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Nordic Cooperation in the Nuclear Safety Sector: High, Low, or Differentiated Integration?
Get PDFNordic cooperation has been depicted as eroding due to the increased importance of EU-related cooperation and integration. However, scholars propose that longstanding Nordic networks, grounded in professions and located in the state administration, may prove to be more robust toward external changes. This article discusses this proposal by looking at Nordic cooperation between the national radiation protection and nuclear safety authorities in Iceland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Finland. The article maps behavioural perceptions of agency staff based on a dataset of 37 interviews to illustrate if the cooperation between the Nordic authorities is characterized by high integration, low integration, or differentiated integration within the nuclear safety sector. The study finds that the cooperation is differentiated between the highly integrated areas of radiation protection and emergency preparedness, and the less integrated areas of nuclear security and safeguards. To account for variation, the data indicates the importance of path dependency and portfolio
Educational Attainment and Gender Differences in Work–Life Balance for Couples across Europe: A Contextual Perspective
Get PDFThe current article aims to explain the interrelationships between the educational attainment of individuals living in households with heterosexual partners, their work–life balance (WLB) and the macro-economic climate of the country they live in, using data from the European Social Survey. WLB is a complex concept, as it is not only determined by factors related to someone’s employment or domestic work and childcare responsibilities, but also by decisions informed by personal experiences and circumstances, subjective perceptions and preferences. Moreover, in households with cohabiting partners, this decision-making process involves certain compromises where financial incentives, interests, gender and power dynamics play an important role. Since educational attainment is positively related to labour market outcomes, such as employment and wages, while at the same time more women are participating in education and the labour market, the gender conflict on the division of work and time within households intensifies and traditional gender roles are challenged. WLB is at the heart of this conflict operating as a mechanism through which division of work and time is reconciled on the individual and household level. Results from the current article reveal great heterogeneity between the 17 European countries examined. Perhaps surprisingly, educational attainment can have a detrimental effect on the WLB of spouses and cohabiting partners, especially for women whose level of WLB seems also more sensitive to fluctuations of the macro-economic climate of the country they live in. However, there is an indication that when an economy goes into recession, higher education has a cushioning effect on female’s WLB compared to relatively better economic times
The Trash Bin on Stage: On the Sociomaterial Roles of Street Furniture
Get PDFThey are easily overlooked, but benches, trash bins, drinking fountains, bike stands, ashtray bins, and bollards do influence our ways of living. Street furniture can encourage or hold back behaviours, support different codes of conduct, or express the values of a society. This study is developed from the observation that the number of different roles taken on by street furniture seem to quickly increase in ways not attended to. We see new arrivals such as recycled, anti-homeless, skateboard-friendly, solar-powered, storytelling, phone-charging and event-making furniture entering public places. What are typical sociomaterial roles that these things play in urban culture of today? How do these roles matter? This article suggests a conceptualisation of three furniture roles: Carnivalesque street furniture takes part in events and temporary places. Behaviourist street furniture engages in how humans act in public. Cabinet-like street furniture makes itself heard through relocating shapes of other objects. These categories lead to two directions for further research; one concerning the institutions behind street furniture, and one concerning how street furniture shapes cities through influencing different kinds of ‘scapes.’ The aim of this article is to advance theory on an urban material culture that is evolving faster and faster. By conceptualising this deceptively innocent group of things and articulating its relations to the everyday structures of the city, I hope to provide a framework for further studies
Digital Social Innovation and the Adoption of #PlanTech: The Case of Coventry City Council
Get PDFThe smart city trend has generated considerable interest in using digital technology to transform urban planning and governance, and in the UK the government funded Connected Places Catapult has been given the remit of stimulating innovation in cities. One of its focuses is urban planning and technology (#PlanTech) which has garnered attention from the Royal Town Planning Institute, a vast number of the UK local authorities, academia and technology companies. #PlanTech aims to revolutionise the urban planning industry across public, private and not for profit sectors in an era where fiscal austerity has catalysed a drive for using advanced technologies to improve the efficiency of operations and decision making. Technological innovation is being promoted to enable local authorities to deliver services with significantly reduced financial resources while simultaneously creating a modernised and more efficient public sector. Within this context, this article uses a detailed ethnographic study of planning functions in Coventry City Council, UK, to analyse how they have adapted so far in response to both austerity and the drive for digital innovation. The article concludes by examining how #PlanTech and digital social innovation may help deliver the broader smart city strategy
Digital Social Innovation and Urban Space: A Critical Geography Agenda
Get PDFDigital Social Innovation (DSI) is a new concept referring to social innovation initiatives that leverage digital technologies potentiality to co-create solutions to a wide range of social needs. These initiatives generally take place in urban contexts. However, in the existing literature, scarce attention is devoted to the spatial dimensions and the social, cultural or political space-related effects of DSI practices. This article suggests that a critical geography perspective can address these gaps. After a review of existing relevant contributes, the article elaborates a research agenda for a critical geography of DSI. This articulates along four research lines, including the emergence of DSI networks, the (re)production of DSI processes and socio-cultural urban space, the representations of DSI practices and the power relationships these mobilise
Research on Politics of Disaster Risk Governance: Where Are We Headed?
Get PDFThis thematic issue aims at unravelling how the global consensus towards a shift to risk reduction and inclusive disaster governance evolves in everyday governance practices, where roles and responsibilities are evolving and negotiated, permeated by politics of power and legitimacy. It identifies three different dimensions of disaster governance. The first is the formal dimension: the way governance arrangements are designed or meant to work. The second is ‘real’ governance: the way in which formal governance arrangements manifest and evolve in actual practice. The third is invisible governance: an amalgam of household and neighbourhood-level activities and networks for disaster response that happen outside of the gaze of the formalized governance arrangements. The 21 articles in this issue address the politics of governance based on thorough empirical work, while theoretically contributing to several themes relating to the politics of disaster governance. The outcomes of the thematic issue are: 1) The three governance dimensions are useful to reveal what the roles and room for manoeuvre is of different actors, including governments, international community, experts, non-state actors and affected communities; 2) Technical solutions for risk reduction and disaster response crucially rely on socio-technical, political, and administrative systems and processes and hence need to be adjusted to the specific context; and 3) The political nature of disaster governance calls for a deeper understanding to advance accountability to affected populations
Different Strokes for Different Folks: Who Votes for Technocratic Parties?
Get PDFIn this study, I look at two types of political actors commonly described as ‘populist’ in literature—namely, rightwing populists and technocratic leaders like France’s Emmanuel Macron and the Czech Republic’s Andrej Babiš. While both types of political actors tend to emerge as a response to a decline in trust in established parties and adopt platforms with anti-establishment and monist elements, they also possess noticeably different qualities. Unlike rightwing populists, technocrats lack a distinctive ideological profile and tend to adopt more inclusive rhetoric by appealing to a broadly-defined community of people. When contrasted with supporters of rightwing populists, empirical analysis of supporters of Macron’s and Babiš’ parties shows that the two have few commonalities. Relatively few examples of such political leadership, the lack of a distinct ideological profile and the variation of their support bases suggest that one should use caution when conceptualizing technocratic populists as a distinct theoretical type
Expert-Led Securitization: The Case of the 2009 Pandemic in Denmark and Sweden
Get PDFThis article goes beyond the study of speech acts to investigate the process of securitization during a health crisis. The article introduces the concept of ‘expert-led securitization’ to account for situations when experts dominate the administrative process that translates a securitizing speech act into extraordinary public policy. Expert-led securitization was particularly salient during the 2009 pandemic flu in Denmark and Sweden. Autonomous public health expert agencies led the national securitization processes, and these never included intense political battles or extensive public debates. In turn, the respective processes resulted in different policies: Sweden’s main response to the pandemic was an extraordinary push to vaccinate its whole population, while Denmark’s was a one-off offer of vaccination to about twenty percent of its people. Hence, the 2009 pandemic example illustrates the added value of investigating the administrative dynamics of securitization when seeking to understand differences in extraordinary policies
Best in Covid: Populists in the Time of Pandemic
Get PDFHow do populists govern in crisis? We address this question by analyzing the actions of technocratic populists in power during the first wave of the novel coronavirus crisis in the Czech Republic and Slovakia. We identify three features of the populist pandemic response. First, populists bypassed established, institutionalized channels of crisis response. Second, they engaged in erratic yet responsive policy making. These two features are ubiquitous to populism. The third feature, specific to technocratic populism, is the politicization of expertise in order to gain legitimacy. Technocratic populists in the Czech Republic and in Slovakia weaponized medical expertise for political purposes
Building a Disaster-Resilient Community in Taiwan: A Social Capital Analysis of the Meizhou Experience
Get PDFResilience has always been key to successful disaster governance throughout the world. Local communities can play an important role in promoting disaster preparedness and executing front-line relief to strengthen the effectiveness and efficiency of both local and national disaster governance. This article addresses a unique case of how a flood-prone, rural, and ageing community in Yilan County, Taiwan, successfully mobilized its citizens for disaster preparedness. Through the lens of social capital analysis, this article unpacks how Bonding Social Capital, Bridging Social Capital, and Linking Social Capital work, by tracing the process through which awareness of disaster resilience was developed and practised in the Meizhou Community. Since 2012, Meizhou has been recognized as a model of disaster preparedness and relief in Taiwan, and in 2019 this recognition was extended to the wider Indo-Pacific region. We begin the discussion of this article by contextualizing social capital as a theoretical departure to the empirical analysis of the Meizhou experience. This is followed by an exploration of how Bonding Social Capital was able to consolidate the community, and how Bridging Social Capital can facilitate the collaboration among functional groups in and beyond the Meizhou locality, and to what extent Linking Social Capital can implement Meizhou’s experience on a national and even international scale. This article is based on a qualitative assessment of long-term fieldwork, interviews, and participatory observation conducted by the authors in the Meizhou community