| 1. |
- Suleiman, Lina
(författare)
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Water Governance in Transition
- 2010
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The constraints experienced by water utilities in developing countries, with regard to the universal provision of access to water and improved water services, have been defined by international policymakers as "a crisis of governance". This study departs from the theoretical perspectives on governance and aspires to accumulate knowledge and advance understanding on how the performance of water utilities can be enhanced. The thesis comprises five papers and the cover essay. Four of the papers address case studies and one is a theoretically based paper, while all five papers are supported by reviews from the literature relevant to the topic of each paper. The thesis uses insights from literature reviews mapping relevant scientific theories and concepts in the areas of mainly governance, deliberative policymaking and communicative planning, social capital, civil society and institutional theoretical perspectives. The study integrates different research methods and explores theoretical perspectives on governance to examine the governance aspects of water utilities in the transition phase from public to private management and operation. The study investigates whether the governance structure that involves the private sector in the form of Public Private Partnership (PPP) of water utility has produced "good governance" and enhanced water governance in two cases, the Lema Water Company in Amman, Jordan and the Ghana Water Company Limited (GWCL) in Accra, Ghana. The analysis highlights evidence of governance deficiency. Accordingly, the thesis argues against the policy design that assumes that simply transferring the management and operation of water utility to private operators would resolve the problems of water utilities and enhance water governance. The analyses and the conclusions reached in the papers, together with a review of the literature on New Institutional Economics theory that knits together all the theories that are utilised in the papers, offer insights in the understanding of aspects of water governance. The insights suggest that policymakers need to better understand how institutions at different levels impact the overall performance of a water utility. The performance of the water utility cannot be detached from the wider institutional setting or reduced to simply changing the operator. What has been disregarded from the calculus of international policymakers, the thesis mainly argues, is the institutional perspective. The study concludes that actors’ performances are affected primarily by their institutional settings. The constraints of water utilities to provide a better performance and good governance processes reside in different kinds of institutional settings To address this, the thesis develops a generic institutional framework within which water governance aspects can be assessed at different institutional levels, from the higher level of politics to that of the individual level. According to this perspective, the study views governance process as "the interaction between actors from the spheres of a society within specific sets of formal and informal institutions in a social setting that produces certain political, economic and social outcomes". It defines good governance as "the legitimacy given by the wider public to institutions in a social setting and the coherency of formal and informal institutions to produce socially effective outcomes for the collective public". The developed generic institutional framework is used to more thoroughly analyse the two cases integrated in the study. This approach to assessment of water governance provides an explanation for why the water utilities were not able to meet their performance goals and enriches our understanding of water governance processes. It also modestly maps the main problematic institutional areas that in each case constrained aspects of good water governance. In practical terms, this thesis emphasises that policymakers have to map and identify the institutional factors constraining the overall performance of a water utility, at all levels. The thesis also urges policymakers to be cautious regarding which formulated policies are seen as solutions. Policymakers should restrain themselves from experimenting with policy when they are not sure that certain outcomes are likely to be produced by adopting a particular policy. In the long run, inappropriate policies may negatively affect local institutional settings and are likely to undermine the capacity of local governance.
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| 4. |
- Baeten, Guy, et al.
(författare)
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Politics, Institutions and Regional Restructuring Processes : From Managed Growth to Planned Fragmentation in the Reconversion of Belgium's Last Coal Mining Region
- 1999
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Ingår i: Regional studies. - : Routledge. - 0034-3404 .- 1360-0591. ; 33:3, s. 247-258
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Politics, institutions and regional restructuring processes: from managed growth to planned fragmentation in the reconversion of Belgium's last coal mining region, Reg. Studies 33 , 247-258. Taking the example of the contested closure of Belgium's last coal mines in the Province of Limburg and the subsequent tumultuous attempts to reconvert the region's economic base, the paper assesses the importance of the political armature in structuring processes of regional change under conditions of prolonged economic stress. Particular attention is paid to the relationship between supra-national (European) programmes and the negotiation of these with regional institutional power configurations, resulting in a new articulation of European and local scales of governance. In the first part, we shall summarize the recent political-economic history of Limburg and indicate the role of hegemonic political apparatuses in shaping development trajectories. In a second part, we shall detail the more recent epochal changes that have changed the political-institutional framework in decisive ways and altered the economic restructuring process. We shall assess the functioning of the recently evaluated First Programme (1989-93). Finally, we shall suggest why the Second Programme (1994-98) has been so unsuccessful in meeting its objectives. We conclude that a regional analysis and planning that ignores the subtleties of power relations, their institutional configuration and shifting power geometries will invariably fail to account for or influence regional socio-economic development paths.
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| 8. |
- Dikec, Mustafa, et al.
(författare)
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Theorizing the politicizing city
- 2017
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Ingår i: International Journal of Urban and Regional Research. - : John Wiley & Sons. - 0309-1317 .- 1468-2427. ; 41:1
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This introductory symposium article develops a framework for an urban political reading and a theorization of urban uprisings. We argue that there is a need to foreground the notion of the urban political as central to the theoretical and practical demands of urban research today. First, we revisit critical urban theory in light of recent urban insurrections and point out a lack of sustained theoretical engagement with the political. Second, based on this critique, we argue for what we call a ‘re-centring of the urban political’ to rethink urban theory in ways that consider the city as a site of political encounter, interruption and experimentation, even when, or perhaps especially when, these ways fall outside institutional forms or lack the organizational form or legitimacy of social movements. Thus, we attempt to place politics at the heart of radical urban political theory and practice today in order to make sense of urban subjects, events and claims that elude established government practices and institutionalized structures.
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| 9. |
- Ernstson, Henrik, 1972-, et al.
(författare)
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Bringing Back the Political : Egalitarian Acting, Performative Theory
- 2019
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Ingår i: Urban Political Ecology in the Anthropo-obscene. - Abingdon and New York : Routledge. - 9781138629196 ; , s. 255-267
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Bokkapitel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The political is categorically and fundamentally performative. Those that gain a voice as equals do not do so by demanding a right to speak within an already policed order, they stage equality and produce new spaces from where equality and freedom can be thought and acted out. This notion of the political, we argue, has to (again) become central in radical and critical theory, urban political ecology (UPE) and associated fields in the coming decade. This concluding essay draws on the chapters of the book to discuss what “politically performative theory” could mean and what challenges and possibilities it brings to a reconfigured UPE and in politicizing the environment.
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| 10. |
- Ernstson, Henrik, 1972-
(författare)
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In Rhizomia : Actors, Networks and Resilience in Urban Landscapes
- 2008
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- With accelerating urbanization it is crucial to understand how urban ecosystems play a part in generating ecosystem services for urban dwellers, such as clean water, spaces for recreation, stress relief and improved air quality. An equally important question relate to who gets to enjoy these benefits, i.e. the distribution of ecosystem services, and how issues of power and equity influence the management of ecosystems. Through case studies from the urban landscape of Stockholm, this doctoral thesis engages with these perspectives through combining ecological theory with social theory, including social network analysis, actor-network theory and social movement theory. Strategies for how to improve urban ecosystem management are presented along with frameworks for how to analyze issues of power and equity in relation to natural resource management.Paper I shows that ecosystem management can be studied through analyzing the structure of social networks, i.e. the patterns of relations between agencies, stake-holders and user groups. Paper II and Paper III analyze, based on a network survey of 62 civil society organizations and in-depth interviews, a transformational process of how an urban local movement managed to protect a large urban green area from exploitation (The Stockholm National Urban Park). Paper IV discusses, based on several case studies from Stockholm, a conducive network structure for linking managers and user groups (e.g. allotment gardens, cemetery managers, and urban planners) across spatial ecological scales so as to improve urban green area management. Paper V presents a framework to analyze the social-ecological dynamics behind the generation and distribution of ecosystem services in urban landscapes.The thesis points towards the notion of "a social production of ecosystem services" and argues for deeper engagement with urban political ecology and critical geography to inform governance and collective action in relation to urban ecosystems.
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| 11. |
- Ernstson, Henrik, 1972-, et al.
(författare)
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O Tempora! O Mores! Interrupting the Anthropo-obScene
- 2019
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Ingår i: Urban Political Ecology in the Anthropo-obscene. - Abingdon and New York : Routledge. - 9781138629196 ; , s. 25-47
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Bokkapitel (refereegranskat)abstract
- We develop the term “the Anthropo-obScene” to show how various discourses on “the Anthropocene” have created a set of stages that disavow certain voices and render some forms of acting (human, non-human, and more-than-human) off-stage. Examples include consensual narratives of adaptive, resilient, and geo-engineered governance, but also more-than-human ontologies that, in spite their purported radicality, could lead to a problematic strengthening of technomanagerial discourse. With the Anthropo-obScene, we seek to interrupt the deepening of “immunological bio-politics” and a politicization of the socio-ecological conundrum we are in, while fully and radically embracing our interdependence with non-humans.
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| 12. |
- Ernstson, Henrik, Dr. 1972-, et al.
(författare)
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Politicizing the Environment in the Urban Century
- 2019
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Ingår i: Urban Political Ecology in the Anthropo-obscene. - Abingdon and New York : Routledge. - 9781138629196 ; , s. 3-21
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Bokkapitel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This chapter focuses on the book’s central theme on how to organize anew the articulation between emancipatory theory and political activism. Framed against the background of five major transformations that deal with planetary urbanisation to de-politicization, we argue that while UPE and associated fields have offered ways to analyse the politics of nature, they have less to offer in terms of what to do, in terms of thinking with radical political activists about new imaginaries and practices of emancipatory socio-ecological change. In light of this, we present the chapters as enriching the approaches to re-centre the political in thought and action in environmental and urban studies.
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| 13. |
- Ernstson, Henrik, Dr. 1972-, et al.
(författare)
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Turning Livelihood to Rubbish? : The Politics of Value and Valuation in South Africa’s Urban Waste Sector
- 2021
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Ingår i: African Cities and Collaborative Futures. - Manchester : Manchester University Press. ; , s. 97-120
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Bokkapitel (refereegranskat)abstract
- We will discuss our experience of researching solid waste management politics in South African cities, in particular Cape Town, Johannesburg, and Ekurhuleni. The title of our project – Turning Livelihoods to Waste? – was designed to raise a serious of questions about ongoing trends in the waste sector and the implications. South African household waste management operates under a paradigm of cooperative governance where authority is distributed across various scales of government, business, and society. Recent efforts to expand, improve, and formalize solid household waste management and recycling initiatives have implications for those who currently work with waste - particularly for informal waste pickers or reclaimers, who do much of the primary work with waste in the global south. Despite promises of green economic development and job creation, many people working with waste in South Africa work are subjected to precarious and difficult work conditions or experience new uncertainties and vulnerabilities which threaten existing livelihood strategies. In turn, there are serious questions about whether waste workers should be expected to work in dangerous conditions, and what sorts of alternate arrangements may be more just and more ecologically sustainable.
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| 14. |
- Ernstson, Henrik, Dr. 1972-, et al.
(författare)
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Wasting CO2 and the Clean Development Mechanism : The remarkable success of a climate failure
- 2024
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Ingår i: Environment and Planning E. - : SAGE Publications. - 2514-8486 .- 2514-8494. ; 7:2, s. 654-680
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This paper examines how global climate mitigation policies articulate with urban political–ecological transformations. It focuses on South African waste-to-value projects as case studies, exploring how local processes of urban ecological modernization combine with global climate finance through the now largely defunct Clean Development Mechanism (CDM). Whilst it is generally recognized that waste-related CDM projects in South Africa (and elsewhere) have been an unmitigated failure in terms of climate and socio-economic benefits, we demonstrate that landfillto-gas/energy projects have functioned effectively as geographical–discursive dispositifs through which particular knowledge systems are enrolled, specific ‘solutions’ are projected, and singular imaginaries of what is possible and desirable foregrounded, thereby crowding out alternative possibilities. This not only nurtures the commodification and marketization of non-human matter with an eye towards sustaining capital accumulation but, rather more importantly, successfully installs state-orchestrated private property relations around common resources, thereby deepening the dispossessing socio-ecological relations upon which expanded capitalist reproduction rests. We argue that whilst the formal outcome of the CDM is a failure, its success resides precisely in how it permitted local and global elites to create administrative and regulatory practices that solidify and naturalize a neoliberal market-based framework to approach the climate crisis.
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| 15. |
- Swyngedouw, Erik, et al.
(författare)
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Interrupting the Anthropo-obScene : Immuno-biopolitics and Depoliticizing Ontologies in the Anthropocene
- 2018
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Ingår i: Theory, Culture and Society. Explorations in Critical Social Science. - : Sage Publications. - 0263-2764 .- 1460-3616. ; 35:6, s. 3-30
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This paper argues that the Anthropocene' is a deeply depoliticizing notion. This de-politicization unfolds through the creation of a set of narratives, what we refer to as AnthropoScenes', which broadly share the effect of off-staging certain voices and forms of acting. Our notion of the Anthropo-obScene is our tactic to both attest to and undermine the depoliticizing stories of the Anthropocene'. We first examine how various AnthropoScenes, while internally fractured and heterogeneous, ranging from geo-engineering and earth system science to more-than-human and object-oriented ontologies, place things and beings, human and non-human, within a particular relational straitjacket that does not allow for a remainder or constitutive outside. This risks deepening an immunological biopolitical fantasy that promises adaptive and resilient terraforming, an earth system management of sorts that permits life as we know it to continue for some, while turning into a necropolitics for others. Second, we develop a post-foundational political perspective in relation to our dramatically changing socio-ecological situation. This perspective understands the political in terms of performance and, in an Arendtian manner, re-opens the political as forms of public-acting in common that subtracts from or exceeds what is gestured to hold socio-ecological constellations together. We conclude that what is off-staged and rendered obscene in the AnthropoScenes' carries precisely the possibility of a return of the political.
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| 16. |
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| 17. |
- Swyngedouw, Erik, et al.
(författare)
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Land as an Asset
- 2022
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Ingår i: The Political Economy of Land. - London : Routledge. - 9781003280255 - 9781032248196 - 9781032248202 ; , s. 40-55
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Bokkapitel (refereegranskat)
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| 18. |
- Swyngedouw, Erik, et al.
(författare)
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Scaling the city : the political economy of'glocal'development-Brussels' conundrum
- 2001
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Ingår i: European Planning Studies. - : Routledge. - 0965-4313 .- 1469-5944. ; 9:7, s. 827-841
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- In this contribution, the new position of the city in the urban political economy will be considered in the context of the shifting realities that characterize an increasingly hybridizing and cosmopolitan global (dis)order. We shall argue that globalization is paralleled by a restructuring of the city and with an increasing importance of the urban in a context of intensifying inter-urban competition. The success of cities is dependent on their local 'embeddedness' in institutional and other networks of power. Attention will be paid to the role of local elites and to the need to forge 'growth coalitions'. We shall conclude that the formation of an inclusive and cohesive growth coalition is a key condition for the future development of Brussels in a context of intense inter-urban competition. However, this poses a host of political problems. Not in the least, the fact the new 'glocal' elites often refuse to partake in local institutional or political networks. The commitment to place that invariably comes with a greater 'local' institutional embedding which may militate against their global strategies and aspirations. The key question for 'local' politics then becomes one of how to forge networks and linkages that force 'glocal' elites to become inserted actively in the regional armatures of governance.
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| 19. |
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Urban Political Ecology in the Anthropo-obscene : Interruptions and Possibilities
- 2019
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Samlingsverk (redaktörskap) (refereegranskat)abstract
- Urban Political Ecology in the Anthropo-obscene: Interruptions and Possibilities centres on how to organize anew the articulation between emancipatory theory and political activism. Across its theoretical and empirical chapters, written by leading scholars from anthropology, geography, urban studies, and political science, the book explores new political possibilities that are opening up in an age marked by proliferating contestations, sharpening socio-ecological inequalities, and planetary processes of urbanization and environmental change. A deepened conversation between urban environmental studies and political theory is mobilized to chart a radically new direction for the field of urban political ecology and cognate disciplines: What could emancipatory politics be about in our time? What does a return of the political under the aegis of equality and freedom signal today in theory and in practice? How do political movements emerge that could re-invent equality and freedom as actually existing socio-ecological practices? The hope is to contribute discussions that can expand and rearrange critical environmental studies to remain relevant in a time of deepening depoliticization and the rise of post-truth politics.Urban Political Ecology in the Anthropo-obscene will be of interest to postgraduates, established scholars, and upper level undergraduates from any discipline or field with an interest in the interface between the urban, the environment, and the political, including: geography, urban studies, environmental studies, and political science.
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