Discourse Yes,Implementation Maybe: An Immobility and Paralysis of Sustainable Development Policy

Sustainable development policies are on the move. Cities the world over are repositioning, repackaging and remarketing themselves as green and sustainable, and sustainable development is the moniker imported to spark the process. At the same time, sustainable development, as a normative point of departure, is itself going through cycles of reinterpretation and re-composition. The research in this article aims to understand this process by mapping the trajectories of sustainable development policies, and understanding sustainable development as a contextually grounded policy in motion. In Luxembourg, as planners are confronted with finding ways to manage growth, sustainable development has come to permeate all levels of the planning system. To understand how this came into being, research methods were employed that included document screening and a series of conversational interviews that were later transcribed and coded. In so doing, the discourse around sustainable development policy could be reconstructed and analysed. The results showed that the multi-scalar, cross-national, and simultaneously micro-level governance structures pose many obstructions to the implementation of sustainable development policies that are imported from abroad. Thus, policy is ultimately immobile, and a policy paralysis can be considered.     

The Pottery Informatics Query Database: A New Method for Mathematic and Quantitative Analyses of Large Regional Ceramic Datasets

There is an increasing demand within the humanities and social sciences to use computers to analyze material culture and discover patterns of historical and anthropological significance. Using southern Levantine Iron Age (ca. 1200–500 BCE) ceramics as a test case, the Pottery Informatics Query Database (PIQD) provides a novel solution for constructing regional ceramic typologies. Beyond digitally archiving 2D/3D-scanned ceramics, the PIQD encodes ceramic profiles as mathematical representations. This method of digital preservation enables rapid queries to be conducted in a mathematically grounded approach. In this sense, the queries are similar to online Basic Local Alignment Search Tool searches developed in the field of genetics by rapidly associating large quantities of digital vessel profiles to each other based on similar morphological traits. The PIQD is an open-source online tool that enables scholars and students to test humanities-related hypotheses against ceramic data in ways that conventional publications or other databases cannot provide. Regional spatial patterning of the ceramic data is delivered over a Google Earth-based user interface. In this paper, we present the PIQD as an objective method for developing a comprehensive ceramic typology of an entire region of archaeological study and provide an arena to conduct novel scientific research. We then demonstrate through a case study its analytical capabilities to handle large datasets of 3D scans and digitized 2D ceramic profiles and generate cultural inferences with the ceramic assemblages of the Iron Age II “Edomite” region located in modern southern Jordan. PIQD adds an important methodological tool to the post-excavation cyber-archaeology tool box.     

Global cultural flows and the routes of identity: the imagined worlds of Celtic FC

In the study of sports and society, there has often been an excessive focus placed on the roots (i.e. origins) of collective identity. Drawing on Appadurai's [Appadurai, A. (1996). Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press] concept of ‘imagined worlds,’ this paper explores five global cultural flows and their influences on the diverse identities of Celtic Football Club supporters. While the historical ‘roots’ of these socially constructed identity attachments are important to understand, this article suggests that the ‘routes,’ or where these identities are being performed, maintained, and renegotiated on an everyday bases, provide a more complete understanding of collective identities in today's globalized world. Ultimately, this article highlights the reasons why people from around the world support a football team from Glasgow, Scotland by clearly demonstrating that the motivations that go into their decision are not as simple as one might initially imagine and are relentlessly renegotiated across both time and space.     

Peopling the Recent Past in the Serra de L’Altmirant: Shepherds and Farmers at the Margins

The region of the Serra de l’Altmirant in southeastern Spain, through its upland location and its rocky and scrub landscape, is strongly perceived as marginal–this mainly in contrast with the nearby fertile coastal plains between Valencia and Denia, busy with orange and vine production especially. A progressive colonization of the lower part of the Serra by weekend homes is starting to counter this image of marginality, but at the same time such constructions threaten the residual archaeology of a different type of human upland exploitation, namely pastoralism and hunting. Abandoned terraces, cisterns, store buildings and larger corrals are evident even on the exposed plateau and testify to a period in which the Serra was active and integral to farmers and shepherds from the villages of the adjoining valleys and plains. This paper discusses the nature of this activity, as recorded through archaeological and ethnographic investigation, and considers also the materials and outlook of Manolo, the last shepherd-in-residence on the Serra.     

Host economy impacts of transnational retail: the research agenda

The last decade has witnessed an acceleration of retail foreigndirect investment into a range of emerging markets across EastAsia, Central and Eastern Europe and Latin America, led by asmall cohort of food and general merchandise retailers fromWestern Europe, and to a lesser extent, North America. Whilethese investment flows have had profound developmental impactsin host economies, research in this area is still in its infancy.This article therefore maps out a detailed research agenda withrespect to the host economy impacts of transnational retailing.After setting the scene empirically and conceptually, the articleconsiders different dimensions of these impacts on retail competitiveness,supply chain dynamics, consumption practices and consumer/civilsociety, institutional and regulatory frameworks and, reciprocally,on the retail transnational corporations themselves. It concludesby calling for a concerted interdisciplinary research effortinto this important and understudied aspect of economic globalization.     

Australia and the ‘Five Eyes’ intelligence network: the perils of an asymmetric alliance

Aside from NATO, the Five Eyes intelligence network between the USA, the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand is the world’s most enduring multilateral arrangement of its type. While the Five Eyes network does not constitute a formal security alliance in the classic sense of the term, it does emulate significant features of how alliances operate in practice, including active burden-sharing and intra-alliance bargaining. Most analysts claim that the USA dictates in hierarchical fashion the terms and conditions of how the Five Eyes network functions, and that junior partners have little alternative but to fall in line if they want to preserve the flow of high-grade intelligence from Washington. Using Australia as a case study, this article shows that a more fluid relationship has been at play, one that challenges conventional assumptions about asymmetrical alliances and the role of junior partners.