Integration Processes in European Research and Development: A Comparative Spatial Interaction Approach Using Project Based Research and Development Networks,Co‐Patent Networks and Co‐Publication Networks

This study focuses on integration processes in European Research and Development (R&D) by analyzing the spatiotemporal dimension of three different R&D collaboration networks across Europe. The studied networks cover different types of knowledge creation, namely project‐based R&D networks within the European Union (EU) Framework Programmes (FPs), co‐patent networks, and co‐publication networks. Integration in European R&D—one of the main pillars of the EU Science Technology and Innovation policy—refers to the harmonization of fragmented national research systems across Europe and to the free movement of knowledge and researchers. The objective is to describe and compare spatiotemporal patterns at a regional level and to estimate the evolution of separation effects over the time period 1999–2006 that influence the probability of cross‐region collaborations in the distinct networks under consideration. The study adopts a spatial interaction modeling perspective, econometrically specifying a panel generalized linear model relationship, taking into account spatial autocorrelation among flows using eigenfunction spatial filtering methods. The results show that geographical factors are a lower hurdle for R&D collaborations in the FP networks than in co‐patent networks and co‐publication networks. Furthermore, it is shown that the geographical integration is higher in the FP network.     

Tristan da Cunha

This paper explores the ambiguities of Englishness/ Britishness from a political geography perspective. An Anglo‐British identity is described in which English territoriality is shown to be both more and less than the geographical area of England. Upper England comprises the south‐east corner of the country only — the Home Counties’ — which is identified as the Crown Heartland of a particularly conservative nationalism. Greater England is the British face of English identity which as hegemon, empire and currently through the City of London used and uses Upper England as a base for extra‐territorial projects. Finally the implications of this unusual nationalism are reviewed in terms of a possible break‐up of England.     

EXPLAINING THE VARIATION IN THE EMPIRICAL ESTIMATES OF ACADEMIC KNOWLEDGE SPILLOVERS*

ABSTRACT This paper presents a meta‐regression analysis of the empirical studies exploring the relationship between academic knowledge spillovers and regional innovation. The results of the literature are found to depend on country effects, the level of geographical aggregation employed, the method of measuring innovative output, the use of industry‐level data, and on the sectoral composition of the sample. Endogeneity, sample selection, and agglomeration forces are further elements that explain the findings on this issue but only weak evidence, after controlling for publication bias, supports the existence of a genuine spillover effect of university research on regional innovation.     

Home as a Pocket of Local Order: Everyday Activities and The Friction of Distance

Discourse on the information society currently highlights issues of networks, flows and mobilities as prime organizers and re‐organisers of time—space relationships. Such discourse promotes notions of the flexible use of time and space, of people's decoupling from place and even of the end of geography — the belief that distance does not matter. Yet, in this article we argue that the roles of geographical stationarity and proximity in everyday life — understood as the creation and maintaining of pockets of local order — indicate the continuing and often neglected importance of the friction of distance. We demonstrate this empirically by focusing on the home as a pocket of local order, investigating the intensity and spatial extension of people's everyday activities, projects and contacts — their corporeal, virtual and medial (media‐related) mobilities — with the world outside. We support our thesis with data from the population, household and individual levels.     

Kites — new discoveries and a new type

The stone structures known as kites and found widely in ‘Arabia’, are one of the more intriguing archaeological traces in what are often arid and bleak landscapes. They were first reported from the air in 1927, and by 1995 — largely through interpretation of old aerial photographs — c.500 had been identified. Now (2012), remote‐sensing techniques of various kinds have produced a huge increase, to over 3000. Recent work has also extended the geographical spread of kites in ‘Arabia’, from south‐eastern Turkey and north‐western Iraq to central Yemen. Much detailed work will be required to develop and refine a typology for kites as a whole and to digest and present data from remote sensing on which specialists may build interpretations and explanations. Current tabulation and mapping, however, already reveal patterns, and the discovery of an unusual form in the desert between Damascus and Palmyra in Syria deserves special attention.     

Entangling alliances? The UK's complicity in torture in the global war on terrorism

The global war on terrorism gives rise to a range of legal, political and ethical problems. One major concern for UK policy‐makers is the extent to which the government may be held responsible for the illegal and/or unethical behaviour of allies in intelligence gathering—the subject of the forthcoming Gibson inquiry. The UK government has been criticized by NGOs, parliamentary committees and the media for cooperating with states that are alleged to use cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment (CIDT) or torture to gain information about possible terrorist threats. Many commentators argue that the UK's intelligence sharing arrangements leave it open to charges of complicity with such behaviour. Some even suggest the UK should refuse to share intelligence with countries that torture. This article refutes this latter view by exploring the legal understanding of complicity in the common law system and comparing its more limited view of responsibility—especially the ‘merchant's defence’—with the wider definition implied in political commentary. The legal view, it is argued, offers a more practical guide for policy‐makers seeking to discourage torture while still protecting their citizens from terrorist threats. It also provides a fuller framework for assessing the complicity of policy‐makers and officials. Legal commentary considers complicity in relation to five key points: identifying blame; weighing the contribution made; evaluating the level of intent; establishing knowledge; or, where the latter is uncertain, positing recklessness. Using this schema, the article indicates ways in which the UK has arguably been complicit in torture, or at least CIDT, based on the information publicly available. However, it concludes that the UK was justified in maintaining intelligence cooperation with transgressing states due to the overriding public interest in preventing terrorist attacks.     

Disequilibrium in Development Finance: The Contested Politics of Institutional Accountability and Transparency at the World Bank Inspection Panel

This article examines the dynamic nature with which independent accountability mechanisms operate. Focusing on the World Bank, the authors argue that its Inspection Panel evolves according to internal and external pressures. In seeking to achieve equilibrium, and protect its authority and independence, the Panel has gone through several distinct phases: negotiation, emergence, protracted resistance, assertion of independence and authority, renewed tension, and contestation. The core novelty of the article is its application of concepts from outside the field of development studies — notably institutional accountability from the governance literature, and judicialization from the legal studies literature — to the topic of the Inspection Panel. Examining the Panel in this way demonstrates that accountability mechanisms represent a hybrid of transnational governance influenced by a range of actors including project‐affected peoples, national governments, managers and development donors. Accountability in development finance is about competing interests as well as competing conceptions and expectations of accountability. In such a complex and multi‐scalar system, the Panel is not only concerned with delivering well‐researched investigation reports; it is also an entity seeking to ensure its own survival, as well as an arbiter of its own brand of legitimacy and accountability.     

The locus of financial regulation: home versus host

If the G's are the world's steering committee, the step from G7 to G20 deepened the democratic legitimacy of this committee. However, it also shifted influence to a group that share little else other than economic power: they have diverse experiences, challenges, cultural perspectives and starting points. This is particularly the case in the field of financial regulation, where action across these countries in recent months—despite all the language of global regulation—is increasingly local. The prospect of the new global being quite local has dismayed some. But it need not. This article challenges the dichotomy of more global versus more local. It argues that financial internationalism—greater cooperation by nations for the benefit of all—is better served by institutions that help to integrate diverse systems than those which try to enforce one‐size‐fits‐all approach to very different economies. International banks persuaded regulators of the benefits of home country regulation and a level playing field for bankers. But the benefits accrued largely to the banks in the boom and proved an avenue for contagion during the crash. Host country regulation may prove a safer way to regulate financial systems, in particular by allowing regulation to be more responsive to national economic conditions and cycles. It is likely that a shift back to host country regulation will act as a drag on international capital flows. The instinct of economists is that the cost of this is uncertain, suspect and conditional, especially when compared to the costs of financial crashes. Host country regulation does not mean there is no role for international institutions, such as the newly minted Financial Stability Board. Instead, it suggests a more nuanced role, potentially encompassing the policing of international market infrastructure, financial protectionism, information free flow between regulators and the convergence of regulatory principles and the consolidation of regulatory instruments. An informed and collegiate process of integrating different financial systems will be a more resilient system than one which tries to apply a single rule book across inherently different countries.     

Has the Income Share of the Middle and Upper‐middle Been Stable around the ‘50/50 Rule’, or Has it Converged towards that Level? The ‘Palma Ratio’ Revisited

In an article published in this journal in 2011, an alternative measure of inequality was suggested, which has subsequently become known as ‘the Palma Ratio’. In this new article, the author of the original proposal revisits the argument for such a measure. Using new data, he examines whether the current remarkable homogeneity in the income share of the middle and upper‐middle around the world — the foundation of the so‐called ‘Palma Ratio’ — is an historically stable stylized fact, or whether it is a new phenomenon, the outcome of a process of convergence towards the current ‘50/50 Rule’ (in which half of the population in each country located within deciles 5 to 9 tends to appropriate about 50 per cent of the national income, or just above). Although partly written in response to a comment on the 2011 paper (published in this issue), the article also makes a substantive further contribution to the literature on inequality and the statistics to measure it.     

Rumour and politics

This article contends that rumour—the circulation of unverified information —is an important form of political communication which deserves more attention from political scientists. To illustrate this claim a study is made of the part played by rumour in the ‘destabilisation’ of Malcolm Fraser's position as leader of the Liberal Party in August to October 1981. Health is a natural subject of rumour, and rumours about Mr. Fraser's health were used as the basis for speculation about a possible leadership challenge by Mr. Andrew Peacock. The collective character of parliamentary party politics, the artificial nature of media ‘facts’ and the predominance of certain types of news value in the media all encourage such rumours to flourish. The rumours had the effect of destabilising Mr. Fraser's position by creating and then enlarging a climate of uncertainty and anxiety within the Liberal Party and the electorate. Mr. Peacock was thereby enabled to test the strength of his potential support without being obliged to risk an open challenge. The author concludes that the most apt model of rumour to this case is that of ‘milling’, on the analogy of a ‘milling crowd’.     

Mobile Adaptation and Sticky Experiments: Circulating Best Practices and Lessons Learned in Climate Change Adaptation

This article engages with the recent geographical literature on policy mobilities in order to examine how the World Bank mobilizes climate change adaptation 'best practices'. Drawing from the relational case study of the Kiribati Adaptation Project and the Community Resilience to Climate Change and Disaster Risk in Solomon Islands Project, the article explores the complex and intensive work required for mobilizing lessons and practices. The analytical work required in building the Kiribati Adaptation Project as a World Bank success story and policy model worthy of replication in new sites is demonstrated. However, heeding calls within the policy mobilities literature to avoid fetishizing mobility and attending to the contradictions between global flows and local institutional specificity, the article finds limited evidence of replication in noted sites of emulation. Instead, there is compulsive citation, publication, and circulation of experiences and successes within the World Bank, which operates to build internal and external legitimacy.     

The strategic anthropologist

Ken Booth's Strategy and ethnocentrism, published in 1979, deserves to be promoted in scholars' esteem to the very small category of works regarded as classics about strategy. Three reasons serve to explain why, over the years, it never received the acclaim it merits: the relatively undistinguished publisher; ironically, the subsequent debate over more than a quarter of a century about culture as a factor necessary for the understanding of strategy; and the attractively accessible style in which Booth expressed himself. Strategy and ethnocentrism is witty and even occasionally amusing—characteristics apt to trigger a response of some disdain from over‐serious scholars. We can now assess Booth's book in its proper context, which is the long if very thinly populated history of strategic ideas, largely free of unduly distorting ‘presentist’ concerns. The fact that Strategy and ethnocentrism was written in the context of the Cold War really does not matter for the quality of its argument. This work is a classic because it speaks to all periods and about all participants in strategic history. The originality of Booth's treatment of culture does not lie so much in the realm of his grasp of its relative strategic significance, but rather in his relentless unwrapping of the actual, or certainly potential, harm, including unanticipated self‐harm, of ethnocentricity. Today, studies of culture and strategy are not in short supply, but works that compel readers to attempt to take due account of their own ethnocentric frailties are in desperately short supply.     

Agglomeration economies and the location of foreign direct investment: A meta‐analysis

This paper undertakes a meta‐analysis of the effect of agglomeration economies on foreign direct investment (FDI) location. It finds strong differences in these economies arising from both measurement and study‐specific characteristics. Economies generated from domestic rather than foreign activity have the strongest effects on FDI, with the latter only significant if related to the home country of the investor. Support is also found for studies that identify different sources of agglomeration economies, although this is largely underexplored in the empirical literature. The average agglomeration economies estimate is not influenced by publication bias and indicates genuine effects for agglomeration economies on FDI location choice.     

Off‐road policing: communications technology and government authority in Somaliland

Prompted by the trend to see information and communications technology (ICT) as a tool for capacity building, this article asks whether the use of ICT has—or can—recast centre–periphery relations in a hybrid country such as Somaliland. Taking as its departure point Herbst's observation that a fundamental problem confronting African leaders concerns how to extend or consolidate authority over sparsely settled lands, it uses recent developments in Somaliland's coast guard and immigration police to assess ICT's contribution to changing security provision in remote and coastal areas. This allows for an analysis of Somaliland's law enforcement framework, the relationship between its politics and practice, the practical application of its coercive resources, and the Silanyo government's priorities and preference for consensus and co‐existence whenever security imperatives allow. It suggests that ICT can be a desirable operational tool or a variable in existing power networks, but that it does not represent a new mode of security governance. ICT's potential to connect Somaliland's government and populace, and politics and practice, is for now minimal, but identifying the ways in which security actors such as coast guards actually use ICT allows for a more accurate assessment of the variables shaping centre–periphery relations. Contrary to Herbst's observation, the Silanyo government does not need to overtly or systematically extend, consolidate or exert its authority in remote and coastal areas. Spatial metaphors such as centre–periphery help to clarify the situation, but the significance invested in them reflects western rationalities, rather than Somali realities.     

The Imperial Visual Archive: Images,Evidence, and Knowledge in the Early Modern Hispanic World

This article examines the role of images as evidence and sources of knowledge in the early modern Hispanic world, arguing for the continued importance of visual epistemology as a technique for producing and circulating knowledge from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. Visual materials played a central role in the production of knowledge, scientific and imperial, and served as key instruments for addressing the considerable challenges of distance and place posed by the geographical expanse of the empire. Historiographically, the article highlights the active generation of scientific knowledge in the Hispanic world and connects it to imperial and administrative practices; it highlights trans-regional channels of circulation, demonstrating the connected histories of the viceroyalties and peninsula and the multidirectional trajectories in which information and knowledge moved; and it points out deep connections between earlier and later colonial periods. Methodologically, the essay explores the potential of images as historical sources, suggesting that the high status of images in the early modern Hispanic world led to the creation of an enormous pictorial archive that deserves the same level of scholarly attention and rigor that has been lavished on the textual archive.     

Shaming and Sanitation in Indonesia: A Return to Colonial Public Health Practices?

Adequate sanitation is vital to human health, yet progress on the Millennium Development Goal for sanitation has been slow and the target is likely to be missed by one billion people. Indonesia has the third highest number of people of any country in the world without access to sanitation and, like most developing countries, it is devoting insufficient resources to the issue. In rural areas, rather than providing additional funding, the government — with support of the World Bank — has promoted the Community‐Led Total Sanitation (CLTS) approach, which uses social mobilization to encourage people to construct their own latrines. In Indonesia as elsewhere, CLTS involves more than just education and encouragement; it uses social shaming and punishments. The authors argue that this is not only an inadequate approach but one which echoes coercive, race‐based colonial public health practices. This article thus integrates extant historiography on Indonesian colonial medicine with contemporary scholarly literature and field research on CLTS using case studies of a 1920s hookworm‐eradication programme funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, and the current World Bank Water and Sanitation Programme, both in Java.     

Sustainable Communities? A Comparative Perspective on Urban Housing in the European Union

This paper examines the sustainability of urban housing in the European Union. It outlines a number of key criteria for assessing the sustainability of urban housing including mixed-use developments, higher residential densities, high-quality dwellings and neighbourhoods, affordability and food production. Utilizing the 2007 tranche of the European Quality of Life Survey, it finds significant variations between countries in the sustainability of urban housing and communities and highlights the leaders and laggards in this regard. The relative success of urban areas in Austria, Denmark, Sweden and Finland deserves some additional research, although there is scope for considerable improvement even in these “leader” countries. The paper highlights significant problems with housing and communities in some urban locations which must significantly retract from (a) the quality of life of residents in these locations and (b) the sustainability of their cities.