THE EFFECTS OF COURT INTERVENTION IN ENVIRONMENTAL REGULATION

Books reviewed in this articles:
Laura M. Lake, Environmental Regulation; The Political Effects of Implementation
R. Shep Melnick, Regulation and the Courts; The Case of the Clean Air Act
Lettie M. Wenner, The Environmental Decade in Court     

“There are thousands who will claim to have been ‘out’ during Easter Week.”: recognising military service in the 1916 Easter Rising

ABSTRACT

Using recently released archives from the Military Service Pensions Collection (MSPC), this article assesses the archival evidence available for assessing how many rebels are recognised as having military service in the Easter Rising of 1916. It argues that while the MSPC contributes towards a more accurate estimation of the number who participated in the Rising, especially in the regions outside Dublin, it does not constitute a definitive figure for rebels active in Easter week. Through an examination of the assessment criteria for military service pensions, it shows how the decision to grant recognised pensionable service for the Rising was affected by geography, politics, legal challenges, the timing of an application, and the subjective assessment of individual assessors.     

Fulfilling Promises of More Substantive Democracy? Post‐neoliberalism and Natural Resource Governance in South America

Benefiting from the commodity boom, progressive governments across South America have sought to move away from the neoliberal policies adopted previously by strengthening the role of the state and using revenues from commodity exports to address social concerns. This approach, often called neo‐extractivism, has become the main development strategy over the past 15 years. Yet, the increasingly intensive and extensive natural resource exploitation underlying this development strategy has also led to multiple protests and contestations across South America. This article thus examines the relationship between neo‐extractivism as a development strategy and the quality of democracy under progressive governments in South America. On the one hand, neo‐extractivism has allowed states to become more inclusive by paying attention to social concerns which in turn has been an important element in the legitimacy of progressive governments. On the other hand, the reliance on neo‐extractivism as the main development strategy poses important constraints on the ability of post‐neoliberal states to build more substantive democracies which could take into account a variety of positions, give citizens a say in decisions directly affecting their livelihoods, and promote public debates on key questions confronting society.     

Complicating hetero-normative spaces at school formals in New Zealand

The school formal in New Zealand constitutes a rich site of analysis for researchers interested in gender and sexuality performances. As a social space, the formal both shapes bodies and is shaped by them. In this article, we explore the school formals of three different types of schools: a single sex girls’, a single sex boys’ and a co-ed. high school, all from an urban centre. Using the theoretical tools provided by poststructuralism and queer theory, we conducted a discourse analysis of observations conducted by the first author at two school formals, interviews with staff and students and interviews with peer researchers. We demonstrate how same-sex practices do not necessarily map onto queer bodies, masculinity onto ‘male’ bodies or femininity onto ‘female’ bodies. Such fluidity challenges the rigid heterosexual/homosexual and masculine/feminine binaries so that schools are more inclusive of gender and sexual diversity.