Beyond the Tipping Point: A Multidisciplinary Perspective on Urbanization and Development

By many estimates, the world has just crossed the point where more than half the world’s population is urban, a trend driven by rapid urbanization in developing countries. Urban centers offer economies of scale in terms of productive enterprise and public investment. Cities are social melting pots, centers of innovation and drivers of social change. However, cities are also marked by social differentiation, poverty, conflict and environmental degradation. These are all issues that not only matter to cities but also lie at the heart of development. As such the time is right to consider afresh the relationship between cities and development. This paper introduces a significant new collection of multidisciplinary papers focused on urbanization and its implications for development. It raises four questions: (i) What is so special about the urban context? (ii) Why is urbanization and urban growth important to development at the present conjuncture? (iii) What are the strengths and limitations of our current state of knowledge about urbanization and development from the policy perspective and finally, (iv) how can a multidisciplinary perspective on the urban context add value to development research and policy?Food Security and Poverty, International Development, International Relations/Trade,

Unraveling the Central State, But How? Types of Multi-Level Governance. IHS Political Science Series: 2003, No. 87

The reallocation of authority upwards, downwards, and sideways from central states has drawn attention from a growing number of scholars in political science. Yet beyond agreement that governance has become (and should be) multi-level, there is no consensus about how it should be organized. This article draws on several literatures to distinguish two types of multi-level governance. One type conceives of dispersion of authority to general-purpose, non-intersecting, and durable jurisdictions. A second type of governance conceives of task-specific, intersecting, and flexible jurisdictions. We conclude by specifying the virtues of each type of governance

Governing the Irish Economy : A Triple Crisis

The international economic crisis hit Ireland hard from 2007 on. Ireland’s membership of the Euro had a significant effect on the policy configuration in the run-up to the crisis, as this had shaped credit availability, bank incentives, fiscal priorities, and wage bargaining practices in a variety of ways. But domestic political choices shaped the terms on which Ireland experienced the crisis. The prior configuration of domestic policy choices, the structure of decision-making, and the influence of organized interests over government, all play a vital role in explaining the scale and severity of crisis. Indeed, this paper argues that Ireland has had to manage not one economic crisis but three – financial, fiscal, and competitiveness. Initial recourse to the orthodox strategies of spending cuts and cost containment did not contain the spread of the crisis, and in November 2010 Ireland entered an EU-IMF loan agreement. This paper outlines the pathways to this outcome

The stewardship of things: Property and responsibility in the management of manufactured goods

In the context of broad-based concerns about the need to move towards a more sustainable materials economy, particularly as they are expressed in debates around ecological modernisation (EM), we argue that product stewardship has radical potential as a means to promote significant change in the relationship between society and the material world. We focus on two important dimensions that have been neglected in approaches to product stewardship to date. Firstly, we argue that immanent within the basic concept of stewardship is a problematisation of dominant understandings of property ownership in neoliberal market economies. In the space opened up by notions of stewardship, different ways of enacting both rights and responsibilities to products and materials emerge which have potential to advance the sustainability of material economies. Secondly, through exploration of existing expressions of product stewardship, we uncover a neglected scale of action. Both policy and dominant articulations of EM focus primarily on the efficiency of production processes; and secondarily, the attitudes and behaviours of individual consumers. Missing from this is the 'meso-scale' of social collectives including households, neighbourhoods, more distributed communities and small scale social enterprises. Based on a review of existing research from Australia and the UK, including our own, we argue that understanding of embedded practices of material responsibility at the household scale can both reinvigorate the concept of product stewardship as a potentially radical intervention, and reveal the potential of the meso-scale as a challenging but worthwhile realm of policy intervention

Liberalism, Neo-Liberalism and Urban Governance: A State Theoretical Perspective.

This paper discusses the recurrence and the recurrent limitations of liberalism as a general discourse, strategy, and regime. It then establishes a continuum of neoliberalism ranging from a project for radical system transformation from state socialism to market capitalism, through a basic regime shift within capitalism, to more limited policy adjustments intended to maintain another type of accumulation regime and its mode of regulation. These last two forms of neoliberalism are then related to a broader typology of approaches to the restructuring, rescaling, and reordering of accumulation and regulation in advanced capitalist societies: neoliberalism, neocorporatism, neostatism, and neocommunitarianism. These arguments are illustrated in the final part of the paper through a critique of the World Report on the Urban Future 21 (World Commission 2000), both as an explicit attempt to promote flanking and supporting measures to sustain the neoliberal project on the urban scale and as an implicit attempt to naturalize that project on a global scale

Institutionalizing alternative economic spaces? An interpretivist perspective on diverse economies

This article offers an approach that helps geographers and others to carefully and critically reexamine prospects for diverse economies. We propose an interpretative institutionalist perspective is useful for elucidating overlooked opportunities for creating alternative economic visions and practices by revealing the process of ‘meaning making’ undertaken by actors in the process of developing policy responses to various dilemmas. We explore this notion in the context of de-growth or post-growth. De-growth is a way of thinking about the economy in ways that are not growth oriented, or fixated on GDP, but on the redistribution of wealth and living within the Earth’s ecosystems

Conference Report The 16th Asia Europe Economic Forum. EU-Asia trade and investment connectivity

Global economic trends over the last decades have steadily increased the links between Asia and Europe. For both regions, a growing economic interdependency represents an opportunity to build strong, fair and sustainable relations. Nonetheless, constant global economic disruptions, political uncertainty and a rapid change in economic dynamics make cooperation no easy task for policy makers. With strong recognition of this challenge, the Asia Europe Economic Forum (AEEF) contributes to interregional cooperation with the diversification and consolidation of the links between Asia and Europe. The AEEF was established in 2006 by Jean Pisani-Ferry, the then-director of the Brussels-based think tank Bruegel, as a high-level forum to bring together Asian and European senior policy makers and experts. As such, the Forum is a platform for research-based exchange and discussion on global issues and mutual interests. It is here where Asian and European policy experts can learn from each other, thereby gaining a deeper understanding of the economic and political ties between Asia and Europe. The AEEF is all about bringing countries together and building partnerships with regard to shared interests—the AEEF is all about connectivity (see Box 1).

Global Risks 2015, 10th Edition.

The 2015 edition of the Global Risks report completes a decade of highlighting the most significant long-term risks worldwide, drawing on the perspectives of experts and global decision-makers. Over that time, analysis has moved from risk identification to thinking through risk interconnections and the potentially cascading effects that result. Taking this effort one step further, this year's report underscores potential causes as well as solutions to global risks. Not only do we set out a view on 28 global risks in the report's traditional categories (economic, environmental, societal, geopolitical and technological) but also we consider the drivers of those risks in the form of 13 trends. In addition, we have selected initiatives for addressing significant challenges, which we hope will inspire collaboration among business, government and civil society communitie

The Global Risks Report 2016, 11th Edition

Now in its 11th edition, The Global Risks Report 2016 draws attention to ways that global risks could evolve and interact in the next decade. The year 2016 marks a forceful departure from past findings, as the risks about which the Report has been warning over the past decade are starting to manifest themselves in new, sometimes unexpected ways and harm people, institutions and economies. Warming climate is likely to raise this year's temperature to 1° Celsius above the pre-industrial era, 60 million people, equivalent to the world's 24th largest country and largest number in recent history, are forcibly displaced, and crimes in cyberspace cost the global economy an estimated US$445 billion, higher than many economies' national incomes. In this context, the Reportcalls for action to build resilience – the "resilience imperative" – and identifies practical examples of how it could be done.The Report also steps back and explores how emerging global risks and major trends, such as climate change, the rise of cyber dependence and income and wealth disparity are impacting already-strained societies by highlighting three clusters of risks as Risks in Focus. As resilience building is helped by the ability to analyse global risks from the perspective of specific stakeholders, the Report also analyses the significance of global risks to the business community at a regional and country-level