Towards an Energy Politics In‐Against‐and‐Beyond the State: Berlin's Struggle for Energy Democracy

Social movements in struggle around energy are currently developing an imaginary of “energy democracy” to signify the emancipatory energy transitions they desire. Deploying a scholar‐activist perspective, this paper contributes to debates around the concretisation of the energy democracy imaginary by exploring the relationship of energy democracy movements to the state. To do so, I focus on the experiences of the Berliner Energietisch campaign, which in 2013 forced (and lost) a referendum aiming to extend—and democratise—the local state's role in Berlin's energy governance. Drawing on relational theories of the state, I argue that it is productive to read Berliner Energietisch as enacting an energy politics in‐against‐and‐beyond the state. In making this argument, I draw out implications for theoretical and strategic debates around the commons and the state.     

Lisbon's Red Belt: A Cautionary Tale on Politicisation and Depoliticisation of the Urban Realm

Within the making of Portuguese liberal‐representative democracy, the Portuguese Communist Party became a major actor in local government in urban deprived peripheries, shaping Lisbon's Red Belt. In this article, we analyse the communist discourse on the Portuguese urban question, showing how it politicised the urban as a site of unevenness and deprivation, but simultaneously depoliticised it by refusing to acknowledge it as a proper space for conflict. This historical account leads us to a critical debate with proposals that discuss urban politicisation by ontologising “the urban” or “the political”—we argue that these approaches tend to be less helpful in understanding processes of contingent, partial and inter‐related forms of politicisation/depoliticisation of the urban in itself. In contrast, we argue for a more attentive theorisation on politicisation–depoliticisation of the urban condition as a most valuable path to grasp situated formulations of citizenship and, hence, configurations of political regimes.     

Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century: Economic Analysis or Tract for the Times?

I argue that the French economist Thomas Piketty's 2014 (American) bestseller Capital in the Twenty-First Century is not the treatise of economic analysis that its author purports it to be, but is rather a work of political partisanship making claims about the supposedly inevitable increase in the share of national income deriving from capital as opposed to labor—to the point where Chinese bankers or Middle Eastern oil sheiks might own “everything,” even people's bicycles, barring either world catastrophe or broad government intervention—that lack any empirical support or logical plausibility. As a professed heir to (what he understands to be) the spirit of the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, as distinguished from the American Declaration of Independence, Piketty displays none of the respect for the rights of the individual—including the right not to have lawfully acquired property arbitrarily confiscated by government—that the original American political tradition entails. Nor, indeed, despite his profession of staking everything on “democracy,” does Piketty display any regard for the principle of self-government. Rather, his ultimate, admittedly “utopian” goal, outlined in Part IV of his book, is of a European “budgetary parliament,” selected in vague fashion by the existing parliaments of Eurozone members (not by the people themselves), that would hold sweeping powers to confiscate any privately owned wealth that its members regarded as “excessive” and redistribute it to others they deem more needy or deserving. This body would exacerbate all the difficulties resulting from the European Union's widely publicized “democracy deficit.” Yet Piketty implies it should ultimately be a model for world governance. Ultimately, his cause is the opposite of democracy: the unfettered continental or even worldwide rule of unaccountable bureaucrats, advised by “intellectuals” like Piketty himself, convinced that they know far better than their fellows how the latter should live their lives, and claiming the authority to regulate it accordingly.     

Government's Unequal Attentiveness to Citizens' Political Priorities

An accumulation of evidence suggests citizens with low incomes have relatively little influence over the policy decisions made by lawmakers in the United States. However, long before elected officials are asked to cast a final vote on a bill's passage, an equally important decision has already been made: the decision for government to focus its limited attention and agenda space on the issue at all. Therefore, it is possible that political inequality is infused earlier in the policymaking process at the agenda‐setting stage if the issues held important by some citizens are given attention while the issues held important by others are not. To investigate this question, we develop novel state‐level measures of citizens' issue priorities and find sizable differences in which issues poor and rich citizens think are most important and deserving of government attention. We then use bill introduction data from state legislatures to measure government attention and uncover evidence that state legislators are less likely to act on an issue when it is prioritized by low‐income citizens as compared to affluent citizens. These findings have important implications for our understanding of political equality and the functioning of American democracy.     

Policy by Doing: Formulation and Adoption of Policy through Government Leadership

Do government choices, rather than legislative policies (i.e., mandatory regulations or incentives), influence the choices private actors make? In this article we develop a concept of “policy by doing,” which examines the power of government actions as hortatory tools to encourage other community members to act. “Policy by doing” can be an attempt to shape outcomes by providing symbolic leadership, reducing uncertainty, creating market, and telegraphing actions. Empirical analysis of privately held green buildings in 591 U.S. cities from 2004 to 2010 suggests that when governments increase their own commitment to green building for their facilities; private actors will be more likely to build green. We find that the actions of local governments, rather than those of state or federal, exert the strongest substantive influence on private decision making. Our findings contribute to understanding how governments can augment existing policy regimes by modeling the behavior they hope to inspire in other actors.     

Spatial Competition and Bounded Rationality: Retailing at the Edge of Chaos

The spatial dimension of competition among retail outlets is well researched and typically captured with spatial interaction models. A stream of theoretical research has studied the consequences of incorporating various types of dynamics into these models. We build on this research by incorporating a behavioral decision process based on bounded rationality, and by allowing for unexpected adversity in the environment in the form of exogenous shocks. Given these characteristics—spatial competition, boundedly rational decision making, and environmental adversity—we study the long-run dynamics of a model retail industry. The model reaches a stochastic steady state which is “poised,” in the sense that a shock may—or may not—trigger a wave of innovation which sweeps the entire system. Detailed investigation of this steady state shows that it has the characteristics of a general type of organization, known as self-organized criti-cality, that has been described in both theoretical biology and statistical physics.     

Theoretical reflections

The article starts with a discussion about the frequent statement that culture is a marginal area in politics. It proceeds with an analysis of the phenomenon and concept of “the cultural turn” and its possible consequences for cultural democracy. Then there follows a reflection on the potential power of religion and culture in political developments. After these introductory sections I present and discuss what I call five “democracy dimensions” of cultural policy: norms and ideologies; distribution of economic resources; institutional structures and decision‐making procedures; agents and interests in the policy‐making process; and access to and participation in cultural life. The conclusion is that under certain circumstances culture may mobilise huge masses of people in political actions but this is unlikely to happen in Western European democracies where culture in a long historical process has been privatised and isolated from big politics by the establishment of a specific sphere with its own structures, norms, logics and discourses. It is questionable if cultural policies will be more democratic under the reign of global capitalism and new liberalism. “The cultural turn” is an ambivalent phenomenon which cannot by itself bring about more cultural democracy. The future of cultural democracy cannot be decided for by cultural life or the cultural policy system themselves, it is dependent on what will happen to democracy as a total political system, of which cultural policy is only a small part.     

‘Extreme pornography’ and the contested spaces of virtual citizenship

This paper considers issues of sexual citizenship in light of new UK legislation that prosecutes the viewers of ‘extreme pornography’. Justified as an attempt to uphold public decency, government intervention seeks to prevent people seeing ‘extreme’ images not by limiting access to certain websites, but instead by intervening in the private consumption of these images. In this paper I draw on the discourses of those who have supported such intervention, and suggest that these arguments make a claim to space that defends the rights of some citizens over others. I examine the entwining of rights of expression, rights to identity and rights to safety. In conclusion, I argue that sexual citizenship is not just about the right to occupy actual physical places but also the right to inhabit the virtual—cyberspace. I hence argue that the internet plays a key role in transforming the sexual geographies of public and private.     

A study of social‐market interventions in the shaping of the field of cultural production

A social analysis based on extensive evaluation of the Dance and Drama Awards programme reveals the social‐market political paradigm underpinning the formation of cultural policy in the UK underthe New Labour government. This specific intervention in the field of cultural production is placed in the context of broader government interventions in the cultural domain that seek to give respect to undervalued social and cultural groups. There is a political analysis of the characteristics of the social‐market political formation that underpin New Labour’s “affirmative” actions, and the political strategies informing the government’s “access” and “inclusion” agendas and their impact on the cultural and creative industries. The authors argue that the construction of a “social‐market” position in New Labour’s cultural policy represents an attempt to bridge or “hyphenate” the contradictory claims of social democracy, on the one hand, and economic fatalism, on the other. Despite the rhetoric of social and cultural “transformation”, the authors argue that a “faith” in the market prevents New Labour from transforming the political‐economic and cultural structures that generate economic and cultural injustices.     

Punctuated Equilibria in the Private Sector and the Stability of Market Systems

The article examines longitudinal trends in expenditures by over 1,200 private firms, finding evidence of punctuated equilibrium—a pattern of change widely interpreted as evidence of stick‐slip dynamics in decision‐making processes. Levels of punctuation in the private sector closely resemble those observed in studies on public budgeting, suggesting that the private sector is not on average any less resistant to change than government. Both private‐ and public‐sector decision making is a function of deliberative processes, which the article compares to market systems. Deliberative decision making takes place when a group comes to a consensus about the allocation of resources. Market processes aggregate the actions of many independent decision makers to arrive at an outcome, such as the value of a commodity. The article considers the relative informational efficiency of these two processes and concludes that market systems should be more adaptive to incoming information. Three case studies provide natural experiments to investigate the stability of outputs during periods of deliberative and market control. A key finding is that when outputs are determined by market systems it greatly reduces the magnitude of punctuation.     

Active Citizenship and Local Representational Politics in Twenty-First Century Ireland: The Role of Residents Groups within Dublin's Planning Arena

This paper explores the relationship between active citizenship at a local level and the workings of local government, focusing on urban planning processes in the Greater Dublin Area, Ireland. The paper argues that to fully understand the role of community actors within urban planning, there is a need to look beyond the institutions of planning and formal avenues of decision-making to examine the overlapping, disorganized and informal practices that are increasingly mobilized to influence planning outcomes. We argue that a key motivation for community action within our case study areas relates to the perceived failure in traditional representative democracy in managing rapid urban growth and addressing quality of life concerns of local residents. Rather than collaborate with the state in organized planning arenas, community actors play a key role in informal politics both outside and against the state, leading to tensions between state efforts to promote active citizenship and the resultant community action.     

Australian bicameralism as semi-parliamentarism: patterns of majority formation in 29 democracies

The article analyses the type of bicameralism we find in Australia as a distinct executive-legislative system – a hybrid between parliamentary and presidential government – which we call ‘semi-parliamentary government’. We argue that this hybrid presents an important and underappreciated alternative to pure parliamentary government as well as presidential forms of the power-separation, and that it can achieve a certain balance between competing models or visions of democracy. We specify theoretically how the semi-parliamentary separation of powers contributes to the balancing of democratic visions and propose a conceptual framework for comparing democratic visions. We use this framework to locate the Australian Commonwealth, all Australian states and 22 advanced democratic nation-states on a two-dimensional empirical map of democratic patterns for the period from 1995 to 2015.     

Hebrews and phoenicians: An ancient historical image and its usage

The modern nation-state is the most common, and so far the most stable, vehicle for modern democracy. The case of Zionism offers a unique opportunity for inquiring into this connection since mainstream Zionism consciously founded its institutions on the premise that democracy and the national state are mutually dependent. Moreover, ever since the early days of Zionism, opposing plans to separate the two—a non-democratic national state and a non-national democratic state—have been, and still are, hotly debated. This article surveys the origins of these ideas and argues that, both politically and theoretically, neither the party of non-democratic nationalism nor the party of non-national democracy offers a viable or even coherent plan. It would seem that non-national democracy will subvert democracy as well as nationalism, and non-democratic nationalism will undermine the national as well as the democratic character of the state.     

The Politics of Crisis: Deconstructing the Dominant Narratives of the Housing Crisis

This paper considers how dominant narratives of the housing crisis, since the 2008 banking crisis in England, have been created and what actions taken in its name. The paper deconstructs the term “crisis”, highlighting that its meaning has evolved from a critical moment to a protracted narrative which must be understood historically. Through discourse analysis into housing and party political policy, media and think tank reports, we argue that the employment of housing crisis by the government and others perceives it as an outcome of housing supply constraints and over-regulation—narratives that have justified subsequent policy actions aimed at propping up the housing and financial systems, opening new avenues for housing commodification, deregulation and financialisation and reproducing crisis anew. However, we note that these narratives can also break down and space can be created for the articulation of new narratives which refocus housing crises as emerging from inequality and class divisions.     

Toxic torts as compensation: Legal geographies of environmental contamination litigation

Residents living in close proximity to contaminated sites may experience adverse effects from financial losses and property devaluation, leading to poor mental health and physical illnesses—effects that may require compensation. The most common legal process of seeking compensation is the toxic tort—litigation pressed on the basis that contamination has harmed the victims. Several recent toxic tort class actions in Australia brought by residents living in areas affected by contamination from per- and poly-fluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) exemplify that process. Two such actions, those at Williamtown and Richmond, provide an opportunity to explore how toxic torts currently function as a means to secure compensation, whether they mitigate the harms of the contamination and considering how spatio-legal manoeuvres may shape the litigation. In this article, we use a legal geography approach to analyse how plaintiffs’ bodies, litigants’ properties, and the state are constructed and represented by parties involved in these toxic torts. Legal geographers contend that examining the spatio-legal manoeuvres made via litigation can make visible the effects of legal action on those involved and draw out how the law and its instruments may shape places and communities. Toxic tort class actions have allowed those affected by the contamination to be heard and receive some compensation. However, we argue that they do little to alleviate plaintiffs’ concerns about the effects of contamination on their health, properties, and the environment. The findings have significance given that torts will likely play an increasingly prominent role in dealing with such challenges.     

基于GIS的区域经济分析与决策初步研究

GIS技术能为区域经济分析直接提供一种交互式的、可视化的决策支持,已广泛应用于地方、区域和国家各级水平的经济分析、规划决策过程中。在本文中,作者首先对区域经济分析决策的各种方法进行了必要的分析,说明了在区域经济分析中GIS所能提供的技术支持,然后对建立一个基于GIS的区域经济分析与决策信息支持系统进行了初步研究,并举例说明了GIS技术在经济分析与决策中的应用。     

Resistance and radical democracy: freedom,power and institutions

ABSTRACT

In this article, I argue that resistance and radical democracy can be used to the good of representative democracy. I submit that resistance is about the popular power – the freedom as power – to create better institutions. I argue that the conflict and resistance that is at the core of radical democracy enables freedom and democracy and resists domination best if it is institutionalized. This counterintuitive claim is substantiated by an argument for freedom as power through representation and how the power to resist is linked to at least four domains of freedom. This builds on the work of Machiavelli, Marx and Foucault, amongst others, and insights drawn from resistance struggles across the globe. I end by proposing institutional changes to representative democracy that, I suggest, would allow us to conceive of democracy as both a form of government and a constantly destabilizing transgressive practice.     

Panchayati Raj in West Bengal: Popular Participation for the People or the Party?

Since 1978 the Left Front government in West Bengal, led by the Communist Party of India (Marxist) — CPI(M) — has pursued a strategy of decentralized planning through locally elected panchayats (councils) in the countryside. The stated ideological commitment of the CP1(M) is to support and eventually empower the poor and oppressed and this has resulted in Panchayati Raj assuming the status of not just a state sponsored decentralization strategy, but the institutional forum for the mobilization of the poor and the expansion of the party's base. However the CPI(M)'s strategy is to some extent ambiguous in that it combines a need to maintain an electoral status as a party leading a state government within the Indian Union and a political status as a party promoting the conditions for, and the transition to, a people's democracy and thereby socialism.     

Between improvement and sacrifice: Othering and the (bio)political ecology of climate change

In this article, we argue that othering is central to the government of climate change. Critically engaging with Foucault’s ideas on biopolitics and racism, we elaborate a conceptual perspective for analysing how such a “technology of government” operates. We review diverse literatures from geography, political ecology, critical adaptation studies and the environmental humanities dealing with discursive constructions of the other in three exemplary areas of intervention—mitigation (particularly “green” mineral extraction for renewable energy production); constructions of “vulnerability” in adaptation policies; and the governing of “climate migrants”. We contend that these interventions largely work through the extension of capitalist relations, underpinned by racist and colonial ways of seeing populations and territories as “in need of improvement”. And that, by legitimising and depoliticizing such interventions, and by suspending responsibility for their unwanted or even deadly impacts, othering helps to preserve existing relations of racial, patriarchal and class domination in the face of climate-induced social upheavals. Othering, we conclude, is not only a feature of fossil fuelled development, but a way of functioning of capitalist governmentality more broadly—which has important implications for thinking about emancipatory and climate-just transformations.     

From the ‘new localism’ to the ‘new regionalism’? The implications of regional development agencies for city–regional relations

Throughout the last three decades efforts to regenerate British cities have been based around the construction of new institutional alliances and policy networks supported by a series of urban-based initiatives. Successive Conservative governments premised their intervention on the assumption that cities (and particular parts therein) were the most appropriate geographical level around which to organise policy intervention. In pursuing this city-based agenda, the policies were themselves instrumental in constituting the city as an object of policy: a problem in need of a solution. The aim of this paper, however, is not to explore how certain spaces or scales become constructed through, for example, government policy, political practices or state restructuring. Rather the paper augments work conducted on the socially constructed nature of ‘cities’ and ‘regions’. It explores for regeneration policy and politics the implications of the tendential shift away from a model of ‘new localism’ towards an alternative model of ‘new regionalism’. The origins of the central element of New Labour's emergent regional project — the Regional Development Agencies (RDAs) — are established before the paper moves on to examine the likely political relationships between the local state, drawing upon the example of Manchester, and the regional state, drawing upon North West England, under the new institutional arrangements.