Digitalising sex commerce and sex work: a comparative analysis of French,Greek and Slovenian websites

The aim of this article is to explore the complexity of the online sex trade and work by analysing sexuality-related commercial websites, with reference to three European states, France, Greece and Slovenia. The article compares websites in each specific sociocultural context, in order to provide insights into the various types of networks and services that emerge, and to explore how they operate, how they communicate and how sex is being merchandised. We have conducted a two-tier analysis: The first part discusses results of a quantitative macro-analysis exploring 149 websites, while the second part is a micro-analysis analysing the visualisation of egocentric network of three selected websites. The focus is on understanding how gender relations develop in digital environment and how within cyberspace sectorial and national divides are dealt with. While there is evidence to suggest that in some sectors the Internet has opened avenues for sex workers to work independently of the control networks, there are also many forms of exploitation that arise from new media. We observe that sex commerce online is not particularly attentive to the agency of sex workers but is, to the contrary, oriented to provide opportunities and a forum for businessmen and clients.     

Territorial Impact Assessment of European Draft Directives—The Emergence of a New Policy Assessment Instrument

European Union directives, along with their transposing arrangements in EU member states, can have unanticipated and sometimes undesirable impacts on certain regions and places. These include impacts on the use of space (e.g. new infrastructure or sprawl), governance, and on wider social, economic or environmental dimensions. Although ex-ante assessment of the potential impacts of EU initiatives has been carried out since 2002 through the European Commission's Impact Assessment procedure and also through national equivalents in some member states, important impacts are still overlooked, frequently because of their territorially heterogeneous nature within and between EU member states. This paper presents the results of the ESPON EATIA research project, in which a new territorial impact assessment methodology was developed for national and regional administrations in EU member states in order to inform their national positions during the negotiation of European draft directives and potentially other policy proposals.     

Delivering a national spatial development strategy: a success story?

The Slovenian national planning policy has been in a renewal process since 2014. The process required an evaluation to reveal to which level the defined measures have been delivered and discuss the policy’s future role. The mixed-methods evaluation approach consisted of a document analysis, a questionnaire with local communities and interviews with representatives of the ministries. Implementation of measures depends on multiple factors: capacity, personal priorities of actors, interpretation skills, financial support, political will for co-operation, etc. The potential to mitigate the influence of factors on implementation through a co-evolutionary trend of planning is elaborated in the light of Europeanization.