Renewable energy innovations and sustainability transition: How relevant are spatial spillovers?

In the societal challenge to switch to renewable energy, innovation has become an ever‐increasing critical determinant. However, while sustainability transition is a global challenge, diffusion and adoption of innovation tends to be uneven in space and unequal access may cause substantial heterogeneity in energy transition. This research analyzes how domestic and foreign innovation activities in the renewable energy sector influence energy transition over time. Empirical testing shows that a country's domestic innovation activity impacts renewable electricity generation capacity sooner than foreign technological innovations. I document that there are substantial barriers to substitute foreign technologies for domestic innovation efforts in the short run but also observe that foreign technologies have a stronger impact after some years. These findings have implications for cross‐border coordination of governmental innovation support and complementary policy instruments that aim at increasing adoption speed across borders.     

Social sustainability tool for assessing land use planning processes

The aim of this paper was to develop a social sustainability tool to clarify what social sustainability means in land use planning processes. The tool was developed through a robust research process covering a large amount of scientific literature and built environment sustainability assessment tools. To assess how the developed tool works in practice, we used it as a coding system for the assessment of social sustainability in a case study from Finland. The case study includes the master planning process of a medium-sized city and the legal framework guiding it. The theoretical contribution of the paper lies in creating a holistic tool for the assessment of social sustainability in planning processes. This study also provides a strong practical contribution, as it goes beyond theoretical definitions to the pragmatic level by providing exemplary measures to be used in designing and implementing processes. Therefore, this paper is a valuable source for those stakeholders (for example planners, developers and policymakers), who struggle with the issue of the successful implementation of social sustainability practices, and it will help them to benchmark their processes against the themes found in the tool.     

TEFL tourism: the tourist who teaches

ABSTRACT

There is evident lineage between the concepts of teaching English as a foreign language (TEFL) and tourism, represented through evocative marketing material, the commoditisation of the TEFL product, teacher motivations and experiences. Yet, to date there has been little attention paid to this relationship. The amalgamation of the two concepts brings rise to the introduction of the niche form of tourism ‘TEFL tourism’, where the tourist travels outside of their usual environment to teach English as a foreign language and whose role shifts between tourist, educator and educatee at various points in their trip. The TEFL tourism phenomenon is explored through the use of a two-phase research approach employing the qualitative examination of blogs written by TEFL teachers and quantitative surveys. Drawing parallels with associated tourism forms including volunteer, education and philanthropic, it is concluded that TEFL tourism is an entity in its own right, with unique characteristics and motivations presented by TEFL tourists. The use of logistic regression facilitated the analysis of TEFL teacher types, presenting a typology classifying tourists as leisure-minded, philanthropy-minded, career-minded and expatriate-minded. This case-study examination facilitates initial comprehension of the TEFL tourism industry, providing basis for subsequent research to be undertaken to enable enhanced sustainable management of the TEFL industry worldwide.     

The Rise in Power of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman

Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is moving across the international stage as the future King of Saudi Arabia. He has the support of his father, Saudi royals, and the oil income of his country. He also has 10‐year plan he agreed upon with the King called Vision 2030. The three components of the Vision are to diversify the oil‐based economy to include technology and tourism, to make the country the heart of Islam and Arab culture and to become the economic and geographic hub of Asia/Europe and Africa. His rise in power will depend upon his skill in expanding the religious tolerance of Saudi people, the current economic structure of the country, and the education of the youth. He is simultaneously addressing all these challenges in order to cement the country's future sustainability. Suggestions for enhancing his multifaceted impact on his country are provided.     

Tailored polities in the shadow of the state’s hierarchy. The CLLD implementation and a future research agenda

The paper provides a theoretical contribution to the multi-level governance debate, discussing the role of the policy instruments in tailoring polities for local development strategies. To this purpose, it examines the Community-Led Local Development (CLLD), a policy tool of the EU Cohesion Policy 2014–2020, which has generated more than 3000 local initiatives across the EU. An institutionalist perspective enables a reflection on the multi-level normative dimensions of these local initiatives. A combination of the post-functionalist governance theory, the soft space debate, state-theory and strategic-relational approach provides an interpretative framework to be deployed for a dedicated research agenda. The interpretative challenge is about whether the CLLD enables spatial-temporal fixes in which a deliberative polity pursues a spatial imaginary for an ad-hoc territory. The consequent analytical dimensions can be found in (a) the relationship between attendant ad-hoc polity, policy agenda, territorial design and societal processes; and (b) the meta-governance dimensions that locate the bottom-up constituency of this institutional technology in the shadow of state’s hierarchy. An overview of the CLLD implementation across the EU provides evidence on the latter.     

The Second Coming of Rail: The Spanish High-Speed Rail-Finance Complex

This article offers a critical account of Spanish high-speed rail (HSR) through the lens of the spatial fix. I designate the integration of Spanish HSR into a European-wide process of circulation of finance capital as the HSR-finance complex. The analysis of the inner workings of the HSR-finance complex reveals the way in which European finance has laid the conditions of possibility for the development of the project and offers a forewarning about the dangers of leveraging finance capital toward green infrastructure. The analysis of the Spanish HSR-finance complex shows that the particular form of capital circulation that has made it possible has not brought about new productive combinations but has instead deepened traditional relations of economic dependency and magnified their socioenvironmental consequences.     

COVID-19 is expanding global consciousness and the sustainability of travel and tourism

Abstract

The sustainable development model has largely failed to address the social and environmental challenges of the 21^st century. True sustainability will only occur when it is valued as a part of the taken-for-granted daily life of individuals and cultures across the globe. This has not yet happened because humanity has not evolved a global consciousness quickly enough to match the global advances in telecommunications and transportation technologies that have created a socially and economically ever-shrinking planet. Travel and tourism contributes to the expansion of global consciousness, although only in a haphazard and unintentional manner. The COVID-19 pandemic is a result of planetary time-space compression and is forcing an expansion in human consciousness that will make humankind better able to address global problems. There will still be considerable diversity on the planet, as now, but the pandemic will stimulate growing numbers of people, businesses and governments to adopt new ways of thinking, behaving and operating that are more closely aligned with the goals of sustainable development. This could be further enhanced if travel and tourism were to adopt the expansion and awakening of global conscious as a fundamental and transformational value in the products and experiences that it offers.     

Power to the people: when culture works as a social catalyst in urban regeneration processes (and when it does not)

This article focuses upon the relationship between culture, urban regeneration schemes, and their impact on socio-cognitive assets – namely, social and human capital. It examines three major urban regeneration projects in the districts of Saint Michel (Montreal, Canada), Auburn (Sydney, Australia) and Bicocca (Milan, Italy), where culture has been invoked as a main transformational driver at the economic and socio-environmental levels, but with different approaches and results. Through comparative analysis, we develop a more general reflection on the social impact of culture-led urban transformation processes, questioning the actual role of cultural initiatives – particularly those related to the creation of new cultural facilities and the programming of big cultural flagship events – and participation as a means to improve the local social milieu. We find that a key role for social efficacy is played by projects’ capacity to elicit the commitment of residents through inclusive cultural participation, as opposed to instrumental top-down initiatives mainly addressing city and neighbourhood branding and real estate marketing purposes.     

Caretakers of the Earth: integrating Canadian Aboriginal perspectives on culture and sustainability into local plans

Abstract

While still contested in most jurisdictions, a consensus on the four-pillar approach to sustainable development is slowly emerging. This perspective attempts to integrate the environmental, social, economic and cultural elements of a community into local sustainability planning processes and has been widely adopted in Canada as the basis of Integrated Community Sustainability Plans. However, Aboriginal perspectives have generally been marginalised in such efforts, largely because Aboriginal peoples take a more holistic approach to both sustainability and culture than Western-educated planners and decision makers. This article examines current approaches and methodologies adopted by Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal communities in Canada to integrate culture in sustainability planning and presents several case studies that examine the application of medicine wheel and other Aboriginal integrative worldviews to community sustainability planning. It discusses whether Aboriginal perspectives on culture can provide an alternative narrative that will advance our understanding of culture’s role in community sustainability and counteract the monocultural perspectives that are the legacy of colonialism throughout the world.