Questioning the Rhetoric of Social Mix: Courteous Community or Hidden Hostility?

This paper explores the increasingly important role of ‘social mix’ in the management practices of the NSW Department of Housing. Social mix is a policy response to the many perceived social, cultural and economic problems related to the concentration of public tenants within larger housing estates. Social mix involves the integration and assimilation of public housing tenants into areas dominated by private home ownership and private rental. Such policies are based upon the belief that social mix has the ability to alter many of these problems simply through the presence of a ‘community’. However, this paper questions the normative construction of homeowners as possessing a ‘community’ which, by implication, will be passed on to public tenants. Through an in‐depth case‐study, it is shown that ‘community’, as constructed by social mix policy rhetoric, may in fact further disadvantage public tenants through processes of othering, stigmatisation and oppression, which operate outside these traditional understandings of community. In addition, this research shows that, rather than increased community integration, it is the physical function of neighbourhood and its direct role in service provision which is the most advantageous constituent of social mix for public housing tenants.     

Fashioned Forest Pasts,Occluded Histories? International Environmental Analysis in West African Locales

This article considers how environmental problematics are produced and interpreted, using case material from West Africa’s humid forest zone. Examing the experiences of several countries over the long term, it is possible to identify a deforestation discourse produced through national and international institutions. This represents forest and social history in particular ways that structure forest conservation but which obscure the experience and knowledge of resource users. Using fine‐grained ethnography to explore how such discourse is experienced and interpreted in a particular locale, the article uncovers problems with ‘discourse’ perspectives which produce analytical dichotomies which confront state and villager, and scientific and ‘local’ knowledges. The authors explore the day‐to‐day encounters between villagers and administrators, and the social and historical experiences which condition these. Instances where the deforestation discourse becomes juxtaposed with villagers’ alternative ideas about landscape history prove relatively few and insignificant, while the powerful material effects of the discourse tend to be interpreted locally within other frames. These findings present departures from the ways relations between citizen sciences and expert institutions have been conceived in recent work on the sociology of science and public policy.     

Empire‐nation: national and imperial discourses in England

When the states of England and Scotland combined in 1707, conditions were created whereby English nationalism could merge into British nationalism. With the expansion of empire, English nationalism was expressed through imperial‐national discourses allowing English nationalists to claim non‐English space when articulating what might be best understood as an Anglo‐British nationalism. Accordingly, such discourses largely ‘hid’ what one might now understand as ‘English nationalism’ within a ‘British’ discourse of empire. The case of England illustrates that imperial discourses can become intimately bound up with the ‘national’ discourse of the nations at the core of the imperial structures. Accordingly, it is here argued that imperial and national discourse are not necessarily opposed to each other, but are able to feed into each other, affecting the manner in which ideas of the nation and empire are conceived and articulated.     

The Problem that Had a Name: French High‐Rise Developments and the Fantasy of a Suburban Homemaker Pathology, 1954–73

Within Western Europe, France had the largest and longest postwar commitment to private social‐market housing inside dense residential suburbs called grands ensembles d'habitation (GEs). Social‐Catholic activists and planners viewed the GEs as facilitating women's maternal mission within egalitarian communities, but others across the political spectrum saw them as pathological spaces, especially for women who supposedly contracted a psychological disease dubbed ‘sarcellite’, after France's flagship GE of Sarcelles. This article analyses how a phantasmatic gendered discourse of housing disaster, first circulated by the media, strategically influenced gendered actors’ residential desires and legitimised policy shifts toward single‐family housing. The discourse of sarcellite reveals how housing realities and imaginaries shaped gendered claims to housing as an evolving aspect of social citizenship. The article considers both suburban women's demands for subsidised childcare and other services and the nuances and contradictions of the evolving discourse of sarcellite.     

Decentralization,the State and Conflicts over Local Boundaries in Northern Ghana

Decentralization projects, such as that initiated by the Rawlings government in Ghana at the end of the 1980s, create a political space in which the relations between local political communities and the state are re‐negotiated. In many cases, the devolution of power intensifies special‐interest politics and political mobilization aiming at securing a ‘larger share of the national cake’, that is, more state funds, infrastructure and posts for the locality. To legitimate their claims vis‐à‐vis the state, civic associations (‘hometown’ unions), traditional rulers and other non‐state institutions often invoke some form of ‘natural’ solidarity, and decentralization projects thus become arenas of debate over the boundaries of community and the relationship between ‘local’ and national citizenship. This article analyses one such debate, in the former Lawra District of Ghana's Upper West Region, where the creation of new districts provoked protracted discussions, among the local political elite as well as the peasants and labour migrants, about the connections between land ownership and political authority, the relations between the local ethnic groups (Dagara and Sisala), and the relevance of ethnic versus territorial criteria in defining local citizenship.     

Contesting Putin's nation‐building: the ‘Muslim other’ and the challenge of the Russian ethno‐cultural alternative

This article explains the crystallisation of a new Russian national discourse, shaped by a challenge posed to Putin's statist non‐ethnic national model by a popularly formed ethno‐cultural alternative, constructed through negation of the ‘Muslim other’. The article describes this new and previously overlooked phenomenon of Russian nationalism and explicates the social mechanism behind its formation. The article concludes that when rampant corruption exists, generating a breakdown of legal order, the ‘other’ is defined through behaviour that deviates from accepted local norms, while the contrasting normative ‘general public’ is defined as ‘Russian’. Such group definitions mean that the current process of Russian grass‐roots exclusive national consolidation is based predominantly on culturally based behavioural codes, rather than on mere ethnic or religious affiliation, as is widely believed. Additionally, a conceptual landmark discourse shift from the question of Russia's mere plausibility as a nation‐state to a focus on its ongoing definition is demonstrated.     

Flexible urban governance. The case of Copenhagen's recent waterfront development

In this paper, the most recent wave of Copenhagen's waterfront development is analyzed and interpreted in the context of broader economic tendencies and political strategies. Recent events illuminate relationships among politicians, bureaucrats and capital to regulate an accumulation process that is highly intertwined with international, national as well as urban interests. Beginning in the late 1980s, the national state, the local state and the port authority, undertook a number of planning and policy initiatives to create a process for transforming Copenhagen's waterfront. When contradictions from the logic of profit maximization became apparent and threatened to de‐rail long term economic growth, a new ad hoc and ‘flexible’ process of urban governance was established to get development back on track. Senior politicians created a so‐called ‘Vision Group’ that functioned as a ‘meta‐steering’ committee providing direction to local development by identifying a development approach that attempted to resolve, at least temporarily, tensions among global market tendencies and the interests of the main actors. In this way, the Vision Group achieved its political purpose to create a shared vision and a discourse for the development of the waterfront. The new strategy was effective at various scales of governance, but circumvented local planning practices.     

Denmark and the first world war

This article analyses general opinions of Scandinavia held by British policymakers in the post‐war period, before going on to examine a particular instance of Britain's attempts to copy ‘Scandinavian policies’ in the early 1960s. Given the generally positive views held as concerned Scandinavian economic and social policies at the time, and the influence those countries wielded in international economic and social policy networks, such attempts were only to be expected. During the 1959–1964 Parliament, the British Conservative Government attempted to adopt housing policies from Scandinavia, in particular housing co‐operatives subsidized by the state, but organized by owners and tenants. They failed to entrench such new ideas in the British policy system, for four reasons. The first was the very strong institutional position of municipal housing and owner‐occupation; the second was the taxation system, which proved impervious to change; the third was the obviously politically‐motivated attempt to change British behaviour in a very short time‐frame; and the fourth, crucially, was the lack of knowledge as to how Scandinavian housing markets actually worked. This failed experiment demonstrates the allure, but also the superficiality and some of the dangers, of direct policy transfer between nations.     

Domestic troubles,national identity discourse,and China's attitude towards the West, 2003–2012

Prior to its recent, much discussed international ‘assertiveness’, China's attitude to the West had deteriorated, as reflected in official discourse of national identity. Drawing from political science and social psychology literature on identity studies, I argue that the discursive pattern of national identity can shift as a function of an elite strategy to exclude internal others through opposition to foreign others. Internally exclusionary nationalism, often employed by elites during major crises, is instrumental to consolidating control and maintaining order. But when targeting internal opponents alone is politically inconvenient or lacks public resonance, elites will accentuate ethnocentric national identity discourse vis‐a‐vis foreign nations in order to reinforce internal battles and divert popular discontent externally. An interpretive analysis of the official texts of Chinese national identity discourse during the Hu Jintao decade, supplemented by quantitative data, shows a significant correlation between the regime's fear of internal instability and bottom‐up political opposition on the one hand and the timing and intensity of ethnocentric identity discourse regarding the West on the other. The party‐state negatively framed the West in order to shift the blame for domestic troubles onto foreigners and discredit internal resistance.     

Politics,income perceptions and living standards

Political and economic debates over community living standards, poverty and economic inequality often pay little attention to the subjective and socially conditioned aspects which influence public perceptions of material wellbeing. An attempt to explore the latter involved asking a national sample of Australian voters in 1988 to estimate the minimum weekly income on which they could ‘just make ends meet’. The amounts nominated varied not only according to the financial and domestic circumstances of respondents, but also with their age, education, housing situation and political affiliation. The relationships between these variables and the ‘making ends meet’ income level are estimated statistically and their implications explored with the help of several illustrative examples. Some speculations are offered as to what these results say about the social meaning of income levels and possible implications for public policy.     

Gender as national interest at the UN Security Council

The United Nations Security Council has often been identified as a key actor responsible for the uneven trajectory of the international Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda. It is, however, the Council members—who also seek to advance their national interest at this intergovernmental forum—that are pivotal in the Council's deliberations and shape its policies. Yet, little attention has been paid to this aspect of deliberative politics at the Council in feminist scholarship on WPS. This article seeks to address this gap in the literature. It notes that gender has increasingly become part of foreign policy interests of UN member states, as evidenced by practices such as invocation of ‘women's rights’ and ‘gender equality’ in broader international security policy discourse. The article demonstrates that this national interest in gender has featured in WPS‐related developments at the Security Council. Using specific illustrations, it examines three sets of member states: the permanent and non‐permanent members as well as non‐members invited to take part in Council meetings. The main argument of this article relates to highlighting member states’ interests underpinning their diplomatic activities around WPS issues in the Security Council, with the aim to present a fuller understanding of political engagements with UNSCR 1325, the first WPS resolution, in its institutional home.     

American home: Predatory mortgage capital and neighbourhood spaces of race and class exploitation in the United States

Predatory home mortgage lending has become a central concern for housing research, public policy and community activism in US cities. Regulatory attempts to stop abuses, however, are undermined by claims that ‘predatory’ cannot be defined or distinguished from legitimate subprime lending, and claims that the industry performs a public service by meeting the needs of low‐income, high‐risk consumers (many of them racially marginalized) who would have been denied credit in previous years. We evaluate these claims in historical‐geographical context, drawing on David Harvey's theory of class‐monopoly rent to analyse what is new (and what is not) in contemporary financial exploitation. We use a mixed‐methods approach to (1) provide econometric measures of subprime racial targeting and disparate impact that cannot be blamed on the supposed deficiencies of borrowers, (2) qualitatively assess the rationale for judging particular subprime practices and lenders as predatory, and (3) trace the connections between local practices and transnational investment networks. The fight against predatory lending cannot succeed, we argue, without a renewed analytical and strategic emphasis on the class dimensions of financial exploitation and racial‐geographical discrimination.     

President Obama at mid‐term

This article provides an analysis of President Obama at mid‐term. It looks at the mid‐term elections from the perspective of the political issues that informed the debate, the implications of Republican control of the House of Representatives for both legislation and relations between the administration and Congress, and the policy areas where cooperation and possible progress is possible. The article looks at the Tea Party movement as a collection of single issue and multi‐issue political groups ranging from ‘nativists’ to Christian fundamentalists to the eclectic and unprecedented combination of fiscal and social conservatives seen at Glen Beck's ‘honoring America’ event at the Washington Monument. This broad movement may be seen as a classical revitalization movement, not unlike those described by Anthony F. C. Wallace. It is opposed by another ‘revitalization movement’ namely the ‘American renewal’ promised by Obama as he ran for office in 2008. These countervailing narratives—in effect two different versions of America, one reflecting the Tea Party broadly conceived and the other reflecting Obama's ‘promise’—are seeking political traction among independents. The implications of this struggle are momentous. The prevailing narrative will frame policy going forward on a range of domestic issues and on selected foreign policy questions, which will include the present debate on the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) with Russia and the upcoming debate on China, which will have even further reaching effects. Finally, this article describes Obama's struggle to frame his policy successes and the ensuing debate in a favourable light. His opponents have sought to limit his progress by presenting him as ‘the other”, an effective but destructive technique that could have longer term effects on the domestic political discourse. However, the author remains an optimist; he believes, together with 50 per cent of Americans, the president is likable, logical and gives a good speech, and that he will be re‐elected in 2012.     

Policy Merchandising and Social Assistance in Africa: Don't Call Dog Monkey for Me

The title of this article draws on a Yorùbá aphorism that roughly translates into ‘don't sell me a dummy’. The dark side of social policy, the theme of this Debate, has a distinct character in the African context. The transformation of the African public policy landscape, shaped by the ‘counter-revolution’ in development thinking, has taken a new form with the donor ‘policy merchandising’ of cash transfer schemes. The stratified and segregated social policy on offer contrasts with the historical experience of ‘donor’ countries themselves. The policy instrument advanced is cast as ‘a silent revolution in development’, embodying the idea of development shifting from structural transformation to poverty alleviation. What is promoted is an impoverished version of development. Within the discourse of ‘working with the grain of African politics’, the politics of social assistance policy merchandising starts with a notion of politics as clientelist. It then deploys the instrumentality of clientelism — within an imperial deployment of power — in the manufacture of civil society and policy coalition, to ensure the local adoption of a policy instrument that the extra-territorial donor actors offer. This modality of public policy formulation contrasts sharply with the historical experience of public policy making in the ‘donor’ countries themselves. The result is the subversion of the consolidation of democracy in the African client states.     

The narratives of exclusion and self-exclusion in the Russian conflict discourse on EU–Russian Relations

The article focuses on the interplay of the narratives of ‘exclusion’ and ‘self-exclusion’ in the Russian discourse on EU–Russian relations. Since the late 1990s, this discourse has acquired an increasingly conflictual orientation, whereby the official foreign policy objectives of ‘strategic partnership’ with the EU and Russia's ‘integration with Europe’ are increasingly problematised across the entire Russian political spectrum. In the analysis of the Russian conflict discourse we shall identify two at first glance opposed narratives. Firstly, the EU enlargement has raised the issue of the expansion of the Schengen visa regime for Russian citizens, travelling to Europe. Particularly acute with regard to Kaliningrad Oblast', this issue has also generated a wider identity-related discourse on the EU's exclusionary policies towards Russia. Secondly, the perception of Russia's passive or subordinate status in EU–Russian cooperative arrangements at national, regional and local levels resulted in the problematisation of the insufficiently reciprocal or intersubjective nature of the EU–Russian ‘partnership’ and the increasing tendency towards Russia's ‘self-exclusion’ from integrative processes, grounded in the reaffirmation of state sovereignty that generally characterises the Putin presidency. This article concludes with the interpretation of the two conflict narratives in the wider context of debates around the project of European integration.     

Heading west? Georgia's Euro‐Atlantic path

Events in Ukraine in 2014 are likely to transform the presence and role of western institutions such as NATO in the post‐Soviet area. The crisis has starkly revealed the limits of their influence within Russia's ‘zone of privileged interest’, as well as the lack of internal unity within these organizations vis‐à‐vis relations with Moscow and future engagement with the area. This will have long‐term implications for the South Caucasus state of Georgia, whose desire for integration into the Euro‐Atlantic community remains a key priority for its foreign and security policy‐makers. This article examines the main motivators behind Georgia's Euro‐Atlantic path and its foreign policy stance, which has remained unchanged for over a decade despite intense pressure from Russia. It focuses on two aspects of Georgia's desire for integration with European and Euro‐Atlantic structures: its desire for security and the belief that only a western alignment can guarantee its future development, and the notion of Georgia's ‘European’ identity. The notion of ‘returning’ to Europe and the West has become a common theme in Georgian political and popular discourse, reflecting the belief of many in the country that they are ‘European’. This article explores this national strategic narrative and argues that the prevailing belief in a European identity facilitates, rather than supersedes, the central role of national interests in Georgian foreign policy.     

Slum clearance, privatization and residualization: the practices and politics of council housing in mid-twentieth-century England

This article contributes to a growing literature on working-class suburbanization by arguing that both the residualization and privatization of council housing need to be properly historicized. This case study of housing policy in the borough of Brighton demonstrates that council house sales between the 1950s and 1970s were important in the residualization of inter-war estates well before the 'right to buy' legislation of the 1980s. Concerns about excessively affluent tenants can also be traced to the inter-war period, although it was not until the late 1950s that local Conservatives sought to push affluent council tenants into owner occupation via capping incomes and encouraging council house sales. The article shows that slum clearance had long been central to the local council's provision of municipal housing and that apart from two short periods following the First and Second World Wars, council housing was conceived of primarily as a residual tenure by those in control of policy implementation. It further demonstrates that slum clearance between the 1920s and 1960s altered the social constituency for council housing and, combined with selective privatization, specific allocation policies and disinvestment, led to the stigmatization of certain inter-war estates. The article suggests that further case studies are needed in order to test the wider applicability of these arguments during the middle years of the twentieth century.     

Rehoboth Baster,Namibian or Namibian Baster? An analysis of national discourses in Rehoboth,Namibia*

Abstract. The point of departure of this article is a conception of nations as discursive constructions of ‘us’/‘here’ in relation to ‘them’/‘there’. The empirical analysis examines three national discourses in Rehoboth, Namibia: (1) a discourse on the ethnic Baster nation; (2) a discourse on the Namibian nation‐state and (3) a discourse on the nation‐state containing a variety of ethnic nations (‘the rainbow nation’). The first discourse is characterised by a primordial belief about Rehoboth Basters, their homeland and their ties to this homeland. This conception is challenged by the discourse on the Namibian nation‐state. Here, it is argued that ‘ethnic nations’ are the creation of colonialism; with Namibia's new independence, it is seen as necessary to tear down previous ‘ethnic nations’ and build up a new, united nation‐state. The rainbow discourse attempts to integrate the other two discourses through ideas about overlapping nations, where the boundaries that separate ‘us’/‘here’ from ‘them’/‘there’ overlap and are inclusive rather than exclusive.     

Investigating everyday acts of contributing as ‘admission tickets’ to belong to the nation in Norway

This article examines the centrality of contributing to questions of belonging in Norway. Building on the diversity of individuals living within a shared national space, the study identifies how everyday acts of contributing were conceived of by the participants as ‘admission tickets’ to belong. The study further investigates the participants' motivations and desires for contributing and unveils how, given their migration background (internal, international or non‐migrant), they respond to expectations of contributing from different positions of ontological security. The participants reveal ontological (in)security at different geographical scales, and they seek to manage this less secure position of national or local belonging through their acts of contributing in everyday life.     

Decentralization and Democracy in Indonesia: A Critique of Neo‐Institutionalist Perspectives

This article assesses some of the major premises of neo‐institutionalist explanations of decentralization policy and practices, but focuses especially on the relationship between decentralization and democracy, in the context of the recent and ongoing Indonesian experience with decentralization. In the last two decades ‘decentralization’ has become, along with ‘civil society’, ‘social capital’ and ‘good governance’, an integral part of the contemporary neo‐institutionalist lexicon, especially that part which is intended to draw greater attention to ‘social’ development. The concern of this article is to demystify how, as a policy objective, decentralization has come to embody a barely acknowledged political, not just theoretical, agenda. It also suggests alternative ways of understanding why decentralization has often failed to achieve its stated aims in terms of promoting democracy, ‘good governance’, and the like. What is offered is an understanding of decentralization processes that more fully incorporates the factors of power, struggle and interests, which tend to be overlooked by neo‐institutionalist perspectives. The current Indonesian experience clearly illustrates the way in which institutions can be hijacked by a wide range of interests that may sideline those that champion the worldview of ‘technocratic rationality’.