Emerging vacuums of strategic planning: an exploration of reforms in Finnish spatial planning

The paper offers a theory-based evaluation of the ongoing reforms in the Finnish spatial planning regime. The paper argues that Finnish planning is moving in a reactive and market-driven direction. This development is not being brought about solely through a direct decrease in public discretionary powers in planning, but is also unfolding indirectly through a process of rescaling in the spatial planning regime. These processes increase municipal autonomy in relation to other planning scales, despite problems observed in the municipality-centred market-driven planning orientation. The resulting reduction in manoeuvring room in public planning is conceptualized in the paper as expanding vacuums of strategic planning. Building on concepts from the literature on state transformation theory and scale theory, the paper draws together theoretical and empirical conclusions from several case studies conducted in close-to-administration projects.     

A Zoroastrian Dispute in the Caliph’s Court: The Gizistag Abāliš in its Early Islamic Context

The Gizistag Abāli? is a ninth- or tenth-century Pahlavi text, recording a debate which took place at the court of al-Ma?mūn between a Zoroastrian priest and a heretical dualist. This article, the first in-depth study of this important work, examines the text in its broader Islamicate environment. It argues that the narrative itself is probably fictional, but reflects a real historical phenomenon, namely the interreligious debates which took place among Zoroastrians, Muslims, Christians, and Jews during the ?Abbasid period. It argues that the text is a unique Zoroastrian example of a literary genre that was common among Christians at the time, namely, “the monk in the emir’s majlis.” By comparing the Gizistag Abāli? to these Christian texts, it explores why Zoroastrians generally did not launch explicit polemics against Islam, comparable to those of other non-Muslim communities. It seems that Zoroastrian authors were more concerned with explaining their own doctrines than critiquing the beliefs of others. This is curious considering the large numbers of Zoroastrians who were converting to Islam at the time. Finally, the article proposes new ways of refining the way we read Pahlavi texts, by analyzing them alongside the literatures of other religious communities in the early Islamic empire.     

Australian energy diplomacy

While Australia is considered an energy superpower, Australian foreign policy has often overlooked energy diplomacy. Given the transformations taking place in global energy markets, the time is ripe to begin a policy discussion in Australia on energy diplomacy. I argue that Australian diplomatic efforts should broaden beyond a historical focus on promoting fossil fuels and securing export markets, to driving global energy governance reforms through the G20. This will not only help to ensure that the international energy architecture is capable of achieving governance objectives around energy security, energy access and climate change, but significantly, it will also help Australia to achieve broader foreign policy goals, such as ensuring emerging economies become responsible stakeholders within the international system.     

Der Weg zum Flussgebietsmanagement

Zusammenfassung Der Flussgebietsansatz ist ein zentrales Element der Wasserrahmenrichtlinie (WRRL) und wurde in Deutschland im Zuge der organisatorischen Umsetzung der Richtlinie strukturell implementiert. Die Kooperationsstrukturen auf Flussgebietsebene sollen dabei einen funktionierenden Rahmen auch für die fachliche Umsetzung der Richtlinie bilden. Beim dazu erforderlichen strukturellen Wandel waren insbesondere die in den Flussgebieten bereits vorhandenen Kooperationsstrukturen von Bedeutung. Diese wurden entweder ausgebaut, umstrukturiert oder von neuen Strukturen zur Umsetzung der WRRL überlagert. Die dabei zum Teil entstandenen Doppelstrukturen erh?hen jedoch den Koordinierungsaufwand der Akteure stark, so dass es aktuell zu einer Zusammenführung und Konsolidierungsbewegung kommt. Allerdings wird auch nach der Konsolidierung eine gro?e strukturelle Vielfalt in den Flussgebieten verbleiben, die durch eine enge Zusammenarbeit der Akteure zu bew?ltigen ist. Es bleibt abzuwarten, inwiefern diese Strukturen sich auch eignen, um neuen Herausforderungen, wie beispielsweise den Folgen des Klimawandels, zu begegnen.     

Suicides of German Jews in the Third Reich

This article re-examines Jewish responses towards Nazi racismby studying German-Jewish suicides. Its purpose is twofold.First, it moves beyond the discussion of suicide as a statisticalincidence and asks what motivated German Jews to commit suicide.Statistics, however elaborate, disregard individual fates andcircumstances. While not entirely dismissing suicide statistics,this article is primarily concerned with qualitative questionsof social context and individual motives. It introduces hithertoneglected archival sources, including suicide notes. These sourcesallow us to assess the impact of Nazi racial policies on individualsuicides and to study the emotional effect of Nazi policieson German Jews. This article also takes up the question as tohow far, if at all, German-Jewish suicides can be considereda form of resistance towards Nazism and to what extent theywere an act of despair and hopelessness. The Nazis claimed tobe the arbiters over the lives of Jews once the deportationsstarted in 1941. The vast majority of Jews left in Germany afterNovember 1938 were fairly elderly. They could not be expectedto go into hiding, and their will to live may have been less,as was, undoubtedly, the ability or desire to start a new lifeelsewhere. In this bleak context, the overwhelming majorityof German-Jewish suicides derived from personal despair andthe desire to preserve individual dignity and agency. Nazi racialpolicies coalesced in a condition of anomie, an overturningof normal life and its norms and values that increases the likelihoodof suicide, prompted by the collapse of hope in the possibilityof a future. Emile Durkheim originally developed the conceptof anomic suicide as a way to explain suicide as a social phenomenon.This concept helps us understand the suicides of German Jewsin the Third Reich both in their wider political and privateimplications.     

Increasing Role of Services in Competitive Power and Innovativeness of Firms and Industrial Clusters

The aim of this paper is to discuss the importance of different types of global services for industrial firms and clusters in terms of their economic competitiveness and innovative performance. The theoretical debates argue that globalization, deregulation and the new production organization make it necessary to use global services that are supplied easily with the help of new telecommunication technologies. The existing empirical studies provide some supporting evidence. However, they also indicate that global service firms can be attained by only smaller numbers of industrial firms and clusters. Still, in-house services besides temporal and informal mechanisms are important to meet the needs of the specialized services, even for the firms that try to become a part of the global production system. The paper focuses on three main questions: “What types of global services are becoming crucial for manufacturing firms and what type of services are still local and national? Is there a significant difference between the characteristics of firms that use the same type of services? To what extent is having access to global services important for the innovativeness of industrial firms and clusters? This paper looks for the answers to these questions based on existing case studies as well as this study of three industrial clusters in Turkey. The findings indicate that there is not a perfect match between theory and empirical evidence and there is a need for more refined theoretical discourses on industry–service relations.