1990s, women's soccer has grown impressively worldwide. Despite its rapid global expansion and growth in the number of playing participants, the sport has been neglected by geographers. In Australia, which is currently the fifth women's soccer country in the world as per registered players, the popularity of the sport has grown significantly in recent years. Perhaps even more strikingly, however, the approach to the sport has changed, to focus on the achievement of results. The shift in the purpose of women's soccer, from a solely social and recreational activity to an achievement sport, is a result of the increasing links between the local women's soccer systems and the global world of sport. The paper examines an exemplar of South Australia, and in particular the Adelaide metropolitan region. Here, in the last 30 years, women's soccer has evolved from a geography of foundation, defined by informal organisation and localised scope, to a geography of achievement, characterised by an institutionalised focus on the production of players, the introduction of higher-profile ‘sportscapes’, a broader pattern of clubs distribution, and a new set of connections with global women's soccer. The current geography of achievement links local and global women's soccer scenes. On the other hand, it funnels access to the achievement level of South Australian women's soccer to a limited central area of Adelaide's metropolitan region. The paper also draws attention to the part that social capital, and especially ‘bridging’ social capital, played in enabling the evolution of Adelaide women's soccer. The role of social capital as a contributing element of the development of sporting systems is a topic that deserves further investigation.     

Children's projected political preference: transcending local politics

Traditionally, research on political preference has primarily focused on adults within their local political context. This research attempts to show that the perceived political preference of children is part of their national identity, and encompasses not only local politics but also the global and regional discourse. The present study surveyed 1187 Palestinian adolescents attending school, grades 5–7, in the West Bank to examine whether children's future political party preference is grounded in local/global discourse. The findings revealed a discrepancy between participants' perceptions of the local dominant political party and their projected political party preferences. This research argues that political party preference is facilitated through the transcendence of national identity embedded in children's geopolitical agency. The significance of the findings emphasizes that territorial boundaries are artificial; therefore, children's geopolitical agency is impacted by extraterritorial discourse and is able to transcend the local and regional context into a global politics.     

The empire writes back (to Michael Cox)

Some analysts contend that the future of the US is bleak and that its days as a superpower are numbered. While no one can ignore the very serious challenges that confront America at home and abroad, most analyses are dangerously onesided. First, they suffer from a short‐term view that overlooks the strong structural underpinnings of American power. Second, naysayers of American power often play up America's faults while ignoring the very serious challenges rising powers must confront if they are to continue on their upward trajectory. Third, writers on America's decline fail to grasp the changing fundamentals of global politics and the shift within world politics that requires states to move away from zero‐sum conceptions of international affairs. This response addresses these issues and the assertion by Professor Michael Cox that the US is in decline—again. It argues that that US will continue to be a pre‐eminent global superpower and that this power can be extended if the US makes wise choices to expand global governance in its final years as the sole superpower.