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Research in economic geography has provided a critical examination of securitization's role in the recent global financial crisis. Building on earlier studies which interrogated the development of US securitization, contemporary research has explored how securitization has been adopted in different political economies. Although these novel studies have begun to highlight the geographies of securitization, our knowledge of the historical spread of securitization remains underdeveloped. This paper seeks to address this issue by exploring how securitization emerged within different European financial spaces. In doing so, the paper examines the cases of France, Spain and Italy to identify how securitization circulated through space and across communities of practice, facilitating the co-creation of new knowledge. The paper provides deeper insight into how securitization became established within European financial centres throughout the 1990s, shaping contemporary financial networks and the spread of the credit crunch. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reducing carbon emissions from the transport sector has become a critical imperative for public policy as our understanding of the impacts of the mobility system on the environment has developed. This paper contrasts policy development in three cities (Aberdeen, Bremen and Malmö) that collaborated as part of a European Union knowledge exchange programme designed to share innovative approaches to carbon reduction in the transport sector. We identify a number of critical aspects of governance, including the approach to policy formulation and implementation, and the status of consensus and cohesion, as key determinants of transport outcomes. We conclude that the degree of institutional alignment evident in each city’s governance network is crucial in explaining their appetite for the pursuit of low carbon policies, and in turn the real potential for policy transfer to occur as envisaged by European Union collaboration frameworks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine the constitution of the European Union territory in socio-technical practices. We argue that calculative practices are central in the constitution of the European Union territory but that these practices need to be understood as being situated within the broader ‘teleological structures’ of European integration. This paper scrutinizes the European Observation Network for Territorial Development and Cohesion (formerly European Spatial Planning Observation Network) programme as one of the activity spaces whereby the calculative practices of the ‘European knowledge-based economy’, a term which arose in the 1990s, are constitutive of the contemporary making of the European Union territory. We thus highlight the practices of surveying, mapping and modelling as central components in the constitution of the European Union as a political object. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using comparative methods of policy analysis, this paper explores the institutional factors shaping the transfer and adaptation of risk-based approaches to regulation within and between the regimes for occupational health and safety (OHS) and food safety in the UK. Over the past two decades successive governments have enthusiastically promoted risk as a key concept for regulatory reform and 'better regulation'. Rather than trying to prevent all possible harms, 'risk-based' approaches promise to make regulation more proportionate and effective by using various risk-based metrics and policy instruments to focus regulatory standard-setting and enforcement activity on the highest priority risks, as determined through formal assessments of their probability and consequences. But despite facing similar external pressures and sharing many historical and structural features as OHS, food safety regulation has proven much less receptive to risk-based reforms of its organizing principles and practices. To explain that anomaly, we consider a range of explanations highlighted in the policy transfer and mobilities literatures. We find that coercive drivers for the adoption of risk, in the form of top-down political pressure for deregulation or hard EU mandates, are much less influential than voluntary ones, which reflect both normative (ie, shared commitments to proportionality, resource prioritization, and blame deflection) and mimetic (ie, imitation of private sector corporate governance models) isomorphism. We conclude with wider reflections about the significance of our cases for policy transfer and mobilities research and for the limits to risk as a universal principle for organizing, and accounting for, governance activity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Whilst transport biofuels have enjoyed strong political support in Europe for much of the past decade, concerns over their full impacts have an almost equally long history. Since 2008 these concerns have centred most intently upon the land-use change impacts of biofuel production, whereby increased demand for biofuels leads nonagricultural landscapes to be converted--either directly or indirectly--into agricultural ones. Amongst other things, biofuel-driven land-use change might potentially lead to significant emissions of greenhouse gases (GHG), losses of biodiversity, reduced ecosystem resilience, degradation of soil and water resources, declines in regional food security, or even land rights infringements through so-called 'land-grabbing'. Political debates surrounding biofuel-driven land-use change in Europe have historically been restricted, however, to considerations of technical modelling work addressing the GHG emissions that might result from this process, thereby ignoring a wide range of alternative issues. Adopting a discursive-institutionalist perspective, this paper scrutinises two interrelated sets of dynamics pertaining to the handling of this political issue in Europe. First, it examines how the specific bureaucratic context of Brussels has itself been constitutive of the discursive practices used by policy makers to establish and retain control of the prevailing political conception of biofuel-driven land-use change. Second, it examines how these practices have inevitably led to what Scott terms a "narrowing of vision" in policy makers' approach to this problem, with concomitant implications for the role occupied by conceptions of 'place' in the policy process. In both instances the argument is made that such interactions exclude critical perspectives on what is at stake in the drive for biofuels from relevant policy-making procedures altogether. In light of these conclusions, I contend that future geographical analyses of environmental policy making writ large should pay greater attention to the interactions of discourse and place, particularly if they are to better understand the precise mechanisms through which political controversy is ultimately managed and settled in modern democratic contexts today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I propose to push the frontier of global value chain (G VC) governance analysis through the concept of 'polarity'. Much of the existing GVC literature has focused on 'unipolar' value chains, where one group of 'lead firms' inhabiting a specific function in a chain plays a dominant role in governing it. Some scholars have explored the dynamics of governance in GVCs characterized as 'bipolar', where two sets of actors in different functional positions both drive the chain. I expand this direction further to suggest conceptualizing governance within a continuum between unipolarity and multipolarity. Empirically, I do so by examining the evolutionary dynamics of governance in biofuel value chains, with specific focus on the key regulatory and institutional features that facilitated their emergence and expansion. First, I examine the formation, evolution, and governance of three national/regional value chains (in Brazil, the US, and the EU); then, I provide evidence to support a trend towards the increasing but still partial formation of a global biofuel value chain and examine its governance traits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Eurozone crisis that erupted in 2008 has raised sincere doubts about the durability of political and financial linkages among its member states. This paper associates the resulting political-economic stasis of the Eurozone with the coevolution of the financial and monetary system at the European scale. The argument builds on insights from financial geography, cultural political economy, and sociology of finance. It focuses on the idea that financial market rationalities, which fluctuate over time and space, are socially constructed through an interplay of acts of 'bricolage' by state and market actors. We relate these rationalities to the main European initiatives regarding financial and monetary integration since the 1992 Maastricht Treaty. By tracing the geographical patterns of cross-border lending of European banks in the period 2003-10 we observe that two radically different rationalities of 'sound investment' have dominated before and after the crisis. In the precrisis conjuncture of convergence, the Eurozone seemed to develop 'according to plan' where the financial system appeared beneficial in terms of equalizing development. However, since the crisis there has been a conjuncture of 'contagion' in which country-level specificities increasingly determine creditworthiness. Meanwhile, we observe that European policy makers try to refit the monetary system to this new market rationality to make the European scale 'perform' again. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As urban centres of agglomeration expand and compete for investment, new demands may arise for additional housing, infrastructure, and services. Failure to meet these demands imposes costs on firms and workers, stifles expansion, and potentially compromises the long-run economic competitiveness of the growth area. Drawing on evidence from Germany (Munich), Sweden (Stockholm), and the UK (Cambridge) this paper examines the organisational and political challenges of growth facilitation in the context of post-Keynesian political and economic restructuring. Particular emphasis is placed on tensions arising from changes in the form and function of European state social regulation. These tensions are not simply a matter of neoliberal regulatory deficit but reflect broader societal cleavages in relation to the uneven spatial impact of local economic growth. Deploying the concept of territorial structures of growth facilitation provides a conceptual framework for taking forward research on the relationship between state spatial regulation, state restructuring, and the competitiveness of city-regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to acquire insights into processes and mechanisms behind the development of policies on universal citizenship rights at higher political scales. It considers politics on national minority rights at different scales in the context of thoughts on postnationalisation and denationalisa- tion of citizenship, which are mainly based on globalisation theories, and in the context of thoughts on shifts in the scales of state activity from a regulation theoretical perspective. The development of common rules on the rights of minorities at the global and European scales is examined and confronted with policies of the individual states. From a systematic analysis of all national minorities in the European Union it appears that common rules at higher scales still allow for considerable diversity. The differences can be attributed to different characteristics of the minorities themselves as well as of the states concerned. Both reflect the vital legacy of strongly different historical paths of nation-state formation in different parts of Europe. The outcomes are better fitting in a regulation theoretical perspective than in a globalisation theoretical perspective on the development of common rules on minority rights in Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Notions of immanence provide the implicit theoretical grammar for much work exploring the political terrain of an active transnational or radically cosmopolitan society in our day. In this paper I attempt to problematize such a gesture in the recent `turn to cosmopolis', arguing that its conceptual frame fails to specify adequately the geohistorical preconditions for a politics capable of mediating between nationalizing and cosmopolitanizing tendencies at work in a globalizing world. For the case of Europe, I argue such a legacy may be more productively located in the `border work' of mid-2Oth-century anti-imperialism and decolonization, whose struggles to redefine the postcolonial couplet of `nation' and `state' haunt current attempts by the European Union to craft a more inclusive and cosmopolitan transboundary future. I explore how such governmentalizing phantasms specifically inform attempts to create viable cross-border regions (euregios) within the EU, and continue to gnaw at attempts to negotiate boundary disputes at the outer limits of the continent. In conclusion, a cautious rite of exorcism is ventured by engaging with the elusive anti-imperial cosmopolitanism of Frantz Fanon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]