Going to a home you have never been to: the return migration of Mexican and American-Mexican children

Focusing on children's experience-driven cosmologies revealed through interviews and survey responses, this article seeks to analyse and interpret the way children explain their migration from the USA to Mexico within the context of increases in both voluntary and forced return migration of Mexicans since 2005. It draws from representative samples of students (aged 9–16) enrolled in both public and private schools in several Mexican states, which are complemented by data drawn from in-depth interviews that complicate the sociological typologies about migration, motives for migration, and returnees. The goals of this article are as follows: (a) to illuminate and value children's own narratives about their migration experiences and (b) to discuss the contribution of diverse and apparently contradictory micro-, meso-, and macro-level approaches in studying migrant children.     

Public and Private Policy Change: Pension Reform in Four Countries

This article offers a comparative, qualitative analysis of the changing nature of—and relationship between—public and private old age pensions in the United States, Canada, Britain, and Japan. Stressing the impact of institutional legacies on policy change, the article explains why these countries have taken contrasting paths toward the restructuring of public and private pension policies. The study finds that the four countries fall into two distinct clusters. On the one hand are Canada and the United States, which have essentially witnessed policy drift toward a greater reliance on private savings. On the other hand are Britain and Japan, which have reshaped their pension systems largely through legislative revision. The last section explains the differences between and within these two country clusters. The article concludes that institutional forces explain the distinctive policy patterns between the two country clusters but that it is necessary to bring in other factors (i.e., demographic aging, union density, and the role of ideas) to account for differences within each of these clusters.     

Uncertainty, Risk, Trust, and Information: Public Perceptions of Environmental Issues and Willingness to Take Action

Environmental policymaking has remained an important issue in American public policy for many years. While many individuals have proenvironmental attitudes, they remain unwilling to take the actions necessary to achieve environmental goals. Many variables have been used to explain support for environmental policymaking. This study looks at the effect of uncertainty about environmental quality, perception of risk from environmental hazards, and trust in government and university scientists on willingness to take environmental action. The study examines the impact of these three variables on two environmental issues—tap water and nuclear power. The data were collected from a national sample of 400 individuals. This article presents the results of this research and examines the complex relationships among risks, trust, uncertainty, and willingness to take environmental action. The conclusions improve our understanding of environmental attitudes as well as have practical implications for policymakers who need to build public support for policies designed to improve the environment.     

The transnational state and migration: Reach,flows and Policies

For long, state building has been addressed as the expression of an exclusive power over a portion of space and population. In recent years, the scholarship moved away from such a conception by regarding state building as an assemblage of multi-scalar public and private actors, beneath and beyond its territorial borders. This paper adds to this conversation by focusing on the way states transform as they engage with migration-induced transnational flows. This paper defines the transnational migration state as the set of policies, concepts and institutions designed to make the most of “profitable” migration-related flows (of people, money, ideas, etc.) while filtering out unwanted ones. Next to the national-level administrations in charge of the management of human, financial and immaterial flows, states seek to extend their reach by rescaling their engagement and relying on a range of private and civil society actors, including local authorities. This paper is a theoretical contribution to the debate on state reconfiguration in a world of globalised migration. It distinguishes and conceptualises two types of migration-related transnational migration states: emigration and immigration states tackling incoming and outgoing flows respectively.     

Drugs, Sex, Rock, and Roll: A Theory of Morality Politics

I assume that (a) the demand for sin is characterized by heterogeneous preferences and (b) private behavior diverges from public statements. From these assumptions, in the first section of this article I derive a series of propositions about morality policy. Rational politicians will perceive that demand for restrictive policies will be greater than it actually is and thus compete to produce more extreme policies. Bureaucracies will lack expertise and thus will not provide a check on political excesses. This "politics of sin" can be translated into a contemporary form of redistributive morality policy politics if the issue can be refrained by political actors to legitimate an opposition position. In the second portion of the article, I argue formally that sin policies in general will fail because they operate on subsets of the population that are more and more resistant to the policy instruments available to government. I conclude with potential expansions of this theory, including how it might be generalized to other types of public policy.     

Branded cities: outdoor advertising,urban governance,and the outdoor media landscape

Abstract: In many cities both rich and poor, new forms of outdoor advertising are emerging with potentially significant implications for the nature of the urban public realm. Public–private partnerships for advertising‐funded provision of basic items of urban infrastructure such as bus shelters, street signs and public telephones have grown as a result of structural changes in the advertising industry and shifts towards neoliberal forms of urban governance. This article critically interrogates the implications of these new outdoor advertising arrangements for the urban public realm, and argues that they have potentially harmful consequences for the accessibility and diversity of the outdoor media landscape. It then proposes three strategies for the democratisation of that landscape. These strategies are not premised on an outright rejection of outdoor advertising, but rather seek to contest the monopolistic capture of outdoor media by public–private partnerships involving urban authorities and outdoor advertising companies.     

Communities,work and public/private sphere models

Based on a study of women's work in the Canadian community of Kitchener‐Waterloo over a century, this paper identifies community work as conceptually separate from domestic and traded work. Using case examples from the study, the paper analyses three propositions associated with public/private sphere models, drawing upon the theoretical work of Carole Pateman and others. The paper proposes a new conceptual framework for understanding the relationship between women and work which includes community work as a third sphere. It suggests that re‐theorising the relationship between women and work is necessary in order to overcome the limitations and inherent contradictions of conventional public/private formulations and in order to acknowledge the nature and extent of involvement in civil action.     

Conservative Philanthropists,Royalty and Business Elites in Nature Conservation in Southern Africa

Abstract: The article investigates the increasingly important connections between the private sector and nature conservation agencies. It looks specifically at the connections between two important philanthropists, the late Anton Rupert, a South African business tycoon, and the late Prince Bernhard of The Netherlands. Both have been highly successful in raising funds for nature conservation, and marketing the idea of transfrontier conservation. This paper explores the networks they formed and were part of to try and explain how they were able to do so. It also attempts to analyse how their donations and fund raising have shaped thinking about nature conservation in (southern) Africa.     

Urban bound migration and rural investment: the case of Mexico

The authors investigate an agriculturally based policy for improving rural incomes and for retarding the rural-urban migration flow. The production of agricultural goods is characterized by a production function in which output increases with increases in agricultural labor inputs, capital, public infrastructure, land, and technology. Differences among regions in agricultural technology will reflect regional differences in education, the institutionalized form of productive organization, and differences in access to technological information channeled through more technically advanced cities. To pick up the effect of out-migration changes in state agricultural labor supply and upon agricultural output, the state's agricultural out-migration rate is included together with the agricultural labor force. The gross migrant flow between 2 locations is hypothesized to depend upon a set of variables influencing the individual's perception of the economic rate of return to be gained by moving, a set of variables reflecting the individual's propensity to relocate, the labor displacement effects of investments, and the at risk population at 1 location available to migrate. It is also taken into account that individuals differ in their response to information about origin and destination wage differentials and that individuals may or may not perceive a new ecnomic gain from migration but may base the decision on other considerations. Results of a statistical analysis using data from the Mexican census of population for 1960 and 1970 are: 1) size of the rural labor force was negatively associated with agricultural wages, contrary to expectations; 2) small farmers have benefited from the expansion of irrigation in Mexico; and 3) higher urban wages attract migration, and higher growth rate of agricultural income retards rural-urban migration. With respect to the 1950-60 decade both agricultural income and rural out-migration impacts could have been substantial but both the impact on local urban growth and on the rate of in-migration to the primate city would have been slight.     

Shame, Guilt, and Anguish in Holocaust Survivor Testimony

This article examines how Holocaust survivors interpret themeaning of specific "iconic," all-absorbing memories that seldomfind their way into the survivors' public account of their Holocaustexperience. Utilizing the idea of public and private space, and personaland corporate pain as heuristic tools, I examine how survivorsorganize experience. In the final section, I argue that survivorslive with countervailing pressures: the struggle to forget andremain silent and the need to tell and to memorialize. Oraltestimony's communal, didactic, and therapeutic nature makeit a unique platform for these conflicting forces to work themselvesout by transforming narratives of suffering into narrativesof witnessing.     

The Study of Local Public Economies: Multi‐organizational,Multi‐level Institutional Analysis and Development

One important extension of the IAD framework has been to the study of local public economies. These are multi‐organizational, multi‐level arrangements defined as the set of governmental jurisdictions, public and nonprofit agencies, and private firms that interact in various patterns to provide and produce public goods and services within a specific locality or region. Commonly, the localities or regions studied from this perspective have been U.S. metropolitan areas, often defined as a central city and its surrounding or adjoining county. Localities can be delineated, however, on various terms, and in the IAD framework, it is the geo‐physical nature of a locality that, in substantial part, drives the analysis. One of the strengths of the approach is its capacity to explain local variations in public organization as a function of the geo‐physical diversity of localities, while at the same time developing empirical generalizations and normative principles that apply across diverse regions. What, for example, might the organization and governance of a complex metropolitan area have in common with the organization and governance of a complex protected area, such as the greater Yellowstone eco‐region or the Adirondack Park? Construing both sorts of regions as local public economies can enhance our overall understanding of public organization at the same time that it permits a more nuanced understanding of diverse localities. Such work contributes to the ongoing IAD project of “understanding institutional diversity.”     

The assumption of equilibrium in models of migration

In recent articles Evans (1990) and Harrigan and McGregor (1993) (hereafter HM) scrutinized the equilibrium model of migration presented in a 1989 paper by Schachter and Althaus. This model used standard microeconomics to analyze gross interregional migration flows based on the assumption that gross flows are in approximate equilibrium. HM criticized the model as theoretically untenable, while Evans summoned empirical as well as theoretical objections. HM claimed that equilibrium of gross migration flows could be ruled out on theoretical grounds. They argued that the absence of net migration requires that either all regions have equal populations or that unsustainable regional migration propensities must obtain. In fact some moves are inter- and other are intraregional. It does not follow, however, that the number of interregional migrants will be larger for the more populous region. Alternatively, a country could be divided into a large number of small regions that have equal populations. With uniform propensities to move, each of these analytical regions would experience in equilibrium zero net migration. Hence, the condition that net migration equal zero is entirely consistent with unequal distributions of population across regions. The criticisms of Evans were based both on flawed reasoning and on misinterpretation of the results of a number of econometric studies. His reasoning assumed that the existence of demand shifts as found by Goldfarb and Yezer (1987) and Topel (1986) invalidated the equilibrium model. The equilibrium never really obtains exactly, but economic modeling of migration properly begins with a simple equilibrium model of the system. A careful reading of the papers Evans cited in support of his position showed that in fact they affirmed rather than denied the appropriateness of equilibrium modeling. Zero net migration together with nonzero gross migration are not theoretically incompatible with regional heterogeneity of population, wages, or amenities.     

Wife Seclusion and the Spatial Praxis of Gender Ideology in Nigerian Hausaland

In much of Nigerian Hausaland the prevailing religio-cultural ideology of female seclusion (if not always the practice) impinges on married Muslim Hausa women to a greater, or lesser, degree. This article examines the intimate relationships between space, gender and ideology in contemporary rural Hausa society, showing the social construction (and connectedness) of gender identities and associated spatial identities, thus illustrating how spatial praxis is based on hegemonic patriarchal gender ideology. Observations and interview material gathered from a village case study in Kano State demonstrate how gender divisions correspond with the ideology and contemporary practice of wife seclusion. Intersecting patterns of gender, space and time are revealed by detailed analyses of time- and space-use data, which scrutinise men's and women's daily activities and mobility patterns. The cross-cutting of gender with class, age and marital status is shown to be highly significant in determining everyday experiences of spatial praxis, especially for women. A materialist feminist theoretical framework is used to explain this gendered geography of Nigerian Hausaland in which men's and women's worlds are spatially segregated, yet complexly interlocked and interdependent beyond simple public‐private divisions of ‘female’ household compounds (private space) and ‘male’ public space. For this peasant society, aspects of the rural economy and ideology emerge as powerful factors in determining the nature of seclusion as part of gender praxis. It is argued that due to various cultural and religious factors socio-economic development in Northern Nigeria has not been translated into improved autonomy for Hausa women.     

States, Markets and Governance for Emerging Market Economies: Private Interests, the Public Good and the Legitimacy of the Development Process

States, markets, and governance are among the pressing issues of our day. The global market exerts dynamic pressures on our societies, economic agents, and systems of government, especially in the developing world. Typically, most analysis begins with the idea that global markets have increasingly intruded upon the capacity of the institutions of government to manage the process of change. Our societies are seen as increasingly subject to the vagaries of market forces, to the delight of some and the regret of others.
This article argues that much thinking about states and markets is flawed, making it highly likely that policy-makers, among others, will commit mistakes in their responses to the undoubted pressures for change. If we alter the way we think about the state and the market, we will see opportunities to change what we do about them and how they evolve over time. The article argues that we should retreat from understandings of the market and governance that involve a clear distinction between states and markets, proposing a radical reformulation wherein states and markets are no longer seen as separate entities, but as a state-market 'ensemble of governance', or 'condominium'. Drawing on Adam Smith, this approach leads to a reinterpretation of the relationship between private interests in market processes and the wider public good. This model is used to interpret contemporary patters of global trade and finance, and the article concludes that this new way of thinking can help us to realise better our normative preferences about the sort of world in which we wish to live.     

Description,appropriation, transformation: Fascist rhetoric and colonial nature

During the period of Fascism, a variety of discourses and representations were attached to colonial landscapes and to their uses. African nature was the subject of diverse rhetorical strategies, which ranged from the persistence of visions of wilderness as the locus of adventure to the domesticating manipulations of an incipient tourist industry aiming to familiarise the Italian public with relatively tame forms of the exotic. Contrasting images of bareness and productivity, primitivism and modernisation, resistance to change and dramatic transformation found their way into accounts of colonial territories ranging from scientific and pseudo-scientific reports to children's literature, from guidebooks to travel accounts, all of which were sustained not just by written texts but also by iconographic representations. This article will look at the specific example of accounts of Italian Somalia in order to explore Fascist discourses regarding colonial nature and its appropriation. Documents examined will include early guidebooks to the colonies, a small selection of travel accounts aimed at the general public, as well as the works of a number of geographers and geologists who were among the most active polygraphs of the period, and whose writings addressed a wide range of Italian readers.     

Madrid's Retiro Park as publicly-private space and the spatial problems of spatial theory

The scholarly focus on the production of space necessitates a thorough reassessment of the static categories employed in the analysis of spatial processes. Emphasizing space as a process, this essay calls attention to the recent implication of Madrid's Retiro Park in larger processes of capital accumulation. At the same time, it highlights the insufficiency of the tempting yet problematic distinction between public and private space that obtains in easy solutions to the struggles over city-space. As many critics have pointed out, there is design flaw in the idea of public space—it can never explain how a given space, such as a park, comes to be free of the ‘private’ (personal and structural) interests operating throughout its societal context. The story of the Retiro ultimately foregrounds the pivotal role of city-space in the drive for capitalist intercity-competition and suggests that the latter process is insufficiently confronted by idealized notions of the role truly ‘public’ spaces might play in radical democracy and citizenship.     

LONG-TERM EXPECTATIONS FOR FINANCING HIGHER EDUCATION

It is an error to base higher education enrollment projections solely on birth statistics of twenty years earlier. Nationwide enrollment may show substantial increases during the present decade, and ultimately very great gains are probable. Federal support will. in the long run come to exceed the contribution of the states. The view of higher education as a private purchase of a consumers1 good, for private gratification and aggrandizement, is slowly changing to the salutary view that higher education is a public service whose benefits accrue chiefly to the whole society. An interlude of emphasis of federal tax-cuting need not necessarily mean that the fifty states will abandon themselves to fiscal austerity for higher education.     

Importing and exporting spatial needs: A Dutch approach1

The increasing demand for space determines much of the approach to spatial planning in countries with a high population density like the Netherlands. In the next three decades more land will be needed for housing, work, traffic, leisure, nature and water. There is only one sector that will yield land: agriculture. The Dutch Minister of Spatial Planning has presented six intervention strategies to cope with the increasing demand for space: (1) priority setting; (2) export spatial needs; (3) reduce the need for space in accordance with policy; (4) intensify land use; (5) combine spatial needs; (6) transform spatial structures and buildings. Spatial planning in the Netherlands is becoming more and more geared to strategies 4, 5 and 6, which take the need for land as given. This paper seeks to explain that the first three strategies, and strategy 2 in particular, are also crucial for a country like the Netherlands, even though the policies associated with them would not generally be labelled spatial. For the spatial planner, however, the export of spatial needs is relevant as this determines the outcome of spatial planning to a large extent. This shall be illustrated by reporting on international residential migration, the use of leisure homes and second homes, international business migration and the restructuring of the agricultural sector. The Netherlands is not only exporting spatial needs, but also in the same time even imports needs at a larger scale, which puts spatial planning on a larger pressure. In the past the lack of space was solved by relinquishing land that was originally earmarked for water or nature. But the need for space for water and nature has increased recently and will continue to do so in the coming decades. This makes intervention strategy 2 even more relevant for the future. Spatial planners need to widen their horizons and include the import and export of spatial needs in their analyses.