Strand,David,An Unfinished Republic: Leading by Word and Deed in Modern China

Mobility and mutability;appeals for public support;desires to construct public opinion;claims to reflect the public will.Thus does David Strand describe the early years of the Republic of China from about 1912 to 1924,when political institutions failed but a republican political culture was nonetheless established.Mobility refers to activists and politicians and soldiers who moved all around the country and sometimes abroad,and mutability to their capacity to take on different roles,from conspirator to journalist to senator.Strand's richly textured study conveys the political passions of this period,and argues that it shaped how voices would be subsequently raised against even the harshest political oppression.     

'Respect the life of the countryside': the Country Code, government and the conduct of visitors to the countryside in post-war England and Wales

Geographers examining the spaces of government and governance, and in particular those drawing upon the writings of Michel Foucault on government and governmentality, have tended to overlook the importance of different media, technical devices and practices of self-government to specific rationalities and programmes of government. In this paper I argue that the materialities and immaterialities of many mundane media technologies, the way they articulate and translate particular programmes of government, and the way they instil practices of self-government in citizens, are important but frequently overlooked dimensions of the geographies of government. I focus on the codes of countryside conduct – The Country Code/Countryside Code – that have been published in England and Wales since 1951. I examine how the National Parks Commission, and subsequently the Countryside Commission and Countryside Agency, identified the potential strengths and limitations of using the Country Code booklet to govern the conduct of visitors to the countryside. The paper shows how the material form of the booklet and methods of distributing and promoting it were seen to matter, and examines how civil servants attempted to extend the 'reach' of the Code and articulate its message through a diverse range of media which entailed different kinds of performative encounters in different spaces.     

Policy Coherence and Component-Driven Policymaking: Arctic Policy in Canada and the United States

This research extends theorizing about the implications of political environments to the content of policy areas. We consider the case of Arctic policy in Canada and the United States as an example of what we label as component-driven policymaking. We show how the lack of a clear constituency and the lack of a stable policy subsystem for the Arctic create a policy environment for which the politics of particular issues dominate Arctic policymaking. The result is a policy space labeled Arctic policy that lacks policy coherence. We suggest that similar features of component-based policymaking help explain limited policy coherence for a variety of policy areas such as policies for children, families, rural areas, urban areas, and women in the United States.     

The Contribution of Volunteering, Trust, and Networks to Educational Performance

Social capital can have a beneficial effect on public policy outcomes by helping to solve collective action problems and by providing individuals and communities with efficient social networks. In education, it also assists students' self-confidence, which can foster motivation and academic success. To investigate the social capital-outcome link, this article analyzes a panel survey of 15–16 and 16–17 year olds in 27 English schools, testing whether social capital, both at the individual and at the school levels, tends to increase grades and examination performance. The analysis concludes that individual-level trust and voluntary action improve pupil performance, but that the parental networks of some young people, particularly those from low socioeconomic status families, have negative rather than positive consequences. The findings add to a debate about the differential impact of social capital and the relative importance of its bridging and its bonding elements.     

Afghanistan: the reconstruction process

In this article the author focuses initially on the degree of support provided by the international community to the interim administration of Afghanistan and notes that the pledges made at the Tokyo Conference do not equate to the per capita levels of funding made available for other recent emergencies. He draws attention to the inter–relationship between security and funding for reconstruction and comments that the recent decision of the US government to join with others in agreeing to finance work to upgrade the major highway system is very timely in shoring up the regime in the wake of the recent assassination attempt on Hamid Karzai. He stresses that the international community needs to provide sustained support to the new government if it is to survive. He also analyses the complex relationship between the administration and the aid community and reports on the calls by the government to be given the major part of the resources allocated by international donors and to be supported to take the lead in determining policy and strategy.
The author notes the nature of the Afghan economy and the potential for reconstruction, taking account of the economic impact of the conflict, the progress made by the aid community since 1992, the humanitarian crisis arising from the drought of 1999–2001 and the large scale, mainly involuntary, return of refugees from Pakistan and Iran since March 2002. He comments on the fact that the agricultural economy cannot support its population, on the need for economic safety valves in the form of migration to Pakistan and Iran, on the availability of camps for internally displaced people, and on urbanization. In concluding the author is both optimistic and cautious, noting the fragility of the situation, but also acknowledging that the international community is taking timely action to address it through reconstruction assistance although it remains reluctant to give sufficient priority to security provision.