Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space

Many governments have recently initiated a process of water sector mercantilización—the introduction of markets or market-simulating decisionmaking techniques, and the participation of private companies and private capital in water management. This paper presents a case study of the mercantilización of water resources in Spain. State-led development of water resources was a key element of Spain's modernisation drive in the mid-20th century, intended to redress not only the high degree of temporal and spatial variation in water availability, but also to underpin the agricultural colonisation of the country's arid interior. Water-resources development, pricing, and allocation remained, with few exceptions, the preserve of the state. In 1999 the government reformed the national Water Law, introducing both water markets and water banks; this in addition to earlier reforms enabling the participation of private companies and private capital in water-resources development. The case study, situating the evolution of water policy within an analysis of key macro political – economic trends (in particular, Spain's transition to democracy and EU-mandated economic convergence) and the country's contested hydropolitics, is employed as a means of elaborating a more general political ecological – economic understanding of the mercantilización of water.

The author examines the rapidly expanding market for private sector management of water systems. He explores the ways in which markets are being constructed, focusing on the role of international bodies—especially multilateral bodies such as the World Bank—in promoting various forms of private sector engagement. Arguing that market making is not politically neutral, he examines how the World Bank sets out to influence national governments in how they run their water-management systems, in the process highlighting alternative visions for community-based systems.

There is a growing realisation that agriculture is a central mechanism for delivering sustainable rural development in Europe. However, agro-industrial and postproductivist logics and dynamics have largely tended to marginalise its significance. In this paper we explore some of the conceptual parameters needed to develop the rural development dynamic. This is one which recentralises agriculture and farm-based activities and provides a basis for countering the growing crisis in rural and agricultural policymaking. In order to further embed the rural development dynamic, however, new alliances need to be attached to the struggles that are currently underway in rural areas. This will involve the state and social scientists playing a greater constructive role in developing the social infrastructure around which current exemplars of agrarian-based rural development can become more mainstream.

‘Following the money’ has become a popular strategy for many NGOs trying to change corporate and institutional practice. Individual shareholders, pension funds, banks, and other investors capitalize projects that cause ecological degradation or social injustice. Pressuring shareholders to divest, invest responsibly, or encourage executives to alter undesirable practices has become de rigueur for civil-society groups working for social change. Such strategies produce value or norm change, greater accountability, activist networks across national boundaries, and improvements in environmental management. Disinvestment helped bring down apartheid in South Africa. But how far can these ‘disciplining’ strategies go in terms of significantly ameliorating ecological destruction and violations of human rights? I explore this question using the case study of the campaign by Friends of the Earth against the operations of Freeport – McMoRan Copper and Gold Inc. in Irian Jaya (West Papua).

During the 1990s the management of forests in British Columbia (Canada) and New South Wales (Australia) underwent many changes. For most of the decade the governments in both of these political jurisdictions were more socially and environmentally aware than their immediate predecessors. They were, however, far short of what many environmental and social activists desired. The New Democratic Party in British Columbia, led to government by Mike Harcourt, and the Australian Labor Party in New South Wales led by Bob Carr, may both be described as ‘centre-left/light-green’ in their political persuasions. This paper develops the regulation approach to explore the achievements, the potential and the limitations of these governments in the area of forest politics. It is argued that these governments implicitly adopted a progressive neopluralist approach to forest politics and attempted to manage environmental conflict by securing the agreement of many diverse interest groups. The experience of these two governments raises questions about the potential and limitations not just of the particular governments, but of a progressive neopluralist political strategy to achieve sustainable forest management.

In this paper I seek to make a preliminary link between the discursive representation of the ‘environment’ and the regulation of economic activity. The contemporary Montana gold mining industry belies accounts that economic regulation can be situated purely in concepts of structures and institutions. In the 1990s, the Montana gold mining industry was fundamentally transformed in the absence of concomitant changes in the economic structure of the industry or in the institutions of regulation. Indeed, the changes in the efficacy of the Montana gold mining economy can only be explicated by adding a discursive account of regulation. In particular, I link a regulationist account of reregulation with the post-structural sensibilities found in cultural economic geography. This analysis, which focuses on how nature is represented in the mine-permitting process, illustrates that how we perceive ‘environment’ in particular places and times can influence access to resources and their subsequent physical transformation.

Spatial association effects, perhaps the most important concern in the analysis of spatial data, have been amply studied from a global perspective in the exploratory and modeling domains, and more recently also from a local perspective in the realm of exploratory data analysis. In a local modeling framework, however, the issue of how to detect and model spatial association by using geographically weighted regression (GWR) remains largely unresolved. In this paper we exploit a recent development that casts GWR as a model of locational heterogeneity, to formulate a general model of spatial effects that includes as special cases GWR with a spatially lagged objective variable and GWR with spatial error autocorrelation. The approach also permits the derivation of formal tests against several forms of model misspecification, including locational heterogeneity in global models, and spatial error autocorrelation in GWR models. Application of these results is exemplified with a case study.

A growing body of research examining the social and political implications of geographic information systems (GIS) considers the extent to which the use of this technology may empower or disempower different actors and institutions. However, these studies have tended not to articulate a clear conceptualization of empowerment. Thus, in this paper, I develop a multidimensional conceptual framework for assessing empowerment (and disempowerment), and employ it in examining the impacts of GIS use by community-based organizations engaged in urban planning and neighborhood revitalization. Drawing on a case study conducted with a Minneapolis, Minnesota, neighborhood organization, I show how this multidimensional framework fosters a more complete analysis of empowerment, and therefore, development of a more detailed explanation of the impacts of this new technology.

The authors examine the impact of mobility on the labor-force status of two-earner households in the United States, in a longitudinal context. There has recently been a resurgence of interest within industry and academia in the impact of family migration on the labor-force status of women, and on dual-earner families in general. Much of the research in this field has documented the disruptive effects of migration on the labor-force status of women, particularly with respect to unemployment, under-employment, and interrupted careers. However, there is another body of research that has challenged the disruption assumption with findings that many women benefit from family migration. The conflicting results persist when the modeling procedures account for the selectivity of migrants. Missing from the literature is a comparison of the impact of mobility on the labor-force status of men as well as women at varying geographical scales. The authors have used a new methodology to extend previous work on the impact of family migration by directly comparing the labor-force status of dual-earner households who migrate long distances, with that of households who move within the same labor market, and with that of households who remain residentially stable. The authors have used data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to show conclusively that, although there are disruptive effects, these are relatively short lived for most households. In addition, the results suggest that average changes mask very large variations in what happens to husbands and wives who relocate. This study emphasizes the dynamic nature of wives' labor-force participation relative to their husbands' immediately before and after a move, a finding that has not been established by other work on migration and labor-force participation.