Towards a Framework for Cooperation: Spatial Public Diplomacy on the Island of Ireland

Abstract

European spatial planning arguments advocate a blend of strategic thinking, coordination and related initiatives to promote and secure territorial cohesion. These ambitions embrace a set of normative agendas around economic, social and environmental convergence, competitiveness, policy coordination and efficient infrastructure provision across space. In practice, territorial management then involves devising interventions across inter-connecting scales of governance which comprise complex agency relations, differentiated places and defined communities. In transnational contexts, attempts to foster appropriate spatial governance arrangements and relations across sovereign borders necessitate re-crafting planning and development cultures and service delivery practices to advance territorial cohesion. Transnational working necessarily involves cooperation across an extended range of institutions, interests, influences and potential actors. This paper examines attempts to secure bi-lateral commitment to a joint planning framework for the two distinct territories on the island of Ireland. Specifically, it traces the formal and informal activities involved in the development of the 2013 Framework for Cooperation between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. Informed by ideas of cross-border regionalism, it discusses the necessary spatial public diplomacy involved in the social reconstruction of strategic spatial planning to improve policy coordination and cross-border working.     

Simple Transfers,Complex Outcomes: The Impacts of Pensions on Poor Households in Brazil

Drawing on quantitative survey data and in‐depth interviews, this article seeks to map out the potential direct and indirect effects of simple cash transfers on households in impoverished rural and urban settings. Brazil is shown to have an extensive system of old age pensions, which affords almost universal coverage to households containing older people. These benefits have a significant impact on levels of poverty and vulnerability in recipient households. They also facilitate access to essential healthcare items, such as drugs, which are seldom freely available through the state health system. The in‐depth interviews reveal that pensions can have important effects on intra‐household relations, but these effects were not generalizable nor easily captured by quantitative survey tools. There was clear evidence that pensions reduced the propensity of older people to remain economically active, but this must be understood in a context of limited employment opportunities for all age groups and a high prevalence of disability. Overall, the article demonstrates the complex effects of a relatively simple cash transfer, which policy makers need to take into account.     

Devolution,decentralization and dispersal: Asserting the spatiality of the public sector in Scotland

Through a case study of Scottish Natural Heritage (SNH), a Non-Departmental Public Body in Scotland, this article considers the arguments associated with changes in public sector location in the UK in the wider context of devolution and decentralization. The policy issues of location and relocation are discussed in light of the wider government interest in modernization, spatial planning and regional development. The case study illustrates an active concern in Scotland with the decentralization of decision-making, and a move to community planning. Notwithstanding the perceived benefits of the government's policy objectives, however, the relocation process, in this instance, has proved to be difficult and protracted in practice, illustrating many of the tensions in a policy which seeks to deliver different and layered policy objectives.     

Business Improvement Districts and the Discourse of Contractualism

Business improvement districts (BIDs) are increasingly being advanced in a range of national contexts as a new delivery mechanism for securing improvement, regeneration and enhanced service delivery in specifically delineated districts. This paper considers BIDs as an example of a modern institutional design that is reconfiguring existing economic and legal regimes within town centres. Drawing on the theories of new institutional economics and transaction costs, the paper discusses how the contractual turn in urban governance advances our conceptual understanding of the rationale, scope and significance of partnership working. The discussion brings together emerging literatures around new ways of understanding partnership working in government thinking. It contrasts the advocacy and use of BIDs with the (previously established) practices of town centre management. It asserts that BIDs represent a new form of formalized and contractualized partnership working in sub-municipal governance, which has particular spatio-temporal implications for state–market–civil relations.     

National Parks in Scotland: Balancing Environment and Economy

The use of National Park designations to bring about aims including the protection and conservation of the natural environment has become established in most European Union member states. In the UK, such arrangements have long featured in England and Wales, but they have not been paralleled by similar designations in Scotland. Now, however, National Parks are being introduced in Scotland. While the proposed arrangements build on the experience of National Parks elsewhere in Europe, and particularly in England and Wales, they incorporate the distinctive feature of seeking to bring about socio-economic development as well as environmental protection.     

Book reviews

CHINA

DORE J. LEVY. Ideal and Actual in “The Story of the Stone”. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. 213 pp. US$49.00/£33.95, hardcover; US$19.00/£13.50, paper.

GREGOR BENTON (ed and trans). Chen Duxiu's Last Articles and Letters, 1937–1942. Richmond, Surrey: Curzon, 1998. 163 pp. Foreword by Wang Fanxi, editor's introduction, appendices, glossary, index. £40.00, hardcover.

EILEEN CHANG. The Rice‐Sprout Song. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. 182 pp. Foreword by David Der‐wei Wang. US$15.95, paper.

EILEEN CHANG. The Rouge of the North. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. 185 pp. Foreword by David Der‐wei Wang. US$15.95, paper.

MCLAREN, ANNE E. Chinese Popular Culture and Ming Chantefables. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1998. viii, 340 pp. US$103.75, hardcover.

EDWARD S. STEINFELD. Forging Reform in China: the Fate of State‐Owned Industry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. 300 pp. Tables, figures, preface, notes, bibliography, index. A$80.00, hardcover; £12.95, paper.

PETER CONN. Pearl S. Buck: a Cultural Biography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. 467 pp. A$28.95, paper.

FLEMMING CHRISTIANSEN and ZHANG JUNZUO (eds). Village INC. Chinese Rural Society in the 1990s. Surrey: Curzon, 1998. 277 pp. Illustrations, introduction, notes, bibliography, index. £35.00, hardcover.

HAROLD M. TANNER. Strike Hard! Anti‐Crime Campaigns and Chinese Criminal Justice 1979–1989. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University East Asia Program, 1999. 253 pp. US$28.00, hardcover; US$17.00, paper.

JAPAN, KOREA

LONNY E. CARLILE and MARK C. TILTON (eds). Is Japan Really Changing Its Ways?: regulatory Reform and the Japanese Economy. Washington DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1998. 232 pp. US$39.95, hardcover.

PETER KATZENSTEIN and TAKASHI SHIRAISHI (eds). Network Power: Japan and Asia. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997. 399 pp. US$62.50, hardcover; US$23.95, paper.

BERNARD FAURE. The Red Thread: Buddhist Approaches to Sexuality. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998. 338 pp. US$18.95, paper.

SOUTH, WEST & CENTERAL ASIA

VIJAY MISHRA. Devotional Poetics and the Indian Sublime. New York: State University of New York Press, 1998. 268 pp. US$21.95, paper.

OLIVER MENDELSOHN and MARIKA VICZIANY. The Untouchables: subordination, Poverty and the State in Modern India. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1998. 289 pp. Glossary, preface, bibliography, index. A$36.95, paper.

DONALD S. LOPEZ, Jr. Prisoners of Shangri‐La: Tibetan Buddhism and the West. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998. 238 pp. Notes, index. US$25.00, hardcover.

MELVYN C. GOLDSTEIN and MATTHEW T. KAPSTEIN (eds), with a foreword by Orville Schell. Buddhism in Contemporary Tibet, Religious Revival and Cultural Identity.

Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1998. x, 207 pp. 37 b/w photographs, notes, bibliography, index. US$40.00, hardcover; US$15.95, paper; £30.00, hardcover; £11.95, paper.

PETER RICHARDUS (ed), with an historical foreword by Alex McKay. Tibetan Lives: three Himalayan Autobiographies. Surrey: Curzon, 1998. xxviii, 223 pp. 2 maps, frontispiece, 33 b/w plates, select bibliography, index. £40.00, hardcover.

RAMAKRISHNA PULIGANDLA. Fundamentals of Indian Philosophy. Delhi: D. K. Print‐world, 1997 (revised edition), xix, 362 pp. Preface to second edition, preface to first edition, bibliography, glossary, index. Rs. 450, hardcover.

SOUTHEAST ASIA

PAUL HUTCHCROFT. Booty Capitalism: the Politics of Banking in the Philippines. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1998. 278 pp. US$39.95, hardcover.

PRAMOEDYA ANANTA TOER. Tales from Djakarta: caricatures of Circumstances and their Human Beings. Ithaca: Southeast Asia Program, Cornell University, 1999. 145 pp. Foreword, introduction, glossary. US$15.00, paper.

GENERAL ASIA

YAYORI MATSUI. Women in the New Asia: from Pain to Power. Melbourne: Spinifex Press, 1999. x, 194 pp. Index. A$29.95, paper.     

An Early Pleistocene Phytolith Record from Wonderwerk Cave,Northern Cape,South Africa

Grass silica short cell phytoliths were sampled from the four lowermost archaeological strata in excavation 1 at Wonderwerk Cave and offer an independent record of climatic change during an episode of Early Stone Age hominin occupation at the cave. Linked to differences in growing season temperature and the geographic distribution of C₃ and C₄ grasses in southern Africa, fossil grass phytoliths were used to trace palaeoenvironmental shifts at the site. The results suggest that Early Pleistocene environmental conditions at the cave fluctuated: between wetter and drier summer–rainfall growing conditions (C₄) towards the end of the Olduvai subchron and the beginning of the subsequent interval of reversed polarity, to mostly dry and cooler winter–rainfall growing conditions (C₃), that continued throughout the interval. It ended with a shift towards increased summer rainfall aridity at around one million years ago. The fluctuation between markedly wetter and drier C₄ conditions at the cave (NADP-me grass types vs. NAD-me grass types) does not support the premise that the expansion of C₄ grasslands was always coupled with increased aridity.     

The French Enlightenment attempts to create a philosophy without reason: the case of Diderot and the effect of Helvétius

It is a well-worn, yet astonishingly resilient, cliché that the Enlightenment was the “Age of Reason”. By focusing on Diderot and Helvétius this paper shows that, rather than proceeding in the name of reason, key figures within the progressive philosophy of the French Enlightenment were in fact extremely suspicious of abstract reasoning and attempted to construct a philosophy which purged the faculty of reason entirely from its philosophical anthropology and reduced the mind’s functions to the single faculty of sensation and so to the passions. It is in this sense that philosophy of the French Enlightenment attempted to produce a philosophy without reason. This paper reconstructs this attempt. In doing so it again engages critically with the idea that the philosophy of the Enlightenment was dogmatically rationalist, it provides a historical case study of a period in which philosophy pushed against the limits of its own identity, and it uses this attempt to reflect on the mythological not historiographical service which the cliché of Enlightenment Reason plays for the philosophical identity.