查看更多>>摘要：Accra, Ghana's capital, is investing massively in its road infrastructure, reflecting a broader trend of infrastructure-led development across Africa. Similar to the experiences of other African cities, many of Accra's road projects are funded and constructed by Chinese actors. These new infrastructures are transforming the urban fabric, and previous research has analysed the techno-political promises and outcomes of such developments. However, less is known about the labour practices and relations that large-scale infrastructures both enable and require. This paper adds a labour perspective, which is sensitive to political-economic relations at multiple scales, to the growing infrastructure literature. It examines the situation of road workers in Accra and how Sino-Ghanaian relations, at various scales, inform working conditions and labour agency. The paper draws on fieldwork conducted between 2022 and 2024 and includes interviews with road workers, government officials, building consultants, a union representative, as well as observations and text analysis. The findings highlight the precarious situation and constrained agency of the studied road workers. This situation is explained by an emerging exploitative Sino-Ghanaian labour regime, driven primarily by the state's prioritisation of infrastructure development over workers' rights and its dependence on China to advance its infrastructure-led development agenda. This study underscores that largescale infrastructure projects are deeply political processes shaped by multiscalar dynamics that inform and potentially reinforce labour inequalities.
查看更多>>摘要：Low-carbon transitions are essential but contested, particularly regarding what constitutes a 'just transition'. To grasp their political nature, adopting a spatial perspective becomes indispensable, as different actors hold different views on how to allocate burdens and benefits across scales. In this study, we examine how notions of 'justice' are expressed and manifested spatially, negotiated between conflicting parties, and undergo changes, delving into the conflict surrounding an electric vehicle (EV) factory near Berlin, Germany. To do so, we leverage the theoretical lens of 'hydrosocial territories'. This framework helps to understand how beliefs about desirable societal development ('imaginaries') interlink with actors' perceptions of just distribution of water-related benefits and burdens, as well as decision-making power across spatial scales. We identify one territory supporting the factory and two counter-territories challenging its legitimacy. Actors of one counter-territory question the net benefit for in situ communities due to water challenges, while the other casts doubt on the legitimacy of the capitalist systems as such and considers the EV technology and its supply chains exemplary of exploitative relations in the water sector. We derive three key insights for the conceptualisation of 'justice': Firstly, divergence in the underlying values of desired societal development and the spatial scales at which transitions are conceptualised can affect the possibilities for compromise. Secondly, justice, as viewed by actors negotiating transitions, requires continuous reassessment due to its fluid nature. Thirdly, localities where low-carbon transitions occur are perceived at multiple spatial scales simultaneously, adding complexity to how actors understand justice. Our research holds value for the study of low-carbon transitions, illuminating the complexity, spatiality, and fluidity of justice and offering a heuristic device to capture it.
Davies, Anna R.Cho, HyunjiVedoa, MarcoVarderi, Robert Martinez...
1.1-1.14页
查看更多>>摘要：Urban and peri-urban (UPU) area food systems need reconfiguration to support just transitions towards sustainability. Collaborative acts around food - food sharing for brevity - have been mooted as a potentially productive arena for enacting such a transition, with research exploring the location, goals, and activities of individual food sharing initiatives (FSIs) internationally. Situated conceptually at the intersection of diverse economies approaches and critical mapping, with an overarching concern for achieving just transitions to sustainable food systems, this paper advances understanding of FSIs by adopting a novel longitudinal lens and focusing on the UPU scale. Implementing a co-designed and collaboratively translated system for identifying and categorizing FSIs that have a digital presence in two European cities: Milan and Barcelona, we contextualize and compare the results uncovered, contrasting these with findings from earlier research to establish evolutionary trajectories for urban FSI landscapes. The expanded mapping process offers significant empirical insights tracing the often invisible but dynamically evolving location, form, and function of UPU FSI landscapes. These methodological and empirical insights are interrogated to identify what contribution critical mapping of FSIs at the UPU scale makes to allied efforts for just and sustainable food systems. In conclusion, while the approach outlined has limitations in terms of resource intensity and explanatory power, we see the approach as one vital component in furthering comprehensive understanding of UPU food systems, providing opportunities to: document diverse food geographies; create new spatial imaginaries; support efforts for greater food democracy, and advocate for more equitable distribution of sustainable food sharing initiatives.
查看更多>>摘要：Several resource-rich developing countries still have insufficient knowledge of their domestic mineral deposits and have not made sufficient investments in geological surveys. The political geography literature has highlighted how geological investigations form part of a government's repertoire to extend three-dimensional control over territories. Yet there are few studies - particularly, of African countries - that examine why some countries may invest in geological surveys more than others. This paper adopts a political economy lens to investigate why the Rwandan government has invested more than the Ghanaian government in geological surveys. We combine insights from political settlements analysis (PSA) and the political geography literature to unpack the political economy dynamics underpinning the decisions to invest in geological mapping. Our findings suggest that Ghanaian politics has been characterised by consistent competition between political parties, which have hindered the capacity of ruling elites to maximise control over their territories through prioritising geological mapping. In contrast, Rwanda's cohesive ruling party has prioritised investing in geological surveys because maximising control over territory is central to preserving its rule. The Rwandan case also highlights how goals of maximising control over subterranean territory, which require long-term investments, are hindered because of conflicting priorities. Instead, Rwanda's structural vulnerabilities, as well as the ruling Rwandan Patriotic Front's material incentives and conflicting ideological goals, result in the prioritisation of trading DRC's minerals rather than investing in its own domestic minerals sector.
查看更多>>摘要：This paper combines two fast-developing perspectives on food provision: diverse economies and temporality. Building on an in-depth study of urban gardening in Czechia, we show that non-market economies play a central role in household food practices and that their specific temporality shapes how other parts of a household's diverse food economy are mobilised at certain times and for certain purposes. Following the diverse economies approach of reading for difference and not dominance, this paper investigates the interrelations and hierarchies among market, alternative market, and non-market food economies on the household level. We decentre the presumed dominance of market-based provisioning by showing that gardeners' food behaviours are crucially shaped by their engagement with food self-provisioning (FSP), which creates particular understandings of food quality. What is more, the cyclical, natural time of gardening seasons determines the social rhythm of food provisioning in a contemporary urban context. This provides a counter-narrative to the dominant account about the dislodging of cyclical time embedded in natural processes by modern, accelerated time, with the former carrying a lower value than the latter. Finally, we engage with temporality on a discursive level as we counterpose our case of traditional FSP against the fascination with novelty permeating much of the search for alternative foodways. With this, we contribute to the debate on the temporality underpinning the ideas of capitalist modernity as well as post-capitalist prefiguration.
查看更多>>摘要：The passage of New Mexico's water code of 1907 enshrined water as a publicly owned good distributed to individuals via private use rights. This system of water governance threatened the communitarian practices of Hispano and Indigenous irrigators in the state. In the area surrounding Albuquerque, the subsequent institution of the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District in 1923 rationalized management, and absorbed and obviated acequias-community irrigation ditches autonomously governed according to Spanish custom-surrounding the state's urban core. The dual thrust of these processes was the colonial enclosure of small farmers in the region via legal means. Six decades later, statewide acequia activism and the threat of water transfer to a large development west of Albuquerque spurred a resurgence of acequia life in the South Valley. Drawing on and informing an insurgent Hispano identity, the water struggles of the South Valley acequieros contest the outcomes of liberal water law using the tools of the same legal code that had earlier dispossessed them. This process refashions both acequias and the liberal systems into which they are absorbed, demonstrating that while colonial water law acts as a structure constraining the agency of hydro-social actors, legal-political struggle by these constrained agents dialectically reshapes the legal edifice within which they act. Water law thus appears as both a structuring condition of hydro-social life, codifying colonial social relations, and an object of struggle by which those relations might be remade from within.
查看更多>>摘要：This paper argues that the cultural industries are a key field for research and action in the context of a socioecological crisis because they are simultaneously entangled in extractivist logics and processes and generating models, spaces and narratives for non-extractive socioecological transformation. Adopting a relational approach to extractivism, the paper first discusses the ways in which the cultural industries enhance and reproduce extractivism through dynamics like greenwashing, the cooptation of culture, and growth-oriented development narratives, what can be understood as cultural extractivism. It then argues for the potential that the cultural industries hold for contributing to socioecological transformations in-and-through-culture that move us away from extractivism. To investigate this, the paper draws on empirical research conducted with cultural producers and workers in Argentina, which aimed to understand how they position their work in relation to the socioecological crisis, and to figure out pathways towards forms of cultural production that are situated in local struggles against extractivism. The study identifies new lines of enquiry for researching the potential of cultural production in enacting socioecological transformations, including the decentralization of cultural production, the development of new indicators of success for the sector, questions around the future of the cultural sector as an industry and culture as work, and the relationship between autonomous cultural production and the state. The paper demonstrates the strength of a situated approach to research for unpacking possible avenues of action for socioecological transformations at local scale that can connect with and inform initiatives at a larger scale.
查看更多>>摘要：Despite a burgeoning population and growing interest, gendered analyses of skilled female migrants are lagging and in turn, theoretical and policy frameworks have been built with a male migrant in mind. This is problematic given that we understand gender, along with other factors like race, class, and social status, impact outcomes of female migrants in general. Gender plays a role in determining the effects of both drivers of migration, and patterns of migration. There are distinct gender differences in employment rates, income, self-reported satisfaction, and access to training that do not abate with time. To improve our understanding of skilled migration and its interplay with gender, we undertook a systematic literature review focusing on factors and mechanisms that mediate the employment outcomes for skilled female migrants in destination state. The corpus of reviewed papers includes 94 articles published between 1980 and 2024 addressing skilled female migrants where skilled aligns with OECD or ILO definitions of skilled. These were double coded following a deductive coding approach. From the analysis of the corpus, we identify 7 explanatory factors and 3 mechanisms which interact to shape employment outcomes of skilled female migrants. We employ transnational feminist geopolitics as an analytic lens to understand the multiple, socially constructed-spatially contingent forms of gendered disadvantage which intersect and accumulate across space and time for SMW. We capture this relationship-between the identified explanatory factors, mechanisms, and outcomes-in a novel gendered framework of cumulative disadvantage.
NETL
NSTL
Elsevier