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In the past decades we witnessed a rise of public participation in transport and land-use projects, and often those practices have been formalised in a solid juridical framework. In the Netherlands and other EU-countries, the cornerstones of this participatory planning framework are the Environmental Impact Study and the Environment Impact Assessment. However, historical appraisals of the impact of these instruments on participatory processes are lacking. Using the case study of the contested Dutch motorway project passing through the Amelisweerd forest (1970s), this paper aims to appraise the role of deliberative democracy concepts and practices. This paper is a plea for a novel academic agenda driven by the research questions: to what extent have participatory processes in transport, land-use and water management policies had an impact on deliberative democracy concepts and practices? Which role did citizens and users have in shaping the decision-making process? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes to investigate the influence of legislative quotas on gender differences in political participation by analyzing the within- and across-country effects of quotas. Gender quotas can signal to women that their presence in politics is welcome, leading to a subsequent increase in their involvement in political activities. This change in political behavior should not be reproduced in men; thus, when gender quotas are present, the gap between men’s and women’s participation narrows. Using the European Values Survey and data from eighteen European democracies, this paper demonstrates that this indeed occurs for some political activities when gender gaps are compared before and after the introduction of quotas within countries. This result, however, is not replicated for across-country analyses. European countries without legislative gender quotas tend to have smaller gender gaps than countries with them. This result is explained by referring to the context of the adoption of gender quotas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is structured into four different parts. In the first part the authors analyze the origins of banking and debt crisis in the EU. The state and the evolution of the EU banking sector before the crisis and in its immediate aftermath is analyzed in detail in order to dispel the myth of the existence of an exclusively debt-induced crisis. This part also introduces the notion of financialization into the analysis. The second part analyzes the crisis-related dynamics by using endogenous monetary theory and makes particular use of balance-sheet recession as a concept. The third part introduces political consequences of the banking and debt crisis in the EU by focusing on the political crisis of legitimacy and its impact upon the EU integration process. In order to deal with this topic the authors borrow several concepts from critical international political economy such as transnational elite, knowledge production, and hegemony. We posit a close link between actions of the European transnational elite, crisis origins, and their ramifications. The fourth part focuses on the two most-discussed policy solutions in tackling the crisis: the banking and the fiscal union as well as their feasibility. Additionally, it lays out some fundamental trillemas for creating a viable way out of the crisis which are unfortunately often neglected in public debate. The main argument refers to the growing impact of financialization in the EU and its detrimental effect on the potential for integrated, stable, and prosperous EU economies. The authors explain the changing social, political, and economic landscape and evaluate the main challenges and obstacles to economic and political governance in the EU. The paper is concluded with some heterodox policy recommendations for overcoming them.JEL classification: B52, E51, E52, F34, F50, G01, G20, P48 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the significance of international and transnational developments for education policy research, with a focus on the European Union. The rise of policy projects at the EU level since 2000, has altered the relationships between the state, EU institutions and education policy, in terms of the definition of values, purposes, and mechanisms of education change, in what is often referred to as the europeanisation of education policy and governance. In a time of financial crisis and extensive population migrations to and within the European space, the paper argues for further critical research on the EU institutions and their relationship to national education systems, as well as on the social justice dimensions and implications of considering both national and EU sites of policy for addressing young and vulnerable peoples' education and social futures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we examine who drives attention to the European Union (EU) in member nations—the media or the parties—and how cross-national variations in these media-party interactions can be explained by focusing on issue salience in campaign communications, party polarization, and media system characteristics. To answer these questions, we rely on a quantitative content analysis of newspaper articles and party press releases in seven countries (Austria, France, Germany, Greece, the Netherlands, Portugal, and the United Kingdom) during the twelve weeks prior to the 2014 European Parliament (EP) election. Our results from a daily-level vector autoregression (VAR) analysis show that parties are the main driver. However, our findings also indicate that single approaches in comparative research, namely, issue salience, party polarization, and media characteristics, cannot fully explain cross-national variations, which stem from combinations of different determinants, such as low (high) EU issue salience interacting with high (low) party polarization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies the gender gap in sport event attendance -- characterized by higher male and lower female participation -- using a macro-sociological and cross-national comparative approach. We argue that because gender is produced and justified in the realm of sport, gender gaps in sport event attendance may be more pronounced in some societies than others, depending on the position women and men have in the particular context in which someone 'does' his/her gender. So, in addition to individual attributes, one has to consider the societal, macro-level gender equality in order to understand the individual-level gender inequalities in sport event attendance. Using multilevel analyses on Eurobarometer data (2007), we evaluate whether the size of the gender gap in sport event attendance varies across European Union (EU) countries and how this variation relates to societal gender equality, as measured by the Gender Equality Index of the European Institute for Gender Equality. We find higher male than female attendance in all EU countries, but also conclude that higher levels of macro-level gender equality are associated with smaller gender gaps in sport event attendance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

Since the European Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA) promoted the image of the Internet as ‘interconnection ecosystem’, Internet security has been increasingly conceptualised through the language of resilience—the capacity to self repair. This paper uses performativity and relational space as theoretical lenses to analyse the political effects that ENISA's redefinition of the Internet entails. It argues that the Internet ecosystem is not only used to conceptualise the Internet as a heterogeneous, complex space, but also to legitimise resilience as a new security practice. The first section traces the trajectory of different discursive framings of the Internet as space and introduces the premise of understanding the Internet ecosystem through performativity and relational space. The paper then utilises this framework to conduct an analysis of the Internet ecosystem on the basis of a selection of ENISA's technical and policy documents. It explores infrastructural and political dimensions and discusses their correlated forms of resilience governance. It concludes that the reconceptualisation of the Internet as ecosystem is a highly political move, which also changes the notion of security. If security governance becomes a matter of facilitating distributed self-repair, security is not a state of being protected, which is how we often think about cyberspace, but it is self-made, processual, emergent, and strictly temporal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Looking for a concept that condenses the normative added value that the European Union may claim to embody vis-à-vis its member states, diversity would appear to be a first-rate candidate. For more than four decades, European institutions have endorsed a complex discourse about diversity that sharply differentiates the European project from the historical experiences of its member-states. The paper stresses the discontinuity inherent in the European Union project and the ways in which diversity is used in European Union discussions. It highlights the existence of several, and only partly overlapping, notions of diversity embedded in the European project: as an acknowledgement of the historical and cultural diversity of member states; as protection of individual and group diversity within a putatively shared and egalitarian European public sphere; as an instrument for achieving political stabilization, market competitiveness, territorial cohesion and economic growth. As an introduction to the special issue on the diversities of Europe, the paper provides the general conceptual framework for the analyses of the four types of diversities analysed: language, religion, foreignness and gender. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Interconnections for cross-border electricity trade improve price convergence and welfare. Increased production from variable renewables however implies higher levels of optimal interconnection capacity than in the past. Rather than using scenario building to determine new optimal levels of interconnection capacity, this paper presents a new methodology for Cost-Benefit Analysis (CBA) based on empirical market data, using the French-German electricity trade as an example. Employing a very fine dataset of hourly supply and demand curves (aggregated auction curves) from the EPEX Spot market, it constructs net export (NEC) and net import demand curves (NIDC) for both countries. This allows assessing hourly welfare impacts for incremental capacity and, summed over the year, the annual welfare benefits for each discrete increase in interconnection capacity. Confronting benefits with the annualised costs of increasing interconnection capacity determines the socially optimal increase in interconnection capacity between France and Germany on the basis of empirical market micro-data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite considerable research analyzing European Union (EU) citizens’ attitudes toward enlargement, there is no scholarly consensus on what drives opposition to the accession of a particular country. To fill this gap, this paper adopts a comparative approach to examine the determinants of attitudes toward the membership of twelve candidate or potential candidate countries to the EU. Using 2005 Eurobarometer survey data from the EU-25, we examine the relative explanatory power of two leading theories—utilitarian and identity—in explaining public opposition to EU enlargement. Our results reveal that, across models, subjective variables capturing material and identity threat perceptions have a more consistent impact on enlargement attitudes compared with objective indicators. While fears of higher EU budget contribution and evaluations of national economic conditions are the most consistent utilitarian predictors of respondents’ opposition to entry of potential EU members, attachment to European identity and fears about the loss of cultural identity are the two most powerful identity-related predictors of public opposition. Contrary to expectations, religious attachment plays a limited role in shaping public opposition. Only Turkey elicits strong and uniform opposition from all religious groups, including atheists, agnostics, and seculars. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper presents an interpretation of austerity that sheds light on the crisis in the Eurozone. It argues that austerity is a long-term policy rather than an ill-conceived short-term remedy. To go beyond the by now familiar criticisms of austerity, we need to examine the crisis in its totality. Especially important are the impediments to a strong recovery driven by market incentives. This might ultimately undermine the very existence of the common currency and the future of the European Union.JEL Classification: E2, O4, B5. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to present a proposal of reform of the TARGET2 (Trans-European Automated Real-Time Gross Settlement Express Transfer) system aimed to correct intra-European Union (EU) financial, trade, and productive imbalances. For this purpose, the proposal relies on the application of the Keynes Plan’s principles to a regional integration process. Previously, the origins of the EU imbalances are traced to the shortcomings of the European monetary integration. Finally, the reforms needed to make the TARGET2 a rebalancing system are discussed in depth.JEL Classification: F32, F33, F36 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to analyze the roots of the sovereign debt crisis around the Eurozone countries. Furthermore, it seeks to deconstruct the orthodox argument which states the crisis is caused by fiscal indiscipline of some of its members. In doing so, the article bears on the political economy tradition, integrating the elements of hierarchy and asymmetry among the various actors, and poses the hypothesis that the crisis in the Eurozone is due to three highly correlated causes: (1) the unfolding of the 2007 crisis that originated in the United States, (2) the financialization of the global economy, and (3) the intra-Eurozone imbalances, a legacy of the neoliberal institutional framework of the last decades. To associate the Euro crisis with this neoliberal architecture, moreover, the main tendencies of contemporary capitalism are described, pointing to the theoretical contribution of Marx, particularly regarding his hypothesis of a tendential fall of the profit rate. Finally, some concluding remarks are considered, stressing alternatives to the budget austerity measures and to the necessary ruptures with this neoliberal institutional framework.JEL Classification: B51; P16; H63; N14 [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]

This paper highlights the importance of recognising forced marriage as a form of violence and draws attention to the interventions that are developing in Europe as a response to forced marriage. The paper highlights the difficulties of conflating all child marriages as forced marriage and discusses the different contexts of childhood in different parts of the globe. The UK is reputed to have the widest range of policy interventions and practice guidance to tackle forced marriage and is therefore used as a case study in this paper, but reference is also made to other countries thus ensuring a wider relevance. The paper’s analysis of UK based research studies on forced marriage identifies three key themes: i) lack of adequate reporting of incidents of forced marriage; ii) lack of professional knowledge of forced marriage and their fear of intervention; iii) the tension between conceptualizing forced marriage as purely cultural or as a form of gender based violence. It also highlights the largely legislative responses to forced marriage in Europe; Civil Protection for victims of forced marriage in the UK is discussed and a critical analysis is offered of the increase in marriage and sponsorship age in the UK and in many European countries. Health and clinical issues related to forced marriage are highlighted and the paper calls for further research globally to i) better understand the extent and nature of forced marriage; ii) to evaluate current interventions; iii) to investigate the clinical and potential mental health implications of forced marriage. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Republic of Ireland was the first country in the eurozone to adopt a neoliberal infused ‘austerity budget’, and the ill-judged state bailing out of a number of reckless banks and associated financial institutions is costing billions of euros. In late 2010, as the crisis deepened, the International Monetary Fund and European Central Bank provided a ‘bailout’ package that resulted in further punitive public spending cuts and the eradication of national sovereignty. This paper maintains that the present crisis is more than a mere economic crisis, but can be viewed as a series of interlinked ‘conjunctures’. Tracing the connection between the historical and the contemporary, the first part of the discussion will explore six thematic components relating to the structuring of the Irish state. These are identified as: a ‘class rule state’; an ‘authoritarian state’; a ‘confining state’; a ‘censoring state’; a ‘discriminatory state’; and a ‘state within the state’. These six dimensions provide a contextual underpinning for the second part of the paper, which focuses on the crisis in child welfare and child protection services and dwells on the shambolic performance of the Health Service Executive (HSE), deficits in the ‘care’ system and the HSE failure to furnish reliable data on the deaths of children in contact with social workers. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The paper advances our empirical and theoretical understanding of migrant assimilation. It does so by focusing on a very particular group of individuals who appear more likely than other migrant types to “go native.” We call these individuals “mixed nationality relationship migrants” ( i.e., migrants who have committed to a life outside their home country because of the presence of a foreign partner). The paper argues that the transnational family milieus that emerge from this form of international migration are critical to the assimilation process. Empirical material from 11 in-depth interviews with female migrants in Britain (Sheffield) and France (Paris) supports our argument. We also suggest that such “extreme” assimilation is more likely within a regional migratory system – like the EU – where the “identity frontiers” crossed in the formation of a transnational family are relatively shallow. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses whether a new paradigm is necessary for independent economic regulation of electricity land closely associated natural gas) systems. We begin by summarizing the nature of the traditional model of electricity reform and the place of economic regulation within it. Next we outline the drivers for changing the current model of electricity regulation, namely, the maturity of the existing model, the reality of changing circumstances, and the coming of age of climate change concern. We go on to discuss the premises on which a new model of regulation should be based. These are: remembering the successes of the current system of regulation; a new focus on processes not just outcomes; a recognition of the economics of climate change; and the appropriate management of uncertainty. We then highlight the key elements of a new model for regulation: new processes of regulation; new models of competition and the issues raised by focus on climate change. The paper draws heavily on the experience of the UK, but has direct implications for the rest of the European Union countries and for other countries whose regulatory systems mirror them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The nature of governance in the European Union (EU) and its member states is continuing to evolve as the EU develops. This paper focuses on the challenges to this governance process in the sector of environmental policy, and particularly the role of external organizations and states in providing alternate policy fora. The policy impact of these institutions and organizations leads to more actor participation in a way that EU players may not be able to anticipate or control since the EU is only one of several arenas involved. Both states and non-governmental actors actively seek to shift issues to arenas that provide them advantages. Consequently, developments in other arenas shape and are shaped by EU issues as actors pursue forum shopping. The paper presents two cases, the amendment of the Basel Convention to ban hazardous wastes export and the EU regulation of chemical risk, which demonstrate how external players can shape EU regulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the aims behind the incorporation of competition rules into the European project and studies how the development of the doctrine has been molded to the specific circumstances and outlooks encountered in postwar Europe. It argues that the objectives of competition law in the EU go beyond economic or legal standards that are applied in individual cases; rather, competition law and policy have been calibrated to contribute to allowing the EU project to harness the benefits of an open capitalist economy within the context of a democratic European society. The analysis aims to demonstrate that while Ordoliberal thinking played a role in the development of European competition law and policy, there were several other social, political, and macroeconomic influences at play as well. As such, the strain that competition policy has come under is a result of attempts to use competition policy to balance several public policy objectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article advances several reasons why EU competition policy on vertical restraints has been a failure. First, the distinction between price and nonprice restraints is inconsistent, since the economic effects of both practices are similar. Second, EU competition law creates a number of inefficiencies that cause a negative impact on social welfare; an example is the ban on absolute territorial protection that does not allow a full protection from free-riding. Third, it is doubtful that the inefficiencies of EU competition law can be justified by the market integration goal, since the rules may turn out to be ineffective in reaching this objective. Fourth, EU competition law on vertical restraints has created negative side effects: it has put an end to experimentation and innovation of competition rules at the member-state level and induced private interests groups to spend a lot of effort in lobbying national regulators. The example of resale price maintenance for books serves as an illustration of the latter problem. Several of the above pitfalls have been indicated by Richard Markovits in his treatise on U.S. antitrust law and EU competition law. These criticisms are supported in this paper and further expanded by a discussion of additional errors that have made the EU competition rules on vertical restraints a policy failure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores social accounting matrices (SAMs) using three country case studies (Egypt, Morocco and Tunisia). For each, the agri-food sector, trade negotiations with the European Union and associated challenges are first presented. The key sectors are then identified and analysed using the SimSip SAM tool (Parra and Wodon, 2009). Using sensitivity analysis, the implications of free trade for key sectors were analysed. By evaluating backward and forward linkages in the economy of each country, the most important sectors likely to take a lead role and become essential drivers of growth were identified. Due to strong backward relations and high labour intensity, some agricultural sectors have the potential to generate significant income, thus supporting economic growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper evaluates the energy efficiency of EU countries over the period 2000-2010. At the first stage, data envelopment analysis (DEA) is used, combining multiple energy consumption data and economic outputs. The efficiency estimates obtained from the analysis are evaluated in a second stage through a multiple criteria decision aiding methodology (MCDA). The proposed non-parametric approach combining DEA with MCDA enables modeling of the problem in an integrated manner, not only providing energy efficiency estimates but also supporting the analysis of the main contributing factors, as well as the development of a benchmarking model for energy efficiency evaluation at the country level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies the income distributional effects of three main instruments of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) in the EU: Coupled Direct Payments (CDP), the Rural Development Programme (RDP) and the Single Payment Scheme (SPS). The authors use a large set of cross-country farm-level panel data for the EU covering the period 1999-2007, and employ the GMM estimator, which allows important sources of endogeneity to be addressed. According to the results, farmers gain 66-72%, 77-82% and 93-109% from the CDP, SPS and RDP respectively. These findings suggest that the initiated shift in CAP expenditure from the support of farm production activities towards supporting rural development and the provision of public goods and externalities is also in line with supporting farmers' income. [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]

This paper estimates the welfare-optimal market share of wind and solar power, explicitly taking into account their output variability. We present a theoretical valuation framework that consistently accounts for the impact of fluctuations over time, forecast errors, and the location of generators in the power grid on the marginal value of electricity from renewables. Then the optimal share of wind and solar power in Northwestern Europe's generation mix is estimated from a calibrated numerical model. We find the optimal long-term wind share to be 20%, three times more than today; however, we also find significant parameter uncertainty. Variability significantly impacts results: if winds were constant, the optimal share would be 60%. In addition, the effect of technological change, price shocks, and policies on the optimal share is assessed. We present and explain several surprising findings, including a negative impact of CO2 prices on optimal wind deployment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers reflections on the Eurosphere's proper object domain. It does so by reflecting on two interrelated questions: (I) what is the European public sphere?; and (2) how does diversity shape the character of the European public sphere? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the pharmaceutical industry, originator companies researching and developing new medicines typically obtain a range of patents to protect these medicines against generic competition. On the other side, generic suppliers seeking to enter the market will often challenge the validity of these patents or may simply launch their products, forcing the originators to bring litigation to enforce their patents and prevent the generics' entry. In the context of the corresponding litigation, the originators and generic suppliers often decide to enter into a settlement. While the settlement terms will vary from case to case, a number of settlements have involved a payment made from the patent holder (the originator) to the accused infringer (the generic supplier) in order to settle the dispute (reverse-payment patent settlements). Against this background, this paper seeks to analyze the compatibility of such settlements under U.S. antitrust law and EU competition law drawing on recent cases. [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]

Does income inequality increase political backlash against European and global integration? This paper reports research suggesting that it can. The article analyses party opposition to and support for trade openness, European Union integration and general internationalism of political party platforms in advanced industrial democracies between 1960 and 2008. It finds that inequality tends to increase anti-globalization positions of parties, net of pro-globalization positions, an effect that does not significantly differ across party families or levels of actual globalization. This effect, however, does depend on, and is diminished by, generous redistributive policies. These findings clarify socio-economic conditions underlying the backlash against political and economic globalization. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Most studies of party competition consider the presentation of ambiguous positions a costly strategy. This literature, however, does not study party strategies in multiple issue dimensions. Yet multidimensionality may play an important role in parties’ strategic calculus. Although it may be rational for a party to emphasize a certain issue dimension, it may be equally rational to disguise its stance on other dimensions by blurring its position. This article argues that parties employ strategies of issue emphasis and position blurring in various dimensional contexts. Who emphasizes and who blurs thus depends on the actors’ relative stakes in different issue dimensions. The paper makes its case by performing cross-sectional analyses of 132 political parties in 14 West European party systems using Comparative Manifesto Project data, the 2006 Chapel Hill expert survey and the 2009 European Election Study. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article discusses the role of efficiencies in the assessment of monopolistic processes in the European Union (EU). It outlines the Guidance Paper on Abusive Exclusionary Conduct which was adopted by the European Commission (EC) to facilitate the assessment of monopolistic practices. It highlights the process of the EC in identifying enforcement priorities to regulate competitive practices under Article 102 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU).

In the design of cold-formed steel purlins based on Eurocode 3, the lateral bending moment in the free flange of the purlin, when in tension, is assumed to be zero due to flange curling and second order effects. To investigate the validity of this design assumption, non-linear analytical and finite element models for analyzing how the gravity load affects the maximum mid-span stresses in cold-formed steel purlins attached to the roof sheeting are presented in this paper. The second-order effect of tensile stresses induced by the gravity load in the free flange of purlins is investigated by emphasizing on Z and C sections. The results obtained from the two models are compared with Eurocode 3, and they are included in this article. It is observed that for shorter purlin span lengths the design assumption underestimates the maximum midspan stresses. [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]

This paper compares different aspects of drinking habits in six EU countries: France, Italy, Germany, the UK, Finland and Sweden. Frequency of drinking is highest in France and Italy, lowest in Finland and Sweden, and increases with age in France and Italy in particular, but also in Germany. The average consumed quantity per drinking occasion is highest in Finland, Sweden and the UK and lowest in France and Italy, and the youngest show the highest quantity per drinking occasion in most countries. Also intoxicationoriented drinking is most common in Finland, Sweden and the UK, and in all countries except Italy the youngest report the highest frequency of intoxication. The youngest show the highest mean alcohol consumption in Finland, Sweden and the UK, but the lowest in France, Italy and Germany. In all six countries, men consume at least twice as much alcohol as women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is an inescapable relationship between the existence of migration movements and the resulting policies which are adopted by the authorities of the area concerned towards encouraging these movements, or more commonly towards attempting to control or to reduce them. This in turn means that the migration researcher must not only look at the effects of policy and changes in policy, important thought this is, but must also attempt to understand the changing political factors which fuel the formation of policy. This paper aims to bring together some of the wide variety of policy issues and responses which may be observed in Europe at the present time and in the recent past, and in particular to make an assessment of the approaches being taken by the European Union member states as a whole, and also by the so-called Schengen group of member states. This article also attempts to look at the perceptions of these policies and their effects from the point of view of both the western and the "eastern" European countries, as migration policy issues are rarely one-sided. In conclusion, it considers some of the research issues and problems which are raised by geographers and others working in this area, difficulties which might be implied by our possibly flippant title, "Keeping Up with Schengen. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]