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    Urban sustainability: learning from best practice?

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    In the quest for sustainable development, numerous examples of ‘best practice’ have been created and circulated in national and international arenas. Yet despite the vast array of examples, demonstration projects, case studies, and the like, little is known about the ways in which best practices are produced and used, and their role in processes of policymaking. Focusing on best practice for urban sustainability, the author argues that, rather than conceptualising its role and impact in terms of policy transfer or lesson drawing, the creation, dissemination, and use of best practice can be better understood as a discursive process, in which not only is new knowledge created about a policy problem, but the nature and interpretation of the policy problem itself are challenged and reframed. Drawing on insights from concepts of governmentality, the author argues that best practices are at once a political rationality and a governmental technology through which the policy problem of urban sustainability is framed and defined. Illustrations of the practice of best practice show how contradictions emerge between claims for general applicability and the need for policy actors to understand the contingencies of the process of urban sustainability, in order to enrol it for their own struggles over sustainability. The local stickiness of best practices points to the very real struggles that the rationalities of urban sustainability have in competing with other governmentalities which seek to shape urban futures.

    Ecological versus social restoration? How urban river restoration challenges but also fails to challenge the science-policy nexus in the United Kingdom.

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    Special Issue on “Knowledge and Policy in the Context of Urban Environments” edited by Judith Petts, Susan Owens and Harriet Bulkeley

    Discourse coalitions and the Australian climate change policy network

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    Ever since the agreement of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, climate change has become the most prominent global environmental issue on domestic political agendas. The author examines how a policy-network approach can contribute to the analysis of domestic climate change responses. Consideration is given to the role of advocacy coalitions and discourse coalitions within policy networks. It is argued that the discourse-coalition approach offers a useful explanation of the processes of coalition formation, interaction, and policy learning. Although it cannot alone explain the outcomes of the policy process, its emphasis on the dynamics of meaning, legitimacy, and knowledge as an essential part of policymaking can usefully be incorporated into an analysis of policy networks.

    Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis

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    The present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
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