Suchergebnisse

Klappentext: For almost half a century scholars on both sides of the Atlantic have worked hard to highlight the distinctively Scottish contribution to the emergence of America's national culture. In particular the impact of the Scottish Enlightenment on the educational, political and cultural life of the USA in the 18th and early 19th centuries has been widely studied. But the map of Scottish-American cultural relations extends far beyond the confines of the Enlightenment. What this book does is offer a series of explorations of the map in a variety of directions and periods from the 18th century to the early 20th. The importance for America's cultural history of Scottish educators, philosophers, historians, rhetoricians and scientists is recognized, but attention is also paid to the literary aspect of Scotland's cultural contribution to America, and the author takes in major figures from both sides of the Atlantic from Walter Scott to William Faulkner. "From Goosecreek to Gandercleugh" offers widely-ranging insights into the intriguing story of the Scottish-American cultural connection.

Despite recent clarifications by central banks that it is indeed commercial banks that are the main creators of the money supply, money creation processes remain as confusing and opaque as ever to many. This article develops a simplified macro-visual diagram of today's money system based on the increasingly accepted "credit theory" of money creation. It aims to explain not only how money is created and which institutions have the authority to create it; it also aims to discuss the implications of this understanding of money creation for wider issues, such as political sovereignty, inequality, and socio-economic development. Ultimately, it aims to provide a pedagogical resource upon which both technical and normative discussions about our current money system among academics, activists, and students can be based.

This article follows the journey of Guyana's Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) programme, from its promising emergence in 2009 as an ambitious, Norway-funded scheme worth US$250m to its near-abandonment by all actors ten years later. It is based on primary fieldwork conducted in Guyana in 2016 and 2017 and a deep review of the theoretical and empirical literature on REDD+ policy processes and the Norway–Guyana agreement. The article shows how, contrary to the mainstream understanding of environmental policy as a disinterested search for a rational, scientific solution, decisions governing REDD+ policy in Guyana were rather shaped throughout by the political objectives and calculations of a small number of opportunistic elite actors. It further shows how even the modest incarnation of REDD+ in Guyana (which ended up resembling more of a results-based aid programme than a Payment for Ecosystem Services scheme) was continually affected by political factors beyond the control of policy managers. These included fluctuations in the world gold price that led to an increase in mining activity and deforestation, the departure of a key international investor which caused the collapse of the flagship REDD+-funded Amaila Falls hydropower project, and legislative gridlock in Guyana generated by a hung Parliament. While not suggesting that REDD+ (or similar Payment for Ecosystem Services schemes) can never work, the article nonetheless illustrates the ways in which political objectives and unforeseen events can overwhelm substantive policy efforts towards fighting climate change. The findings also illustrate the dangers of prioritizing short-term 'success stories' over longer-term and more consultative environmental policy processes.

This article applies a political ecology framework to examine the challenges of 'greening' Guyana's relatively established small-scale gold mining sector. Based on a year of fieldwork conducted in Guyana's gold mining landscape, the article highlights a range of ways in which the supposed stability and transparency of Guyana's institutional mining framework is undermined by the dynamic and discretionary realities of actual small-scale gold mining activity. The tendency of mining activity to overspill institutional boundaries is contributing to worsening ecological conditions in the country's interior. For miners, it is shown that, even having acquired or accessed formal property, they face various challenges (such as minimal state support, stressed conditions of production, and tenure insecurity) that compromise their ability to enact 'green' mining. The state meanwhile faces related challenges in ensuring that dynamic and fluid mining activity remains within its legal and literal boundaries. Overall, the article illustrates how the mainstream green mining 'storyline' – based on the notion of formal institutions as a disciplining or containing force – is disrupted by an intimate interaction among unruly socio-ecological realities.

Proponents of formalization argue that bringing artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) into the legal sphere represents the best way of enabling social and economic development. Critics counter that formalization policies can be a source of exclusion for smaller producers, as new properties become difficult and expensive to access, and new regulatory standards prove beyond the technical and financial capacity of smaller operators. Guyana's long-formalized ASM gold-mining sector offers a useful lens through which to examine these arguments. This article finds that Guyana's relatively established and egalitarian ASM sector has become the site of various complex exclusionary dynamics. On the one hand, the impacts of increasingly restrictive state-led forms appear to support contentions about how formal mining environments tend towards the exclusion of smaller operators. On the other hand, evidence shows that it is not merely state policies that are responsible for exclusion, but further social and ecological factors, such as landlord-tenant relations and the depth and scarcity of mineral deposits. Overall, these findings offer new perspectives on ASM dynamics within formalized institutional environments. They suggest that understanding exclusion can be aided by adopting an analytical lens capable of capturing the complex interactions between a range of social and ecological phenomena.

A rapid expansion in small-scale gold mining properties over the landscape since the late-2000s has generated new social and environmental pressures for both titled and untitled Amerindian communities in Guyana. Some commentators in Guyana claim that these negative impacts are 'governance problems' – related to lapses in the monitoring of mining, a poor application and understanding of existing rules and rights, and delays in the Amerindian land titling process. However, using examples from two Amerindian villages in Guyana and employing extensive spatial Geographic Information Systems (GIS) data, this article shows that these problems are rather rooted in deeper institutional and political biases against Amerindian notions of customary land and the ongoing privileging of mineral interests over other tenure types. The article nevertheless argues that resolving tensions between miners and Amerindian communities over land titling is being hamstrung by the perpetuation of binary framings of these claims according to which they are legitimate only when they are grounded in 'traditional' motivations. As a way of moving beyond this impasse, the article suggests recognizing the 'hybridity' of indigenous livelihoods and the legitimacy of indigenous participation in mining as necessary steps in re-framing debates on indigenous communities and mining.

Despite the existence of one of the most comprehensive and progressive formal frameworks for artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) in the world, the majority of gold mining within Guyana's vast landscape nonetheless appears to drift perpetually towards what could be understood as 'informal' activity. These divergences from institutional form appear rooted in a diverse set of explanations, including actors' shared demands for a flexibility that the current institutional framework cannot provide, broader structural socio-economic conditions, and plain opportunism. Moreover, rather than representing harmful transgressions of institutional function, expressions of informality can often be relatively benign in their effects, depending on their nature and temporal emergence within the mining process. The findings from this article therefore suggest that states could do as Guyana has largely done and focus on pragmatic governance approaches that seek to address the most egregious expressions of informality while being prepared to regularize locally-responsive governance modalities as they emerge. As the 'worst' impacts of informality in Guyana are arguably those in which state actors are complicit, it is however clear that civil society and researchers have an important role to play in building a better picture of how mining actually takes place – and in highlighting why (and when) divergences from institutional form need addressing.

This article examines the political and performative function of the deforestation 'reference level' within Guyana's Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) agreement with Norway. It argues that the establishment of, and continual negotiations around, the reference level rate illustrate how the Guyana-Norway REDD+ agreement was always more about ensuring the programme's 'success' than materially reducing deforestation in Guyana. By setting the 'reference level' at 0.275% per year in 2010, far above Guyana's historical rate of 0.02%, Guyana's successful performance in terms of 'avoiding deforestation' against this inflated level was all but guaranteed – even as 'business as usual' forest use continued on the ground. The fact that the reference level was high moreover allowed Norway to claim that it had 'contributed' (through its REDD+ payments) to higher 'avoided emissions', even though there was never a clear relationship between its payments and Guyana's deforestation rate throughout the programme. The 'performative' nature of the programme was meanwhile confirmed in 2019, when Norway disbursed the entire remaining balance from the US$250 million originally pledged to Guyana, despite the fact that Guyana had infringed the adjusted reference level 'floor' of 0.056% in several years of the programme. The article concludes that if meaningful solutions for 'avoiding deforestation' are to be developed, especially in the context of a new centrality for offsetting within the global 'net zero' agenda, 'success' must mean more than achieving results on paper and resources must be committed that are commensurate with the scale of the stated policy challenge.

The development of solar energy has been depicted as a paradigmatic break in unsustainable global growth, largely because it is framed as an innovation with minimal carbon emissions. On the contrary, drawing on literatures from spatial justice and political ecology, including on authoritarian populism, this article analyzes the rise and fall of the solar industry and the associated failures of "green industrialization" in Bitterfeld, East Germany—an area that is characterized by political, economic, and social peripheralization, marginalization, and the rise of the far right. The development of solar energy, we argue, is merely the latest iteration of an industrial growth model that is rooted in a similar modernist mode of development. Based on original mixed methods field research in eastern Germany, it argues that many of the same inequalities that characterize fossil fuels and "gray" (de)industrialization—undemocratic and unsustainable industrial processes, the concentration of corporate power and profits, and externalized waste and pollution—are replicated by solar energy. What is distinct is the fact that such contemporary "green" manufacturing processes appear to negatively affect a wider and more dispersed range of spatial locations, also denying these locales the benefits of accumulation, production, and consumption. This unevenness reflects the reconfiguration of global supply chains over the past thirty years and the nature of green production processes that depend on a wider range of inputs that invariably produce localized sacrifice zones. We offer a spatial justice framework for solar energy, zooming in at the manufacturing stage, to explore the multiple sacrifice zones at the different stages of solar energy. Finally, we highlight the politics of resignation that is the product and foundation of capitalist realism that serves to dispossess communities around solar energy manufacturing sites in eastern Germany and might feed into the rise of the populist far right. The article contributes to the emerging critical literature that analyzes the dark side of renewable energy and, in doing so, reveals the social and ecological costs of energy transitions that continue to be underresearched yet deserve heightened attention.

Until recently the regulation, ownership and governance of the electricity sector was subject to long-standing debates between those advocating for a state-owned monopoly at one end and those for market liberalisation at the other. However, this debate has now been disrupted by dramatic developments in low-carbon technologies which pose a potentially radical challenge to the centralised system of electricity and have huge implications for the nature of electricity markets, policy and planning. Within this dynamic we explore how rapid technological shifts and processes of electricity governance and procurement are interacting over time, across scales, across technologies and within the different national political economies of Germany and South Africa. We find that while the nature of Germany's regulatory framework introduced in the early 1990s prioritised decentralised renewable energy systems with a strong role for community ownership, the design of South Africa's national programme for the procurement of renewable electricity two decades later has privileged generation projects at the utility-scale, and in turn the large-scale corporate and financial actors that operate and own them. Yet as such dynamics have continued to evolve, more recent policies in Germany have given greater encouragement to large-scale projects built by corporate actors, while in South Africa, small-scale distributed generation has been installed by wealthy consumers in the absence of appropriate legislation rather than because of it. In exposing these complexities, we challenge the assumption that radical low-carbon technological change will automatically result in a reconfiguration of political, economic and social power structures.