The natural hazard sector's engagement with Indigenous peoples: a critical review of CANZUS countries

Natural hazard management agencies across the settler countries Canada, Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand, and the United States (or CANZUS countries) are presently involved in an increasing range of collaborative and consultative engagements with Indigenous peoples. However, perhaps because these engagements are diverse and relatively recent, little has been written about how they emerged and, from these agencies' perspectives, little is known about how these engagements find their motivation within government natural hazard management frameworks. In this article, we review existing academic and grey literature to categorise the origins of recent and present engagements and then identify and elaborate on the key rationales informing natural hazard management agencies' interactions with Indigenous peoples. We argue both that the broad principles of sustainability and inclusion have transformed these interactions and that developmentalist approaches and an overemphasis on Indigenous peoples' traditional knowledge can sometimes undermine this work. Incorporating critiques of settler colonialism relevant to the CANZUS context, this review aims to support established, emerging, and future collaborative engagements by investigating and analysing the literature to date.     

Western Australia's Royalties for Regions program: a policy response to growth,regional neglect,and perceived disempowerment

Under the right conditions, compounding socio‐political and economic change can dramatically alter government policy. From 2000, Western Australia, a resource‐rich jurisdiction, experienced significant change owing to a once‐in‐a‐generation resources boom, which forced a break with earlier development approaches. In 2008, regional interventionism returned to the State via the State Government's Royalties for Regions program. Departing from the neo‐liberal tradition, the program allocated 25 per cent of the State's royalty income to non‐metropolitan regions, over and above existing regional allocations, and its success remains disputed. While it is easy to question the program retrospectively, the socio‐economic and political circumstances from 2000 to 2008 reveal a “perfect storm” of conditions enabling the transition from neo‐liberalism to interventionism in regional development. This paper sets out to understand the multi‐faceted conditions that enabled the dramatic paradigm shift embodied by the program. To this end, it examines the State's rural–urban settlement dichotomy, its staples economy, and the policy context leading up to the program. Following that, the paper proposes a causal framework mapping out the factors driving and rationalising the program. These factors are then examined in detail and include perceived rural voter disenchantment, ineffectual regional development policy, the State's mining boom, inadequate regional development funding, the contrasting fortunes of two regions (illustrative of the impact of growth, and the lack thereof), and the political manoeuvring during the 2008 election. Finally, the paper concludes by considering how the conversion of these conditions resulted in the State's most significant regional policy redirection in decades.     

Translation as techné: female sexuality and the science of social progress in colonial India

Abstract

In this article, I analyze processes of translation that shaped the science of sex in eastern India between the 1880s and the 1930s. I trace the impact of translation – the rendering of words between the language of English and Bengali as well as the travel and transformation of concepts – through close textual analysis of influential Bengali-language medical and scientific textbooks on nymphomania, female sexual excesses, and the evolution of Indian society. The translation of sexual categories was a techné by which Bengali intellectuals produced categories of social behavior and identity as equivalent and homogenous. Through claims of equivalence in translation, Bengali scientists argued for the commensurability of Indian social practices with universalist schemes of social evolution and civilizational progress. This process of exchange pivoted on the figure of the sexually deviant woman, who became a key site of translation and categorical equivalence. In thinking translation through techné, I foreground how a semiotics of female sexuality produced ‘the social’ as an object of inquiry in colonial India.     

Nostalgia and Titanic commemorations in Cobh,Ireland

The year 2012 marked the centenary of the sinking of the liner Titanic. This event has been commemorated in a variety of ways, including the development of “authentic” and “created” tourist projects related to Titanic. This research presents one location's tourist response to the centenary. The heritage town of Cobh in Ireland was the last port of call for the ill-fated liner. Its commemorative activities focused on a week-long festival of cultural events from 9 to 15 April. It will be contended that its use of nostalgia and “vintage” can be interpreted more as a function of the interpretative agenda of Irish tourism policy and its heritage construction of Cobh than as a genuine symbolic expression of a town remembering its past.     

Do rural development programmes promote gender equality on farms? The case of Slovenia

The necessity of gender equality in agriculture has been identified as a relevant political issue and incorporated into strategic documents and programmes of the EU. However, until now, not much has been examined about the actual contribution of these policy actions and programmes to the everyday life of farm women; there is a considerable gap in the data about women in farming across Europe, particularly for new member states. The article addresses this issue by focusing on the situation of gender equality on farms in Slovenia. Pertaining to two measures of The Rural Development Programme 2004–2006 – the Setting Up of Young Farmers and the Early Retirement of Farmers – the aim of the analysis is to compare the beneficiaries and non-beneficiaries of these two measures at family farms in terms of their development capacities and their inclination towards gender equality. Results based on the survey data ‘Generations and Gender Relations on Slovenian Farms 2007’ revealed the above-mentioned measures did indeed reach those family farms that showed better development capacities in terms of economic and demographic conditions. However, the farms did not show significant development in terms of gender equality as examined through division of work and decision-making on family farms. The rigidity in gender statuses and roles on family farms is explained and discussed through the issue of unequal access of women to farmland ownership and agricultural education, and through persistently weak institutional support to increase political participation and power for farm women.     

Australian Foreign Policy under the Abbott Government: Foreign Policy as Domestic Politics?

While foreign policy featured prominently on the Australian political agenda in late 2014, the manner of Australia's engagement with the world challenges the idea of a ‘pivot’ from domestic politics to foreign policy. In particular, the government demonstrated a tendency to prioritise domestic political considerations, in particular public opinion, in its dealings with the outside world. This was evident across a range of issue areas: from the ‘internationalist’ agenda of asylum, climate change and aid to more traditional concerns such as bilateral relations with Indonesia and international security. This article explores these dynamics and asks what implications this has for both Australian foreign policy and theoretical accounts of the role and desirability of public engagement with foreign policy in international relations thought.     

The limits to China's non-interference foreign policy: pro-state interventionism and the rescaling of economic governance

China's foreign policy has been long committed to a principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of sovereign countries. While one could easily point out past and present-day inconsistencies in its implementation, this article argues that defenders and critics of the principle both rely on a limited interpretation of ‘interference’ or ‘intervention’ based on an ideology of Westphalian sovereignty. Particularly problematic is the conceptual distinction between the ‘political’ or ‘diplomatic’, on the one hand, and the ‘economic’, on the other. As Polanyi's concept of embeddedness reminds us, markets, society and politics occur simultaneously, and can only act as discrete realms in epistemological abstractions. It is thus argued that non-interference is a semi-formal institution that governs China's diplomatic engagements and affects its economic activities. While the totality of China's interactions with the world has diverse and sometimes contradictory impacts on global governance, non-interference itself has apparent consequences for the rescaling of regional economic governance. Specifically, this article contends that Chinese non-interference results in the empowerment of political elites at national levels, and thus in the (re-)emergence of the nation state as a gatekeeper and facilitator of the advancement of capitalist enterprises. As a result, through non-intervention, China's foreign policy undermines supranational regulatory approaches and fosters state-based regional architectures.     

Managing Policy Dilemmas in South Korea: The Case of the Emissions Trading Scheme

This paper analyses the policy dilemma of South Korea’s Lee Myung-bak government regarding the greenhouse gas Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), the cornerstone of the government’s Low Carbon Green Growth (GG) policy. The paper analyses policy governance, with a focus on the deliberative nature of the policy process. The ETS was promoted as a way to overcome certain international, political and socioeconomic challenges facing the government, yet the process of its establishment featured severe confrontations between the stakeholders (industrialists and environmentalists), and a lack of effort on the part of the government to pursue deliberation with them, resulting in a significant policy dilemma. The government reacted passively at first, and later responded with a symbolic decision that failed to pursue deliberative processes and exacerbated the situation. This paper addresses the theoretical and policy implications of this policy process by identifying the mechanism that created the policy dilemma. The reliability and validity of the study are substantiated through a multi-strategy approach, including a review of the literature and an in-depth interview with a government economic official.     

Public Policy and the Idea of the Vietnamese State: The Cultural Political Economy of Domestic Water Supply

Using Rural Water Supply (RWS) policy practices as a case study, this article shows that the disjunction between implementation as formally conceived and informally practised is not a question of ineffective policy cycle dynamics, but rather an inherent feature of Vietnam’s Cultural Political Economy. Drawing on critical realist approaches to social and state theory, we argue that formal and informal RWS policy practices, as a set of two interconnected spheres, serve as key, separate but connected, mechanisms for reproducing the distribution of material resources (primarily through the informal sphere) and the hegemony of ideas (primarily through the formal sphere) in Vietnamese society. We conclude that the formal, administrative practices of RWS policy are primarily to be understood in their function of reproducing the idea of the state and state legitimacy. RWS administrative practices function to sustain the core social and political order in Vietnam as institutionalised in “the state”, rather than being primarily oriented to improving rural water supply. The findings raise questions for donor-supported programs that focus on formal administrative institutions and practices for improving the performance of the water sector.     

Women,gender and feminism in the Australian Journal of Political Science: A review

This review article, written for the fiftieth anniversary of the Australian Journal of Political Science (formerly Politics), analyses articles focusing on women, gender and feminism that were published in the journal. The analysis demonstrates that the study of gender is relevant to a broad range of fields, and methodological approaches used, in political science. It also demonstrates that political science knowledge is itself historically and socially constructed, reflecting both traditional social power relations and the influence of the social movements that challenge them. Consequently, key articles have drawn attention to the ways in which the frameworks of mainstream forms of political science were gender-biased and have sometimes continued to be so, particularly in terms of narrow constructions of the ‘political’. Such narrow constructions may still be contributing to some ongoing gaps in the literature, despite the important contributions made by work published in the journal.