Geographies of asylum, legal knowledge and legal practices

Law and legal discourses are an integral part of social life, a central means of producing social identities and exercising social power in day to day life. Critically informed geographical perspectives on law have illustrated in a number of ways how the legal and social (and therefore the spatial) are mutually constitutive. This paper argues that perspectives from critical legal geography can offer insights into the operation of asylum and immigration law in the UK in the late 1990s. This paper argues that legal practices and relations are organised in hegemonic and counter-hegemonic ways in different places and institutional contexts in London. In addition law and legal practices comprise a particularly important way in which ‘community’ can be constructed simultaneously across a variety of different scales in ways that can marginalise and exclude relatively powerless groups like asylum seekers. Thus refugee identities offer a particularly clear example of how social realities are constituted by law and legal practice.     

Business Improvement Districts and the Discourse of Contractualism

Business improvement districts (BIDs) are increasingly being advanced in a range of national contexts as a new delivery mechanism for securing improvement, regeneration and enhanced service delivery in specifically delineated districts. This paper considers BIDs as an example of a modern institutional design that is reconfiguring existing economic and legal regimes within town centres. Drawing on the theories of new institutional economics and transaction costs, the paper discusses how the contractual turn in urban governance advances our conceptual understanding of the rationale, scope and significance of partnership working. The discussion brings together emerging literatures around new ways of understanding partnership working in government thinking. It contrasts the advocacy and use of BIDs with the (previously established) practices of town centre management. It asserts that BIDs represent a new form of formalized and contractualized partnership working in sub-municipal governance, which has particular spatio-temporal implications for state–market–civil relations.     

Adaptation Machines and the Parasitic Politics of Life in Jamaican Disaster Resilience

This paper unpacks a politics of life at the heart of community‐based disaster management to advance a new understanding of resilience politics. Through an institutional ethnography of participatory resilience programming in Kingston, Jamaica, I explore how staff in Jamaica's national disaster management agency engaged with a qualitatively distinct form of collective life in Kingston's garrison districts. Garrison life has been shaped by the confluence of political economic, cultural, geopolitical force relations, which creates a hyper‐adaptive life that exceeds the techniques and rationalities of neoliberal disaster resilience. I draw on autonomist Marxist and Deleuzian readings of biopolitics to identify a new subject of disaster politics that I call, after Deleuze and Guattari, “adaptation machines”, decentralized apparatuses of capture that are parasitically reliant on the population's immanent adaptive capacities. The concept of adaptation machines enables us to envision resilience politics as a struggle over how to appropriate vulnerable peoples’ world‐forming constituent power.     

Expanding Women's Co-operatives in China through Institutional Linkages

This article examines the institutional linkages between three women workers' co-operatives, the first women's credit co-operative in China, and the co-operative support organization, the International Committee for the Promotion of Chinese Industrial Co-operatives (ICCIC). The study shows that Chinese women in rural areas have increasingly adopted co-operatives as a form of organization in their efforts to address the problem of their lack of access to resources, including land, credit, jobs, training and information, and to participate in the mainstream economy as an organized force. This article demonstrates that stronger institutional linkages between local offices of the All-China Women's Federation and the ICCIC encourage the growth of women's co-operative activities. It raises two sets of policy issues that are central to the development of co-operatives and women's banking: the continued growth of these activities will depend upon the government adopting legislation to define the legal framework governing co-operative relations and management systems, and establishing gender-inclusive policies to increase credit to women's income-generating activities.     

Taming sovereignty: constituent power in nineteenth-century French political thought

Political theorists recently focused their attention on the history of the idea of constituent power. This, they claim, shows that the notion of pouvoir constituant expressed the radical and absolute power of the sovereign people. In other words, constituent power pointed at the democratic and irresistible core of popular sovereignty. In this paper, I argue that the analysis of nineteenth-century French political thought offers a different account of constituent power’s history. Relying upon archival resources, I show that in the aftermath of the French Revolution politicians and legal scholars used constituent power to tame the very idea of sovereignty and the powers from it derived. First, during the Restoration constituent power was used to pose a limit to the power of the monarch. Second, throughout the July Monarchy scholars resorted to constituent power to oppose the Parliament's claim to be the sovereign power and the only legitimate author of the constitution. Moreover, they also used it to claim that claim that, even if the people was sovereign, its power was restricted to authorizing the constitution. Third, during the Second Republic, jurists and politicians addressed the people’s sovereign power in terms of constituent and constituted power. While the first was meant to disappear after the constitution’s approval, the second was a second-order power limited by the hierarchy of norms and the rigidity of the constitution.     

Urban governance of liminal legality comparing the incorporation of migrant children in Tel-Aviv and Jerusalem

Increasing numbers of migrant children worldwide grow up with fragmentary and revocable legal statuses that perpetuate their liminal legality as socially present yet legally non-existent. Scholars of migration have mainly explored macro drivers and micro-level effects of liminal legality paying less attention to the role of urban governance and actors in shaping migrant children's pathways of incorporation amidst broader processes of local rescaling. Taking into consideration that neoliberal rescaling is anchored in the uneven institutional landscapes in which it unfolds, this comparative research shows how different trajectories of urban rescaling result in two modes of governance: centralized–segregated in Tel-Aviv, and particularistic–integrative in Jerusalem. Grounded on 101 in-depth interviews with local agents and surveys of municipal policies and NGO reports, we show that in cosmopolitan-oriented yet relatively less ethno-nationally heterogeneous Tel-Aviv, actors maneuver institutional ambivalence by emphasizing liberal status-blind principles in the provision of segregated services. Conversely, in ethno-religious oriented yet ethno-nationally heterogeneous Jerusalem, migrant children are incorporated in integrative frameworks that recognize their particularity. Drawing on an inter-city comparison, we argue that local actors both reflect and mobilize inherited institutional landscapes and legacies of sensemaking of “otherness” as they negotiate similar national restrictive migration policies. Integrating critical scholarship on urban rescaling, attentive to structures of social provision and policy paradigms, and local actors' sensemaking, we foreground the centrality of cities in forging liminal legality as a multidimensional space where policies, institutional contexts, and agency work together in emplacing migrant children, suspended between legal categories, as urban subjects.     

Art and science in the UK: a brief history and critical reflection

ABSTRACT

This paper begins by reviewing the historical construction of ‘SciArt’, and the way in which its supposed interdisciplinarity often shaded into science communication. Early discussions about the complementarity of art and science were conceived in terms of epistemology, notably the qualities of imagination and curiosity. The paper moves on to discuss how, during the current decade, Art and Science (A&S) discourse has altered due to changes in the cultural politics of both its constituent fields, emerging as a ‘transdiscipline’ characterized by ‘creativity’. Eighteen in-depth surveys with leading practitioners in A&S form a substantial part of the research material, yielding an evaluation of what the disciplinary, economic and cultural implications of this changed discourse may be. Though potentially angled towards the solution of ‘wicked’ problems, transdisciplinarity also sacrifices the specific critical expertise of art, fetishizes tech at the expense of science and selectively ignores institutional problems inherent in funding and power structures.     

The state as a symbol or a means to an end: internal border changes in multinational federations

Federalism is an important institutional option for the management of difference in multinational states. A number of scholars have argued that the internal boundaries of such states should divide each constituent group into several federal units. In theory, boundary engineering of this type should activate cross‐cutting cleavages, subvert secessionist movements and, ultimately, foster political integration and stability. This article, by contrast, demonstrates the conditions under which the subdivision of territorial units can destabilise polities. Where statehood is a central symbol in nationalist narratives of constituent groups, the fragmentation of the sub‐state unit will be perceived as a threat to national identity of the group in question. The article compares former Yugoslavia and Nigeria, two cases in which such processes led to divergent outcomes.     

REFORMING ROAD USER CHARGES: A RESEARCH CHALLENGE FOR REGIONAL SCIENCE*

ABSTRACT The way in which road usage is priced and road infrastructure is funded in the United States has become unsustainable. Support is growing for a Vehicle Miles Traveled (VMT) fee to encourage efficient road usage and replace fuel taxes as the primary funding mechanism for road construction, operations, and maintenance. This paper addresses some questions about a VMT fee including what functions it should perform, how finely it should be differentiated, and how users are likely to adapt to it. To implement an efficient VMT fee, it will be necessary to overcome various technological, legal, institutional, and public acceptability barriers.     

On the frontlines of the law: Legal advocacy and political protest by lawyers in contested Kashmir (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

This article analyzes the role of Kashmiri lawyers working in a context of conflict, militarization and political resistance in Kashmir Valley, India. It finds that the Kashmir Bar Association, operating under conditions of state control that are maintained and legitimized through the law, constitutes an authoritative normative community and powerful institutional actor, working within the parameters of the Indian legal system while simultaneously supporting and maintaining solidarity with the movement for self‐determination, and contesting the legitimacy of Indian state rule. The association's decidedly moral vision of the law offers an alternative form of legal imagination that draws on transnational normative frameworks and practices to challenge the legal provisions and legal failures that function to legitimize human‐rights violations taking place under conditions of militarization. As we show in this article, the recent crisis period in Kashmir has posed challenges to KBA lawyers, as they negotiate and assess their relationship to the state, their place in the struggle for self‐determination, and the promise and potency of law as a strategy for social change.     

International Institutions and Social Learning in the Management of Global Environmental Risks

This article investigates the role played by formal international institutions in the broader process of international efforts to respond to and manage global and transboundary environmental risks. Because few international institutions are designed to deal with the broad nature of environmental risks, it focuses on institutional learning. By analyzing the experiences of the United Nations Environment Program, World Meteorological Organization, and other international institutions involved with global warming, this article identifies institutional properties (or functions) that encourage or inhibit social learning in the management of global environmental risks by international institutions, and that influence the adoption of such lessons by their constituent members.     

Thick Decisions: Expertise,Advocacy and Reasonableness in the Federal Court of Australia

Drawing from the litigation around the Hindmarsh Island Bridge (especially Chapman v Luminis Pty Ltd 2001) this article provides an analysis of judicial responses to anthropological expertise. Sensitive to the institutional responsibilities of judges, as well as rules of evidence, procedures and legal causes of action, it examines the strategic representation and appropriation of anthropological knowledge and practice. In exploring the relations between law and expertise the article illustrates how their combination shapes outcomes. In the process it explains how the judge could have produced a range of (in)consistent outcomes through the modulation of legal categories and their relations with prevalent images of anthropological expertise. This analysis positions the article to critically reflect on some of the implications for anthropologists working in and around legal or quasi‐legal settings as well as those commenting on that participation.     

Climate change,conflict, and cooperation: Global analysis of the effectiveness of international river treaties in addressing water variability

Climate-driven water variability is a natural phenomenon that is observed across river basins, but one that is predicted to increase due to climate change. Environmental change of this kind may aggravate political tensions, especially in regions which are not equipped with an appropriate institutional apparatus. Increased variability is also likely to challenge regions with existing institutional capacity. We argue that our best attempts to assess the ability of states to deal with variability in the future rest with considering how agreements have fared in the past. In this paper, we explore treaty effectiveness, or treaty resilience, by investigating whether particular water allocation and institutional mechanisms help mitigate inter-country tensions over shared water. We use water-related events from the Basins at Risk events database as a dependent variable to test particular hypotheses regarding the impact of treaty design on conflict and cooperation over time. A broad set of climatic, geographic, political, and economic variables are used as controls. The analysis is conducted for the years 1948–2001 using the country dyad as the level of observation. Findings pertaining to our primary explanatory variables suggest that country dyads governed by treaties with water allocation mechanisms exhibiting both flexibility and specificity evince more cooperative behavior. Country dyads governed by treaties with a larger sum of institutional mechanisms likewise evince a higher level of cooperation, although certain institutional mechanisms appear to be more important than others.     

Smart specialization and institutional context: the role of institutional discovery,change and leapfrogging

ABSTRACT

Recent years have witnessed much experimentation with smart specialization strategies (RIS3) and entrepreneurial discovery processes (EDPs) in European regions. The EDP can be seen as an opportunity to address institutional questions. Because institutional patterns can explain why some policies are eventually successful while others are not, looking at the institutional context of regional economies can increase the effectiveness of regional policy. This article argues that the EDP functions as a framework to discover institutional patterns specific to a regional economy, and to define policies either consistent with existing institutions or aiming at institutional change. The article proposes a conceptual framework to understand and analyze the two institution-related roles of the EDP, first as an institutional discovery process and second as an institutional change process. The article builds on empirical case studies in two regions (Lower Austria, Austria and South Tyrol, Italy) and two small countries (Slovenia and Croatia). The case studies focus on how these regions or countries organized the EDP that eventually led to the formulation of their RIS3, and on the institutional dynamics of the EDP in discovering and changing institutions. The article concludes with policy implications that contribute to the debate on post-2020 EU Cohesion Policy.     

Letting Indigenous People Talk About Their Country: a Case Study of Cross‐Cultural (Mis)communication in an Environmental Management Planning Process

This paper presents a case study, based on the experiences of two senior Aboriginal traditional owners who were engaged in negotiations surrounding the establishment of a Regional Forest Agreement (RFA) in southeast Queensland. This case is notable as an illustration of the capacity of natural resource management planning, through negotiation within a formal process, to extinguish native title. Importantly, the personal experiences of two senior Aboriginal people provide an insight into a situation designed to enhance interactions between government and community, with the overt intention of improving natural resource management. However, the record of this personal experience indicates that the communication was less than satisfactory and that the outcomes, at least in terms of the experiences recorded here, of the individual senior Aboriginal community members, was less than satisfactory. We conclude that, despite best intentions, there is an important lack of provision for community influence or power, including any legal or administrative institutional framework. We also conclude that there are important institutional and social processes of engagement still to be developed, including ways of engaging the community more widely that has conventionally been the case.     

Aborigines,mining companies and the state in contemporary Australia: A new political economy or ‘business as usual’?

Since the early 1990s major changes have occurred in the legal, policy and institutional context within which mineral development occurs on Aboriginal land in Australia. This article assesses whether these changes have substantially enhanced the capacity of Aboriginal people to control mining and share in its benefits. It examines, in turn, the major actors involved in mineral development in Australia, the policy positions they are adopting and the way in which they are behaving in relation to mining on Aboriginal land. It concludes that while some Aboriginal groups are gaining greater control over resource development, many have failed to do so, reflecting the fact that the legal, policy and institutional environment remains largely hostile to Aboriginal interests. Only adoption by Aboriginal people of effective political strategies operating on a number of scales can change this situation.     

Politically Engaged Geographical Research with the Community Sector: Is It Encouraged by Australia's Higher Education and Research Institutions?

With the application of neoliberal thinking to the higher education sector, measures of research quality and utility have proliferated in efforts to increase academic accountability, innovation, and contributions to public policy. We intend to reignite discussion about community activism and the role of the academic in response to trends in higher education policy and recent debate in Australia about research quality assessment and policy relevance. We challenge the common portrayal of the public sector as the sole locus of policy‐making and argue the case for greater recognition of the role of the community sector and its research partners in policy development and implementation – one that is not given due attention in the discourse on or in measures of research value and impact. Informed by recent literature on governance and interpretative approaches to policy analysis, we draw on our combined experience conducting research with two Australian movements at the forefront of reforms to property rights institutions, legal standards, and norms relating to social and economic equity to outline the institutional tensions and structural impediments facing researchers working with the non‐government sector. The paper documents the progressive roles the academic can play in such work, arguing that institutional change is required within the tertiary sector to support researchers to build closer, more trusting research partnerships in which due attention is given to social impact and relevance.     

Segmented Publics and the Regulation of Critical Speech in China

Abstract

In contemporary China strict censorship coexists with significant freedom of expression and restrictions are enforced inconsistently. Yet certain principles underlie determinations of what is acceptable public speech, depending on the institutional location of the utterance, the identity of the speaker and the time of the event. What is allowed depends on the specific circumstances, but it results from patterns in the institutional practices of Chinese politics that involve constraining debate within “segmented publics”. This article analyses how formal and informal rules limit discussions of particular issues to specific segmented publics, and how varying degrees of debate are permitted within these institutional fields, based on the expertise of their members or, in the case of associations, their engagement in specific areas of policy implementation. Another dimension of variation relates to the personalised character of authority in the Chinese system of governance, which means that leaders set the tone for debate within institutional spheres they control. State control, however, is only part of the story: segmented publics are dynamic spaces where boundaries are permeable, often contested, and constantly in formation. The operation of segmented publics is explored here through case studies of activism in the legal field; on women’s rights in the associational field; at the grassroots in resident and villager committees; and in oppositional publics.     

Local Decisionmaking and Management in Czechoslovakia: 1990–19921

This article discusses the local government and decisionmaking system which emerged in the post-communist era in the former Czechoslovakia as a result of sweeping political, economic, and social change. The legal, institutional, and financial framework put in place following on rapid decentralization and deregulation is outlined; also discussed are problems associated with fragmentation, role definition, and uncertainty, as well as lack of management experience, strategic planning stills, training (both of local officials and elected representatives), and money.