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This study examines the territorial cohesion of Catalonia in terms of political affiliations to Catalan nationalist parties in regional elections between 1980 and 2015. The objective is to evaluate the explanatory power of the nationalization thesis, which assumes convergence, uniformity, and nation-wide source of political alignments. Although usually applied to the state-level, the nationalization thesis can do justice to the independence demands of regional nationalist movements as well. The thesis is measured using the two traditional conceptualizations, and a new one which scrutinizes the Catalan-wide distribution of socio-spatial cleavages. The study uses municipal resolution data to provide a detailed insight into Catalan electoral geography. The methods involved include local and global statistical indexes for measuring variation in and distribution of electoral support, and linear and geographically weighted regressions which aim to identify predictor variables and, above all, their spatial (non-)stationarity. The results indicate that spatial patterns of nationalist affiliations are clustered, place-specific, and of a non-stationary character which disproves the nationalization thesis in all its three conceptualizations. As a consequence, the concept of spatial modes within the Catalan territory is introduced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the last decades, North America as well as Europe have experienced a significant boom of craft breweries. While it has been understood mainly as a result of neolocalism, we argue that this view is overly unilateral and depending on spatial context. Other factors like glocalization may potentially also affect the emergence of craft breweries. This paper examined the factors influencing the expansion of craft breweries in seven regions of Czechia and Poland, two Central European countries that share similar history but differ in their brewing traditions. Based on semi-structured interviews with representatives of 59 breweries, we identified important similarities but also fundamental differences. Many breweries have indeed been significantly influenced by neolocalism, while some did not capitalize on it, and others even directly rejected it. The role of spatial context has also manifested, particularly through the increased importance of glocalization in several regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Unsafe management of human faecal waste represents a major risk for public health, particularly in low- and middle-income countries. Efforts to improve sanitation conditions are considerably sensitive to contextual specifics of natural and social environments. This review operationalises, analyses, and synthesises evidence of how contextual factors and motivations affect different sanitation outcomes with a specific focus on community approaches to rural sanitation.Methods and Findings: We operationalised contextual factors and motivations as determinants that influence sanitation conditions independently of the examined intervention. We conducted a systematic search of both peer-reviewed and grey literature with no restriction on the methods After screening the titles and abstracts of 19,198 records obtained through initial searches, we scrutinised the full content of 621 studies for relevance. While 102 of these studies qualified to be assessed for risk of bias and information content, ultimately, just 40 studies met our eligibility criteria. Of these 40 studies from 16 countries, 26 analysed specific interventions and 14 were non-interventional. None of the experimental studies reported the effects of contextual factors or motivations as operationalised in this study and only observational evidence was thus used in our review. We found that sanitation interventions are typically seen as the principal vehicles of change, the main instruments to fix 'deviant' behaviour or ensure access to infrastructure. The programmatic focus of this study on sanitation determinants that act independently of specific interventions questions this narrow understanding of sanitation dynamics. We identified 613 unique observations of quantitatively or qualitatively established relationships between certain contextual factors or motivations and 12 different types of sanitation outcomes. The sanitation determinants were classified into 77 typologically similar groups clustered into 12 broader types and descriptively characterised. We developed a graphical synthesis of evidence in the form of a network model referred to as the sanitation nexus. The sanitation nexus depicts how different groups of determinants interlink different sanitation outcomes. It provides an empirically derived conceptual model of sanitation with an aggregate structure indicating similarities and dissimilarities between sanitation outcomes with respect to how their sets of underlying determinants overlap.Conclusion: This study challenged the understanding of context as merely something that should be controlled for. Factors that affect targeted outcomes independently of the analysed interventions should be scrutinised and reported. This particularly applies to interventions involving complex human-environment interactions where generalisability is necessarily indirect. We presented a novel approach to comprehending the contextual factors and motivations which influence sanitation outcomes. Our approach can be analogously applied when mapping and organising underlying drivers in other areas of public and environmental health. The sanitation nexus derived in this study is designed to inform practitioners and researchers about sanitation determinants and the outcomes they influence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]