Sustainable Public-Private Partnerships in Sub-Saharan Africa: A Conceptual Framework for Low Carbon Development and Domestic Financing

Public-private partnerships (PPPs) in Sub-Saharan Africa face critical challenges in advancing low carbon development and securing domestic financing. This study employs institutional theory and the capability approach to analyse how PPP frameworks can be adapted to address climate change mitigation and the challenges of investment scarcity in the post-COVID-19 era. Through a systematic review of existing literature, the research highlights the shortcomings of conventional PPP models, which often fail due to disproportionate risk distribution, regulatory deficiencies, and inadequate consideration of environmental sustainability. To address these issues, the study introduces the Sustainable Domestic Resource Mobilisation (SDRM-PPP) model, designed to prioritise carbon footprint reduction, domestic resource mobilisation, and the achievement of sustainable development goals. Key policy recommendations include the establishment of dedicated climate finance units within PPP regulatory bodies, the standardisation of carbon accounting practices, and the development of financing instruments denominated in local currency. This study offers valuable insights into strategies for fostering sustainable infrastructure development in Sub-Saharan Africa

The Unexpected Actor? Civil‐Military Relations and Regulatory Agency Control in Brazil

Democratic backsliding around the world has sparked debate about its impact on public administration and governance. This article explores a growing yet less visible phenomenon threatening democracy. It examines the influence exerted by authoritarian populists over autonomous regulatory agencies through militarized patronage, that is, the discretionary appointment of military officers to civil positions. Scholars have not fully untangled how and why contemporary populists employ militarized patronage, and much less is known about militarization of autonomous regulatory agencies. To fill this gap, we highlight enabling factors underpinning militarized patronage and draw on a unique empirical dataset that integrates military with civil service records to account for the militarization of autonomous regulatory agencies in Brazil during the far-right presidency of Jair Bolsonaro (2019–2022). The article deepens our understanding of the role of civil-military relations in restructuring regulatory governance during populist rule, and the effects of democratic backsliding on regulatory governance

Geographies of race in Poland and Central and Eastern Europe

This article is a discipline-defining agenda. It addresses the oversight of Geographies of race in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and explores geography’s potential contributions to the unfolding debates around race, decolonisation, and whiteness. Geographies of race remain unmarked and therefore unchallenged within the field of geography in CEE. Consequently, geographers typically consider CEE as peripheral to the global racial discourses and possibly post-racial. By drawing on sociological, migration, historical, and anthropological approaches, particularly in Poland, the article emphasises the importance of geography in discussions around race, decolonisation, and whiteness. It considers the appeal of geographies of race to this “peripheral location” to demonstrate a shift in racial and colonial discourses. By bridging interdisciplinary approaches and challenging prevailing discourses, the article aims to broaden the scope of the geographies of race and foster a more inclusive and global understanding of race and colonisation

Recalibrating Authoritarian Coercion With Neoliberalism: Prepaid Meters, Techno‐Politics and Mundane Governance in Egypt

This article examines how authoritarian governance, in Egypt, is being recalibrated through infrastructural technologies that embed regulation into everyday life. It argues that, in the current phase of neoliberal financialisation, authoritarian governance must, by necessity, harness citizens' capacities for self-regulation to achieve the neoliberal objective of making the population creditworthy. Focusing the analysis on the recent nationwide rollout of prepaid electricity meters, the article traces a gradual shift from direct police coercion to technopolitical control, where mundane devices are used to discipline consumption and enforce financial compliance. Using digital ethnography, the study investigates citizens' responses to the new technologies of governance. The analysis shows that, in their engagement with these technologies, citizens articulate a normative critique that challenges the inequity and exclusion embedded in them, forging a distinct idiom of contestation and opposition

The Gentle Decolonial Civilizer of Nations

Book review of Umut Özsu's Completing Humanit

Tourism ethnography and tourism geographies

Akin to the parable of the six blind men and the elephant, we all have a sense of what constitutes tourism ethnography, but our understandings vary based on where we are situated. This paper examines this core methodology and writing convention in tourism research. It details ethnography’s roots in colonial-era cultural anthropology and outlines classic elements of the ethnography of tourism. Following an overview of the more recent history of ethnographic work in tourism, the paper traces how tourism ethnography has evolved and expanded to address new research agendas and challenges that have emerged over the past 25 years. Newer interventions discussed in the paper include autoethnography and memory work, netnography, emotion-centered and embodied sensory ethnography, among others. Recent ethnographic strategies designed to decolonize and democratize tourism ethnography are also addressed, including participatory, collaborative, and social-justice-oriented approaches. Additionally, the paper outlines key gaps in the literature and indicates new areas of consideration for tourism ethnographers. These include the need for more penetrating reflections on ethical aspects of emergent permutations of tourism ethnography and the urgent need to develop new genres of ethnography equipped for lending constructive insights into tourism’s entwinement with planetary peril. Creative reformulations of ethnography are essential for producing insights into how tourism and touristic practices are entangled with the ecological and climatic changes that constitute our greatest challenge. While the past 25 years have witnessed considerable advances in critical approaches to tourism, the project of using knowledge culled from tourism ethnography to constructively reckon with current social and planetary challenges is in its infancy

An anthropological critique of psychiatric rating scales

This article discusses sceptical arguments about measurement scales. Measurement scales are part of a promising agenda of openness, transparency and patient and public involvement (PPI) in medical research, but have received critical, sometimes hostile attention from anthropologists. This is because scales repackage localised cultural assumptions about distress as something universal and pan-human and have the capacity to reshape people's interior lives in unhelpful, possibly harmful ways. We take as an example the Patient Health Questionnaire-9 (PHQ-9). Use of the PHQ-9 is currently mandated by major funders. But its history suggests flawed PPI and a lack of openness. The article suggests a constructive role for anthropology in mental health research, using ethnographic evidence and theory to show how, although they have their uses, mental health scales should not be regarded as inert or harmless