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.”     

Family and Collective Remittances to Mexico: A Multi‐dimensional Typology

The development potential of remittances has resurfaced as a topic of analysis, based in part on dramatic increases in migration and amounts of money ‘sent home’, and partly in the growing interest and involvement by states and non‐state actors in gaining leverage over remittances. The trend is indicative of an emerging remittance‐based component of development and poverty reduction planning. This article uses the case of Mexico to make two broad arguments, one related to the importance of extra‐economic dimensions of remittances, particularly the social and political meanings of remittances, and the other based on a disaggregation of remittances into family, collective or community‐based, and investment remittances. Key dimensions of this typology include the constellation of remitters, receivers, and mediating institutions; the norms and logic(s) that regulate remittances; the uses of remittances (income versus savings); the social and political meanings of remittances; and the implications of such meanings for various interventions. The author concludes that policy and programme interventions need to recognize the specificity of each remittance type. Existing initiatives to bank the un‐banked and reduce transfer costs, for example, are effective for family remittances, but attempts to expand the share of remittances allocated to savings, or to turn community donations into profitable ventures, or small investments into large businesses, are much more complex and require a range of other interventions.     

Geography’s Emerging Cross‐Disciplinary Links: Process,Causes, Outcomes and Challenges

In Australian universities the discipline of Geography has been the pace‐setter in forging cross‐disciplinary links to create multidisciplinary departments and schools, well ahead of other disciplines in humanities, social sciences and sciences, and also to a greater extent than in comparable overseas university systems. Details on all cross‐disciplinary links and on immediate outcomes have been obtained by surveys of all heads of departments/schools with undergraduate Geography programs. These programs have traced their own distinctive trajectories, with ramifying links to cognate fields of enquiry, achieved through mergers, transfers, internal initiatives and, more recently, faculty‐wide restructuring to create supradisciplinary schools. Geography’s ‘exceptionalism’ has proved short‐lived. Disciplinary flux is now extending more widely within Australian universities, driven by a variety of internal and external forces, including: intellectual questioning and new ways of constituting knowledge; technological change and the information revolution; the growth of instrumentalism and credentialism, and managerialism and entre‐preneurial imperatives; reinforced by a powerful budgetary squeeze. Geographers are proving highly adaptive in pursuit of cross‐disciplinary connections, offering analytical tools and selected disciplinary insights useful to non‐geographers. However, this may be at cost to undergraduate programs focussing on Geography’s intellectual core. Whereas formerly Geography had high reproductive capacity but low instrumental value it may now be in a phase of enhanced utility but perilously low reproductive capacity.