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'Collaborative Federalism: Economic Reform in Australia in the 1990s' by Martin Painter is reviewed.

Williams reviews 'A Federal Republic: Australia's Constitutional System of Government' by Brian Galligan.

Even if the U.S. national security apparatus can operate entirely outside of politics, it remains exposed to the effects of Truth Decay—the diminishing role of facts and analysis in American public life. Little work is being done to understand how severe the impact of Truth Decay is on national security and, more importantly, how to mitigate it.

This paper explores the contradictory and sometimes incompatible imperatives towards enhancing water supply reliability and addressing the water-energy nexus. Using the highly contested development of seawater desalination for municipal water supply in the San Diego metropolitan region as an analytical entry point, the paper excavates divergent water-energy politics emerging in California. Two underlying paradigm shifts of water governance are identified. First, supply diversification represents an attempt to increase reliability through the development of multiple decentralised water sources. Second, the notion of a loading order is being promoted by certain groups as a way of prioritising different water source options according to sustainability criteria, including energy footprint. Drawing on the concept of the socio-ecological fix, the paper argues that seawater desalination – as a technological adaptation to water stress – occupies a paradoxical position, being consistent with diversification, but representing a water-energy trade-off inconsistent with the loading order. This has resulted, the paper suggests, in a polarised debate between desalination and wastewater recycling as alternative climate-independent sources of freshwater. As such, the disputes over desalination in San Diego are understood to be a crucible for broader politics of resource governance transitions.

This paper is about the peculiar particularities of the dual trends towards urban water privatization and commodification. It uses as its analytical entry point the extraordinary emergence of large-scale seawater desalination, delivered through public-private partnerships, as an alternative municipal water supply for the San Diego–Tijuana metropolitan region. The paper engages and extends Karen Bakker's work on water as an 'uncooperative commodity'. Interrogating the neoliberalization of water through desalination, it is argued, requires reference to the socio-technical relations drawn together under the 'desalination assemblage'. Such water treatment technologies –and the social relations that flow through them– are, in other words, efficacious in the market-disciplining of water. The paper presents an understanding of privatization and commodification as diffuse, and as unfolding through multiple and contradictory materially heterogeneous relationships. Drawing on both urban political ecology (UPE) and assemblage thinking, the paper calls for a more constructive dialogue between different concepts of socio-material relationality. The empirical case studies of two large seawater desalination plants (one in Southern California, one in Baja California) and the re-configuring relations of public/private water governance associated with these projects, provides a pertinent imperative for greater attention to be paid to contingency and heterogeneity in our understanding of the ecology of capitalism.

Low carbon urban transition experiments are emerging across cities globally. These experiments are socio-technical innovations with a high potential to contribute to a low carbon. Through the Global Intelligence Corps knowledge of these experiments is being disseminated across a variety of spatial contexts. Foreign cities are keen to replicate these examples of best practice; whilst technical experts, technology providers and governments are keen to export their expertise and technologies. However, the factors influencing the successful translation - movement, transformation and adaptation - of these experiments across spatial contexts requires deeper investigation. This paper explores the process using a mobile transitions conceptualisation. In this paper we develop a theoretical conceptualisation of the mobile transition process and test it using two low carbon experiments - Hammarby Sjostad (Stockholm) and BedZed (London). We identify the type of knowledge that is translatable (in the global form), and how this is modified both by the global and local assemblages throughout the process. The implication of our findings is that greater clarity is needed throughout the translation process if outcomes are to improve. Firstly, in order to determine the potential for an urban experiment to translate into a new spatial context the practitioner must understand the context from which it emerged and the context into which it will be translated. Secondly practitioners need to clearly define the translatable global form emerging from an experiment. It must be possible to decontextualise and re-contextualise the global form if it is to translate successfully. In some cases it may be impossible to decontextualise the global form without undermining the fundamental principles underlying the experiment. Thirdly, practitioners need to be aware of how the global form can be manipulated and re-represented by the global and local assemblages during the translation process. The global form is not fixed. Finally practitioners should be aware that new socio-technical systems (adopting the fundamental principles developed in the experiment) will emerge from the translation process.