Interest Groups,Federalism, and Water Quality in the Great Lakes: Chasing a Moving Target

Federalism often creates additional decisions for interest groups in determining how best to advocate for their policy recommendations in the legislative process. Should they focus their advocacy at the local, state, or national level of government? This article examines interest group behaviors in water quality policy in the Great Lakes region from 1960 to 2000. I evaluate the reasons for interest group decisions about which level of government to target, using historical analysis of Great Lakes water quality policy in the United States and Canada. The results of this analysis show that in many cases groups are influenced in their decision-making based on the level of government that has the greatest jurisdiction over the policy, supporting a neoinstitutional argument.     

The Gender,Place and Culture Jan Monk Distinguished Annual Lecture: Gentrification,assassination and forgetting in Mexico: a feminist Marxist tale

In this article, I employ feminist and Marxist tools to expose the struggles over the constant plunder and expansion of global capitalism along Mexico's northern border, specifically in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua. In particular, I examine how an official politics – promoted by the Mexican and US governments – for forgetting the economic and social devastation of a transcontinental drug war contributes to the mechanisms for further exploiting the working poor. By combining a feminist focus on the daily struggle of social reproduction with a Marxist emphasis on accumulation by dispossession, I show how this official ‘forgetting’ segues with an international gentrification plan in downtown Ciudad Juárez that seeks to expand the rent gap by denying place, legitimacy and legal status to the working women and their families who have made this border city famous as a hub of global manufacturing. As such, I argue that the social struggles against the official forgetting are struggles against a violent political economy that generates value via a devaluation of the spaces of the working poor, even of the spaces of their literal existence.     

Hearing girls’ silences: thoughts on the politics and practices of a feminist method of group discussion

Many contemporary feminist research methods employed in the interest of realizing social justice advocate ‘listening’ to subordinated others, groups variously categorized and marginalized by gender, sexuality, race, age, and so on, in order to examine the sources and workings of knowledge construction and social power. Increasingly, feminist scholars are using group discussion or focus groups, in an effort to give subordinated others ‘a voice.’ Group discussions are seen as potentially empowering in exploring and enabling group members’ social agency and knowledge production while at the same time diminishing the unequal power relations between the researched and researcher. In this article, I argue that the attention given to ‘voices’ in group discussions (dis)misses meaning‐ful silences thereby limiting its political potential. There exists an ‘epistemological messiness’ inherent in a feminist group discussion method that makes it difficult to hear meaning‐ful silences. Through reflection on my own research into the spaces of adolescent Latina gender identities, this article offers some insights into this messiness and recommends that a feminist group discussion method be guided by a politics of voice which includes ‘silence within voice.’     

Earth Mother Myths and Other Ecofeminist Fables: How a Strategic Notion Rose and Fell

The notion that women are ‘closer to nature’, naturally caring for land, water, forests and other aspects of the environment, has held powerful sway in certain development circles since the 1980s. Along with the rise in global environmental concern, ‘women, environment and development’ (WED) perspectives gained ground among many donor agencies and NGOs, complementing and sharing core assumptions with earlier‐established ‘women in development’ (WID) discourses. The materialist dimensions of WED were bolstered by fables about women's natural, cultural or ideological closeness to nature grounded in varieties of ecofeminist analysis. This proved a seductive mix for agencies wishing simultaneously to promote environmental protection and WID, as well as for certain forms of feminist activism and sisterhood‐construction, such as those around the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development. This contribution revisits these narratives and the politics of this strategic fix in the development of international environmentalism and explores the sustained critiques of these ecofeminist fables by feminist scholars and activists from the early 1990s onwards. It provides a critical review of the approach to gender and the environment in some current donor, NGO and other policy documents, which draw little from the feminist critiques of the 1990s. The author reflects on how, and for whom, women–nature links might have practical or strategic value today.     

Reviews

DOCUMENTS AND SPEECHES ON COMMONWEALTH AFFAIRS 1952–1962. Nicholas Mansergh (ed.). London, New York, Toronto, Oxford University Press, 1963 for the Royal Institute of International Affairs. Pp. xxi, 775. £stg. 6–0–0.

THE POST‐WAR TRANSFORMATION OF THE COMMONWEALTH: Reflections on the Asian‐African Contribution. M. S. Rajan. London, Asia Publishing House, 1963, for the Indian School of International Studies, Pp. 67. Stg. 18/‐.

COMMUNITY AND CONTENTION: BRITAIN AND AMERICA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. Bruce M. Russett. M.I.T. Press, Cambridge, Mass. Pp. xii, 252, $7.00.

PEACE KEEPING BY UNITED NATIONS FORCES FROM SUEZ TO THE CONGO. A. L. Burns and Nina Heathcote. Princeton Studies in World Politics, Number 4, 1963, pp. 256.

NEUTRALISM. Peter Lyon. Leicester University Press, 1963. Pp. 216. U.K. price 25/‐.

THE ATLANTIC ALLIANCE: A SHORT POLITICAL GUIDE. Alvin J. Cottrell and James E. Dougherty. London, Pall Mall Press, 1964. Pp. 262. U.K. price 30/‐.

THE ECONOMIC INTEGRATION OP HUNGARY INTO THE SOVIET BLOC. L. Zsoldos. Bureau of Business Research, Ohio State University, 1963. Pp. 149. Price $5.00.

VOSPOMINANIYA O FEVRALSKOY REVOLYUTSII. MEMOIRS OF THE FEBRUARY (MARCH RUSSIAN) REVOLUTION. I. G. Tsereteli. Mouton & Co., Paris. The Hague. 1963. Two volumes. I, xxx + 494; II, 429 & Index. Published with the cooperation of the Russian Institute of Columbia University and the Russian Research Centre of Harvard University.

ALBANIA AND THE SINO‐SOVIET RIFT. William E. Griffith. The M.I.T. Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1963. Pp. 423. Australian price £1/9/6.

MAO AGAINST KHRUSHCHEV. A SHORT HISTORY OF THE SINO‐SOVIET CONFLICT. David Floyd. London, Pall Mall Press, 1964. Pp. 456. Stg. 50/‐.

TIBET AND ITS HISTORY. H. E. Richardson. London, Oxford University Press, 1962. Pp. ix + 297, illustrated, maps. Australian price 65/‐.

THE TWO VIET‐NAMS. Bernard B. Fall. London, Pall Mall Press, 1963. Pp. viii + 493. Stg. 50/‐.

PROBLEMS OP FREEDOM: SOUTH VIETNAM SINCE INDEPENDENCE. Wesley R. Fishel (ed.). New York, The Free Press, 1961. Pp. xiv + 233. $6.95.

FROM COLONIALISM TO COMMUNISM: A CASE HISTORY OF NORTH VIETNAM. Hoang Van Chi. London, Pall Mall Press, 1964. Pp. xv + 252. Stg. 40/‐.

INDONESIA. Ruth T. McVey (ed.). New Haven, HRAF Press, 1963. Pp. xviii + 600. $12.00.

THE DECLINE OF CONSTITUTIONAL DEMOCRACY IN INDONESIA. Herbert Feitk. Cornell University Press, 1962. ‘Pp. xx + 618. $8.75.

THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF INDEPENDENT MALAYA: A CASE STUDY IN DEVELOPMENT. T. H. Silcock and E. K. Fisk (eds.). Australian National University, 1963. Pp. 306 + xi. 42/‐.