中国行政区划改革的内卷化风险及其生成机制

透过对行政区划调整现象与文献的梳理，发现中国部分政区有“改而不变”的倾向，本文借用“内卷化”的概念对这种现象及其效应进行探讨，指出政区改革在行政层级、运行逻辑、空间关系、职能配置等方面都存在着“内卷化”隐忧。在此基础上，通过对国家结构、行政区划的资源属性和行政区经济之间关联的分析，阐释了政区改革内卷化的生成机制，认为行政区划配置资源的功能可能是政区改革陷入内卷化的一个重要前提。最后以常州武进和海南政区改革为例，探讨了本研究的分析框架与逻辑，并建议构建面向市场经济的行政区划调整框架，为继续深化行政体制改革提供空间支撑。     

The commodity crisis of the 1970s: scarcity,vulnerability and the West German metal supply

ABSTRACT

The 1970s were a period marked by price hikes and fluctuations in the commodity markets, both of which had considerable economic and political repercussions. Although this refers to almost all kinds of raw materials, the case of oil dominates the memory. Metals, by contrast, have received little attention despite their crucial importance for both industrialized consumer states and ore-exporting developing countries. This article develops three main points. First, by highlighting the global metal markets from the late 1960s to the early 1980s it contextualizes the oil-price shock and points out the interactions between the markets for energy and other raw materials. Second, the article aims to draw attention to the sense of crisis in Western industrialized countries regarding their metal supply during this period. This is a topic which has been overshadowed by the case of oil, but which nevertheless deserves study, also because of the parallels to recent developments between 2004 and 2011. Third, the article analyses how notions of resource scarcity, vulnerability and crisis were constructed despite the fact that the commodity crisis proved to be a merely anticipated crisis with high and volatile prices, but no long-term disruptions of supply. Within this article West Germany serves as a case study for highly industrialized, import-dependent countries. The focus is on non-ferrous metals like copper, nickel and aluminium.     

Climate as resource and challenge: international cooperation in the UNESCO Arid Zone Programme

ABSTRACT

Perceptions of climatic challenges have changed significantly during the twentieth century. In recent decades, the question of global climate change received more attention than regional climatic challenges and the problems of arid regions. Historians have shown that persistent misconceptions and a lack of understanding of arid zones rooted in misguided colonial ideologies were propagated by United Nations (UN) initiatives such as the UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) Arid Zone Programme. Alarmist narratives of progressive desertification proliferated and put the blame on destructive local practices such as deforestation and overgrazing. This article investigates UNESCO’s interests in natural resources (section 1) and takes a closer look at the development and scientific elements of the Arid Zone Programme (sections 2 and 3). It argues that the Arid Zone Programme offered an effective framework that helped develop and spread new interdisciplinary research approaches to improve knowledge about arid zones. The myth of progressing desertification and misguided colonial expertise characterized much of its political rhetoric, but not its scientific work, which reflected balanced and more critical appraisals of out-dated colonial expertise. In its conclusion, the article suggests that broader contexts need to be taken into account to understand a resurgence of alarmist narratives of desertification such as shifting interests in climatology from local climatic issues to the global atmospheric circulation and a neglect of the climatology of arid zones.