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This article develops the argument that a 'knowledge economy,' despite its cheerful optimism, is also an elegant incarnation of the demise of Western economies. An analysis of policy documents, research statements, and national accounts reveals this paradoxical coexistence of anxiety and progress in the discourse on knowledge economies. While the concept is often hailed as a temporal concept (superseding other forms of economic production), this article argues that a knowledge economy is best understood as a spatial concept – it is a way of contending with global reorganizations of production. This spatial approach is elaborated to tackle three paradoxes. (1) A knowledge economy enfolds defeat with progress. (2) A knowledge economy downplays the importance of industrial labor and simultaneously depends on it to materialize its ideas. (3) While seemingly intangible and ephemeral, a knowledge economy is fixed in place in national economies through government and corporate policy (including through the emergent phenomenon of 'knowledge-adjusted gross domestic products'). A spatial approach provides a view of the tenuous global interconnections and specific conditions that prop up a knowledge economy, and shows how the concept is mobilized to redraw the map so that endangered economies can regain their challenged sense of centrality in a world economy.

This essay is an attempt to think 'mobile peoples' as a political concept. I consider mobile peoples as a norm rather than an exception and as political subjects rather than subject peoples. After discussing the tension between 'mobile' and 'peoples', I draw on Ian Hacking's historical ontology for understanding how a people comes to be. For understanding how the people comes to be, or rather, how the tension between a people that constitutes itself as a whole and those peoples that remain as residual parts, I draw on Giorgio Agamben, Jacques Rancière, and Ernesto Laclau as authors who identified this tension as a fundamental problem of 'Western' political thought. Yet, their inattention to territory draws me to James Scott whose work on early states challenges how we have come to understand the people as sedentary in the first place. His account of how 'barbarians' (mobile peoples) came to be seen as a threat to sedentary peoples enables us to understand that tension. Then a path opens toward thinking about mobile peoples as a political concept. ; Leverhulme Doctoral Scholarship

Defenders of male circumcision increasingly argue that female 'circumcision' (cutting of the clitoral hood or labia) should be legally allowed in Western liberal democracies even when non-consensual. In his target article, Richard Shweder (2022) gives perhaps the most persuasive articulation of this argument to have so far appeared in the literature. In my own work, I argue that no person should be subjected to medically unnecessary genital cutting of any kind without their own informed consent, regardless of the sex characteristics with which they were born or the religious or cultural background of their parents. Professor Shweder and I agree that Western law and policy on child genital cutting is currently beset with cultural, religious and sex-based double standards. We disagree about what should be done about this. In this commentary, I argue that 'legalising' childhood FGC so as to bring it into line with current treatment of childhood MGC is not an acceptable solution to these problems. Instead, all medically unnecessary genital cutting of non-consenting persons should be opposed on moral and legal grounds and discouraged by all appropriate means.

BackgroundDespite health impact assessment (HIA) being increasingly widely used internationally, fundamental questions about its impact on decision-making, implementation and practices remain. In 2005 a collaboration between public health and local government authorities performed an HIA on the Christchurch Urban Development Strategy Options paper in New Zealand. The findings of this were incorporated into the Greater Christchurch Urban Development Strategy;MethodsUsing multiple qualitative methodologies including key informant interviews, focus groups and questionnaires, this study performs process and impact evaluations of the Christchurch HIA including evaluation of costs and resource use;ResultsThe evaluation found that the HIA had demonstrable direct impacts on planning and implementation of the final Urban Development Strategy as well as indirect impacts on understandings and ways of working within and between organisations. It also points out future directions and ways of working in this successful collaboration between public health and local government authorities. It summarises the modest resource use and discusses the important role HIA can play in urban planning with intersectoral collaboration and enhanced relationships as both catalysts and outcomes of the HIA process;ConclusionAs one of the few evaluations of HIA that have been published to date, this paper makes a substantial contribution to the literature on the impact, utility and effectiveness of HIA.

Electricity is an important resource for an economy and its demand for the last decade have witness a significant increase. This work has as aim to study the impact of electricity insecurity on the performance of small and medium scale businesses in Cameroon within the period of 1980 to 2018. The study made use of time series data within the period of the study and uses two methodological approaches; the time series data are analyze using a multiple linear regression for the first method of the work with statistical package SPSS, STATA for treatment. The work also made use of a survey analyzes which helps in the collection of field data which are treated using the statistical package SPSS version 27. The result showed that electricity consumption and petroleum consumption which both constitute elements of energy have a positive relationship with Gross domestic product (GDP) in Cameroon. Survey result from this study also showed that small and medium scale businesses in Cameroon perceive insufficient electricity supply from the energy company which render their business activities difficult. Based on findings from this work, it is suggested and recommended that, the government of Cameroon with the energy company should expand the source of energy to meet up the high electricity demand. A move to the renewable sources such as solar and wind energy will help to boost the energy sector and improve on the economic growth of the country. Key words: Electricity insecurity, SMEs performance, Electricity consumption, GDP

This year there are celebrations, around the world, of the 30th anniversary of the Ottawa Charter. We have seen similar celebrations five years (e.g., De Leeuw 2011, REFIPS 2012) and ten years ago (e.g., Baum 2007, Ridde, Guichard & Houeto 2007). The Charter remains visionary and inspirational, with a lasting legacy. But it has not delivered on its vision comprehensively. Two of its action areas stand out as having failed to show real evidence of success: the call to build healthy public policy, and the need to reorient health services for health promotion.'Healthy Public Policy' has now been replaced by 'Health in All Policies' (De Leeuw, Ståhl & Tang (2014). 'Reorientation of Health Services' still struggles. Both of these, in our assessment (de Leeuw 2017), suffer from the relative marginalisation of health promotion advocacy on the fringe of the mainstream medical-industrial complex. Clinical care and the pharma and biomedical technology sector continue to grow, while public health and health promotion remain on the resource and policy periphery. A partial solution to this challenge is for the global health promotion community to embrace a health political science (Bernier & Clavier 2011, Clavier & de Leeuw 2013). This would explain the political process for making choices in the public domain, and explicitly recognise issues of power, perception and trade-offs. The world of 2016 is very different from the world of 1986. Socialist states and Marxism-Leninism have all but disappeared from the face of the earth. Globalisation and its neoliberal market dictatorship is now the dominant and virtually unchallenged ideology (Labonté 2016). Progress has been made but it has not been shared by all. Humanity as a whole is doing better, but differences between populations and groups persist and grow, in terms of health, well-being, wealth and life opportunities. Knowledge, information and entertainment are available everywhere and anytime, at mind-numbing speeds, qualities and quantities. The gap in the ozone layer may have closed, and acid rain disappeared, but they have been replaced by the seemingly unstoppable advent of the slow disaster of climate change. Rampant population growth and (often disaster-driven) mobility have led to an urban planet with hundreds of millions living in camps, slums and on the fringe. The ecosystem services that buffer hardships for these people – fresh air, clean water, food, fuel, building materials, and protection from flooding – are collapsing. Against this backdrop, the government of the People's Republic of China with the World Health Organization is organising the Ninth Global Conference on Health Promotion in Shanghai in November 2016.In this world - is the Ottawa Charter still relevant? Is the Shanghai Declaration on Health Promotion going to have the visionary and lasting impact the Charter had?

Cette année nous assistons à des nombreuses célébrations, dans le monde entier, à l'occasion du 30ème anniversaire de la Charte d'Ottawa. Nous avons connu des manifestations similaires respectivement cinq ans (par exemple [ , ]) et dix ans auparavant (par exemple [ , ]). La Charte demeure un texte visionnaire et une source d'inspiration, à l'héritage durable. Toutefois, elle n'a pas accompli toutes les promesses que sa vision globale laissait miroiter. En particulier, deux de ses domaines d'action se distinguent comme ayant échoué à apporter une preuve réelle de leur efficacité : l'appel à construire des politiques publiques saines et la nécessité de réorienter les services de santé pour la promotion de la santé. Le terme même d'« Etablir une Politique Publique Saine » a maintenant été remplacé par celui de la « Santé dans Toutes les Politiques » [ ]. En ce qui concerne la réorientation des services de santé, nous sommes encore bien loin de la réussite. Dans notre évaluation [ ], les deux domaines d'action souffrent de la relative marginalisation du plaidoyer de promotion de santé, cantonné dans la périphérie lointaine du complexe médico-industriel. Les secteurs des soins cliniques, de la technologie biomédicale et pharmaceutique continuent de croître, alors que celui de la santé publique et de la promotion de la santé demeure en marge des ressources et des politiques publiques. Une solution partielle à ce défi consiste à ce que la communauté mondiale de promotion de la santé s'approprie une science politique de la santé [ , ]. Dotée de ce bagage méthodologique, elle serait alors apte à mieux comprendre les processus politiques visant à faire des choix dans le domaine public et à reconnaître explicitement les questions de pouvoir, de perception et de compromis ou de compensations mutuelles. Le monde de 2016 est très différent de celui de 1986. Les Etats socialistes et le marxisme-léninisme ont presque disparu de la surface de la terre. La mondialisation sous sa forme néolibérale est maintenant l'idéologie dominante et pratiquement incontestée. Des progrès ont été accomplis, mais ils n'ont pas été partagés par tous. L'humanité dans son ensemble se porte mieux, mais les différences entre les populations et les divers groupes, en termes de santé, de bien-être, de richesse et de la vie économique, persistent et empirent. Les connaissances, l'information et les divertissements sont disponibles partout et à tout moment, à des vitesses ahurissantes, en qualité étonnante et en quantités énormes. Le trou dans la couche d'ozone peut avoir été comblé et les pluies acides disparues, mais ils ont été remplacés par l'avènement apparemment inexorable de la catastrophe lente du changement climatique. La croissance démographique galopante et les mouvements de population (dont des catastrophes sont souvent à l'origine) ont conduit à une planète urbaine avec des centaines de millions des gens qui vivent dans des camps, des bidonvilles et dans l'habitat informel. Les services éco-systémiques qui sont à même de réduire les privations pour ces personnes en leur fournissant une bonne qualité de l'air, de l'eau propre, de la nourriture, des matières combustibles, des matériaux de construction, la protection contre les inondations, etc., sont en train de s'effondrer. Dans ce contexte, le gouvernement de la République Populaire de Chine et l'Organisation Mondiale de la Santé (OMS) ont organisé la Neuvième Conférence Mondiale sur la Promotion de la Santé à Shanghai en novembre 2016. Dans un tel monde, la Charte d'Ottawa est-elle toujours pertinente ? La Déclaration de Shanghai sur la Promotion de la santé va-t-elle avoir le même impact visionnaire et durable qu'a connu la Charte ?

The legislative agenda in most parliamentary systems is controlled tightly by the government and bills offered by individual members of parliament have low rates of success. Yet, members of parliament (MPs) do seek to present (private) members' bills even where the rate of adoption is very low. We argue that members' bills serve as an electoral connection but also as an opportunity for MPs to signal competence to their co-partisans. To demonstrate the presence of an electoral connection we take advantage of the random selection of private members' bills in the New Zealand House of Representatives and show that survey respondents approve more of electorate MPs whose bills were drawn on the ballot. In addition, we show that MPs respond to the incentives created by the voters and parties' willingness to reward legislative effort and, consequently, that electorally vulnerable legislators are more likely to place members' bills on the ballot.