Scotland's demographic regime: Population and the politics of devolution

Scotland, with just over 5 million inhabitants, is a small country relative to most of its neighbours in Europe, including England. Under the recently (re)established Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh, devolved responsibilities have provided a new context within which the characteristics of its demographic regime have come to be seen as problematic. In this paper we review the empirical evidence underpinning political perceptions of a population ‘crisis’ in Scotland and argue that spatial comparisons have been particularly influential in this politicisation of population. We then examine the dimensions of the population debate through the voices of politicians and the media. We conclude with a brief consideration of the relationships between population and devolved politics, suggesting a direction for policy‐relevant research to which population geographers could make a major contribution.     

Networks of connectivity,territorial fragmentation,uneven development: The new politics of city-regionalism

Over the past decade much has been written about the centrality of city-regions to accounts of economic success. But despite a rich and varied literature highlighting the importance of city-centric capitalism, the concept of the city-region remains ambiguous. Defined in economic terms, all too often what is missing from these accounts is how city-regions are constructed politically, and the processes by which they are rendered visible spaces. While recent interventions have done much to advance debates on the former, this paper explores the struggle to define, delimit and designate city-regions through recent endeavours to construct a spatial map of city-regions in England. The aim is to demonstrate how the processes by which city-regions are constructed politically are the mediated outcome of trans-regional economic flows and political claims to territory. The paper concludes by relating these findings to ongoing debates around state, space and scalar geographies, and speculates what they might mean for the future of city-regional debate.     

Levinas's beginnings: ethics,politics, and origins

It is commonplace in philosophy, political theory, and theology to speak of the other and the problem of the identity of the West. No one has done as much to foreground the language of the other in recent years as Emmanuel Levinas, whose works have sparked a renewed interest in ethics across the humanities. Moreover, few have advanced as forceful a critique of European otherness, not only its exclusivity (whereby the other is marginalized) but also its hegemony (whereby the other is absorbed). I explore Levinas's critique of Western ethical thought in order to try to pinpoint what exactly he offers to post‐Hegelian reflection on the other, focusing on his insistence that equality must be grounded in the asymmetry of ethics. The question is: does this take one further than Europe, modernity, the West? If so, where is one thereby going? If not, what is novel or important in these claims?     

From sustainable development to carbon control: eco-state restructuring and the politics of urban and regional development

The management of carbon emissions holds some prospect for challenging sustainable development as the organising principle of socio-environmental regulation. This paper explores the rise of a distinctive low-carbon polity as an ideological state project, and examines its potential ramifications for the regulation of economy–environment relations at the urban and regional scale. Carbon control would seem to introduce a new set of values into state regulation and this might open up possibilities for challenging mainstream modes of urban and regional development in a manner not possible under sustainable development. But low-carbon restructuring also portends intensified uneven development, new forms of state control and a socially uneven reworking of state–society relations. In order to explore these issues we start by setting out a framework for conceptualising environmental regulation based around the idea of eco-state restructuring. This idea is introduced to capture the conflicts, power struggles and strategic selectivities involved as governments seek to reconcile environmental protection with multiple other pressures and demands. Overall the paper seeks to make a distinctive contribution to theoretical work on state environmental regulation and the emerging spatial dimensions of climate policy.     

Globalization and the politics of local and regional development: the question of convergenc

Globalization, and the increased exposure to international competition that it has supposedly induced, has led to expectations of institutional convergence in, among other things, local and regional development policy and the politics surrounding it. There have been changes in the United Kingdom, but not of the decentralizing, neo-liberalizing form anticipated. A comparison of the British with the very different, highly decentralized, American case seeks to shed light on this. Emphasis is placed on both the strongly embedded nature of institutions and on misunderstandings about the strength of the forces of globalization.     

Power,politics and business

The study of business and politics is attracting new interest, perhaps due to changing configurations of power in Western societies undergoing rapid but uneven structural and cultural change. Previous debates have demonstrated the inadequacy of the pressure group model, primarily because of its insensitivity to the socio‐economic foundations of power and the significance of the cultural context. This paper reviews the approach proposed by Charles E. Lindblom's Politics and Markets, examines some attempts to refine that approach and advances some criticisms of a general methodological nature. It is suggested that neo‐marxist perspectives are more likely than post‐pluralist ones to be able to comprehend the articulation of agency and context, or behaviour and structure. A concluding section points to the relative paucity of Australian work on business and politics, notes the contributions of Connell and Irving and Tsokhas, and suggests that the increasingly important and volatile field of banking and finance has been especially neglected.     

Classes,elites and Iranian politics: an exchange

The Politics of Iran: Groups, Classes and Modernization. By James Alban Bill. Columbus, Ohio: Charles E. Merrill Publishing Company, 1972. ix + 174 pp.     

Feminising the Economy: Metaphors,strategies, politics

Within contemporary feminism, common approaches to feminising the economy involve adding a sphere or sector or attributing a monetary value to women's unpaid labour. Each of these approaches is interested in creating an accurate representation of the real or 'whole' economy. But these representations are in the same lineage as mainstream economic conceptions; the economy remains a bounded entity that can be known by enumerating its parts. The 'adding on' and 'counting in' strategies employed by feminists complete the picture of what is needed to produce social well-being but do not necessarily help us think differently about how goods and services are or might be produced. In this article, the authors ask how feminist economic theory might contribute to envisioning or enacting alternative economies. They find answers to this question through reading feminist interventions for glimmers of a deconstructive project that opens 'the economy' to difference. Pursuing these glimmers, they attempt to insert the possibility of non-capitalist forms of economy, including economies of generosity, non-profit businesses, worker collectives and alternative capitalist enterprises impelled by a social or environmental ethic. In place of the view of the economy as a whole comprised of a pre-established number of parts or sectors, it can begin to be seen as a discursive construct that can be reconstructed to contribute to social transformation.     

Native Americans,politics, and frontiers

Ehrenreich, Jeffrey, ed. Political Anthropology of Ecuador: Perspectives from Indigenous Cultures. Albany, New York: The Society for Latin American Anthropology and the Center for the Caribbean and Latin America, 1985. xxvii + 256 pp. including individuals chapter notes and references. Cloth $10.00.

Schmink, Marianne and Charles H. Wood, eds. Frontier Expansion in Amazonia. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1985. xviii + 502 pp. including individual chapter notes and references, and index. $12.00 paper.     

Taking back taste: feminism,food and visceral politics

Despite much thoughtful agro-food scholarship, the politics of food lacks adequate appreciation because scholars have not developed a means to specify the links between the materialities of food and ideologies of food and eating. This article uses feminist theory to enliven a discussion of what the authors call visceral politics, and thus initiates a project of illustrating the mechanisms through which people's beliefs about food connect with their everyday experiences of food. Recent work on governed eating and material geographies is brought together with poststructural feminism in order to move towards a non-dualistic, visceral understanding of (everyday) socio-political life. In showing how the mind–body whole can be conceived as a singular, albeit ambiguously-unified agent, the article prefigures a more complete disclosure of the play of power in food systems. Food is shown as a means to trace power through the body in order to understand the making of the political (eating) subject. Specifically, reconceptualizing taste and the ‘Slow Food’ (SF) movement of taste education helps to concretize what a visceral politics of food might look like. The authors conclude that appreciating how food beliefs and representations exist materially in the body is crucial to the ability of food-based movements to inspire action across difference and achieve their progressive goals.     

Environmental science, sustainability and politics

Research evidence and pleas that humans are undermining their own survival on a robust and unforgiving planet seem to be falling on deaf ears. The drive for economic and military security remains more powerful than the evidence that both of these objectives are being undermined by environmental damage, social disruption, unjust treatment and forced migration. Yet the signs are growing that environmentally and socially sound futures may be vital prerequisites for economic and military stability. So, at the heart of multi-nationalism, sustainable development is beginning to be recognized as a crucial element in reliable international agreements. The consequence of all this is that environmental science has become highly political, and geographers need to recognize and work within an expanding political process. Examples of new forms of governing via sustainability science for sustainable futures are offered in the latter part of the paper, especially at local government level. The antagonistic pressures of established power and economic hegemony are never far away. Indeed, the confirmation of these established patterns of power still pervades the politics of environmental science. But it is possible that these antagonistic political frameworks are beginning to be transcended by the more influential aspects of sustainability partnerships incorporating new arrangements between government, private capital and civil associations. These partnerships will not be easy to create, for they criss-cross boundaries of familiarity and rules of operation. But geographers can play a critical role in helping to shape them and assess the best circumstances for ensuring their success.     

Federalism: Money and politics

J. S. H. Hunter, Revenue Sharing in the Federal Republic of Germany, Centre for Research on Federal Financial Relations, Research Monograph No. 2, ANU, 1973, pp. 116 + xi, $3.00.