The high priests of global development: capitalism, religion and the political economy of sacrifice in a celebrity‐led water charity

Throughout the world, 785 million people lack a basic drinking-water service and at least 2 billion people consume contaminated drinking water. At the same time, numerous global water charities fronted by ‘caring’, politicized celebrity figures — dubbed the ‘high priests’ of global development by the authors of this article — have sought to ‘solve’ inequalities in access to clean water through market-based solutions and charity donations. This article engages with the fields of critical social theory, political theology, political ecology and celebrity studies to analyse the interrelationship between capitalism and religion, to interrogate the drivers of international development, and to historically situate the work of celebrity-led water charities and the growing role of these ‘high priests’. It takes the case of Matt Damon’s Water.org to examine the increasingly religious nature of these neoliberalized charity processes, and outlines the main elements of what the authors term a contemporary political economy of sacrifice. They argue that this results in charities that, rather than reducing inequalities, actually reproduce, normalize and legitimize the very system and exploitative relations that are responsible for these inequalities and environmental problems in the first place, while scattered and localized fixes sustain the illusion that things are getting better

The tropes of celebrity environmentalism

Celebrity advocacy for environmental causes has grown dramatically in recent decades. An examination of this expansion and the rise of causes such as climate change reveals the shifting politics and organization of advocacy. We address these changes to the construction and interpretation of celebrity advocacy and detail how they have produced a rich variety of environmental celebrity advocates. We also account for differences between legacy (e.g., radio, TV, newspapers) and online celebrities and their practices (e.g., hashtag publics, brandjacking, online communities). Environmental celebrity advocates’ performances can be divided into nine tropes, each characterized in part by the particular varieties of environmentalism that they promote. We present the tropes and discuss their five cross-cutting themes. We conclude with a set of questions for future research on celebrity environmentalism

Kinematics of Multigrid Monte Carlo

We study the kinematics of multigrid Monte Carlo algorithms by means of acceptance rates for nonlocal Metropolis update proposals. An approximation formula for acceptance rates is derived. We present a comparison of different coarse-to-fine interpolation schemes in free field theory, where the formula is exact. The predictions of the approximation formula for several interacting models are well confirmed by Monte Carlo simulations. The following rule is found: For a critical model with fundamental Hamiltonian H(phi), absence of critical slowing down can only be expected if the expansion of in terms of the shift psi contains no relevant (mass) term. We also introduce a multigrid update procedure for nonabelian lattice gauge theory and study the acceptance rates for gauge group SU(2) in four dimensions.Comment: 28 pages, 8 ps-figures, DESY 92-09

The use of routine outcome measures in two child and adolescent mental health services: a completed audit cycle

Background: Routine outcome measurement (ROM) is important for assessing the clinical effectiveness of health services and for monitoring patient outcomes. Within Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS) in the UK the adoption of ROM in CAMHS has been supported by both national and local initiatives (such as government strategies, local commissioning policy, and research). Methods: With the aim of assessing how these policies and initiatives may have influenced the uptake of ROM within two different CAMHS we report the findings of two case-note audits: a baseline audit conducted in January 2011 and a re-audit conducted two years later in December 2012-February 2013. Results: The findings show an increase in both the single and repeated use of outcome measures from the time of the original audit, with repeated use (baseline and follow-up) of the Health of the Nation Outcome Scale for Children and Adolescents (HoNOSCA) scale increasing from 10% to 50% of cases. Re-audited case-notes contained more combined use of different outcome measures, with greater consensus on which measures to use. Outcome measures that were applicable across a wide range of clinical conditions were more likely to be used than symptom-specific measures, and measures that were completed by the clinician were found more often than measures completed by the service user. Conclusions: The findings show a substantial improvement in the use of outcome measures within CAMHS. These increases in use were found across different service organisations which were subject to different types of local service priorities and drivers

Collective memories, place-framing and the politics of imaginary futures in sustainability transitions and transformation

A geographical perspective is crucial to understanding sustainability transitions and transformation, but previous research on place framing in sustainability transitions and transformation has had a marked focus on the politics of the future and its performativity in the present. This paper analyzes place-framing in sustainability transitions and transformation by examining how the conflicting collective memories of a place and the framings of the future of this place interact and lead to the justification of particular forms of socio-material development, land use and sustainability of the peri-urban spaces of the city of Sogamoso, Colombia. Based on 38 semi-structured interviews, we identify three distinct assemblages of future visions, collective memories and place frames, which we call urban development, recovering tradition, and cultural revitalization. The analysis shows that place framing is an exercise through which collective memories and future visions are connected and co-constituted in a spatio-temporal ‘dialogue’: collective memories, future visions and place frames are processes of social construction activated in the attempt to shape or contest sustainability transitions and transformation. We contend that the existence and mobilization of collective memories—and their critical influence on future visions—are a core aspect of the politics of place framing fundamental to the socio-material processes of sustainability transitions and transformation. Furthermore, a politics of place-making in sustainability transitions and transformation involves acknowledging and negotiating collective memories of the past as much as future visions. This suggests ways to critically counterbalance the marked future orientation taken in recent years by sustainability science and transition studies

Collective memories, place-framing and the politics of imaginary futures in sustainability transitions and transformation

A geographical perspective is crucial to understanding sustainability transitions and transformation, but previous research on place framing in sustainability transitions and transformation has had a marked focus on the politics of the future and its performativity in the present. This paper analyzes place-framing in sustainability transitions and transformation by examining how the conflicting collective memories of a place and the framings of the future of this place interact and lead to the justification of particular forms of socio-material development, land use and sustainability of the peri-urban spaces of the city of Sogamoso, Colombia. Based on 38 semi-structured interviews, we identify three distinct assemblages of future visions, collective memories and place frames, which we call urban development, recovering tradition, and cultural revitalization. The analysis shows that place framing is an exercise through which collective memories and future visions are connected and co-constituted in a spatio-temporal ‘dialogue’: collective memories, future visions and place frames are processes of social construction activated in the attempt to shape or contest sustainability transitions and transformation. We contend that the existence and mobilization of collective memories—and their critical influence on future visions—are a core aspect of the politics of place framing fundamental to the socio-material processes of sustainability transitions and transformation. Furthermore, a politics of place-making in sustainability transitions and transformation involves acknowledging and negotiating collective memories of the past as much as future visions. This suggests ways to critically counterbalance the marked future orientation taken in recent years by sustainability science and transition studies

Ordinary land grabbing in peri-urban spaces: land use conflicts and governance in a small Colombian city

Recent scholarship on ‘urban land grabbing’ has urged researchers to take more geographically nuanced perspectives on land appropriation, especially in the global South. In this, there is the need to understand the actions of and interactions amongst a multiplicity of local actors—beyond large-scale investors and global cities—when considering land grabs in the spaces of urban development. Therefore, this paper analyses what—in building on the work of Ojeda (2016)—we conceptualise as the more ‘gradual’ and ‘ordinary’ driving factors of land use conflict and dispossession in the peri-urban spaces of the small-scale city of Sogamoso, Colombia. Based on participant observation fieldwork and 38 semi-structured key-informant interviews between 2017 and 2018, we first situate our findings within debates on peri-urban landscape governance and conflict and urban environmental politics in Latin America and Colombia. We then explore the ways that the everyday, livelihood practices of agriculture, mining and ecological conservation are in tension with urban expansionism and land grabbing within the urban and peri-urban spaces. In particular, we found that these tensions are facilitated by local policy incoherence and the failures of municipal, place-based policies and politics: Policy confusion, incoherence and capture by elites results in normative uncertainty and weak environmental governance while a lack of coordinated municipal governance in peri-urban spaces leads to further confusion and an exacerbation of already unequal, grounded power relations. Both lead to gradual and more ordinary processes of land grabbing by powerful actors in Sogamoso to the detriment of the livelihoods of citizens and ecological conservation in peri-urban spaces. In short, focusing on these often unnoticed, place-based and internally-dynamic forces of landscape conflict within the city of Sogamoso brings to the fore the everyday actions, actors and power relationships involved in urban expansionism, mining, farming and ecosystems conservation as these practices seek to coexist and compete for the same, relatively sparse amount of peri-urban space. The paper makes a substantial empirical and theory-building contribution to understanding the shifting urban geographies and environmental governance of the cities of the Global South through the day to day local scale governance of urban land use conflicts and land grabbing from the perspective of peri-urban landscapes in the small-scale city of Sogamoso, Brazil

Multigrid Monte Carlo Algorithms for SU(2) Lattice Gauge Theory: Two versus Four Dimensions

We study a multigrid method for nonabelian lattice gauge theory, the time slice blocking, in two and four dimensions. For SU(2) gauge fields in two dimensions, critical slowing down is almost completely eliminated by this method. This result is in accordance with theoretical arguments based on the analysis of the scale dependence of acceptance rates for nonlocal Metropolis updates. The generalization of the time slice blocking to SU(2) in four dimensions is investigated analytically and by numerical simulations. Compared to two dimensions, the local disorder in the four dimensional gauge field leads to kinematical problems.Comment: 24 pages, PostScript file (compressed and uuencoded), preprint MS-TPI-94-