Keeping the Network out of view: Mining,Distinctions and Exclusion in Melanesia

ABSTRACT This paper examines the ‘property effects’ surrounding competition over access to mining benefits in Papua New Guinea. Under conditions of rapid social change engendered by large scale resource extraction, Lihirian islanders have increasingly recalibrated their social networks, manifest through shifting notions of sociality and obligation, and ownership strategies that seek to limit other people's claims to wealth. These local changes are paralleled by larger and more paradoxical processes: although the state uses the mining project to consolidate itself, Lihirians have consistently challenged the state through their attempts to appropriate the mine for their own ends. By keeping the multiple layers of their social networks out of view, Lihirians deny the connections that can provide others with access to benefits. In considering the strategic responses to the inequalities, discontents and inconsistencies of life in modern Papua New Guinea, it becomes apparent that questions of property are simultaneously questions about identity and belonging.     

Initial source evaluation of archaeological obsidian from the Kuril Islands of the Russian Far East using portable XRF

Obsidian artifacts recently have been recovered from 18 archaeological sites on eight islands across the Kuril Island archipelago in the North Pacific Ocean, suggesting a wide-ranging distribution of obsidian throughout the island chain over the last 2,500 years. Although there are no geologic sources of obsidian in the Kurils that are known to have been used prehistorically, sources exist in Hokkaido, Japan, and Kamchatka, Russia, the southern and northern geographic regions respectively from which obsidian may have entered the Kuril Islands. This paper reports on the initial sourcing attempt of Kuril Islands obsidian through the analysis of 131 obsidian artifacts. Data from this research were generated through the application of portable XRF technology, and are used to address research questions concerning prehistoric mobility, exchange, and social networking in the Kuril Islands.     

Academic travel from Cambridge University and the formation of centres of knowledge, 1885–1954

This paper draws attention to academic travel as a key issue in the geographies of knowledge, science and higher education. Building upon recent work in science studies and geography, it is argued that academic travel reveals the wider geography of scientific work and thus of the knowledge and networks involved. By examining academic travel from Cambridge University in the period 1885 to 1954, the study clarifies its role in the development of Cambridge as a modern research university, the emergence of global knowledge centres elsewhere and the development of an Anglo-American academic hegemony in the twentieth century. Using unpublished archival data on all recorded applications for leave of absence by Cambridge University Teaching Officers, it is further explored how the global geographies of academic travel varied among different types of work, thereby exposing distinct hierarchies of spaces of knowledge production and sites of study.     

Global Public Policy,Transnational Policy Communities,and Their Networks

Public policy has been a prisoner of the word “state.” Yet, the state is reconfigured by globalization. Through “global public–private partnerships” and “transnational executive networks,” new forms of authority are emerging through global and regional policy processes that coexist alongside nation‐state policy processes. Accordingly, this article asks what is “global public policy”? The first part of the article identifies new public spaces where global policies occur. These spaces are multiple in character and variety and will be collectively referred to as the “global agora.” The second section adapts the conventional policy cycle heuristic by conceptually stretching it to the global and regional levels to reveal the higher degree of pluralization of actors and multiple‐authority structures than is the case at national levels. The third section asks: who is involved in the delivery of global public policy? The focus is on transnational policy communities. The global agora is a public space of policymaking and administration, although it is one where authority is more diffuse, decision making is dispersed and sovereignty muddled. Trapped by methodological nationalism and an intellectual agoraphobia of globalization, public policy scholars have yet to examine fully global policy processes and new managerial modes of transnational public administration.     

Regulating unemployment the Continental way: the transfer of municipal labour exchanges to Scandinavia 1890–1914

Statistical knowledge, insurance and labour exchanges constituted the principal elements in the policies developed to handle the new social problem of unemployment in the decades before 1914. Political transfer, the exchange of ideas, problems and policies between reformers all over the modern world, contributed heavily to the making of unemployment. This article analyses the introduction of labour exchanges, a German innovation, in the Nordic countries. Special attention is given to the different settings, both extra- and intra-Nordic, for transfer and cross-learning. The aspiration that the municipal labour exchange, providing a free and impartial service to both employers and workers, would reduce unemployment and social tensions explains its swift introduction.     

Value chains, networks and clusters: reframing the global automotive industry

In this article, we apply global value chain (GVC) analysisto recent trends in the global automotive industry, with specialattention paid to the case of North America. We use the threemain elements of the GVC framework—firm-level chain governance,power and institutions—to highlight some of the definingcharacteristics of this important industry. First, nationalpolitical institutions create pressure for local content, whichdrives production close to end markets, where it tends to beorganized nationally or regionally. Second, in terms of GVCgovernance, rising product complexity combined with low codifiabilityand a paucity of industry-level standards has driven buyer–supplierlinkages toward the relational form, a governance mode thatis more compatible with Japanese than American supplier relations.The outsourcing boom of the 1990s exacerbated this situation.As work shifted to the supply base, lead firms and supplierswere forced to develop relational linkages to support the exchangeof complex uncodified information and tacit knowledge. Finally,the small number of hugely powerful lead firms that drive theautomotive industry helps to explain why it has been so difficultto develop and set the industry-level standards that could underpina more loosely articulated spatial architecture. This case studyunderlines the need for an open, scalable approach to the studyof global industries.     

Global production networks and the extractive sector: governing resource-based development

This article explores the opportunities a GPN approach providesfor understanding the network configurations and regional developmentimpacts associated with extractive industries. The article elaboratestwo core claims: (i) that the application of the GPN analyticalframework provides a way to make progress in a stalled policydebate regarding the linkages between resource extraction andsocio-economic development (popularly known as the ‘resourcecurse thesis’); and (ii) that the encounter between GPNand a natural resource-based sector introduces distinctive issues—associatedwith the materiality and territoriality of extractive commodities—that,to date, GPN has not considered fully. The article examinesthe global production network for oil as an empirical case ofhow extractive industries can provide (limited) opportunitiesfor socio-economic development.     

Partisanship,policy entrepreneurs and the market for ideas: what we can learn from policy failure

ABSTRACT

The Office of Living Victoria (OLV), was established in 2011 by the then Liberal-National Party Coalition Government. It was created in response to a water crisis and intended to revolutionise water management and delivery, challenging established authorities and practices consolidated under the previous Labor government in Victoria. There was a decidedly partisan motivation for its conception. The drive for new ideas and innovation created opportunities for policy entrepreneurs who won the competition against more conventional research advocacy, and determined the agenda of the new agency, in the process curbing an existing policy network. Yet within a short period, this initiative was mired in scandal, and ended in 2014 having failed to achieve its purposes. This article explores this instance of policy failure, assessing the policy trajectory of the OLV in relation to the concepts of partisanship, policy entrepreneurship, and policy networks.     

The Ecology of Games as a Theory of Polycentricity: Recent Advances and Future Challenges

The Ecology of Games approach to examining complex governance systems in democratic societies has been recently refurbished to infuse renewed vitality in the analysis of institutions and collective action in polycentric governance systems. This opening article to the special issue on the Ecology of Games Theory (EGT) will discuss the main component elements of the theory, as well as recently produced empirical advances that test and extend it. The article is structured in three sections. The first section describes the EGT as a theory of polycentricity and explains why it is critical to study both the structure and function of polycentric governance systems, including collaboration among policy stakeholders, learning about problems, and equitably distributing the resources generated by policy interactions. The second section reviews empirical evidence that examine structure and function in polycentric systems, including their coevolution. Finally, the third section will provide insights on future research needs to strengthen this newly developed theory of polycentricity.     

Competitiveness through integration in the European Union Strategy for the Alpine Region: a ‘balanced development’ approach

In the last 10 years, the European Union has devoted specific attention and resources to the establishment of macro-regional strategies, with the objective of joining together transnational areas to favour the effective and organized management of common challenges. In most macro-regions, however, the identification of strategies to increase competitiveness is a rather difficult task, given the extreme internal diversity in economic activities. Focusing on the youngest macro-regional strategy – EUSALP – this paper highlights the specific combinations of territorial growth assets that allow to overcome the inefficient use of local abundant strategic resources, in line with a ‘balanced development’ approach. The results, obtained on the basis of a database gathered at NUTS3 level, are useful to provide policy suggestions to support the competitiveness of EUSALP through synergies and complementarities, according to a cooperation networks perspective.