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The Problem of Fit in Flood Risk Governance: Regulative, Normative, and Cultural-Cognitive Deliberations
Get PDFFlood risk is a growing global concern that is not only affecting developing countries, but also the sustainable development of the most affluent liberal democracies. This has attracted attention to the systems governing flood risk across administrative levels, which vary between countries, but are relatively similar in the Nordic region, with both responsibilities and resources largely decentralized to the municipal level. However, floods tend not to be bounded by conventional borders but demand attention to the catchment area as a whole. Influential voices have long argued the importance of fit between the biophysical basis of an issue and the institutional arrangements of actors engaging in its governance. The article investigates such institutional fit in flood risk governance, based on a case study of flood risk mitigation in the Höje Å catchment area in Southern Sweden. Analyzing a unique dataset comprising 217 interviews with all individual formal actors actively engaged in flood risk mitigation in the catchment area illuminates a ‘problem of fit’ between the hydrological system behind flood risk and the institutional arrangements of its governance. This ‘problem of fit’ is not only visible along the borders of the municipalities composing the catchment area, but also of the spatial planning areas within them. The article deliberates on regulative, normative, and cultural-cognitive elements that align to lock flood risk governance into a regime of practices that, if not addressed, continues to undermine society’s ability to anticipate and adapt to the expected escalation of flood risk in a changing climate
Resilience in Practice: Responding to the Refugee Crisis in Turkey, Jordan, and Lebanon
Get PDFLittle is known about how the idea of ‘resilience’ translates into practice. It has nonetheless emerged as a dominant theme in the governance of crises, such as political instability, armed conflict, terrorism, and large-scale refugee movements. This study draws on interviews with humanitarian and development practitioners in Turkey, Jordan, and Lebanon working under the Regional Refugee and Resilience Plan to explore how resilience is interpreted and translated on the ground. Results suggest that resilience is translated as the economic self-reliance of refugees, and the capacity for crisis management of refugee-hosting states, enacted through ‘localization’ and strengthening the ‘humanitarian-development nexus.’ The prominence of the political and economic context and the power relations between crisis response actors that it generates reveals the limits of what a buzzword like resilience can achieve on the ground. The findings highlight the need for researchers, policymakers, and practitioners to engage in continuous critical reflection on whether the ways in which resilience policies and programmes are implemented actually improve the ability of systems and vulnerable populations to recover from crisis, as well as on the validity of the assumptions and interpretations on which such policies and programmes are built
The Creeping Conformity—and Potential Risks—of Contemporary Urbanism
Get PDFAs new urbanism has come to dominate planning, it has contributed to new kinds of design conformity. The recent emergence of the Covid-19 pandemic has exposed the potential risks generated by some of new urbanism’s key principles, such as higher densities and transit orientation intended to enhance efficiency and sustainability
Native Media and Business Models: Comparative Study of 14 Successful Experiences in Latin America
Get PDFFrom its onset on the 1990s, both digital native (with sister headings on the analog platform) as digital native news media have experienced a constant transformation process. The accelerated technological evolution linked to the changing information consumption habits of the users demanded a constant reinvention capability. Furthermore, the need for profit and the drop in advertisement sales have pushed the media to redefine their structure, content and social media presence. The Ibero-American scene has experienced a sprout of a mixture of digital native news media. They are journalistic projects, conceived from and on the Internet, which have reached considerable renown and becoming reference media on the information level. Internet prompted a reduction of the costs related to the creation of media outlets. However, the establishment of a sustainable business model is one of the main challenges. The research presented looks at the business models of Ibero-American digital native news media based on a comparative analysis of 14 case studies, alongside interviews with their founders. The findings include, among other things, a tendency for business models based on diverse and hyper-specialized content targeted at micro-audiences. This research found an interest in horizontality, participation and user engagement, and noticed the need for these media to diversify their income sources
The Enduring Popularity of Legacy Journalism: An Analysis of Online Audience Data
Get PDFAs news publishers continue to lose subscribers and advertising revenue, journalism practitioners and researchers have looked to newcomers to the field for ideas of how to adapt and succeed in a much more saturated and unstable media environment. Many have specifically looked to digital native news organizations to understand the ways that journalism is attempting to reinvent itself for a media landscape that is very different from the previous one. Yet what often gets lost in this focus on the newest news organizations is the resilience of many of journalism’s older ones. In this study, I analyze a year’s worth of U.S.-based online news consumption data to show that, even in a media environment increasingly saturated with digital native news outlets, legacy news brands continue to comprise a majority of the most popular news sites. Drawing on audience studies literature, I argue that these findings likely reflect audience preferences for familiar, established brands, as well as structural advantages these brands maintain due to their size and capital. I conclude that the fate of digital news organizations is not just a question of their innovativeness or nimbleness. It is also a question of their ability to combat a combination of powerful, stubborn forces: the habits of the people they hope to reach, and the deep pockets of their competitors
Quantification 2.0? Bibliometric Infrastructures in Academic Evaluation
Get PDFDue to developments recently termed as ‘audit,’ ‘evaluation,’ or ‘metric society,’ universities have become subject to ratings and rankings and researchers are evaluated according to standardized quantitative indicators such as their publication output and their personal citation scores. Yet, this development is not only based on the rise of new public management and ideas on ‘the return on public or private investment.’ It has also profited from ongoing technological developments. Due to a massive increase in digital publishing corresponding with the growing availability of related data bibliometric infrastructures for evaluating science are continuously becoming more differentiated and elaborate. They allow for new ways of using bibliometric data through various easily applicable tools. Furthermore, they also produce new quantities of data due to new possibilities in following the digital traces of scientific publications. In this article, I discuss this development as quantification 2.0. The rise of digital infrastructures for publishing, indexing, and managing scientific publications has not only made bibliometric data become a valuable source for performance assessment. It has triggered an unprecedented growth in bibliometric data production turning freely accessible data about scientific work into edited databases and producing competition for its users. The production of bibliometric data has thus become decoupled from their application. Bibliometric data have turned into a self-serving end while their providers are constantly seeking for new tools to make use of them
New Research on Housing and Territorial Stigma: Introduction to the Thematic Issue
Get PDFThis introduction to the thematic issue on housing and territorial stigma provides concise overviews of the concepts of stigma, housing stigma, and territorial (or neighborhood) stigma, while tracing back current research on these topics to the pioneering work of Erving Goffman and Loic Wacquant. In doing this, we place particular attention on social responses to, and coping strategies with, stigma, especially various forms of stigma resistance. Finally, in brief summaries of all articles in the thematic issue, we emphasize their shared themes and concerns
The Grandmothers’ Farewell to Childcare Provision under China’s Two-Child Policy: Evidence from Guangzhou Middle-Class Families
Get PDFAs China’s one-child policy is replaced by the two-child policy, young Chinese women and their spouses are increasingly concerned about who will take care of the ‘second child.’ Due to the absence of public childcare services and the rising cost of privatised care services in China, childcare provision mainly relies on families, such that working women’s choices of childbirth, childcare and employment are heavily constrained. To deal with structural barriers, young urban mothers mobilise grandmothers as joint caregivers. Based on interviews with Guangzhou middle-class families, this study examines the impact of childcare policy reform since 1978 on childbirth and childcare choices of women. It illustrates the longstanding contributions and struggles of women, particularly grandmothers, engaged in childcare. It also shows that intergenerational parenting involves a set of practices of intergenerational intimacy embedded in material conditions, practical acts of care, moral values and power dynamics. We argue that the liberation, to some extent, of young Chinese mothers from childcare is at the expense of considerable unpaid care work from grandmothers rather than being driven by increased public care services and improved gender equality in domestic labour. Given the significant stress and seriously constrained choices in later life that childcare imposes, grandmothers now become reluctant to help rear a second grandchild. This situation calls for changes in family policies to increase the supply of affordable and good-quality childcare services, enhance job security in the labour market, provide supportive services to grandmothers and, most importantly, prioritise the wellbeing of women and families over national goals
Split Households, Family Migration and Urban Settlement: Findings from China’s 2015 National Floating Population Survey
Get PDFFor decades, China’s rural migrants have split their households between their rural origins and urban work locations. While the hukou system continues to be a barrier to urban settlement, research has also underscored split households as a migrant strategy that spans the rural and urban boundary, questioning if sustained migration will eventually result in permanent urban settlement. Common split-household arrangements include sole migration, where the spouse and children are left behind, and couple migration, where both spouses are migrants, leaving behind their children. More recently, nuclear family migration involving both the spouse and children has been on the rise. Based on a 2015 nationally representative “floating population” survey, this article compares sole migrants, couple migrants, and family migrants in order to examine which migrants choose which household arrangements, including whether specific household arrangements are more associated with settlement intention than others. Our analysis also reveals differences between work-related migrants and family-related migrants. The findings highlight demographic, gender, economic, employment, and destination differences among the different types of migrant household arrangements, pointing to family migration as a likely indicator of permanent settlement. The increase of family migration over time signals to urban governments an increased urgency to address their needs as not only temporary dwellers but more permanent residents
Transitions and Conflicts: Reexamining Impacts of Migration on Young Women’s Status and Gender Practice in Rural Shanxi
Get PDFThis article explores impacts of migration on young women’s status and gender practice in rural northern China. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in a village in Shanxi Province, it suggests that rural-urban migration has served partially to reconstruct the traditional gender-based roles and norms in migration families. This reconstructive force arises mainly from the changes of the patrilocal residence pattern and rural women’s acquisition of subjectivity during the course of migration. However, after migrant women return to their home villages, they usually reassume their roles as care providers and homemakers, which is vividly expressed by a phrase referring to one’s wife as ‘the person inside my home’ (wo jiali de). Meanwhile, although migrant women’s capacity and confidence have greatly increased consequent upon working out of the countryside, their participation in village governance and in the public sphere has been decreasing. Further examination suggests that the reinforcement of gender inequality and the transformation of gender relations result from the continuous interplay of local power relations, market dominance, and unchallenged patrilocal institutions. Through adopting a life course perspective, it challenges too strict a differentiation between migrant and left behind women in existing literature