After Neoliberalism? Community Activism and Local Partnerships in Aotearoa New Zealand

In Aotearoa New Zealand, as elsewhere, partnership programmes overtly targeted to the strengthening of local communities are developing in a range of institutional sites. This development, it is claimed by some, moves social governance well beyond the narrow, market‐oriented, contractualism of earlier forms of neoliberalism, and into a new era of joined up, inclusive governance. Here we highlight the emergent role of "strategic brokers" who do the grounded joining up of governance in this new partnering ethos. Drawing on the findings of a large project on local partnerships in Aotearoa New Zealand, we show how community activists have played a distinctive historical role in shaping the form that local partnerships take. We then turn our attention to the current context, examining the rise of mandatory partnership working and the implications of this for community activists. We highlight key aspects of new forms of gendered professionalism, including the need to have both knowledge of and knowledge about communities. In outlining the historical development and current scope of strategic broker roles, we ask what we can learn about the nature of would‐be "post‐neoliberal" social governance.     

Defining 'underwater cultural heritage'

The newly adopted United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization's Convention on the Protection of the Underwater Cultural Heritage provides the first universal protection regime for this value archaeological resource. A central difficulty in concluding this Convention was defining underwater cultural heritage. This article considers the development of the definition agreed upon and analyses its utility in providing for a pragmatic and effective protection regime.     

The application of microfossils in assessing the provenance of chalk used in the manufacture of Roman mosaics at Silchester

Microfossils recovered from chalk tesserae in mosaics from the Roman town of Calleva Atrebatum, modern Silchester, southern England, are used to suggest a provenance for the source-rock. The microfossils include foraminifera characteristic of late Cretaceous (Campanian) foraminiferal biozone BGS20 (quadrata macrofaunal biozone) and foraminiferal subzone BGS21i (basal mucronata macrofaunal biozone). Calcareous nannofossil assemblages from the same tesserae are poorly preserved, preventing precise age determination, but confirm an age of Santonian to Campanian. As indurated chalk beds of this age are not normally present in the stratigraphically higher chalks of southern England, it is probable that calcretised chalk, formed by secondary calcification beneath Palaeogene rock cover, was used to manufacture the tesserae. This suggestion is supported by a comparative analysis of chalk tesserae from the Norden Roman site in Dorset. Although the provenance of the chalk in some of the Silchester tesserae can be placed only within a broad geographical area of downland in southern England, others may have originated in the Dorchester–Swanage area, some 100 km to the southwest of Silchester, or the Portsdown area of southern Hampshire. None of the tesserae have been constructed from chalk found near Silchester.     

Social reform through parks: the American Civic Association's program for a better America

The American Civic Association, an urban, elite organization based in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and Washington DC, provided a major impetus to the creation of the National Park Service in 1916. The association had actively involved itself with national parks for nearly a decade before 1916 despite the fact that most members lived far from the national parks in the West. This article argues that the concern of the American Civic Association for national parks sprang from its conviction that parks comprised vehicles for reforming society. They dismissed the differences in scale between national and urban parks as irrelevant to the ability of parks to affect society. All properly organized parks offered means to improve America. They characterized the reformed society that would follow on the heels of a national park system as healthy, wealthy, equal and patriotic, the same qualities that they attributed to a post-urban park society. The significance of the national parks for the American Civic Association, therefore, came from the presumed ability of these parks, like all parks, to foster a better America.     

The Origins of New Deal Agricultural Policy: Interest Groups' Role in Policy Formation

In its examination of New Deal agricultural programs, this article takes issue with the pluralist, state-centered, and class-centered approaches which ignore the complexity of these policy programs' development and implementation as well as the role of organized interests. This over simplification is rectified through a comparison of the AAA and FSA programs, which demonstrates the primary role played in these programs' existance by organized interests both outside and within, the state.