This paper characterizes different types of policy narratives that influence the trans-local motion of urban policies and elaborates on their relations. The paper first introduces conceptual and methodological recommendations from policy narrative literature to debates on policy mobility. In an empirical section, it then analyses narratives that support policies on temporary use of vacant lands and buildings in the German cities of Berlin and Stuttgart.
Krisenproteste in Athen und Frankfurt by Daniel Mullis combines a detailed insight into political struggles in the context of the European austerity regime with a deep theoretical reflection about hegemony, moment and space referring to Laclau/ Mouffe, Rancière and Lefebvre. The result is a valuable proposition to think in a new manner about protest and institutionalisation as two equally significant elements of emancipation.
REDD+ requires forests to be measured. However, many communities have their own concepts of forest with different meanings. Global forest inventories frequently ignore these conceptualizations. This paper describes an approach for generating alternative measures of forest simultaneously to support the international objectives of activities such as REDD+ and to reflect local concepts and semantics associated with forest.
This paper interrogates the endurance of a national forest management programme in Burkina Faso called Chantier d’Aménagement Forestier (CAF) despite
evidence of its shortcomings. Analysing the political economics of control over fuelwood markets helps elucidate the endurance of the CAF model. This is
important because it helps us understand how certain areas continue to be officially referred to as "forest" even when they do not have the ecological
characteristic of one.
I critically interrogate the usefulness of the terminology of „post-secularism“ to understand the entanglement of religion and politics in multi-religious societies in the West and elsewhere. I suggest that the vocabulary of a descriptive political theology is better suited to study these dynamics and apply this conceptual vocabulary to analyse political-normative debates on Indian secularism and the everyday struggles of religious actors in the violent politics of Sri Lanka's civil war.
Current efforts to formalize the Anthropocene as a new geologic epoch provoke deliberations concerning the re/unification of human and physical geography. The end of traditional (dualist) human-environmental thinking is noted, a vital pluralism of alternative approaches including gaia-politics welcomed, and, following Bruno Latour and others, the hegemony of a geoscientists’ (geocratic) narrative rejected for reasons provided by political ecology.
This article examines young people's night out experiences extending through digital spaces of social relations such as WhatsApp. On the one hand, I illustrate that young people are encouraged to direct their attention towards missing friends and absent nightlife places. On the other hand, I find that young people create dynamics of comparison, competition, and optimization through constant connectedness. This raises new questions on young people's experiences of leisure time and space.