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The article analyzes the specific experience of civil society development in the Middle East, which remarkably exposes the dilemma underlying the civil society concept as a matrix of working democracy. This concept limits the understanding of the very phenomenon of civil society and peculiarities of its functioning in the region. An analysis of the Middle Eastern specifics requires a functional approach and a hybrid definition of civil society. This approach has a number of heuristic advantages over both liberal and critical theories. The article outlines the Middle Eastern model of civil society and postulates the key characteristic of illiberal civil society—it becomes conducive to the reproduction of authoritarian regimes even despite its institutional diversity. The analysis shows the ambivalence of civil society in the Middle East as a space of limited freedom of political/non-political activity and as a testing ground for the development of various tools designed to curb civic initiative. The liberal model of civil society, directly incorporated in state-building, is turned upside down in the Middle East. Civil society organizations in this region are hardly functional as an outpost for promoting liberal democratic values because they prove to serve the interests of the elite or alternative political forces much more than the interests of ordinary citizens.

While there is a common belief among policymakers and academics around the world that Triple Helix relationships between university, industry and government provide optimal conditions for innovation, it should be noted that the Triple Helix concept has been developed from the experience of advanced economies in the West. There is a lack of theoretical considerations and empirical evidence on whether the Triple Helix model is applicable in non-Western contexts. Following the understanding that the evolution of an ideal Triple Helix model is facilitated by certain institutional logics in Western societies, this paper takes China as an example to examine how the institutional logics in China are different from those of the West and how the institutional logics in China would promote or impede the development of the Triple Helix model in China in light of an extensive review of the relevant literature and policy documents. The study suggests that to optimise the Chinese innovation policies, China needs on the one hand to adjust some elements of its institutional environment to facilitate the interactions between key innovation actors and on the other hand to be innovative in developing its own Triple Helix modes given the unique Chinese institutional environment which will persist in the foreseeable future.

ABSTRACTBetween the mid-1990s and the mid-2010s, the Chinese government was distinctly open to the Western offer of democracy-assistance programs. It cooperated with a number of Western organizations to improve the rule of law, village elections, administrative capacity, and civil society in China. Why did the Chinese government engage with democracy promoters who tried to develop these democratic attributes within China? The author argues that the government intended to use Western aid to its advantage. The Chinese Communist Party had launched governance reforms to strengthen its regime legitimacy, and Chinese officials found that Western democracy assistance could be used to facilitate their own governance-reform programs. The article traces the process of how the government's strategic intention translated into policies of selective openness, and includes evidence from firsthand interviews, propaganda materials, and research by Chinese experts. The findings show how democracy promoters and authoritarian leaders have different expectations of the effects of limited democratic reform within nondemocratic systems. Empirically, reflecting on the so-called golden years of China's engagement with the West sheds new light on the Chinese Communist Party's survival strategy through authoritarian legitimation.

Calls for non-Western forms of democracy are becoming louder and more ubiquitous. More needs to be done to nurture a wider variation in democratic processes and practices. Forms of democracy that differ from prevailing Western norms should be encouraged rather than simply dismissed as a cloak for illiberalism or authoritarianism. However, it is highly questionable that a wholesale non-Western variety of democracy exists. Indeed, the calls for non-Western democracy suffer from some major problems. Rather than a binary competition between 'Western' and 'non-Western' democracy, joint experimentation is needed between different regions of the world to advance democratic renewal.

Abstract. A significant portion of the literature concerning intra‐urban residential location has involved the development of a utility maximization bid‐price model which relates income and distance to work. When distance‐overcoming costs are monetary, a positive income‐distance function is predicted, and studies in several Anglo‐American cities have provided some confirmation. If expenses are made to be temporal, the model forecasts a negative relationship because the opportunity cost of commuting is directly variable with income. A study was conducted in Piracicaba (pop. 125,000), Brazil, and neither positive nor negative income‐distance functions were encountered for any of the transportation differentiated groups. The findings indicate that the prevalence of walking, bicycling and other commuting modes which consume large amounts of time does not adequately explain the "non‐western" residential pattern (negative income‐distance to the Central Business District function) which is common in many Latin American cities. The results also suggest that hypotheses which consider spatial relationships between residences and sites other than the place of work may prove to be more fruitful (1).