(In)Security Theater

We examine local government response to the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States utilizing a unique dataset created by the National League of Cities. The most common action by local governments was changing administrative procedures and implementing policies aimed at prevention or “flattening the curve”. The general public was the most common population target. In addition to detailing the most common local action types, policy areas, and population targets, we analyze local response based on the autonomy granted to local governments by states. We expected local governments with greater levels of autonomy would have a greater level of response; however, some local governments did not ‘behave’ as expected based on their degree of policymaking autonomy granted by state governments. Some states with higher levels of autonomy enacted relatively few local actions in response to the pandemic, whereas some with little autonomy engaged in considerable activity to address COVID-19.

In addition to describing the judicial and political contexts in which Poland's penal system operates, this paper also raises a central question that is directly opposite to the one that usually surfaces in this context. Instead of simply asking how far the political situation in Poland has shaped the criminal justice system, it also asks how much, in their turn, criminal justice routines, penal traditions, habits and practices, have infused Poland's politics and squeezed out more rational and supportive actions in response to crime.

The morphological and molecular characterizations of Gracilaria (Rhodophyta) specimens collected from the Mediterranean Sea are reported and suggest the existence of a new species inside this genus.

This study engaged with local government staff in two communes in Mopti Region, Mali and two districts in Karamoja in Uganda. After identifying with staff the occasions when they had taken proactive action in response to the warning or threat of a crisis, repeated conversations were used to create a detailed timeline of what was known when and what actions were taken. The conversations also investigated where warnings came from, what strategies were adopted and how they were supported. The examples that local authority staff gave included floods, droughts, a locust plague and epidemics of human and livestock diseases . The study looked only at the perspectives and thinking of local authorities on forward-looking action: their successes and the opinions of assisted populations was largely beyond its scope.

This chapter examines the role of a Chinese state-owned enterprise — the Bank of China (BOC) — in China’s capitalist transformation. Although the barriers to entry into China’s banking sector are being dismantled and state-owned commercial banks (SOCBs) now have nonstate — including foreign — shareholders, the process is slow and BOC continues to enjoy state support and operate in an oligopolistic banking sector dominated by it and its three major competitors, which are also SOCBs. While BOC has to respond to the reality of majority state ownership, it is not a passive actor. It is a rational actor that actively seeks to maximise profit subject to the rules of the game. Although the state regards banking as a strategic sector, official authority over SOCBs has fragmented. The end of central planning and reform to the governance of SOCBs has enlarged its feasible set of strategies and tactics. As a result, BOC’s actions are no longer always consistent with the wishes of the central or local governments.

The first years of this century have seen significant advances in integrating the many perspectives on what it will take to achieve a healthy and sustainable future. Intense activity among agencies worldwide has produced a stream of reviews of the global condition. These include the combined United States Research Council (1999); a consortium of the United Nations Development Programme, United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), World Bank, and World Resources Institute (2000); the Millennium Development Goals (2000). United Nations Environment Program (2003); the Global Reporting Initiative (2006); and Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (2005). Each review has deplored a lack of adequate follow-up action on the implications of previous reports. Continuing concern about the state of the planet and the associated risks to health (Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, 2005; Corvalen et al., 2005) has increased the challenge to deliver an effective response. That success is possible has been demonstrated in the Montreal protocols, in which United Nations members continually monitor and control their use of chlorofluorocarbons and so slow the disintegration of the planet s ozone layer (United Nations Environment Programme, 1999). Local government authorities agreement to reduce their carbon emissions in the face of global warming is beginning to show results (ICLEI, 2002). Such effective responses are still far from established practice. There is an inability, first, to agree on, and then to implement, protocols controlling global environmental hazards; for instance, the Kyoto protocols for reducing national carbon dioxide emissions have only just established a framework (United Nations Environment Program, 2006). At the local scale, the management of ecosystem resources tends not to take sufficient account of the needs for long-term sustainability (Corvalen et al., 2005). These precedents confirm that there is much yet to be learned on taking action in response to scientific reports on the state of the world. In this essay, we report on a workshop on that theme held at the EcoHealth ONE meeting, in Madison, Wisconsin in October 2006. The workshop reviewed the three initiatives below with the aim of determining how EcoHealth actions can best be guided in the future. One, a master plan has been provided by the suite of eight United Nations Millennium Development Goals, formed from the synthesis of national commitments made separately at conferences and summits during the 1990s Published online: February 7, 2007 Correspondence to: Valerie A. Brown, e-mail: val.brown@anu.edu.au EcoHealth 4, 95–98, 2007 DOI: 10.1007/s10393-007-0082-8

South Africa failing people displaced by xenophobia riots

Cape Town is the second-largest city in South Africa, with a population of over four million people. Established by Dutch colonists in 1652, it is a diverse and complex city, with a long history of segregation and inequity. The city continues to be characterized by high levels of inequity, most tangibly manifested in the presence of informal settlements. Much of this inequity is along racial lines as a result of enforced spatial segregation during colonial and apartheid times. Since South Africa’s transition to democracy in the 1990s, the city has continued to evolve, with significant urban regeneration initiatives (such as the Victoria & Alfred Waterfront) and with major governance reforms (with the fifty-seven local government bodies and regional government body that existed in the early 1990s being merged into one local government body in 2000). Cape Town has been the site of much research, from a range of perspectives. During the apartheid era, this research largely focused on the implementation of apartheid segregation and the resistance to apartheid, whereas since the 1990s, the focus has been on the implementation of developmental local government, continued inequities, and the roll-out of neoliberalism. Research from a “developmental local government” perspective has focused on government reform and the large amount of service delivery (for example, housing delivery) that has occurred since the 1990s. Another major focus of research has been on the implementation of neoliberal urban strategies and the resistance of civil society to this (although some scholars of “southern urbanism” would argue that the importance of Neoliberalism in Cape Town and other cities in the Global South has been overemphasized by scholars from the Global North). Given its location in a magnificent setting with unique levels of biodiversity, tourism and the urban interface with the natural environment have also become major topics of research. Probably the most effective reflections of life in Cape Town have been in fiction and popular nonfiction works, so it is important to also consider these as well. The bibliography is structured in the following sections: History of Cape Town (to 1990); Overviews of Post-Apartheid Cape Town (after 1990); Poverty, Inequality, and Exclusion in Cape Town; Place and Space in Cape Town; Governance of Cape Town; Neoliberalism in Cape Town; Crime and Violence in Cape Town; Tourism in Cape Town; Cape Town and the Natural Environment; and Fiction and Popular Works about Cape Town.

Background: This study aims to document the relationship between local revenue planning and service delivery in Mityana Municipal Council, Central Uganda. Local government revenue planning entails projecting local revenue and determining how it is received and allocated to deliver services to citizens efficiently. With efficiency in planning and assessment of resources within local government, planned resources would significantly contribute to local council service delivery in developing countries such as Uganda. Mityana, the municipality has a wide range of local revenue management systems including e-logrev and E-las systems. Methodology: The study used a descriptive, correlational, and cross-sectional research design. Further, it adopted both quantitative and qualitative research approaches hence a mixed research. Results: The study documents the relationship between planning and service delivery in local government in Mityana Municipal Council, Central Uganda at 71.2% which is above average. 71.2% was obtained from the respondents who agreed with the statement that there is a relationship between local revenue planning and service delivery in local government. Conclusion: The rate at which planning and service delivery in local government in Mityana Municipal Council relates is high above the average. Recommendation: Information about the cost of local revenue collection should not be confidential. The responsible people working in the municipal offices should not fear disclosing any information regarding service delivery to the people within the municipality.

Fiscal system incentivises local government officials to depend on central government’s transfers to fund their budgets. This paper examines whether district and municipal status local government officials exhibit the same spending behaviour when presented with central government’s transfers. The paper uses the panel data model to estimate the flypaper effect on district and municipal status local governments in the Central Region of Ghana from 2008 to 2015. The result shows differences in spending behaviour between district and municipal status local governments, where the flypaper effect is more pronounced on municipal status local governments (52.6%) than district status local governments (44.8%). Though municipal local governments are financially better in raising own-source revenues compared to the district local governments, the design of the fiscal system tends to make municipal local governments more reliant on central transfers than on expenditure of own-source revenues. This reduces interest in raising own-source revenue and its expenditure, a situation which has an adverse long-term impact on decentralisation in terms of citizen empowerment and participation. The study recommends an optimal level of central transfers which will serve the purpose of correcting vertical and horizontal imbalances, as in theory, and at the same time promote the ideals of decentralisation (citizen empowerment and participation).

Place-based climate adaptation workshops are designed to help communities understand their climate-related vulnerabilities and plan adaptive actions in response. Through a series of surveys and interviews with participants, we examined the immediate and long-term impacts of eight place-based climate adaptation workshops in the United States. Six took place online due to COVID-19 restrictions; two took place in-person. All workshops positively enhanced declarative, procedural, and relational knowledge of participants and, to a lesser extent, their personal commitment to work on climate adaptation, optimism about climate adaptation in their communities, and perceptions of qualities of the network of actors engaged locally in climate adaptation. In-person workshops yielded somewhat stronger positive influences on relationship-building than online workshops. Most participants who responded to surveys 6 months to a year after the workshop reported that their workshop had a “minor” to “moderate” impact on stimulating meaningful adaptation actions in their area. Reported actions attributed to the workshops included the incorporation of climate adaptation into formal planning documents, the expansion of adaptation outreach, consideration of climate adaptation in day-to-day planning and decision-making in local government departments, and both successful and unsuccessful grant applications for projects and positions associated with climate adaptation. We describe the workshops’ design, as well as participant assessments of the value of different workshop components. We conclude with lessons learned for future effective workshop planning and design.

Conceptually grounded, integrated, city-scale and comparative studies remain rare and are based mostly on meta-reviews of the literature or broad surveys. Conversely, debates about the limitations of incremental or transitional change and exhortations towards more ambitious processes of system or transformative changes are rarely grounded in adequate empirical analysis. Accordingly, this paper examines city-scale plans and actions in order to throw light on these issues in a carefully contextualised Global South–North comparison between Cape Town, South Africa, and Greater Manchester, UK. Cape Town has a considerable pedigree of citywide climate policy and action but achieving cross-departmental integration remains a key challenge, along with operationalisation and monitoring. Greater Manchester has abundant climate ambitions to become a leading European green city, but recent innovative policy processes revealed a lack of capacity and in-house expertise. The comparative analysis therefore focuses on capacity constraints hampering fulfilment of progressive city aspirations that engage with global agendas, and on how they use innovative planning and implementation processes and different forms of knowledge to address integrative or cross-cutting issues, as well as on their relative success to date in doing so in the face of different extents of inequality and power asymmetry. <em><strong>Policy relevance</strong></em> A comparative analysis of city-wide climate policy initiatives provides four insights that are highly relevant for policymakers. First, the political–institutional context in which local climate policy is designed invariably shapes the policy process, making it imperative to consider redesigning the ‘multilevel governance’ structures between the local governments that ‘hold the problem’ of climate change with the tools required to address the root causes. Second, policymakers need to grapple with and negotiate across the conflicting rationalities held by different professionals and stakeholders to bring together and integrate different types of knowledge into a comprehensive perspective. Third, local governments must find ways to address the underlying challenge of institutional inertia to embrace more ambitious, transformative policy agendas, moving away from incrementalist approaches. Finally, local governments should integrate debates on socio-spatial fairness and justice with climate policy, recognising the interdependencies between these agendas.

Local government reform, urban crisis and development in South Africa

The city of Guwahati is one of the most rapidly growing cities in India, at the same time being the most important hub of Northeast (NE) India. According to the reported seismic activity in India, the entire Northeastern region, where Guwahati City falls into, is among the most seismically active parts of the Indian subcontinent and even of entire South Asia. The seismicity of NE India has been proven by many damaging earthquakes in the past and is also reflected by the seismic zoning map of India’s current seismic building code which classifies the entire region into Zone V, i.e. the country’s highest seismic zone. The present chapter describes the different technical aspects that were implemented for the development of an earthquake loss information system for the city of Guwahati. The development of the system has involved both extensive fieldwork and computational efforts including ground shaking modelling considering soil amplification effects, defining ground shaking scenarios for earthquakes on local active faults and significant historical earthquakes, demarcation of the Guwahati City area and its subdivision into geographical units, the definition of building typology classes and generating their vulnerability functions, collection of building inventory data and socio-economic information throughout the city and finally the computation of damage and loss scenarios. The developed earthquake loss information model for Guwahati City can be used as guidance to local authorities on future city planning and earthquake mitigation and response actions.

The article analyses the policy engagement component of a research project on climate resilience in vulnerable communities that took place in Cape Town, South Africa. Conducted in 2022, the engagement included community and stakeholder events in three research sites, and a cross-cutting policy event with municipal officials, held at the end of the project. Importantly, this policy engagement process occurred in a context of political marginalisation, that is, one characterised by low trust, and little meaningful representation or even communication between these vulnerable communities and the city. This article examines the impact of policy engagement on political relations between local government and vulnerable communities. The overall methodology of the article is qualitative, using an illustrative case-study research design to unpack the subjective experiences of both government officials and residents of vulnerable communities. Primary data included many primary documents, direct observation of the engagements and post-event interviews. First, the engagement process created new 'invented' spaces for the representation of community perspectives to the city, and the city's perspective to the community. Second, the engagement facilitated community self-representation through educating community members to advocate for their ideas in these new invented spaces. Third, this engagement tended to be more constructive and deliberative than polarising and confrontational. Drawing on the theoretical framework of 'political mediation', the policy engagement process is characterised as a positive instance of democratic mediation through 'empowered representation', with some specified limitations.