Geography, Planning, Environment

Individual leaders play an important role in the initiating and directing the democratisation processes, with their actions shaping the ensuing regime, the rules of the game and their positions. Different approaches are reviewed in the scientific literature to explain why and how transitions to the democracy happen, to identify internal and external drivers of democratization, the role of leaders in the maintaining the sustainability in the process of democratization. However, particularly sustainability leadership and the role of such leaders in the success of democratisation is not sufficiently surveyed especially in transition countries. The challenges faced by the transitional leaders and presented in the scientific literature are enough complicated to focused only on environmental and sustainability issues. Consequently, complexity approach is needed to identify and specify the ability of individual leaders to shift the transition towards environmental sustainability and adaptive governance of social–ecological systems through their actions.
This paper seeks to identify and describe some common features of transitional leadership during the so-called ‘Third Wave’ of democratization, contrasts of this leadership to the other leadership concepts (including sustainability leadership), the factors influencing the ability of leaders to govern from the triangle of environmental sustainability and the example of successful implementation of sustainability leadership in the particular transition country: Uruguay.

The paper  investigates the impact of independent advocacy on the lives of advocacy partners experiencing mental ill-health. By using qualitative methods we sought to determine not only if there were positive impacts, but what these impacts were and why they were positive. Several independent advocacy organisations across Scotland were contacted and 5 of these assisted us in making contact with interviewees. We conducted expert interviews with the organisations’ managers and 12 interviews with advocacy partners experiencing mental illness, who had used one to one advocacy. Furthermore, interview data on the impact of advocacy collected previously by two other advocacy organisations was also included in our analysis. It was found that advocacy was considered a much needed support by our interviewees that fulfilled needs that other services did not adress, such as help with communication and information about legal and social rights from an independent source.

This article presents apprenticeship as an ethnographic method suitable for researching topics concerning gender and space. To use this method, the researcher takes up a practice, such as a sport. Emphasis lies in understanding one’s topic ‘by body’, and the article argues that such an embodied perspective sheds a new light on gender construction in the boxing gym. An empirical study of female amateur boxers in Scotland, conducted by the author, herself a competitive female boxer, reinforces the argument. The position of an embodied insider offers the researcher a unique vantage point with regard to various contrasting processes of gender construction on different scales, such as the body, embodied encounters and the gym. By giving attention to the transformative power of bodily practice, apprenticeship focuses on possibilities for, resistance to, and transformation of, gender norms in hyper masculine spaces. The apprenticeship method can therefore enrich geography’s understanding of the role of physical practices for gender construction in different spaces.

De bereikbaarheid van werkgelegenheid staat in deze bachelorthesis, ter afronding van de premaster Geografie, Planologie en Milieuwetenschappen, centraal. De toegang tot werkgelegenheid is een belangrijke variabele voor de mogelijkheden die iemand heeft om te participeren in de maatschappij. In dit onderzoek wordt bereikbaarheid gemeten als het aantal cumulatieve banen dat vanuit een Nederlandse postcode (op vier cijfers postcodeniveau) te bereiken is en dit is voor zes stadsgewesten (Groningen, Zwolle, Leeuwarden, Den Haag, Rotterdam en Utrecht) in beeld gebracht.

“We constantly create, recreate and change structures” (D. Inglis 2012, Ernste 2016).

In this paper the value of bilateral agreements for climate change adaptation will be discussed in light of Jürgen Habermas’ theory of Communicative Rationality and the Theory of Risk Society. The aim is to identify what parties are involved in climate politics and bilateral climate agreements, what discourses are interacting and play an important role here, and how bilateral agreements can change climate change mitigation and adaptation.
Risk Society theory poses an interesting and seriously contrasting frame for the climate change and sustainability discussion and social-natural relationship of it. A moral commitment to climate change mitigation and the enabling of climate and nature protecting (bilateral)agreements is in a sense hard-edged politics. Manufactured risk like climate change shifts the discourse of collective and individual responsibility. Manufactured Risk and Risk Society have some serious implications for political agenda’s all over the world.

In dit onderzoek staan kennisuitwisseling tussen energie coöperaties in Gelderland en de rol die visies en organisatiestructuur hierin spelen centraal. In het kader daarvan van is de vraagstelling dan ook;

“Hoe wordt kennis uitgewisseld tussen energie coöperaties in Gelderland en wat is de rol van visies en organisatiestructuur in het versterken van deze initiatieven door kennisuitwisseling?”

- Wat zegt de literatuur over de voorwaarden voor kennisuitwisseling tussen energiecoöperaties?
- Wat zijn verschillen en overeenkomsten in organisatiestructuur van coöperaties in Gelderland?
- Wat zijn de overeenkomsten en verschillen in de visies van coöperaties op de energietransitie, uitdagingen die zij tegenkomen en hoe deze kwesties opgelost dienen te worden?

In de analyse van het onderzoeksveld zoals bepaald in de doel- en vraagstelling van dit onderzoek kwam naar voren dat er nog weinig onderzoeken zijn gepubliceerd over de rol die visies en organisatiestructuur hebben op de (mate van) kennisuitwisseling tussen lokale energie coöperaties (Arentsen & Bellkom, 2014; Curran, 2012; Loorbach, Van Bakel, Whiteman & Rotmans, 2010). In een poging een deel van dit kennistekort aan te vullen bouwt het theoriehoofdstuk 2 op tot een nieuw conceptueel kader op basis van elementen uit verschillende andere theorieën.

Met behulp van deze theorieën wordt inzichtelijk gemaakt dat kennisuitwisseling een geëvalueerde, duurzame informatiestructuur is ontwikkelt door een (bedrijfs)orgaan om problemen op te lossen en het leer- of aanpassingsvermogen te vergroten (McElroy, Jorna & van Engelen, 2006). Van Wijk, Jansen en Lyles (2008) classificeren verschillende antecedenten van belang voor kennisuitwisseling tussen organisaties; kennis-, organisatie- en netwerkeigenschappen. In deze casus en voor kennisuitwisseling zijn visies en organisatiestructuur van bijzonder belang. In visies op de energietransitie komen met de representaties en verhalingen die Curran (2012) en Miller et al (2015) beschrijven vier thema’s naar voren; besluitvorming, investeringscapaciteit (financiële middelen en menselijk kapitaal), werkgelegenheid en haalbaarheid van de energietransitie.

Vanuit de theorie bekeken kon gezien de complexiteit en de omvang van de onderzoeksconcepten alleen de nodige informatie worden verkregen door middel van diepte interviews, welke bij Rijn en IJssel Energie Cooperatie (REIJE), samen voor Duurzame energie Apeldoorn (DeA), 11duurzaam (11d), Thermo Bello (TB), Wageningen op Zon (WoZ) en WindPower Nijmegen (WPN) hebben plaatsgevonden.

Uit het onderzoek is naar voren gekomen dat een gedeelde visie en organisatiestructuur van invloed zijn op de mate van kennisuitwisseling. Kennisuitwisselingen die niet te verklaren zijn door een regionaal component, zijn te verklaren door overeenkomsten in visie en organisatiestructuur. Wat opvallend naar voren komt in gesprekken met coöperaties zijn de kennisuitwisseling tussen DeA en TB, evenals DeA en REIJE. Daarnaast is er de kennisoverdracht tussen TB en 11d, die wederzijds zo groot is dat zij vanuit regionale samenwerking een paraplu organisatie hebben opgericht voor lokale duurzame initiatieven. Als laatste bespreken we de lage kennisuitwisseling van WPN, die alleen soms kennis voedt aan overkoepelende netwerken zoals de CoP.

De eerste aanbeveling is de kennisuitwisseling en de structuren voor kennisuitwisseling zoals de bestaande werkgroepen en tafels in de CoP en bijeenkomsten van de VEG te evalueren, met speciale aandacht voor visies en organisatiestructuur. Met deze evaluatie van en aandacht voor visie en organisatiestructuur kunnen gemeenschappelijke referentiekaders tot stand komen die het leervermogen (de kennisuitwisseling) en daarmee de ontwikkeling en prestatie van deze subnetwerken vergroten. (Curran, 2012; Helm, 2008; Miller, 2015; Burt, 2000; Goot, 2009; Ison, 2014; Van Wijk, Jansen & Lyles, 2008). Een dergelijke overeenkomstige manier van verhalen kan helpen de energietransitie concreet vorm te geven en effectieve stappen te zetten richting een duurzame toekomst (Curran, 2012; Gorp & Goot, 2009; Ison, 2014; Loorbach, Van Baker, Whiteman & Rotmans, 2010).

Over the past thirty years new territorial governance forms in Europe have multiplied at rapid speed. These new forms of governance have not only come to coexist with traditional spaces of government, but also complement them. They are operational on multiple (from local to EU) levels. This is of importance because the planning activities outside of traditional planning systems have also been proliferating. These un-statutory, new planning activities include innovative territorial management involving soft spaces and bleary borders (Haughton et al., 2010). Examples of such ‘ soft spaces’ involving bleary boundaries are the Baltic Sea macro-region and recent work of planners on metropoles and city regions, such as the Uberregionale Partnerschaften (supra-regional partnerships) in Nuremburg and Hamburg (Allmendinger et al., 2015). The geography of the soft spaces produced by the Fehmarnbelt fixed link do not correspond directly to functional relations but emerge with an eye to the relations that are anticipated to come with this infrastructure project.

Introduction In an article published almost two decades ago, G H Pirie (1983, page 472) wrote: ``It would be a pity indeed if the busyness of political philosophers was to go completely unnoticed by spatial theorists and applied researchers. Equally, it would be a pity ... if this essay were to stand alone as a review of implications of that busyness.'' In that article, entitled``On spatial justice'', Pirie reflected``on the desirability and possibility of fashioning a concept of spatial justice from notions of social justice and territorial social justice'' (page 465). The present paper offers yet another reflection on the notion of justice as it relates to space and spatiality, to point to the ways in which various forms of injustice are manifest in the very process of spatialization, and the ways in which an increased awareness of the dialectical relationship between (in)justice and spatiality could make space a site of politics in fighting against injustice. As will become clear further through the text, the conceptualizations of both justice and space differ from the ways Pirie once viewed them. The paper is organized in five sections. The first section is a brief review of the geography literature which engages with the notion of justice, and serves to outline the theoretical position assumed in this paper. The second section provides an urban context in which a notion of spatial justice may be conceptualized. The third section is devoted to such a conceptualization. The fourth section presents the case of French urban policy in order to make the arguments more concrete. The concluding section is an attempt to define an ethico-political ground on which emancipatory politics in an urban spatial framework may be defended. The paper is conceptual in nature. Examples, however, are provided to stir the imagination as to the ways in which the dialectical relationship between (in)justice and spatiality may be conceived. The examples, therefore , are used to make this relationship more concrete, rather than attempting to provide a thorough discussion of the cases selected.

This PhD thesis focuses on the migration trajectories of sub-Saharan Africans who are heading for the European Union. With an analytical framework that is inspired by the new mobilities turn, and by the means of a trajectory ethnography, I have investigated migrants' journeys by focusing on the changeability of migrants' aspirations, the importance of social connections and disconnections, and migrants' experienced mobility/immobility.

This paper analyzes the migration process of sub-Saharan Africans heading for Europe in the framework of the conceptual discussion on transit migration. It focuses on the organization and facilitation of migration and the sharing of information among migrants in their process of migrating.

Onder een tentzeil wachten op die ene kans om de Europese Unie in te komen. Veel migranten draaien er hun hand niet voor om. Vaak leven zij tijdenlang in informele nederzettingen, die de rafelranden van Europa een ander aanzien geven. Het nieuwe landschap dat daardoor ontstaat krijgt de vorm van een ‘grenswachtland’.

This first working paper in a series discussing the different implications of the concept of transit migration focuses on the role of information in the migration process of sub-Saharan African migrants towards Europe. Both the pre-migration phase and the actual migration are taken into account. The first part outlines the migration encouraging factors in Senegal and the second part focuses on the importance of information and information-sharing when migrants are travelling through Africa on their way to Europe.

This chapter examines research related to migration in a globalizing world. It attempts to answer questions such as what do we know, and what kinds of research partnerships have been created in order to gain a better understanding of ongoing developments? To the extent that we generate knowledge, whose voices are heard, and who decides on the kind of information that is used for policy making and in public debates? Finally, in order to answer the questions that remain open, what kind of capacity do we need, and how can we strengthen our capacity to understand the implications of rising numbers of migrants? The chapter starts by exploring migration research in three regions – Latin America, Asia and in Africa. Finally, section 4 presents some conclusions related to regional differences, and about how to encourage partnerships, strengthen the embeddedness of research in society and improve capacity building.