Regional Forest Agreements: Resolving Resource Conflicts or Managing Resource Politics?

Regional Forest Agreements (RFAs) are the latest institutional response to conflict over the allocation, use and management of forests in Australia. RFAs involve a process of resource assessment leading to a long-term agreement between federal and state governments. This paper examines the approach to assessment being used in RFAs with reference to the literature on the practice of resource and environmental assessment and the changing shape of intergovernmental relations in Australia. It concludes that RFAs have not succeeded in resolving conflict over forestry, as was intended, but have successfully managed forest politics, both between governments and in the broader policy community.     

Archaeological geophysics of a Bronze Age agricultural landscape: the AROURA Project,central mainland Greece

Between 2010 and 2012, the AROURA project conducted magnetometric prospection in the ancient polder around the Late Bronze Age (ca. 1300–1190 b.c.) fortress of Glas, mainland Greece. As had been hypothesized, the anomalies detected were consistent with a system of agricultural fields. This system appears to have been irrigated and drained through previously identified hydraulic mechanisms in and around the polder. Comparison of soil profiles of anomalies with those of background areas, including their magnetic susceptibilities, corroborated magnetometric data. Anomalies were traced from sampled to unsampled areas through corresponding reclassified satellite bandwidths. Constituent sediments of features discovered were dated to the Late Bronze Age through AMS radiocarbon and OSL analyses. The results validated the use of extensive geophysics to detect and investigate ancient agricultural landscapes.     

New Research on the Late Prehistoric Coastal Polities of Northern Peru

Previously, the Chimú empire was thought to have dominated the north coast of Peru during the Late Intermediate period, virtually to the exclusion of other polities. However, new research on sites from this period has not only changed perspectives on the Chimú, but also shed light on two other important coastal polities: the Lambayeque/Sicán and the Casma, providing insights with the potential to reshape our understanding of the development of urbanism and the Andean state. This article presents a critical summary of recent literature, fieldwork, and discoveries. Analyses of these new data address a wide range of topics that can be loosely grouped into four major areas: complexity in political organization and the geopolitical landscape, variations in the urban environment, the intensification of trade and exchange, and dynamic expressions of religion and ideology. The latest interpretation of the north coast Late Intermediate period is a story of three major, competing polities that were eventually subsumed under one.     

Justice Breyer's Constitutional Jurisprudence: Active Liberty and Pragmatism

This analysis of Associate Justice Stephen Breyer's jurisprudence proceeds from his first book devoted to this subject, Active Liberty, a term he derives from Benjamin Constant and that Breyer defines as participatory democracy. Active Liberty and two subsequent books, as well as numerous off-bench writings, explain his jurisprudence of pragmatism, an approach he contrasts with originalism. This article addresses three general questions: Is Breyer's jurisprudence, founded on active liberty and pragmatism, fundamentally consistent with the design of the Constitution? Does his jurisprudence support his opinions in the constitutional decisions examined, a number of which are also treated in his books and articles? In a system that is designed to empower and to limit government, do his jurisprudence and judicial decisions constrain judges? This last question is especially important because of Breyer's thesis “that courts should take greater account of the Constitution's democratic nature when they interpret constitutional and statutory texts.” Breyer believes that his theory of active liberty ameliorates the democratic anomaly between a system “based on representation and accountability” that at the same time entrusts “final or near-final” authority to unelected judges who are insulated from public opinion.     

East Polynesian Islands as Models of Cultural Divergence: The Case of Rapa Nui and Rapa Iti

The diverse island societies of East Polynesia are well-suited as models for comparative evolutionary analysis. Settled ca. 750 BP by a common ancestral population, colonists of the remote corners of the Pacific shared a pool of cultural traits that included commensal species, language, technology, and other cultural practices. Following colonization however, island populations diverged in language, subsistence practices, degree of territoriality, settlement patterns, investment and forms of monumental architecture, and social organization. Driven by historical circumstances and varied environmental conditions, this divergence presents evolutionary case studies of alternative paths of cultural change. One explanatory approach to this evolutionary divergence involves isolating the critical ecological parameters that likely constrained and shaped the diverse history of island populations. Here, we offer a comparative evolutionary analysis that explores the divergent histories of two marginal East Polynesian islands: Rapa Nui and Rapa Iti.     

Stumbling towards Empire: The Shanghai Local Post Office,the Transnational British Community and Informal Empire in China, 1863–97

In the second half of nineteenth century, a small transnational British and foreign community grew up in the treaty ports scattered along China’s coast, a community literally caught between the great inner Asian empire of the Manchu Qing and British-dominated informal empire in Asia. Although scholars often contend that few major developments occurred in the foreign sector of the treaty port world until the very end of the nineteenth century, this article joins recent revisionist scholarship seeking to better understand the growth of this transnational treaty port community through a study of the Shanghai Municipal Council’s local post office in the context of informal empire prior to the rise of muscular Chinese nationalism in the early twentieth century.

As an institutional history of the virtually unknown local post office, this article is a study of the decades-long process by which the foreign settler community of Shanghai slowly built up the administrative capacity, trading networks and communications infrastructure of informal empire and semi-colonial order in the nineteenth-century treaty ports. The history of the local post office is largely unknown not because of its insignificance, but because we have not paid enough attention to the institutions that facilitated the emergence of transnational expatriate and settler communities throughout the world of British informal empire and the global and local influences that shaped them.     

Gendering the city: the lived experience of transforming cities,urban cultures and spaces of belonging

Debates centred on ‘planetary urbanisation’ have raised questions over the adequacy of existing theories and epistemologies to explain the quantitative and qualitative transformations of cities. However, this theorization of the urban has met with opposition from post-colonial and feminist researchers amongst others. The comparative, empirical research in this collection, from Bolivia, India and Turkey, highlights that the city remains an important analytical and concrete framework, demarcated by contingency and cultural change through which residents must navigate. In particular we focus on the specificity of women’s lives and their capacity to problematise universalist theory, documenting their interrogation of simplistic binaries such as modern/traditional; their innovative approaches to informal settlement, housing and markets; their production of urban knowledge in order to negotiate the city; and processes and practices of mobility, experimentation, risk taking and aspiration that contest or support a myriad of urban imaginaries. Whilst not rejecting the need for theories that allow comparative perspectives on cities, our conclusions underscore the importance of recognising the multiple logics that generate city space and urban cultures, and the consequent need to parochialise the empirical basis of theories that claim to be global in outreach.