Making a homeland,constructing a diaspora: The case of Taglit-Birthright Israel

The study of diaspora policies in political science, international relations, and political geography has moved away from conceiving diasporas as bounded entities to conceptualizing diasporas as a process to be made. One body of literature maps different strategies employed to bond diasporas to their country of origin, while another body of literature pays specific attention to diasporic identities and the ways such identities are reproduced and constructed abroad. This article seeks to bring these two literatures together by focusing on homeland tourism as a diasporization strategy, i.e. the construction, reproduction, and transmission of diasporic identity. Through the case of Taglit-Birthright – a free educational trip to Israel offered to young Jewish adults – the article identifies the specific mechanisms and micro-practices used in order to transform Israeli territory into a Jewish homeland, reproduce the narrative of dispersion, and demarcate group boundaries. Incorporating insights from theories of territorialization and based on the program's educational platform and existing ethnographies of Taglit-Birthright, this article unpacks the notion of the homeland and demonstrates how the homeland itself – as an embodied, affective, and symbolic site – is strategically used in order to cultivate diasporic attachments.     

Citizen-led democratic reform: innovations in Indi

Contemporary political systems are experiencing a democratic disconnect between formal institutions of representative government, and the more informal spaces of political participation. Rather than offer an institutional remedy, this article turns to practice and considers how citizens themselves are seeking to transform dysfunctional democratic practices. The article provides an in-depth analysis of democratic events that have unfolded between 2012 and 2017 in the Australian federal electorate of Indi. The analysis explores the intertwined participatory efforts of the citizens’ group, Voices4Indi, and the local Independent federal member, MP Cathy McGowan. The Indi experience demonstrates that while citizens may be frustrated with ‘politics as usual’, they are not rejecting the system but rather instigating creative democratic reforms.     

Legitimacy and Public Policy: Seeing Beyond Effectiveness,Efficiency, and Performance

Studies of failure typically assess public policies through the lenses of effectiveness, efficiency, and performance. Here I wish to propose a further dimension to the evaluation and assessment of policy failure—legitimacy. The substantive elements of public policies and the procedural steps taken by authoritative decision makers during the policy cycle affect the perception of policy legitimacy held by both stakeholders and the public. In substantive terms, policy content should align with the dominant attitudes of the affected policy community and, ideally, the broader public. Procedurally, factors such as policy incubation, the emotive appeals deployed to gain support for an initiative, and the processes of stakeholder engagement shape the legitimacy of public policies and the governments who promote them. This argument is based on a comparison of education reform in two Canadian provinces during the 1990s. Governments in Alberta and Ontario pursued common agendas of education reform, but while Alberta achieved success, the Ontario government experienced a series of setbacks and lost the support of education stakeholders and the public. The root of Ontario's failures lies in the realm of legitimacy. These findings highlight the fact that the strategies used for enacting policy change may fail to bring about the necessary consensus among societal actors to sustain a new policy direction and calls attention to our need to better understand how governments can achieve meaningful public participation while still achieving legislative success in an efficient fashion.     

Development Imperative,Terrae Incognitae: a Pioneer Soil Scientist 1912–1951

James Arthur Prescott was a prominent soil scientist whose career responded to an increasingly complex, recognisably Australian web of interpenetrating spatial scales, served to promote revolutionary global advances in his chosen field, and in the process negotiated the blurred boundaries between ‘pure’ and ‘applied’ research. Encounters with this instructive life suggest that, while resolutions of pivotal anxieties might turn on ineluctably personal qualities, they also reflect a dynamic interplay between international, imperial, national and state contexts. Prescott's innovative contributions to soil science, fruits of a tenaciously consolidated career, influenced resource appraisal and environmental management across a prodigious continental expanse. A sustained focus on local and regional development brought him into contact with a wide range of contemporaries, including pioneering geographers, and culminated in his election to a Fellowship of the Royal Society.     

Improving the use of history by the international humanitarian sector

Abstract

This article challenges the often implicit assumption by historians working on humanitarian history that their work is being read and used by present-day humanitarian workers. Key characteristics of the modern-day humanitarian sector are highlighted, including the unpredictable and often inadequate levels of funding, stressful working conditions and high staff turnover. The article argues that, to a significant degree, the humanitarian sector is ahistorical and locked into a state of ‘perpetual present’. Two principal obstacles to the greater use of historical knowledge within the present-day humanitarian sector are identified as being the limited accessibility of the available literature on humanitarian history and the perceptions that the work of humanitarian historians is of limited relevance. The paper concludes by describing recent initiatives including the planned humanitarianhistory.org website which is intended to improve the accessibility of the available literature and facilitate engagement and co-production between historians and humanitarian workers.     

尺度政治中的空间重叠及其制度形态塑造研究——以深汕特别合作区为例

以深汕特别合作区为例,借鉴依赖空间和交互空间分析思路,对基于共同利益而非对抗性的尺度政治过程进行分析。其中,深圳市对连续依赖空间的建构、汕尾市对依赖空间交互功能的挖掘、广东省在交互空间中的管制试验等分别定义了它们各自的依赖空间和交互空间,这些空间在多个尺度上相互重叠,并集中体现在深汕特别合作区这一新的尺度和制度空间中。在这种情况下,各行动者依赖和交互空间的性质、行动者间的相对权力关系以及各自掌握的不同资源等因素共同塑造了合作区的组织架构、管理权限和利益分配等制度形态。     

Engaging with Economic Geography in the ‘Real’ World: A Central Role for Field Teaching

Debates concerning how to engage students with economic geography have ignored the important role of field teaching. This paper argues that fieldwork must remain a key component of economic geographical teaching and that it offers a variety of advantages to overcoming student disinterest in the sub-discipline. It goes on to argue that field teaching must be developed, not neglected, in economic geography and illustrates its pedagogical advantages with reference to the example of a field class in north-east England.     

Network Governance and the 2020 Summit

The idea that governance has replaced government, and that networks have replaced hierarchy as the dominant mode of governance, have become mainstream views in the public policy literature. In this article, we consider a key initiative of the Rudd government in Australia, the 2020 Summit, which, at first sight, seems like an example of network governance in action. Having considered the operation and outcomes of the Summit, however, we argue that it more accurately illustrates how governments, perhaps particularly in Westminster systems, attempt to preserve hierarchy, through a process of metagovernance.     

Collaboration and Partnership Development for Sustainable Tourism

Abstract

For many years, the need to improve sustainability in the tourism industry has been widely recognized. Many destinations have attempted to move toward sustainability, but unfortunately, have been hindered in their attempts by a lack of collaboration among stakeholders that is necessary to support their sustainability agendas. Collaboration, specifically through multi-stakeholder partnerships, has been seen as an effective way to support initiatives in tourism development. Through the lens of Gray's collaboration theory and Selin and Chavez's tourism partnership model, the success of collaboration and partnerships in tourism development on the island of Gili Trawangan, Indonesia, will be examined. Through a multi-method approach consisting of an environmental audit and semi-structured interviews, this paper explores the implementation of a multi-stakeholder partnership. The partnership that has been developed, called the Gili Ecotrust, provides an example of successful collaboration, leading to the implementation of innovative sustainability initiatives on the island.