Honours for Glasgow staff

Political Geography of the Twentieth Century: A Global Analysis. Edited by Peter Taylor, 245 x 184 mm, xiii + 269 pp, Belhaven, London, 1993, pbk ISBN 1–85293–1973, £12.95.

Environmental Management in the Soviet Union. By Philip R. Pryde, 228 x 153 mm, xiii + 314 pp, Cambridge University Press, 1991, pbk ISBN 0–521–40905–5, £10.95.

Green Development: Environment und Sustainahility in the Third World. By W.M. Adams, 216 X 138 mm, 273 pp, Routledge, London, 1992, pbk, ISBN 0–415–08050–9, £12.99.

Debt and Development. By Stuart Corbridge, 230 x 153 mm, 231 pp, Blackwell, Oxford, 1993, hbk ISBN 0–631179046, £35.00, pbk ISBN 0–631181383, £10.99.

Contemporary Rural Systems in Transition: Vol. 1 Agriculture and Environment, Vol. 2 Economy and Society. Edited by I.R. Bowler, C.R. Bryant and M.D. Nellis, 240 x 160 mm, viii + 277 and xx + 314 pp, Wallingford, CAB International, 1992, hbk, ISBN 0–85198–813‐X (two‐volume set), £70.00.

Controlling Tropical Deforestation. By Alan Grainger, 232 x 152 mm, 310 pp, Earthscan, London, 1993, pbk, ISBN 1–85383–142–5, £14.95.

Deforestation in the Postwar Philippines. By David M. Kummer, 228 x 152 mm, xvii + 178 pp, University of Chicago Press (Geography Research Paper 234), Chicago and London, 1992, pbk, ISBN 0–226–46169–6, £13.50.

Nineteenth‐Century Cape Breton — A Historical Geography. By Stephen J. Hornsby, 230 x 153 mm, 304 pp, McGill‐Queen's University Press, Montreal and Kingston, 1992, hbk, ISBN 0–7735–0889–9, £33.95.

Challenge of the Natural Environment. By B.J. Knapp, S.R.J. Ross, and D. McCrae, 236 x 135 mm, 272 pp, Longman, Harlow, 1989, pbk, ISBN 0–582–35597–4, £9.99.     

Meeting places: drivers of change in Australian Aboriginal cultural institutions

Since the 1970s, there has been a fraught yet hopeful Aboriginal cultural resurgence in Australia. An element of this movement has been the establishment of Aboriginal art centres and cultural centres across Australia. Using a comparative approach to Aboriginal art centres, this paper analyses the appearance and characteristics of the more recent Aboriginal cultural centres. The methods used are a review of the literature on Aboriginal art centres, and for the less-researched Aboriginal cultural centres, a case study. This paper posits that cultural centre characteristics are shaped through the formation of alliances made possible by the advent of land rights, an Aboriginal cultural turn amongst Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people, and changing approaches to regional development. While not themselves a movement that will lead to socio-economic change, these types of arts and heritage projects are aligned to such movements. With a larger scale and more central locations, Aboriginal cultural centres open up opportunities for larger and more diverse alliances, and therefore new opportunities for Aboriginal people’s participation, activism and expression.     

An Angel on the Wind: How Heroic Policy Narratives Shape Policy Realities

Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) is a new and maturing theory of the policy process that takes a systematic, scientific approach to understanding the social construction of policy realities. As such, NPF serves as a bridge between postpositivists, who assert that public policymaking is contextualized through narratives and social construction, and positivists, who contend that legitimacy is grounded in falsifiable claims. The central questions of NPF are: What is the empirical role of policy narratives in the policy process and do policy narratives influence policy outcomes? First, the contributions of NPF scholarship at three levels of analysis—micro, meso, and macro—are examined. Next, necessary conditions of a policy narrative are specified, accompanied by detailed discussion of the narrative components: narrative elements, narrative strategies, and policy beliefs. Finally, an empirical illustration of NPF—a case study of Cape Wind's proposal to install wind turbines off Nantucket—is presented. Although intercoalitional differences have long been studied in the NPF scholarship, this is the first study to examine intracoalitional cohesion or the extent to which a coalition tells the same story across narrative elements, narrative strategies, and policy beliefs. NPF is a new approach to the study of the policy process that offers empirical pathways to better speculating the role of narrative in the policy process.