Ambitious deep energy retrofits of buildings to accelerate the 1.5°C energy transition in Canada

Scientists advise limiting global warming to 1.5°C with substantial actions by 2030. Our viewpoint argues that climate response strategies in Canada have underemphasized and underestimated the potential contribution deep energy retrofits can make to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reductions, leading to inadequate responses in the building sector, and that Canada can (and should) be ambitious with building retrofits over the next decade. GHG savings from building retrofits can be realized more quickly than GHG reductions from other sectors, and either deliver net cost savings or are cost‐effective when compared to other mitigation measures. Retrofits can also provide social and economic benefits, such as improved health and comfort, and lower energy costs. This paper reviews energy use and building retrofits in Canada and argues the following should be implemented: (1) focus innovation on deep energy retrofit processes, not singular retrofit actions; (2) maximize both social and environmental benefits; (3) improve data gathering and availability for analysis and delivery; (4) innovate for a process of decisions and to avoid “dropouts” during the retrofit process; and (5) focus innovation on business models that maximize benefits.     

Walking with preschool‐aged children to explore their local wellbeing affordances

An increasingly well‐developed body of research uses neighbourhood walks to better understand primary school children's experiences of local environments, yet virtually nothing is known about preschool‐aged children's connections to their neighbourhoods. A reason for this omission is the commonly held view that preschool children lack competency to reflect on lived environments beyond playgrounds, kindergartens, and other confined settings that dominate early childhood. However, preliterate children walk around, use, and create intimate relationships with local environments as shown by 10 children aged 3–5 years from Dunedin in New Zealand during go‐along interviews. We asked each to walk us around their locale, explaining and pointing out favourite and less beloved places and activities. In this article, we advance two arguments: first that preschoolers are knowledgeable meaning makers of place; second that walking with them is a key step to understanding their life worlds and provides a way for preliterate and preverbal children to demonstrate knowledge and understanding of their spatial worlds, including as research participants. We challenge the idea that children of this age lack large‐scale spatial competency and understanding. Walking with them generated an in‐depth appreciation of their experiences of environments and revealed deep connections they had with their locales at varied scales. The work enables us to offer novel insights into spatial competency, sociospatial complexities, and the multiple dimensions of young children's wellbeing affordances in urban environments. Such insights are highly relevant for geographers, planners, and others who shape children's urban environments.     

All things go in pairs,or the sharks will bite: the antithetical nature of Fijian chiefship

Via an historical-cum-ethnographic analysis of the history of chiefship in the vanua (country) of Sawaieke, central Fiji, this essay argues against the prevailing view that Fijian social relations are fundamentally hierarchical. Rather social relations in general and chiefship in particular are predicated on complementary and opposing concepts of equality and hierarchy, such that neither can become, in Dumont's terms, ‘an encompassing value’. This radical opposition between equality and hierarchy, Hegelian in form, is fundamental to Fijian dualism, so it pervades Fijian daily life and informs, for example, sexual relations, kinship, chiefship and notions of the person. ‘The household’ is the basic kinship unit and while relations within households are hierarchical, relations across households are those of balanced reciprocal exchange, epitomised in the relation between cross-cousins as equals and affines. The analysis shows that Fijian chiefship — past or present — cannot, as ‘value’, encompass the pervasive antithesis between hierarchy and equality. Rather its efficacy and its continuity require that hierarchy and equality remain in tension with one another as opposing, and equally important, concepts of social relations.     

Representing Structural Change in U.S. Migration Patterns

This paper focuses on the identification of three sets of relationships exhibited by a time series of age-specific national migration rates and multiregional transition probability matrices: the relationship across time for the same age group, as defined by period (temporal) transformation coefficients or matrices; the relationships across age at a particular moment in time, as defined by age transformation coefficients or matrices; and the relationships across time and age, as defined by cohort transformation coefficients or matrices. Given any two of these relationships one can solve for the third. This feature of age-period-cohort relationships has a practical application in the development of improved methods for representing structural change in migration patterns over time and for indirectly estimating migration patterns using inadequate data.     

Explaining A Paradox: The Alberta-California Natural Gas Trade Dispute

For over 3 years the Alberta government and the California Public Utilities Commission engaged in a bitter dispute over the future of the Alberta-California natural gas trade. This article examines how both sides sought to use their regulatory authority to control the substance of gas trade restructuring. It assesses the dispute as an exercise in deregulatory policymaking and suggests the need for increased study of the role and motivations of subnational regulatory actors.     

Inward investment and economic development in Poland

This paper summarizes results of a research project funded by the Overseas Development Administration of the UK Government. Its aims were to explore the nature and extent of foreign direct investment in Poland, and to assess the extent of integration of such investment with the indigenous economy. The research involved interviews with Polish government ministries, banks, development agencies, inward investors and indigenous firms. It concludes that there are numerous financial and technical obstacles to indigenous business development. The majority of inward investors aim to serve the Polish and other Central and Eastern European markets rather than simply selling cheaply produced products to the West. Moreover, most have already developed significant local sourcing from Polish suppliers.