Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space

The concept of green services, developed in the Netherlands, aimed at rewarding activities by farmers in the field of nature and landscape management with a ‘market-based price’ provided by public and private actors. Despite a positive stance on the concept at member-state level, it took considerable efforts to get the concept implemented. The selected case, which is an exemplary case for a more general reorientation on the provision of agrienvironmental measures (eg in the context of the EU Common Agricultural Policy), shows that uncertainties of the EU state aid regime and complex power relationships within a multilevel governance setting led to much delay. We explain these difficulties by drawing from new-institutional and sense-making literature and the literature on escalation. We also show how a modus vivendi was found for establishing the green service concept and thereby provide insights for initiators of new agrienvironmental schemes or other horizontal modes of governance.

Nowadays there is an imperative for governments to be more responsive to community needs, and public sector modernisation programmes are introducing opportunities for citizen participation. We look at citizen participation initiatives through the lenses of institutional and stakeholder theories. Using survey data and exogenous variables we analyse experiences in thirty OECD and MERCOSUR local governments. We find that the possible gains in legitimacy and trust explain the efforts made towards citizen participation. In addition, the different levels of commitment towards meaningful citizen participation suggest that factors such as power and urgency can be complementary to legitimacy when analysing citizen participation.

In this paper we put forward the case for viewing ‘spatial planning’ as a political resource, one which has been largely supportive of the rollout neoliberal approach of New Labour. Drawing on work on postpolitics, we argue that ironically the progressive credentials of spatial planning in terms of consensus building, policy integration, and the search for ‘win – win – win’ solutions may have helped script out oppositional voices. We then outline how the combination of changes to planning systems, devolution, and local government reform has not generated a ‘double dividend’ of greater planning powers devolving from new territorial administrations to local planning authorities. Instead a more complex process of creating new planning spaces has emerged after devolution. Five types of new planning spaces and spatial practices are identified, including new soft space forms of governance.

The number of immigrants across the world has doubled since 1980. The estimates of the impact of immigration on wages and employment in host countries are quantitatively small but vary widely. We summarize previous meta-analyses of the empirical literature and consider the implications for policy. We conclude that, on average, the impact on employment of the native born is smaller than on wages, while impacts are generally smaller in the US than in other countries studied to date. The variation in the estimates is related to the definition of the labour market, the extent of substitutability of foreign and native workers, and controls for endogeneity of immigrant settlement in statistical modelling. Policies enhancing labour-market flexibility, while at the same time improving immigrant economic integration, are likely to be effective in reducing transitory negative impacts.

Given the scarcity of resources, an economic approach is necessary in order to determine an optimal strategy of adaptation to climate change. In this paper we develop an economic framework for the study of adaptation which allows distinguishing between decentralised adaptation by private agents, on the one hand, and centralised adaptation measures by the government, on the other hand. The paper is in two parts: in the first we present the neoclassical view of adaptation policy, which is based on the paradigm of market failure. In the second part we deal with challenges and complements of the neoclassical view arising from the introduction of equity principles, security of supply concerns, and a polycentric approach to the provision of public goods. The analysis is illustrated with examples of adaptation measures in Germany.

Many US municipalities are engaged in climate mitigation planning, or efforts to reduce their communities' greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions through land-use, transportation, and energy planning. However, they face a number of procedural and institutional obstacles that limit the adoption and implementation of those plans. The literature identifies some of the factors that lead municipalities to join relevant policy networks, but provides little guidance for overcoming the aforementioned obstacles and adopting policies to reduce community-wide GHG emissions. With this study I increase the understanding of climate mitigation planning by examining whether the adoption of these plans and policies is driven primarily by local demographic, economic, environmental, or political – institutional characteristics. My research is based upon a survey of 255 US municipalities. I combine the survey responses with secondary data and use multiple regression techniques to estimate the impact of fifteen demographic, political – institutional, economic, and environmental variables on the adoption of climate mitigation plans and policies. The influence of neighboring jurisdictions, the presence of staff members assigned to energy or climate planning, and the level of community environmental activism are found to have the greatest impact on climate mitigation policy adoption. These findings support the conclusion that the extent of climate mitigation planning is driven primarily by internal processes, and municipalities that are successful in this area do not fit any one profile according to their demographic, economic, or environmental characteristics.

Although urban sustainability programs frequently include measures that focus on the environmental and economic components of sustainability, the social dimension of sustainability remains underrepresented. An analytical vulnerability approach from global change vulnerability research provides one way to evaluate the distributional impacts and procedural aspects of sustainability initiatives. I apply the vulnerability approach to a study of one contemporary sustainability initiative in New York City, brownfield redevelopment, and identify populations who are vulnerable to the negative impacts of the redevelopment process: elderly residents, renters, and residents receiving government assistance. The results of the case study suggest that the vulnerability approach provides a way to develop indicators of social sustainability for inclusion in existing urban sustainability indicator projects.

Previous research on regional innovation systems (RISs) has shown that Prague is a prime example of a fragmented metropolitan RIS. Fragmented innovation systems are characterized by a strong endowment of knowledge and innovation infrastructure elements, but they suffer from a lack of local networking, cooperation, and knowledge transmission. The aim of this paper is to investigate the nature and geography of innovation, knowledge sourcing, and collaboration in the emerging and still embryonic biotechnology industry in the Prague metropolitan region. The key questions to be answered are whether this general feature of Prague's innovation system (ie its fragmented structure and the lack of local networking) can also be found in a knowledge-intensive sector, such a biotechnology, or whether sectoral drivers are more significant and the generalized ‘local buzz and global pipelines’ model can also be applied to Prague biotech firms. Our research, in contrast to previous studies, shows that relatively intensive linkages exist within the biotechnology sector. Therefore, our results imply that an RIS, even within a single city, might be more diversified and structured than existing studies and typologies of RISs have suggested.

A major source of healthy foods, North American supermarkets have become larger in recent years, with new stores opening and older stores closing. Upon closure, there is evidence of some supermarket sites being placed under restrictive covenants, a practice that restricts future use of the site. The purpose is usually to limit food sales at the location, thus minimizing competition for a chain's nearby stores. In Edmonton, Alberta eighteen covenants have been documented on former supermarket sites. At six of these sites, termed food desolated, there is no operating supermarket within walking distance (800 m) of the former stores. The covenants disproportionately affect senior citizens as neighbourhoods with covenants have a significantly higher percentage of seniors than those neighbourhoods without covenants. Results of a group interview with community leaders from a neighbourhood that lost a supermarket and historical case study also point to the restrictive covenants resulting in difficulties for seniors accessing healthy food.

Two opposing viewpoints can be found in recent literature on trends in welfare states. The first (efficiency thesis) envisages the retrenchment of the welfare state, while the second viewpoint (the ‘resilience theory’) holds that reforms and cutbacks in some parameters of social protection will be minor and will not jeopardise the essential nature of Western states. The present study makes sense in this context of hypotheses to be tested and it proposes an alternative to the measures currently available. The measure drawn up and used in this paper could be called the ‘synthetic relative standards of protection measure’ and is based in the aggregate social spending levels. Much of the evidence gathered in this research study is consistent with the resilience thesis. The impact of reforms is by no means as drastic as posited by the champions of the efficiency thesis.

Volume 28, issue 4, page 625

“Overcoming cost-inefficiencies within small municipalities: improve financial condition or reduce the quality of public services?” by José Luis Zafra-Gómez, Manuel Antonio, Muñiz Pérez

There are errors in the acknowledgements. The correct acknowledgements are:

Acknowledgements. A previous version of this paper (No 462/2009) was presented at the Colección de Documentos de Trabajo de Fundación de Cajas de Ahorros (FUNCAS); we acknowledge their help and support. We are grateful to the editors and two anonymous referees for their comments, which contributed greatly to a general overhaul of the paper. José L Zafra-Gómez is also grateful for the financial support of SE J2007-67441/ECON from the Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia (Spain), PRY(160/09) from Centra de Estudios Andaluces, Junta de Andalucía (Spain), and P09-SEJ-5395 from Proyectos de Excelencia de la Consejería de Innovación, Ciencia y Empresa, Junta de Andalucía (Spain).

The electronic version (http://dx.doi.org/10.1068/c09118) has been corrected accordingly as of 28 September 2010.