Book reviews

Australian politics

Francis G. Castles (ed.), Australia Compared. People, Policies and Politics (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1991) pp.290. $22.95 ISBN 0 04 442339 X.

A. Kouzmin and N. Scott (eds), Dynamics in Australian Public Management: Selected Essays (Melbourne: Macmillan, 1990) pp.454. $34.95 ISBN 0 7329 0187 1.

Raymond Markey, The Making of the Labor Party in New South Wales 1880–1900 (Sydney: New South Wales University Press, 1988) pp.320. $24.95 ISBN 0 86840 370 9.

Rosemary Whip and Colin A. Hughes, Political Crossroad: The 1989 Queensland Election (St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1991) pp.270. $29.95 ISBN 0 7022 2362 X.

Glenn Withers (ed.), Commonality and Difference: Australia and the United States (Sydney: Allen & Unwin in association with the Australian/American Educational Foundation, 1991) pp.138. $19.95 ISBN 1 86373 074 5.

Comparative and international politics

Joel D. Aberbach, Keeping A Watchful Eye: The Politics of Congressional Oversight (Washington DC: The Brookings Institution, 1990) pp.288. $US12.95 ISBN 0 81570 059 8.

Zehra F. Arat, Democracy & Human Rights in Developing Countries (Boulder and London: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1991) pp.219 $n.p. ISBN 1 55587 170 4.

Ian Bellany, A Basis for Arms Control (Aldershot: Dartmouth, 1991) pp.155. $n.p. ISBN 1 85521 051 7.

Noam Chomsky, Deterring Democracy (London and New York: Verso, 1991) pp.421. $n.p. ISBN 0 86091 318 X.

Ivo Daalder, The Nature and Practice of Flexible Response: NATO Strategy and Theater Nuclear Forces Since 1967 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991) pp.411. $US57.00 ISBN 0 231 17520 0.

John Darwin, The End of the British Empire: The Historical Debate (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991) pp.128. $27.95 ISBN 0 631 16428 6.

Bogdan Denitch, The End Of The Cold War: European Unity, Socialism, and the Shift in Global Power (London: Verso, 1990) pp.123. $24.95 ISBN 0 86091 532 8.

David Donnison, A Radical Agenda: After the New Right and the Old Left (London: Rivers Oram Press, 1991) pp.215. £9.95. ISBN 1 85489 030 1.

Peter Drysdale (ed.), The Soviets and the Pacific Challenge (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1991) pp.160. $17.95 ISBN 1 86373 010 9.

Leon Hurwitz and Christian Lequesne (eds), The State of the European Community (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1991) pp.475. $49.95. ISBN 1 55587 249 2.

Tetsuya Kataoka, The Price of a Constitution: The Origin of Japan's Postwar Politics, (New York: Taylor & Francis, 1991) pp.237. $n.p. ISBN 0 8448 1714 7.

Daphne A Kenyon and John Kincaid (eds) Competition among States and Local Governments (Washington, DC: The Urban Institute Press, with the Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations, 1991) pp.285. $n.p. ISBN 0 87766 517 6.

Jan‐Erik Lane and Svante O. Ersson, Politics and Society in Western Europe, 2^nd edn, (London: Sage, 1991) pp.421. £10.95. ISBN 0 8039 8407 3.

Stephanie Lawson, The Failure of Democratic Politics in Fiji (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991) pp.307. $90.00 ISBN 0 19 827322 3.

E.M. McLeay (ed.), The 1990 General Election: Perspectives on Political Change in New Zealand, Occasional Publication No.3 (Wellington: Victoria University of Wellington, 1991) pp.183. $NZ29.95. ISBN 0 475 11202 4. ISSN 1170 7356.

Henry Phelps Brown, Egalitarianism and the Generation of Inequality (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991) pp.552. $n.p. ISBN 0 19828 390 3.

Philip R. Pryde, Environmental Management in the Soviet Union (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991) pp.314. $37.50 ISBN 0 521 40905 5.

Anthony Smith The Age of Behemoths. The Globalization of Mass Media Firms (New York: A Twentieth Century Fund Paper. Priority Press Publications, 1991) pp.80. $n.p. ISBN 0 87078 325 4.

Immanuel Wallerstein, Geopolitics and Geoculture: Essays on the Changing World‐System (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991) pp.242. $35.00 ISBN 0 52140604 8.

Daniel Warner, An Ethic of Responsibility in International Relations (Boulder and London: Lynne Rienner, 1991) pp.151. $US30.00 ISBN 1 55S7 266 2.

Political theory and methodology

Norman Barry, Welfare (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1990) pp.144. $24.95 ISBN 0 335 15595 2.

Peter Beilbarz, Labour's Utopias: Bolshevism, Fabianism, Social Democracy (London and New York: Routledge, 1992) pp.168. $49.95 ISBN 0 415 06616 6.

Sebastian de Grazia, Machiavelli in Hell (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989) pp.497. $n.p. ISBN 0 7450 0634 5.

Terry Eagleton, Ideology: An Introduction (London: Verso, 1991) pp.242. $29.95 ISBN 0 86091 538 7.

Ellen Frankel Paul, Fred D. Miller Jr., and Jeffrey Paul (eds), Ethics, Politics, and Human Nature (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991), pp.191. $39.95 ISBN 0 631 17885 6.

Barry Hindess, Choice, Rationality, and Social Theory (London: Unwin Hyman, 1988) pp.132. $70.00 ISBN 0 04 301306 6.

A. Khoshkish, Power or Authority? The Entelechy of Power (Lanham: University Press of America, 1991) pp.128. $n.p. ISBN 0 8191 8395 4.

Frank Lewins, Social Science Methodology: A Brief but Critical Introduction (South Melbourne: Macmillan, 1992) pp.110. $14.95 ISBN 0 7329 1331 4.

David Miller (ed.), assisted by Janet Coleman, William Connolly and Alan Ryan, The Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Political Thought (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991) pp.570. $39.95 ISBN 0 631 17944 5.

Raymond Plant, Modern Political Thought (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991) pp.398. $34.95 ISBN 0 631 14224 X.

Alan Udoff, Leo Strauss's Thought: Towards a Critical Engagement (Boulder and London: Lynne Rienner, 1991) pp.327. $n.p. ISBN 1 55587 232 8.     

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.     

Inconsistent,downplayed, and pathologized: How mining's gendered impacts are considered in BC environmental assessment

To what extent do mining environmental assessments in British Columbia (BC) consider gendered impacts? How are they considered? And how are these considerations shaped during the environmental assessment process? To answer these questions we undertook a systematic review of all completed BC mining environmental assessments between 1995 and 2019 (n = 37). Through a careful reading of documentation archived in the BC Environmental Assessment Office registry, we found that 60% of projects did not consider the gendered impacts of mining development; the remaining 40% of projects inconsistently assessed gendered impacts. While noting an increase in gender considerations in environmental assessments since 1995, also quantified in our results is what has not changed. Even where gender is considered, the assessments often collapse this concern into one of “women's issues,” obscuring intersectional impacts and downplaying violence along racialized and gender diverse lines, including those experienced by Indigenous women, children, two-spirit, trans, queer and non-binary people. Environmental assessment is a regulatory tool designed to adjudicate the impacts of mining projects, yet our results lead us to conclude that it is also a tool of environmental injustice, compounding and further sedimenting heteropatriarchal and racialized patterns produced through generations of settler colonial resource extraction in BC.