Loggers,Development Agents and the Exercise of Power in Amazonia

Many believe that Amazonian communities could benefit from the growing market for timber through self‐governed approaches to forest management. However, there is no clear understanding of how communities are to develop such approaches given logging frontiers that are characterized by informal negotiations with loggers and community forestry initiatives that are promoted by development agents. This article reports on research from four study areas in Bolivia, Brazil and Peru which reveals that external players exercise considerable power over communities. First, loggers and development agents impose forest management schemes directly on communities, hindering them from developing their own approaches. Second, paternalistic relationships with loggers and development agents prevent communities from identifying common interests and expressing these through their representative organizations. Finally, loggers and development agents use powerful discourses to shape acceptable schemes in forest management, silencing communities’ voices in debates. Through these different power mechanisms, external agents thwart the emergence of self‐governed community management approaches.     

National Systems of Innovations and Natural Resources Clusters: Evidence from Copper Mining Industry Patents

While natural resource-based industries are very efficient exploiting the natural endowments in developing countries and having an important participation in world markets (e.g. copper in Chile), most of them have not generated economic development based in knowledge-based resources in their societies. While this article reviews the national system of innovations in which the mining industry in Chile is based, we cannot neglect the importance of an international dimension in terms of its spatial dimension of the system of innovations [Fromhold-Eisebith, M. (2007) Bridging scales in innovation policies: How to link regional, national and international innovation systems, European Planning Studies, 15, pp. 217–233.] given the globalized characteristics of the mining industry. We found that Chile contributes 36% of the total copper production in the world but the investments in research and development are very low compared with the revenues of the industry and there are almost no patents originated in Chile registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) data base, the most important market for knowledge-based innovations. We can conclude that Chile is still depending on comparative advantages rather than constructed advantages [Cooke, P. (2007) To construct regional advantage from innovation systems first build policy platforms, European Planning Studies, 15, pp. 179–194.].     

Behind the Seven Veils of Inequality. What if it's all about the Struggle within just One Half of the Population over just One Half of the National Income?

This article addresses three main issues: why there is such a huge diversity of disposable income inequality across the world, why there is such a deterioration of market inequality among countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), and why inequality seems to move in ‘waves’. There are many underlying questions: does diversity reflect a variety of fundamentals, or a multiplicity of power structures and choice? Is rising market inequality the product of somehow ‘exogenous’ factors (e.g., r>g), or of complex interactions between political settlements and market failures? How do we get through the veils obscuring these interactions and distorting our vision of the often self‐constructed nature of inequality? Has neoliberal globalization broadened the scope for ‘distributional failures’ by, for example, triggering a process of ‘reverse catching‐up’ in the OECD, so that highly unequal middle‐income countries like those in Latin America now embody the shape of things to come? Are we all converging towards features such as mobile élites creaming off the rewards of economic growth, and ‘magic realist’ politics that lack self‐respect if not originality? Should I say, ‘Welcome to the Third World’? In this paper I also develop a new approach for examining and measuring inequality (distance from distributive targets), and a new concept of ‘distributional waves’. The article concludes that, to understand current distributive dynamics, what matters is to comprehend the forces determining the share of the rich — and, in terms of growth, what they choose to do with it (and how they are allowed do it).     

Shakespeare's Fault or Yours? Melzer's Maxim: A Guide to Tentative Omniscience for the Congenitally Hyperfallible

Abstract

Arthur Melzer's tremendous accomplishment is even greater than he may realize. The tradition of esoteric writing in political philosophy exists, as he convincingly demonstrates, and the consequences of this discovery are as significant as he claims. But the method of esoteric reading that he recommends applies more broadly than he seems to suggest. Applied liberally, moreover, as a corrective to nearly everything that's gone wrong with education in the humanities and social sciences over the last forty years, his humble heuristic—Melzer's Maxim, I call it—has the potential to reorient and renew the whole concept of Liberal Education for an age whose pedagogy is foundering. A boon to the sub-discipline of Political Theory in particular, Philosophy Between the Lines has even more to offer to classroom instruction in general. Read between the lines, Melzer's specialized work of scholarship promises nothing less than the opening of the American mind. It is the antidote to the poison of politically correct multiculturalism.     

Teaching landscape in Spanish universities: looking for new approaches in Geography

In order to determine the degree of implementation of the teaching of landscape in the new curriculum for Geography Degrees in Spain, some aspects are analysed: educational plans are analysed and verified, the presence therein of subjects directly devoted to landscape, as well as the inclusion of indirect or cross landscape issues in the subjects related to teaching guides. We propose ideas for the necessary updating of landscape teaching at the university level in the context of Geography, with a view to adapting both professional practice and research.     

Introduction: Liberalism in the Early Nineteenth-century Iberian World

Summary

This essay is an introduction to a special issue on ‘Liberalism in the Early Nineteenth-century Iberian World’. The essay reviews why Iberian intellectual history, particularly liberal political thought, has been neglected in English-language scholarship. It offers suggestions for the incorporation of Portuguese and Spanish language texts into the broader canon. The essay then outlines persistent debates common to the study of liberalism in both Iberian and other national contexts, in an effort to instigate a dialogue between intellectual historians of Spain and Portugal and their counterparts elsewhere. It concludes with a consideration of the geopolitical forces, cultural trends, and social conditions that encouraged the forging of transnational liberalism in the early nineteenth century.