Mapping Submerged Landscapes Using Multibeam Bathymetric Data: a case study from the north coast of Ireland

This paper outlines work currently being undertaken to reconstruct submerged archaeological landscapes off the north coast of Ireland. This research uses the recently‐completed Joint Irish Bathymetric Survey (JIBS), which has provided full‐coverage high‐resolution multibeam bathymetric data for the sea‐bed off the north coast. This data has been examined for evidence of past sea‐level change and been used to produce palaeo‐geographic reconstructions of the past landscape, which in turn have facilitated the identification of ten areas of high archaeological potential. The results presented here will form the basis of a future programme of archaeological survey and prospection. © 2010 The Authors     

What Accounts for the Resilience and Vulnerability of Clusters? The Case of Istanbul's Film Industry

In this paper, the film cluster in Turkey's cultural capital, Istanbul, is examined with the ultimate purpose of contributing towards a better understanding of the dynamics shaping the resilience and vulnerability of clusters. The paper seeks to shed light on the issue of how and why, in the face of a similar set of threats, Hollywood has proved so resilient but Istanbul's film cluster so vulnerable. Scrutinizing the emergence and the subsequent lock-in of the particular path followed by the Istanbul cluster and investigating the attributes of the proximate business environment that have been shaped along the way reveal that sustainability of a cluster seems to depend on three interrelated factors: how the cluster participants strategically respond to the upcoming threats, the structural capacity of the cluster to overcome such threats, and finally, the macro-socio-economic conditions (both at the national and global levels) against which the challenges occur and which mitigate or exacerbate them.     

Karl Polanyi and the Modernity-versus-Postmodernity Debate

The originality of Karl Polanyi's work in the interwar period has gained increasing recognition in recent years, during which time the major debate on modernity has erupted. In order to link Polanyi's work with this debate, I will first discuss his legacy on the controversial concept of progress, and then relate his position to this debate. It is my contention that Polanyi's position combines the better aspects of the two rival approaches to modernity. I will then re-link Polanyi's thought to the intellectual figures, movements and climate of his time and thereby disclose a curious affinity between his thought and the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School. This affinity can best be understood within the parameters of the historical context that they once shared.     

Changing public accountability mechanisms in the governance of Dutch urban regeneration*

Contemporary urban planning dynamics are based on negotiation and contractual relations, creating fragmented planning processes. On the one hand, they trigger technocratic forms of governance, which require the ‘legal instrumentalisation’ of planning in a piecemeal approach ensuring legal certainty. On the other hand, these processes require flexibility to enable easy, fast and efficient forms of implementation due to the increasing involvement of private sector actors in urban development. This article unravels the influence of these conflicting dynamics on the fundamentals of urban planning practices by focusing on changing public accountability mechanisms created through contractual relationships between public and private sector agencies. Dutch urban regeneration has demonstrated changing governance principles and dynamics in the last three decades. Representing instrumental and institutional measures, we connect accountability mechanisms to these changes and argue that they ‘co-exist’ in multiple forms across different contexts. This article embeds this evolution in wider theoretical discussions on the changing relationships between public and private sector actors in urban governance relative to the changing role of the state, and it addresses questions on who can be held accountable, and to what extent, when public sector actors are increasingly retreating from regulatory practices while private sector actors play increasingly prominent roles.     

The Political Life of Natural Infrastructure: Water Funds and Alternative Histories of Payments for Ecosystem Services in Valle del Cauca,Colombia

This article shows the two-way relation between global norms and local conditions as they shape Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) theory and practice, through a case study of a water fund in Valle del Cauca, Colombia, the heartland of the country's sugarcane industry. Drawing on interviews, survey data and historical research, the article argues that the water fund should be understood in the context of the history of infrastructure for the sugarcane industry in the region, and that this infrastructural perspective provides a more nuanced insight into the fund's political life than the traditional PES framing. Furthermore, the article shows how the norms embedded in this locally grown programme circulated through international networks to influence PES theory and design. This case offers one example of the need to attend to the multiple and geographically specific histories of actually existing PES in order to understand its diversity in the present.     

Biopolitical Violence and Waiting: Hotspot as a Biopolitical Borderzone

This paper conceptualises Lesvos hotspot as a biopolitical borderzone where migrants experience concentrated violent practices of borders, including legal exclusion, presence of exclusionary surveillance and absence of surveillance for safety, degrading living conditions, and waiting. The paper also discusses the biopolitical consequences of these practices for migrants such as physical illnesses and injuries, and psychological disorders. The paper contributes to the scholarship on biopolitical borders in two main ways. First, through conceptualising hotspot as a form of biopolitical borderzone and demonstrating the specific biopolitical practices in the Lesvos hotspot and their effects on migrants. Second, through highlighting the key role of waiting in the operations of the biopolitical border. The paper demonstrates how waiting is entangled in a complex way with other biopolitical practices and how it both creates and amplifies biopolitical effects for migrants.     

The Role of Pilot Projects in Urban Climate Change Policy Innovation

Cities are taking a leadership role in addressing global climate change and reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, but policy innovations are needed to help cities move from goals to outcomes. Pilot projects are one means by which cities are experimenting with new ways of governing and financing climate change mitigation. In this paper, we develop a framework for understanding the role of pilot projects in urban policy innovation: their emergence and rationale, and the means by which they ultimately scale up and out to reduce GHG emissions. We use this framework to evaluate a pilot project for retrofitting social housing buildings in Toronto. We find the initial pilot project helped address the challenges of pursuing deep retrofits of social housing. Scaling these lessons up to the city level required overcoming challenges to financing and coordinating a larger project; scaling out to the provincial level revealed institutional and political obstacles to pursuing the co-benefits of deep building retrofits in social housing. Bridging agents play an important role in both scaling processes. The analysis reveals the additive nature of urban policy innovation and the dynamic interplay of change agents and institutional and political context in innovation processes.     

Resource extraction and national anxieties: China’s economic presence in Mongolia

Abstract

Over the last two decades and particularly in the last 10 years, Chinese investment in Mongolia has skyrocketed, with the vast majority of the country’s exports now flowing to China. As foreign investment has grown in Mongolia, particularly in the mining sector, apprehension circulates about the extension and meaning of increased Chinese power. We argue that contemporary anxieties about China’s economic influence in Mongolia go beyond recent and contemporary political economic issues and are tied to memories of the Qing Dynasty. Controversies surrounding Mongolia’s flagship mine, the Oyu Tolgoi copper–gold mine in South Gobi province, demonstrate how even non-Chinese foreign mining operations are intertwined with Mongolia’s past and future relationships with China. Rather than acting simply as resource nationalists, the people and government of Mongolia often see contemporary Chinese economic power through a historical lens, with fears of declining sovereignty and becoming Chinese through control over land and resources. This paper draws on fieldwork conducted by the authors in Mongolia from 2009 to 2015 and contributes to discussions about fears of Chinese influence, extractive industry development, and resource nationalism in Mongolia.     

War as Feminized Labour in the Global Political Economy of Neoimperialism

ABSTRACT

This article examines the structures of international relations that facilitate political violence in postcolonial states. It explores the intersections of patriarchy and imperialism in the contemporary political economy to understand how armed conflict and political violence in postcolonial states form an integral element of the global economy of accumulation in deeply gendered ways. By focusing on the structural level of analysis, this article argues that the siting of armed conflict in postcolonial contexts serves to maintain neo-colonial relations of exploitation between the West and non-West, and is made both possible and effective through the gendering of political identities and types of work performed in the global economy. I argue here that armed conflict is a form of feminized labour in the global economy. Despite the fact that performing violence is a physically masculine form of labour, the outsourcing of armed conflict as labour in the political economy is ‘feminized’ in that it represents the flexibilization of labour and informalization of market participation. So while at the same time that this work is fulfilling hegemonic ideals of militarized masculinity within the domestic context, at the international level it actually demonstrates the ‘weakness’ or ‘otherness’ of the ‘failed’/feminized state in which this violence occurs, and legitimizes and hence re-entrenches the hegemonic relations between the core and periphery on the basis of problematizing the ‘weak’ state’s masculinity. It is through the discursive construction of the non-Western world as the site of contemporary political violence that mainstream international relations reproduces an orientalist approach to both understanding and addressing the ‘war puzzle’.     

REFINING ESTIMATES FOR THE SEASON OF SHELLFISH COLLECTION ON THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST COAST: APPLYING HIGH‐RESOLUTION STABLE OXYGEN ISOTOPE ANALYSIS AND SCLEROCHRONOLOGY

Stable oxygen isotopes from estuarine bivalve carbonate from Saxidomus gigantea were analysed combined with high‐resolution sclerochronology from modern and archaeological shells from British Columbia, Canada, to determine the seasonality of shellfish collection from the archaeological site of Namu. The combination of high‐resolution sclerochronology and a micro‐milled sampling strategy for δ¹⁸O analysis permits a precise estimate of archaeological seasonality, because seasonal freshwater influxes and changes in temperature have dual effects on the δ¹⁸O value of the shell. Sclerochronological analysis identifies the timing and duration of growth that is temporally aligned to stable oxygen isotope results, since δ¹⁸O_shell appears to be strongly influenced by seasonal inputs of very low δ¹⁸O snowmelt‐water from adjacent coastal mountain ranges. The results show that shellfish were collected year‐round at this site over a 4000‐year period, and these data combined with other zooarchaeological lines of evidence support the interpretation of year‐round occupation.