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.     

Geographies of exploration and improvement: William Scoresby and Arctic whaling, 1782–1822

Although historians of the long eighteenth century have broadened our understanding of the concept of improvement beyond the agrarian reforms of a landed elite, to other social groups and geographical settings, the private ownership and access to the resources of the oceans and seas are phenomena that have until recently been largely neglected. This paper examines the concept of improvement in the maritime context by exploring a range of tensions between whaling as a form of economic private self-interest on the one hand and as a source of disinterested, virtuous knowledge about the oceans and the animal kingdom on the other hand. William Scoresby, a leading whaling captain and improver, embodied the spirit of those northern European nations which competed to improve the maritime sphere of the northern ocean by implementing different social and technical schemes of enlightenment. He went further than developing new and more efficient and profitable whaling technologies by cultivating disinterested virtue through providing privately obtained natural history specimens from the Greenland Seas for gentleman of science. This in turn gave him entry to participate in the civic circles of polite science and imperial networks of natural history. Although the ascent from industrial whaling in pursuit of profit to disinterested whaling in pursuit of science and exploration made perfect sense to Scoresby, his implicit social improvement laid him open to criticism from those who for different reasons disapproved of the marriage of industrial artisanship and polite natural history. The complexity of Scoresby's identity as an improver is revealed through Robert Jameson, the Professor of Natural History at Edinburgh University, who jealously controlled access to Scoresby's specimens, research, and publications from the Greenland Seas, while simultaneously promoting Scoresby as an intrepid, disinterested captain capable of representing the nation as an Arctic explorer. Through Jameson's Wernerian Natural History Society, they called on government to finance Arctic exploration to reach the North Pole, benefit science, and subsidise the costs through whaling. Their plans were consistent with a long tradition of commercial improvement serving state interests. The Royal Navy's response, to wrest control of Arctic exploration, was by contrast, not a rejection of improvement per se, but rather a determination to place itself at the centre of improvement, by renewing the Board of Longitude with elite, improvement-minded, gentlemen of science, while damning Scoresby with faint praise as an accomplished artisan.     

Detection of archaeological crop marks by using satellite QuickBird multispectral imagery

The capability of satellite QuickBird imagery for the identification of archaeological crop marks is herein presented and discussed for two test sites located in the South of Italy. The selected sites, dating back to Middle Ages, were buried under surfaces covered by herbaceous plants characterized by a different phenological status (dry/green) when the satellite data were acquired.     

The Changing Circumpolar World for Canada,Quebec, Nunavik,and the Arctic Council

ABSTRACT

Arctic Quebec is one piece of the puzzle comprising the Circumpolar World. In fact, almost one-third of Quebec’s territory lies within the Canadian Arctic. This geographic fact places Nunavik and its people squarely in economic and political affairs swirling around the Circumpolar World, but so far their political involvement has been minimal. This article explores three main themes: the Arctic nature of Nunavik; Nunavik’s place in the political corridors of the Arctic Council, Canada, and the Circumpolar World; and global warming as a link between these topics, because of its impact on the Arctic environment and peoples and because of the growing interest of non-Arctic nations in the Arctic.     

城市容积率确定的技术要点透视

容积率是反映城市土地利用强度的一项重要指标。本文提出了利用大比例尺航空像片测定现状容积率的技术路线和方法。对于规划容积率,可通过逐层控制、地块测算和因素修正的方法,予以确定。     

论旅游意象属性及其构成

本文从对英文Image本意的探究辨析入手,指出,作为核心范畴的意象应当是内在底蕴和外在形象有机结合,进而从分析层面对意义、意识和意蕴以及物象、视象和心象的联系和差异进行阐释,从综合层面尝试对内在底蕴和外在形象的互动生成机制予以说明.     

Postcolonial polar cities? New indigenous and cosmopolitan urbanness in the Arctic

ABSTRACT

The arrival into geography, and especially urban geography, of a frame of questioning coming from postcolonial studies has contributed to a fascinating debate about what a “postcolonial” city is and how the urban duality between ethnically, socially, and spatially segregated “European” towns and “native” settlements is being reformulated and transformed. Obviously, Arctic cities are not postcolonial in the political sense of being independent from the former colonial centre – although this process may be under way in Greenland – but they have seen a progressive move from a Eurocentric culture toward greater hybridization. This article looks into two new trends that contribute to making Arctic cities postcolonial: first, the arrival of indigenous peoples in cities and the concomitant diminution of the division between Europeans/urbanites and natives/rurals; and second, the arrival of labour migrants from abroad, which has given birth to a more plural and cosmopolitan citizenry. It advances the idea that Arctic cities are now in a position to play a “decolonizing” role, in the sense of progressively erasing the purely European aspect of the city and making it both more local and rooted (through indigenous communities) and more global and multicultural (through foreign labour migrants).     

Norwegian and Soviet/Russian World War II Memory Policy During the Cold War and the Post-Soviet Years

Abstract

World War II has played a significant role in using “memory” in all kind of “memory politics” in Europe as well as in the USA. Using examples from Norway and the Soviet Union, later the Russian Republic, this article shows how successfully, but also how contradictorily, historical events can be used as memory politics. We will also see what “memory culture” and “memory policy” is predominant in circumpolar Norway and the Soviet Union/Russia after World War II. We are introduced to the concept of “memory agents”, the producers and directors of “memory politics”. The case is first and foremost the battle of Narvik in Norway in the spring of 1940. We also take a look at the circumpolar borderland between Norway and the Soviet Union during World War II, where the German “Gebirgsjäger” from the Narvik front regrouped and continued their assault on Soviet Union in Murmansk County from the summer of 1941. In what way were the war events useful in the post war era, and how could they directly affect Soviet–Norwegian relations during the Cold War? In addition we ask how memories contributed to the justification of different approaches to the foreign policy in both countries. Besides, the article demonstrates how the memory policy of World War II was affected after the end of the Cold War and the fall of the Soviet Union in Norway and Russia, respectively.     

Explorers’ Bodies in Arctic Mediascapes: Celebrating the Return of the Austro-Hungarian Polar Expedition in 1874

Abstract

This article investigates the welcoming receptions held on the return of the Austro-Hungarian Polar Expedition (1872–1874) as part of a Scandinavian and Central European discourse of the Arctic and of Arctic exploration. Also called the Payer–Weyprecht or Tegetthoff Expedition, it was subjected to a long series of such public celebrations on its way home to Austria–Hungary via Norway, Sweden and Germany. While our access to these celebrations is through written sources such as newspaper reports, the celebrations themselves are here seen as constituting a discourse primarily made up of performative and material elements. This discourse is formed by values such as heroism, national identities, local identities, class and gender, and is regulated by the mediascape of the time, which gives a central role to the explorers’ bodies. The article focuses on welcoming receptions in Bergen and in Vienna. Differences between dominant topoi such as those of science and gendered attraction in Bergen and those of spectacular simulacra and exhaustion in Vienna can be ascribed to a combination of factors, but especially to the differences in the development of mass culture in the two contexts.