Assessing the Performance of Voluntary Environmental Programs: Does Certification Matter?

The promotion of voluntary environmental programs (VEPs) as alternative approaches to traditional environmental regulation has fueled numerous researchers to evaluate VEP performance. However, these studies have focused on assessing the environmental performance of a single VEP. As yet, we know little about the overall environmental benefits of these programs. Moreover, questions remain about whether VEPs designed with different monitoring regimes—related to whether programs are self‐monitored or undergo external certification—vary in their ability to improve environmental conditions. Using meta‐analysis methodology, this article evaluates the aggregated environmental outcomes of U.S. VEPs drawing on data from nine studies and over 30,000 firms. We show that collectively VEP participants do not improve their environmental performance over nonparticipants. Rather, nonparticipants improve their environmental performance by 7.7 percent more than VEP participants. Additionally, nonparticipants improve the environment 24 percent more than participants in self‐monitored VEPs, whereas participants in International Standards Organization 14001 as a group exhibit inconclusive environmental performance improvements.     

Seniors’ Long-Term Care in Canada: A Continuum of Soft to Brutal Privatisation

We situate the contemporary crisis of COVID-19 deaths in seniors’ care facilities within the restructuring and privatisation of this sector. Through an ethnographic comparison in a for-profit and nonprofit facility, we explore what we identify as brutal and soft modes of privatisation within publicly subsidised long-term seniors’ care in Vancouver, British Columbia, and their influence on the material and relational conditions of work and care. Workers in both places are explicit that they deliver only bare-bones care to seniors with increasingly complex care needs, and we document the distinct forms and extent to which these precarious workers give gifts of their time, labour and other resources to compensate for the gaps in care that result from state withdrawal and the extraction of profits within the sector. We nonetheless locate more humane and hopeful processes in the nonprofit facility, where a history of cooperative relations between workers, management and families suggest the possibility of re-valuing the essential work of care.     

Progressive and reactionary rhetoric in the municipal reform debate in New South Wales,Australia

Albert Hirschman's rhetoric of reaction is a potentially powerful typology of the arguments made by both proponents and opponents of reform (1991. The rhetoric of reaction: Perversity, futility, jeopardy. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press). However, scholars have identified a number of gaps in the typology, in particular that it has struggled to explain the lines of rhetoric associated with disputed empirical evidence. This paper reviews Hirschman's typology before applying it to the contentious municipal amalgamation debates currently unfolding in New South Wales, Australia. We then examine the lines of attack open to progressives and reactionaries on the basis of empirical data. We conclude that the use of empirical data opens new lines of rhetoric for both ‘progressives’ and ‘reactionaries’ generally, but that both information costs and complexity significantly affect the timing and penetration of the arguments.     

Planning the post‐political city: exploring public participation in the contemporary Australian city

This special section examines the possibility of meaningful debate and contestation over urban decisions and futures in politically constrained contexts. In doing so, it moves with the post‐political times: critically examining the proliferation of deliberative mechanisms; identifying the informal assemblages of diverse actors taking on new roles in urban socio‐spatial justice; and illuminating the spaces where informal and formal planning processes meet. These questions are particularly pertinent for understanding the processes shaping Australian cities and public participation today.     

Lithic technology and social transformations in the South Indian Neolithic: The evidence from Sanganakallu–Kupgal

Here we examine patterns in stone tool technology among Mesolithic, Neolithic and Iron Age localities in the Sanganakallu–Kupgal site complex, Bellary District, Karnataka, South India. Statistical tests are used to compare proportions of raw materials and artefact types, and to compare central tendencies in metric variables taken on flakes and tools. Lithic-related findings support the inference of at least two distinct technological and economic groups at Sanganakallu–Kupgal, a microlith-focused foraging society on the one hand, and on the other, an agricultural society whose lithic technologies centred upon the production of pressure bladelets and dolerite edge-ground axes. Evidence for continuity in lithic technological processes through time may reflect indigenous processes of development, and a degree of continuity from the Mesolithic through to the Neolithic period. Lithic production appears to have become a specialised and spatially segregated activity by the terminal Neolithic and early Iron Age, supporting suggestions for the emergence of an increasingly complex economy and political hierarchy.     

A comparison of the 1889 and the revised 1903 edition of Somerville and Ross's first novel,An Irish Cousin

In 1903, after the publication of the second volume of the Irish R.M. stories, Edith ?. Somerville and Martin Ross revised and republished their first novel, An Irish Cousin (1889 Somerville, E. OE., and MartinRoss. An Irish Cousin. London: Richard Bentley, 1889. [Google Scholar]), under its original name. They reduced it from two volumes to one, made global revisions to the plot, and edited it at the word and sentence level. More interestingly, they modified the representation of the main Irish protagonists of the gothic plot, both landlords and tenants. To date, no extensive comparison between the two editions exists. The 1889 edition is rare, so commentators have relied on the 1903 edition even though they often cite the social context of the first edition. This article compares the two editions and provides explanations for the revisions, examining the authors’ personal and professional reasons for these changes voiced in their published and unpublished letters and diaries within the cultural, social, and political context of the period. The comparison briefly considers the implications of these changes for theorists of the Irish Gothic.     

Order on the Edge of Empire: Social Network Analysis of Colonial Mission Landscapes in Nuevo México and the Pimería Alta

International Journal of Historical Archaeology - Archaeologists working from a postcolonial framework are increasingly examining how the politics of Indigenous societies in North America...