The politics of discretion: Authority and influence in asylum dispersal

This paper considers how discretion, understood as both a capacity to make decisions and a form of influence that is often hidden, operates within the accommodation and support of asylum seekers. Combining critical discussions of discretion with accounts of a ‘local turn’ in migration policy, I argue that discretion plays a key role in shaping how policy is implemented and offers insight into the changing governance of asylum at national and local levels. Drawing on empirical material examining the development of the UK's asylum dispersal system, the paper extends accounts of discretion beyond ‘street-level’ to argue for a focus on how discretion reflects different claims to institutional authority. Addressing four accounts of discretion in dispersal, I argue that tracing discretion can offer insights into how ‘implementation gaps’ in asylum policy are negotiated and how tensions between national and local governments are contained. Tracing discretion in this way may advance critical interrogations of power relations in welfare bureaucracies and develop understandings of institutional agency and influence within liberal democracies.     

The socio-ecological fix by multi-scalar states: The development of ‘Greenways of Paradise’ in Chengdu

This paper examines the recent green turn in China by investigating a large-scale urban greenway project. Using the perspective of the socio-ecological fix, we demonstrate that multi-scalar states strive to upgrade environmental quality. Specifically, the local state seizes the opportunity for ‘ecological civilisation’ envisioned by the central state to carry out green infrastructure development. We reveal complex motivations to incorporate ecological changes into entrepreneurial urban governance instead of encroaching greenspace for economic growth. Our state-centred analysis reveals that such an environmental strategy, the making of Chinese green urbanism, is promoted like a political mission, despite its operation by the development corporation. We argue that, while the socio-ecological fix facilitates capital accumulation, its deployment must be understood through state politics and actors.     

Staking claims: Hybrid governance and state-making on the North Kosovo frontier

This article examines how state and non-state actors claim public authority in areas of contested sovereignty. It develops the concept of the frontier as a point of departure. As zonal spaces of weakly established or overlapping authority, frontiers have historically been sites of collaboration between state and non-state actors. Extending the concept to shed light on contemporary forms of state and non-state governing arrangements, I argue that frontiers can be can also be analysed across specific domains of public authority. I highlight three domains in particular: the symbolic domain, where the state is imagined as a collective actor; the contractual domain, which depends on the use of public services to establish a social contract; and the protective domain, the classic Hobbesian justification for the state as a provider of security. Applying the frontier framework to North Kosovo, I argue that Serbia has sustained a near monopoly over the symbolic and contractual domains in the contested region yet is severely constrained in the protective domain. As a result, Belgrade has relied on outsourcing authority to local illicit actors to maintain leverage. However, these actors have also carved out their own autonomous forms of authority and actively manipulate the ambiguous political boundaries in North Kosovo to their advantage.     

大都市区跨界地区空间演化及动力机制研究

本文结合中央—地方政府管治特征,以临沪地区为实证案例,提出大都市区跨界地区在中央政府和地方政府协调治理下经历了三个阶段的发展。现阶段发展目标和治理主体均呈现出不同于以往的新特征：在区县级地方政府和省市级地方政府以提升地区竞争力为目标的企业型治理下,跨界地区逐渐兴起并实现社会经济的快速发展;在中央政府运动型治理下,跨界地区进入以协调区域功能为主的发展阶段。随着跨界发展不断深入,跨界地区空间结构由散点式分布转为以开发区为核心的产城融合空间,最终转型为融入中心城市网络的重要节点。研究总结了大都市区跨界地区各阶段发展的时空格局,提出跨界地区发展的治理逻辑及其动力机制,对区域协同治理提供了经验借鉴。     

The Magic of Money and the Magic of the State: Fast Money Schemes in Papua New Guinea

As Keith Hart (1986) articulated in his neat phrase ‘two sides of the coin’, money and the state are inextricably intertwined. However, academic discussions of the state tend to fall under the heading of ‘governance’, with implicit reference to democratic ideals, while money is regarded as ‘economics’, a field dominated by ideas of the market. In this paper, I use material from U‐Vistract, a mass Ponzi scam to show how quasi‐magical ideas of money and wealth have grown out of the disillusioning experience of the state in its failure to deliver ‘development’. These imaginings of prosperity entail a different kind of state, based on the moral reform of Christian citizens and political leaders and the reorientation of the banking system to deliver benefits to ordinary people. As the Royal Kingdom of Papala, U‐Vistract sought to be seen to be like a Christian state and so deceived its investors into thinking that they were participating in a moral project that would allow them to redress the short‐comings of the Papua New Guinean state. As the scam took on the appearance of the state, so the state came to be seen as a scam.     

Petitions from Peripheries of Empire: Louisiana and Québec

As stress on water resources increases from growing human demands and a changing climate, recognition of the need to develop effective strategies for water governance is expanding. Consequently, it is timely to consider the legacy of effective instances of water policy innovation that have been highly influential in water resource management in Canada. We present two historical examples of policy transfer – that is, when policy employed in one jurisdiction is adapted for use in another. The first is the late nineteenth-century adoption of water allocation law in the North-West Territories that was a noteworthy departure from how water had been allocated in eastern Canada. The second is the twentieth-century introduction of conservation authorities in Ontario as regional watershed-based management entities. These examples illustrate how, in an era of expert-driven natural resources management, notions of governance were adapted from Australia and the United States. They also reveal how the biophysically-based policy context of water influences which policy transfer mechanisms are appropriate for lesson-learning. We conclude that the potential for policy transfer and lesson-learning to shorten the policy innovation timeline must be viewed as a critical response to urgent and evolving demands on water.     

Voluntary Environmental Governance Arrangements in the Australian Building Sector

Voluntary environmental governance arrangements (VEGAs) are designed to minimise negative outcomes through the use of collectively agreed arrangements. They have attracted a large literature, but issues remain unresolved, especially regarding their effectiveness. This article takes up a small part of this challenge of mapping the role of VEGAs in larger systems of environmental governance by examining the development and implementation of a range of VEGAs in the Australian building sector, here defined as the construction and use of buildings.

人们设计了自愿环境治理计划,意在通过集体认同的安排尽量减少消极结果。它吸引了大量文献的关注,但问题依旧是问题,特别在效率方面。本文试图回答其中一小部分问题,通过考察其在澳大利亚建筑部门（这里定义为建筑和建筑物的使用）,看看自愿环境治理计划在更大的环境治理中究竟扮演什么样的角色。     

Heritage diplomacy

This paper explores the concept of heritage diplomacy. To date much of the analysis regarding the politics of heritage has focused on contestation, dissonance and conflict. Heritage diplomacy seeks to address this imbalance by critically examining themes such as cooperation, cultural aid and hard power, and the ascendency of intergovernmental and non-governmental actors as mediators of the dance between nationalism and internationalism. The paper situates heritage diplomacy within broader histories of international governance and diplomacy itself. These are offered to interpret the interplay between the shifting forces and structures, which, together, have shaped the production, governance and international mobilisation of heritage in the modern era. A distinction between heritage as diplomacy and in diplomacy is outlined in order to reframe some of the ways in which heritage has acted as a constituent of cultural nationalisms, international relations and globalisation. In mapping out directions for further enquiry, I argue the complexities of the international ordering of heritage governance have yet to be teased out. A framework of heritage diplomacy is thus offered in the hope that it can do some important analytical work in the field of critical heritage theory, opening up some important but under theorised aspects of heritage analysis.     

Economic policy and development in Austrian Lombardy, 1815-1859

The question of economic integration is not new in Europe. Historically, the birth and construction of nation-states was important in stimulating interest in the systematic relationships between political and economic integration. In the case of the multinational structure of the Habsburg monarchy in the nineteenth century, the result was an economic policy that, for political reasons, aimed to unite the material interests of a state that was completely heterogeneous in other respects. Lombardy was a case in point. Traditionally the region had been in the economic vanguard in central Europe. When it again became part of Austria in 1815 it also became subject to the imperial policy of political integration. As a result its economic priorities were partially reformulated. On the one hand, Austria had a protectionist system aimed at autarky which made incentives to industrial production a priority. Lombardy's purely mercantilist outlook, on the other hand, was based around the production of a few highly specialized goods, most notably silk, for export. Conflict between economic interests in Lombardy was the inevitable result. Nevertheless, the imperial government had to take account of the fact that it was impossible to restrict Lombardy's international trade relations exclusively to the Austrian market. And the problems that beset any effort to tie the Lombard economy into a denser network of relationships with the Austrian market were not due to the political formation of the Italian nation because Northern Italy, and Lombardy in particular, continued to occupy an anomalous position within the context of the Italian economy.