Scaling just transitions: Legitimation strategies in coal phase-out commissions in Canada and Germany

Climate change mitigation triggers both spatial and moral complexities, as demonstrated by the contentious issue of phasing out coal power. The success of the Paris Agreement depends on, among other things, the acceptability of climate policy measures and thus, from a moral perspective, on the ability to organize transition processes in ways that do not damage the livelihoods of workers, communities, and entire regions. Spatially, the unequal distributions of burdens and advantages of both climate change and respective mitigation measures provoke struggles over their legitimacy in contexts ranging from local to global. Phasing out coal mining and the respective power generation capacity thus triggers processes of structural transformation that cut across geographic scales, vertical levels of policy and politics, as well as sectoral boundaries.In light of the urgency of the climate crisis, countries such as Canada and Germany have established stakeholder-driven commissions to develop proposals for just transition pathways for phasing out coal production and consumption. We argue that these commissions are arenas in which spatial, moral, and sectoral (re-)negotiations materialize. Comparing the Canadian and German stakeholder commissions through expert interviews with their members, the article traces how governments use commissions to legitimize their transition policies. Expectations at different levels and from different actors in turn place commission members under pressure to justify their involvement and the outputs of the commissions. We find that the Canadian task force showed greater commitment to collecting and reflecting the needs of communities in its coal regions, and to communicating these to the federal government. In the German coal commission, legitimation strategies focused mainly on a broad representation of interests, and on government spending for affected regions, workers, and industries. In that case, a compromise was reached that satisfied most, but not all, of the diverse requirements.     

Contesting scale: A space of the political in a post-disaster context

Disasters create spaces for the political to unfold. This paper contributes to the recurring debates on space and the political in geography by providing a novel empirical focus: following a fire in Lærdal, Norway in 2014, contesting discourses on how emergency services should be spatially organized revealed themselves. A scalar discourse of the local, situated in discourses on periphery and rurality in Norway, emerged to contest a neoliberal discourse promoted by the government. I illustrate the scalar discourse of the local through four identified narratives in Norwegian newspapers that emphasize different aspects of the local. This demonstrates how scalar categories are meshed with everyday vocabulary, and hence are important to study. Although a space of the political was realized following the fire, in the last part of the paper I reflect on why the scalar discourse of the local has not gained recognition as legitimate contestation, as reforms aiming to centralize and/or merge continue to be rolled out in Norway.     

A place to remember: scaling the walls of Angel Island immigration station

This paper considers the restoration and presentation of Angel Island Immigration Station, a federal facility in the San Francisco Bay that between 1910 and 1940 worked to prevent the arrival of Chinese laborers to the United States in accordance with the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. The production of Angel Island Immigration Station as a national historic landmark is delineated through the social construction of scale. I discuss efforts to achieve a leap in the scale of the site's significance and how this brings forth new management regimes that change the format of the interpretation there. In particular, narrative construction, landscape design, and revised tours, insert a standardized story of Chinese exclusion into the national memory. This paper shows how the imperative to increase the scope of recognition—to petition nationally for status and funds—requires a repackaging of stories to affirm popular American ideals of freedom over those that challenge the nation's persecution of Chinese immigrants.     

The relationship between children's perceptions of the natural environment and their subjective well-being

The overarching aim of the study was to ascertain the relationship between children's perceptions of the natural environment and their subjective well-being. More specifically the study aimed to fit a structural model depicting the nature of the relationship between children's environmental views and their global, and domain-specific life satisfaction. The sample included 1004 twelve-year-old participants randomly selected from 15 primary schools in Cape Town, South Africa. The measuring instrument included the New Ecological Paradigm (NEP) Scale for children, the Students' Life Satisfaction Scale and the Personal Well-Being Index-School Children. Confirmatory factor analysis was used to test the validity of the NEP Scale which showed appropriate fit structure. A good fit structure was also found for the overall structural equation model. However, the overall model showed that children's environmental views were not related to their global life and domain-specific life satisfaction. At a foundational level, more research is required to allow for a better understanding of how children in differing circumstances construct and assign meaning to nature, and what their perceptions of nature are before we can begin to ask them when, how or why they engage in nature.     

金华市特殊教育现状的调查研究

特殊教育是对残疾人的一种教育,是社会的人本、民主、公平的反映,是国家及其文明程度的一个窗口。通过对浙江省金华市七所特殊教育学校现状的调查与研究,了解到近几年金华市的特殊教育有很大的发展,但是在办学规模、地理位置、师资力量、硬件设施等方面还存在不足,影响了学龄残疾儿童的入学率与特殊教育的发展速度。故立足于金华市特教的现实问题,提出具有可行性的方法与对策,促进金华市特殊教育事业更好更快的发展。     

Scaling heritage. The construction of scales in the submission process of alpinism to UNESCO’s intangible cultural heritage list

ABSTRACT

For the last two decades, the polysemous notion of ‘scale’ has drawn an increasing amount of attention among scholars studying heritage policies and practices, often with regard to UNESCO conventions. Significantly, in many of these works, terms such as ‘global’, ‘national’ and ‘local’ are connected to categories of ‘scale’ or ‘level’ that are taken for granted by the scholars who use them to guide their analysis. This paper, in contrast, promotes a different, constructivist understanding of the notion of scale. From our perspective, there is an added value to be found in focusing—without using any preconceived or external conception of scale—on the ways in which stakeholders conceive of and use scale throughout the processes of heritage making. Using the case of alpinism and the creation of its file for submission to the Intangible Cultural Heritage list, we show that the interest of this approach lies in its comprehensive ability to highlight how people define, elaborate and use scale in order to qualify their practices or to achieve specific goals.     

Brands of youth citizenship and the politics of scale: National Citizen Service in the United Kingdom

This paper explores the politics of scale in the context of youth citizenship. We propose the concept of ‘brands of youth citizenship’ to understand recent shifts in the state promotion of citizenship formations for young people, and demonstrate how scale is crucial to that agenda. As such, we push forward debates on the scaling of citizenship more broadly through an examination of the imaginative and institutional geographies of learning to be a citizen. The paper's empirical focus is a state-funded youth programme in the UK – National Citizen Service – launched in 2011 and now reaching tens of thousands of 15–17 year olds. We demonstrate the ‘branding’ of youth citizenship, cast here in terms of social action and designed to create a particular type of citizen-subject. Original research with key architects, delivery providers and young people demonstrates two key points of interest. First, that the scales of youth citizenship embedded in NCS promote engagement at the local scale, as part of a national collective, whilst the global scale is curiously absent. Second, that discourses of youth citizenship are increasingly mobilised alongside ideas of Britishness yet fractured by the geographies of devolution. Overall, the paper explores the scalar politics and performance of youth citizenship, the tensions therein, and the wider implications of this study for both political geographers and society more broadly at a time of heated debate about youthful politics in the United Kingdom and beyond.     

意象与现实:宋代城市等级刍议

人口数量是反映城市发展水平的重要指标。不少学者在论著中,从不同的侧面提出了他们关于宋代城市等级的看法,研究思路都是通过广泛搜集文献记载中偶存的宋代城市人口数据的片断信息,归纳得出结论,但相互间歧见颇大。其实,宋人关于城市人口规模的表述更多地是出于意象,宋人的这种意象,与其说主要依据于实际人口数量,不如说依据于城市的行政地位,因此在时人意象中城市规模的差序格局就形成了都城百万家、路治十万家、州军与重要县城万家以及一般县城数千家这样几个等级分明的序列。这说明至少就某种程度而言,在两宋士人的心目中,城市的行政地位比它们的实际规模更为重要。讨论宋代城市发展史不应忽视这一史实。