Learning policy—the contextual curtain and conceptual barriers

Many European states are now giving attention to strategic planning as a means of coordinating and democratizing local government. The UK government is not alone in seeing some form of ‘community planning’ as a means of promoting closer sectoral integration in policy‐making and service delivery while also encouraging public participation. This suggests scope for comparative research to inform lesson drawing, especially from Norway, which has been rolling out kommuneplan at the municipality level since 1985. Cross‐national lesson‐drawing is hazardous, however, given the different legal, political and cultural traditions which make policies ‘work’ in particular local settings. In this article these difficulties are acknowledged and ethnographic research is used to explore further problems in lesson‐drawing, especially the very different ways in which concepts of participation and integration are given meaning in particular national contexts. Through comparative ethnographies of community planning processes in Asker Municipality, Norway, and South Lanarkshire Council, Scotland, remarkable similarities are revealed in the language and objectives of the planning documents in each setting, but show that this belies important differences in the relations between administrative and political domains, in the governing role of plan statements, and in the underlying theories of democracy.     

Why be witty? Fichte and Kant on the nature of wit with a view to wit's political ramifications

In a brief section of The Characteristics of the Present Age, Fichte presents one of the strangest ideas to have arisen in transcendental thought: that wit is related to what Fichte calls the highest idea and to truth. The concept of wit does not arise anywhere else in Fichte's philosophy, and he does not analyze it completely in either The Characteristics of the Present Age or his philosophical texts. I contend that Fichte does not expand upon his idea because his understanding of wit arises out of the Kantian analysis of wit, even though Fichte gives his own spin to Kant's view. What I show in this paper is how Fichte both appropriates and alters Kant's understanding of wit, and how wit serves a social/political function in Fichte's thought.     

Conditional recognition as an instrument of ethnic conflict regulation: the European Community and Yugoslavia

The European Community's conditional recognition of new states in Yugoslavia in 1991–2 represents the revival of an approach to ethnic conflict management that harks back to the Congress of Berlin (1878) and the minority treaties negotiated at the end of the First World War. Despite the historic parallels, and the continued relevance of this approach to ethnic conflict regulation, scholars have given scant attention to the strategic logic governing the EC's use of recognition. This article seeks to recover the conceptual thinking behind the EC's recognition policy. It argues that however much extra‐strategic considerations may have informed EC policy and however imperfectly that policy may have been implemented, conditional recognition represented a genuine attempt to address some of the presumed sources of violent conflict in the region.     

'That Beijing Thing': Challenging transnational feminisms in Kampala

How does the representation of gender in the transnational 'gender and development' discourse shape lived social relationships? This article draws on research carried out in Kampala, capital of Uganda, a site of extensive development initiatives over the last 15 years. Analysing the way gender is discussed within the local print media and in a series of interviews and focus groups, the article shows how Ugandans interpret the 'gender and development' discourse as a European feminist agenda. The article demonstrates that middle-class Ugandans localise these 'transnational feminisms' by rejecting overt labels such as 'activist' or 'feminist'. Insisting that a 'Ugandan' approach to gender issues should be based on the principle of consensus rather than conflict, women and men negotiate appropriate masculinities and femininities in response.     

Provenance studies of Esie sculptural soapstone from southwestern Nigeria

A group of soapstone statues found near the village of Esie in southwestern Nigeria is one of the largest collections of prehistoric sculpture found in sub-Saharan Africa. The statues were found at Esie by people of the Igbomina sub-grouping of the Yoruba ethnic group when they settled in the Esie area some 300 years ago. The origin of the statues remains unknown. Several areas of soapstone in the Nigerian Schist Belt are considered as potential source areas for the Esie statues. Mineral assemblages, textures, and compositions of talc, cummingtonite, and chlorite from some of the statues suggest a source for the statue soapstone from the Agbonda area, the closest proposed source area to Esie. However, mineralogic data from one of the statues are unlike any of the proposed source areas. The result of our study, together with earlier studies of Stevens, Hambolu and Onabajo provides strong evidence that the soapstone statues were carved from local ultramafic rocks from Esie area.     

From trusteeship to development: how class and gender complicated Kenya's housing policy, 1939–1963

Colonial rule required the control of territory, nowhere more than in cities. In the early twentieth century, colonial policy in Kenya and the rest of East and Southern Africa had only grudgingly accommodated Africans in urban areas. After 1939 policy changed, not only in response to poor local conditions and social unrest but also because London's new colonial development policy made a place for African workers in towns. From 1940, new housing and colonial policies acknowledged the importance of the discourses of class and gender. Administrators stabilised an African working class by building better municipal housing, and then sought to fashion a middle class by promoting home ownership. They began to promote housing for families, having recognised that African women could help to make their men at home in the city, and to educate children to become good citizens. The evolution of Kenya's housing policy illuminates the characteristic pressures, calculations, and responses of colonial rule that were being played out internationally in the late colonial period.     

Is Geography (Still) a Science?

Geographic science remains contested. The practice of geographic science has long been criticized on both methodological and institutional grounds, often justifiably. Even more serious is the continuing assault on the very idea of science as the objective discovery of and search for explanation in the university, including human behaviour in space and place. This essay argues that a scientific epistemology is incompatible with a relativistic one.