Australia's national climate: learning to adapt?

Pride in Australia's extreme climate has long been a part of Australia's national identity. Today, climate continues to be enrolled in a range of nationalistic projects, including the (re)development of climate science and other responses to climate change. In this paper, we outline some of the contours of the ‘Australian national climate’, claims to know it, and four idealised responses to it: bounce back, dismissal, endurance, and migration. We argue that the deeply cultural framing of climate in Australia—in particular, Australians' emphasis on the climate's inherent variability and unknowability, and their own historical adaptability—is being exploited by the federal government and hampering climate change mitigation nationally.     

Political Power and Policy Design: Why Are Policy Alternatives Constrained?

Little research examines the stage of the policy process during which policy alternatives are formulated. Using quantitative and qualitative data from Swedish local politics, we address this deficiency by analyzing the process by which the number of specific policy alternatives is reduced. The findings suggest that, in approximately 20 percent of issues, more than one alternative will reach all politicians making the binding decisions. Most local politicians, in both the majority and opposition factions, think that they lack sufficient information on alternative policy designs. We also find a “political bias,” that is, alternatives are discarded at an early stage because they are deemed not politically feasible. Politicians outside the inner circles, especially those with higher education, would like to see more policy alternatives to discuss and from which they can make choices.     

清末直隶煤炭业变迁中的政策问题

近代直隶地方政府在执行中央政府矿业政策的过程中,既执行中央政策,又加强自己的控制权,因而导致直隶现代煤炭企业发展不快,土法煤矿大量存在。清中央政府鼓励兴办现代矿业的政策成效大减。     

Greening America's Skylines: The Diffusion of Low-Salience Policies

The diffusion literature is replete with examples of highly salient policies spreading across subnational governments. However, low-salience policies that do not benefit from a groundswell of public opinion also spread across jurisdictions in patterns that appear similar to those of other, more well-known policy ideas. This research is an investigation of the mechanisms that propagate low-salience policies. I analyze the adoption of the U.S. Green Building Council's (USGBC) Leadership in Energy Efficient Design standard across 119 U.S. cities from 2000 to 2008. The investigation indicates that a knowledge broker, in this case the USGBC, occupies critical roles in linking a low-salience policy to a broader set of widely held societal values, developing a common policy vocabulary, providing a base policy that jurisdictions may freely adapt, and creating a diffusion infrastructure by acting as a communication hub for existing and interested jurisdictions to discuss innovations and progress.     

Why get involved? Finding reasons for municipal interventions in the Canadian music industry

This article investigates the role of Canadian municipal governments in relation to the development of music industry policy. It examines two attempts by Canadian cities (Calgary and Toronto) to develop municipally based music policies. Both cases are examined in context of the policies of other levels of government in Canada, where municipalities have not generally played a significant role in addressing the music industry. Historically, music industry policy has been a concern of federal government policies. The article addresses how this creates a particular conception of the industry and the extent to which municipal policies need to challenge this in order to be effective. Further, the article examines some of the other factors that constrain and shape the ability of Canadian municipalities to intervene in this field.     

An exploration of regional climate change scenarios for Scotland

Based on a high resolution regional climate model (RCM) experiment, a climate change scenario for Scotland for the end of this century is constructed with the aim of exploring the added value of utilising a regional rather than a global model (GCM) for climate change scenario construction. Spatial variations in regional seasonal average temperature and precipitation change are analysed and the local response of ‘extreme’ weather events to climate warming is assessed using daily model output. The analyses suggest that in comparison with the GCM, the RCM does not provide fundamentally different patterns of seasonal climate change and daily weather response over Scotland, although it does capture more subtle spatial variations in these changes. The RCM also simulates more realistic daily weather events than the GCM, although the relative changes in the frequencies of daily extremes are not greatly different. However, with the limited length of the single model simulation analysed here, it is not easy to establish how robust and significant are the sub‐national patterns of climate response across Scotland. To improve the quality and comprehensiveness of regional climate change scenario information, a number of research issues remain to be addressed.     

From institutions to events – structural change in Norwegian local cultural policy

In this paper we discuss the ongoing restructuring of local cultural policy in Norway. Since the 1990s, we argue, the local cultural sector has been undergoing a structural change, in the form of a movement from institutions to events. As public resources granted to traditional local cultural institutions such as libraries and culture schools decrease, there is a rise in resources granted to new arenas of local cultural life, such as cultural festivals and culture houses. We explain this shift of balance from institutions to events in local cultural policy with reference to three types of mechanism. First, we point to the ‘flexibilisation’ of the cultural sector, which ensues from its sensitivity to changes in the funding of the local governments. Second, new forms of earmarked state funding schemes pull local resources in the direction of cultural festivals and cultural events. A third mechanism that explains the shift from institutions to events is local policymakers’ adoption of theories of culture as a source of urban and regional regeneration.     

Local Media and Experts: Sources of Environmental Policy Initiation?

Research on the process of policy change often involves a direct or indirect analysis of the roles of policy entrepreneurs and the mass media. In Colorado, beginning in 1998, twelve communities decided to obtain water rights for recreational in-channel purposes such as kayaking and whitewater rafting. These water rights stirred political controversy within some communities in Colorado related to spending public money, appropriate uses of water, and the role of recreation in local economies. Using a comparative case study research method, this research analyzes the role that policy entrepreneurs and local media coverage of recreational water rights played in initiating policy change in local communities. The most critical finding from this study is that in communities where citizens acted as policy entrepreneurs there was more controversy, less positive media coverage, and more media coverage early in the process. This case contradicts the assumption that local media coverage helps to highlight policy problems within communities. It supports the idea that experts wield higher levels of influence than citizens in promoting policy agendas.     

Cultural retaliation: the cultural policies of the ‘new’ Front National

This study examines the conception of culture and the cultural policies of the French Front National. Tracing the developments of the party’s cultural agenda before and after Marine Le Pen took over the leadership of the party from her father, I show how the Front National has adapted its discourse on cultural policy to its wider programmatic profile. In the context of a strategy of de-radicalisation promoted by Marine Le Pen, recent years have witnessed focussed efforts by the party leadership to professionalise and modernise the party’s cultural policy programme. However, the analysis of the party’s current cultural policy agenda reveals a remarkable continuity in the way the party leadership conceives of national culture and of what cultural policy should promote. This programmatic continuity becomes apparent in the analysis of the local cultural policies of municipalities won by the Front National in 2014. Exploring the cultural agendas of ten local governments with a Front National majority, I argue that the cultural policies of the Front National remain deeply rooted in a nativist understanding of culture and a dirigiste approach that wilfully excludes postcolonial minorities.     

A Critique in Search of a Corpus: Re-visiting Governance and Re-interpreting Urban Politics

One of the most profound changes of the last two decades has been in the form and the function of local government. Its role as part of the local state has been challenged through the re-scaling and re-configuration of many of its aims. This paper examines the growth of business sector involvement and the ascendancy of the partnership model in urban development, as part of an analysis of the changes and the continuities that stretch across the local government – local governance conceptualization of political relations. I start the paper with a discussion of the main issues in the local governance literature as a precursor to a commentary onImrie and Raco's (1999) recent paper, 'How New is the New Local Governance? Lessons from the United Kingdom'. The wider literature is drawn upon to discuss some of the theoretical approaches used to analyse this much-vaunted transformation and three key themes are used to structure the remainder of the paper. I argue that Imrie and Raco caricature the work of other academics in order to make their claims over omissions from the literature. In doing so, they ignore or under-play how state restructuring and the logic of capital has often been the object of analysis, rather that the voluntarist incorporation of business élites into the local governing apparatus. Using empirical examples from three English cities I argue that while, on the one hand, their examples are revealing and serve to sensitize current debates around governance, the state and regulation, on the other hand, there is still a need to interpret these 'local' politics within a broader and more scale-sensitive framework and in more abstract terms. This demands a clear distinction between local governance as a concept, and its investigation in an empirical way.