Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space

Through a focus on farming practices this paper considers farmer–science knowledges and explores three interrelated issues. First is the hitherto neglected issue of temporal dynamicity—the paper gives attention to how past history and time are constructed, organised, and drawn upon both in the way farmers develop and understand their own practices as well as in how they understand and negotiate those practices that they are now being asked to undertake in contemporary agrienvironment schemes. Second, the paper considers the way in which farmers draw on context-specific experiential understandings in completing their practices, and how these understandings conflict with, and are negotiated alongside, those understandings embedded within conservation schemes and their ‘prescriptions’. Third, the paper develops recent suggestions relating to the potential role of farmers within agrienvironment schemes by illustrating how, when approached through the appropriate methodology, farmers' localised understandings may be usefully incorporated within the discussion of hay-meadow management for conservation.

The paper explores green markets as relational effects. The aim is to show that the green markets of the forest industry did not develop and expand through green consumption behaviour but were performed by a hybrid set of actors including environmental nongovernmental organisations, publishing companies, certification agencies, market researchers, and critical citizens. The spatiality of greening is expressed by showing how spatial relations, territorial spaces, and spatial differences were created and utilised within the process. Empirically, the focus is on the Russian forest sector. By analysing two examples, a conflict over old-growth forests, and a forest certification process, the study indicates how spatial reorientation and the westward export of the forest industry have resulted in greening timber markets in various parts of the Russian forest peripheries.

The paper examines the ways in which citizens negotiate responsibility in relation to various environmental and technological risks. It focuses on the role of agency and the way that this figures in constructions of relations of responsibility between individuals and institutions. A central argument is that, across the different issue contexts, patterns of perceived agency are crucial to understanding the apparent contradiction in citizens' attributions of role-responsibilities for the management of risk. The empirical basis of the paper is a series of twelve reconvened focus groups conducted at locations around England, giving a total of twenty-four meetings, in which citizens discussed six different areas of technological risk: genetically modified (GM) crops, genetic testing, mobile-phone handsets; mobile-phone masts; radioactive waste; and climate change. The authors highlight the problem of citizen ambivalence towards responsibility, tracing it to perceived tensions affecting both citizen and state performances of responsibility, and conclude by discussing the implications for policy and by outlining an agenda for further research.

This paper shows the main limitations and difficulties in the efficiency argument of ecological modernization. Eight limitations in the concept of eco-efficiency are revealed. Recommendations to improve the use of eco-efficiency in ecological modernization policy and management are derived from the critique. Eco-efficiency serves as an important technical tool, practical instrument, or indicator in environmental policy and management, but is not suitable as the overall goal and strategic vision.

The past decade has witnessed a revival of interest in the role of labour in political and economic restructuring. Following a period in the 1980s and early 1990s when trade unions and employees were routinely portrayed as passive victims of corporate restructuring, the past ten years have seen a resurgence of work by geographers highlighting the continued agency of labour. Despite this ‘new labour geography’, however, there has been little empirical research examining the uneven development of employment relations at a broad industry level. We address this issue by examining the changing geography of employment regulation in the UK's privatised rail industry. A major shift in the scale at which industrial relations are organised has taken place under privatisation, away from national collective bargaining to a system of localised company bargaining. On the basis of secondary data gathered from industry sources, we provide an initial assessment of key outcomes of employment change in the rail industry. Our analysis indicates that considerable disparities in pay and conditions exist between different groups of workers, companies, and regions, although these are perhaps less extreme than suggested by the unions. In addition, the number of industrial disputes has escalated in the aftermath of privatisation. Moreover, instead of the set piece national strikes that took place in the nationalised industry, the majority of this strike action has been conducted against particular operators at the local and regional scales, reflecting the logic of company-level bargaining. At the same time, the membership of the three main unions has actually increased in recent years against a backdrop of long-term decline, suggesting that the decentralisation of collective bargaining presents unions with opportunities as well as challenges.

Held in abeyance by the Cold War and the preeminence of the nation-state over the past fifty years, the legitimacy of the corporation is once again in dispute. New kinds of private agencies and social actors have emerged to raise questions and, in some cases, intervene directly in the governance of major corporations. Often, corporate engagement is out of the public view—being a conversation amongst financial elites about common interests. In other cases, however, shareholder activism is a public affair played out in the full glare of the media at annual general meetings. In this paper social activists' corporate engagement strategies are evaluated utilizing three proprietary databases which enable analysis of the patterns of activists' shareholder resolutions with respect to the financial structure and environmental performance of target corporations. An analytical framework is introduced, referencing two models of the firm, the nature of corporate assets (tangible and intangible), and public expectations of corporate performance. Utilizing Interfaith Center for Corporate Responsibility data on social activists' shareholder resolutions it is shown that these types of resolutions can be differentiated according to the nature and volume of activists' resolutions and the motive forces driving intervention. It is also shown that, for all the differences between institutional investors and social activists, they may share the same approach to realizing shareholder value depending on the nature of the corporation.

Since the 1990s the largest transnational temporary staffing agencies have progressively expanded the geographical extent of their operations. Moving beyond the established Dutch, French, UK, and US markets in which the majority are headquartered, and encouraged by supportive supranational and national reregulation, they have entered a number of countries in Southeast Asia, Southern Europe, and Latin America. Moreover, in the run-up to, and since, the accession often new member states to the EU on 1 May 2004, the leading transnational agencies have turned their attentions to establishing and expanding operations in Central and Eastern Europe. This paper offers an initial assessment of the state of temporary staffing and its regulation in two leading markets in the region, the Czech Republic and Poland. It explores how temporary staffing markets are being forged through the interactions between regulators, transnational agencies, local agencies, trade bodies, and inward investors. Both countries legalized temporary staffing in 2004, having begun the legalization process prior to accession. Rather than these developments heralding the start of a period of sustained growth, however, our research suggests that there are still significant constraints on expansion in markets where the pressure to neoliberalize labour markets intersects with postsocialist expectations, norms, and economic structures.

Despite its broad definition, the concept of sustainability has become central to regeneration policy in the UK. A growing body of research, however, suggests that the policy goals of urban regeneration and sustainable development are not being integrated in practice. Ambiguity surrounding what ‘sustainability’ actually means is often cited as the reason why projects fail to achieve policy goals. We seek to make an innovative contribution to this debate, arguing that sustainability does make a positive difference in practice, and that it is necessary to develop approaches that capture these ‘actually existing sustainabilities’. Using a detailed case study of a multistakeholder regeneration project, we develop a more positive analysis of the role which ambiguity plays in the development process. We advance a dialogic conception of sustainability based upon Michel Bakhtin's sociolinguistic theory of the word as a ‘shared territory’. We suggest that the notion of sustainability acts as a shared territory for meaning around which diverse stakeholder groups coalesce, and show how the ambiguity inherent in this shared conception can generate more creative (and sustainable) outcomes to developmental challenges. Viewing sustainability as a shared territory makes ambiguity not only intelligible, but also desirable to the development process, and it is argued that there is a need to avoid the reduction of sustainability to the assessment of predetermined benchmarks or policy goals, both within the regeneration literature and across studies of planning policy and practice more generally.

Cities are increasingly cast as being shaped by globalization and related neoliberal policies. While these diverse literatures have provided needed theoretical advancement to rethink the city in relation to political–economic change, they also run the risk of conceptualizing, studying, and representing cities without sufficient attention to the spatial copresence of multiple actors. The result is that some treatments of the city reproduce a unified story line that conceals human agency, reads as if there is only one trajectory on which all cities are moving, and does not engage in imagining alternative urban futures. In this paper we suggest that there is a continued need to critically examine the spatial narratives mobilized both by researchers as well as by the other actors they encounter. Drawing on the widespread idea that the stories which researchers tell are intimately linked with the conduct of research itself, we advocate a researcher mode of engagement that permits collaborative critique of projects that aim to transform urban space. We report on our experience with two research practices—grounded interviewing, and the public research memo—to provide empirical examples of our perspective.

Integrated, collaborative governance arrangements are viewed as answering the limitations of the liberal, democratic state in the face of ‘wicked’ policy dilemmas such as environmental degradation. The nature of institutional resistance to governance experiments, however, has received limited attention. This paper explores a case of such resistance by the New South Wales political system: the decision to disband the Hawkesbury–Nepean Catchment Management Trust. This discontinuation of the administrative coordination and community engagement aimed at restoring the health of Sydney's major river system is herein characterised as a deliberative truncation. Discussion of what would constitute constructive ecological institutional and policy settings was cut short by intolerant notions of efficacy sustained by political/administrative routines. Analysis of this truncation is progressed through a nexus between three mutually informative theories of modernity dealing with the policy challenges facing liberal democratic societies today.

EU policies seek to bring the EU territory closer to resembling a ‘level playing field’. The paper first discusses efforts to inject a territorial dimension into EU policies, including the European Spatial Development Perspective. During its preparation, the same issue of national sovereignty has been dominant as in the subsequent debate concerning the European Constitution. Had it been ratified, the Constitution would have given European planning a boost. The paper discusses its rejection and reviews literature that presents views of the EU as an unprecedented, dynamic construct, with transnational learning as the engine. Next, the paper discusses the application of the European Spatial Development Perspective, during which planners have been learning about territory and territorial governance in the context of an integrating Europe. Like with European integration generally, European planning can thus be understood as a learning machine.

Worldwide, metropolitan areas continue to be confronted by a growing number of increasingly difficult planning issues. It is our experience that planning practitioners have not taken full advantage of what the Delphi technique can contribute to making informed choices in a wide variety of decision and policy environments. The objectives of this paper are to describe and explain the research design that supported a real-world application of the Delphi technique in an urban, regional, and ecosystem-based planning context, as well as to demonstrate how this model has been or can be adapted to serve a variety of planning research or application tasks.

Given the propensity of Canadians to migrate, it is likely that migration has a large impact upon the distribution and redistribution of income across regions. Such impacts may be magnified within the older population, as their relocation involves the transfer of nonearned income such as pensions, retirement investments, or other income supplements from province to province and so return migration to a province of birth following retirement subsidizes local economies. By using methods proposed by Plane in 1999, income-based versions of demographic effectiveness are applied to evaluate the movement of nonearned income in the Canadian context among Canada's older population. The analysis uses data drawn from the 2001 Canadian Census, and focuses upon the older population (aged 60+ in 2001) who reported nonearned incomes in 2000. The paper distinguishes between four types of nonearned income, including (i) Old Age Security and Guaranteed Income Supplements; (ii) Canada/Québec pension plan benefits; (iii) Retirement Investment income; and (iv) Investment Income. The objectives of the paper are twofold. First, it documents the movement of nonearned income between Canada's provinces, focusing upon the demographic effectiveness of the observed flows. Second, the paper explores the potential for primary, return, and onward migration to redistribute nonearnings income across Canada, and the significance of regional income redistributions by each type of migration. Results illustrate the importance of migration in transferring nonearned incomes over space, and the particular importance of return migration as a vehicle to redistribute nonearned income to economically depressed provinces.